Bloghdad.com/Just_For_Kids

Club Iguana is the Westin Puerto Rico's program for kids, age 4-12, image:westinriomar.com
A new kid in town is competing with Club Iguana at
The Westin Rio Mar Beach’s Club, image:westinriomar.com

“At Club Iguana kids get to have all the fun! Every day, we welcome Westin’s young guests age 4 to 12 with activities planned especially for them.”
Sensing that Westin missed a lucrative opportunity, Brown & Root, the operators of the 16-and over Camp Delta on Guantanamo, Cuba (just a short military flight from Rio Mar, PR!), have created Camp Iguana, specially designed for kids ages 13-15. While it’s admittedly no Westin, if the extreme loyalty of Camp Delta’s clientele is any gauge (read my October review), Camp Iguana’s operators, Brown and Root, are sure to have a sensation on their hands. When Camp Iguana’s normally tight-lipped staff talk about their program, they do so in metaphors that pay homage to Cuba’s two national sports, baseball and repression:

[Camp Counselor] Richard Myers: “They may be juveniles, but they’re not on a little-league team anywhere, they’re on a major league team, and it’s a terrorist team. And they’re in Guantanamo for a very good reason — for our safety, for your safety.”
[Camp Director] Donald Rumsfeld: “And this constant refrain of ‘the juveniles,’ as though there’s a hundred children in there — these are not children … There are plenty of people who have been killed by people who were still in their teens.”

Like so many other Caribbean hideaways, Camp Iguana is almost unknown in the US, but Europeans are sure excited about it. So how can your juvenile get a spot? Well, it may sound unfair, but like so much in life, scoring a spot in Camp Iguana depends on attending the right madrassas. Call for reservations.

*Ah-choo!* Sorry. Just got back from Toronto and I can’t seem to shake this cold

I told this, the newest Worst Joke In The World, last night at dinner, which turned out to be an inadvertent prelude to a Night Of Canadian Hilarity.
Talked about the AM script, which has several Canadian settings and elements, and is, obviously hilarious. Talked about South Park, too.
Read this funny, slight Timothy Noah piece in Slate about “the novelty of seeing the words “danger” and “Toronto” in the same sentence.”
Saw the kooky Mayor of Toronto on The Daily Show. He reminded me of Robert Novak doing a bad Ed Koch.
But the surprise was a midnight screening of the first contemporary film to deal with the Torontonian Threat, a film I only recently learned was about the US staging a phony war against Canada, a film you might even call the 300-pound gorilla of Blame Canada Movies,Canadian Bacon.
It was largely funny, intermittently hilarious, but it had some really slack moments, too. Like Orgazmo, Gangs of New York or The Cremaster Cycle, Canadian Bacon feels made by a supreme creator, someone who can’t/won’t take (or doesn’t get) any suggestions or advice. They’re all unconventional concepts coming from auteurs with unassailable-seeming points of view, which may inhibit people from giving suggestions. Maybe the auteurs, having convinced themselves that no one else could understand their vision, closed themselves off to outside perspectives. Whatever, in any case, all thesemovies had tremendous promise, moments of greatness and unnecessary flaws.
Perhaps one IMDb user said it best: “Of course, only somebody like Roger Moore could make this movie.”

Bloghdad.com/When_In_Rome

It depends on how you count. If you group desks+chairs together with vases+cuneiform+manuscripts, we are now seeing the second wave of looting in Iraq. Still to come: US-imposed mass privatization of the Iraqi infrastructure/patrimony opening the Iraqi economy to foreign investment, but I digress. [And just sounded alarmingly like a lobster-puppet-wielding globalization protester for a minute, there. Just one of those fluctuations in The Matrix.]
Anyway, the second wave: journalists and soldiers, or Our Troops, as they’re known on TV.

  • There’s the guy from Fox who had 12 undeclared paintings from Saddam’s palaces “embedded in his luggage.” He’s being charged with felonies, even though he planned to give “one to his employer.” Oh, and he got fired. See a tiny picture, or the Getty press conference photos. TSG has the complaint and a photo.
  • And Jules Crittenden declared (and had confiscated by Customs) another palace painting, but didn’t get charged with anything. A Customs official said the painting wasn’t worth enough to trigger any penalty. (The Fox dude should’ve flown back through Boston.)
  • And remember how the LA Times reported that 3rd Infantry found $656 million in a bunch of sheds last week? Well, at least six soldiers are under investigation for lifting/hiding either $12.3m, $13.1m, or $900k from the stash. FWIW, the LAT guy, David Zucchino, is owning this story, with a detailed tally of how and where the sealed aluminum boxes–each with $4mm in sealed $100k bricks of $100’s–and bricks went missing.

    US soldiers liberating the Benjamins in Baghdad. Rick Loomis for the LAT, image: latimes.com
    For the benefit of those whose last shock-and-awe came from applying buy-and-hold to dot-com-stocks, this US soldier is holding up a $100K brick. image: Rick Loomis, latimes.com

    [Rule #1 of Three Kings: There should only be three of you. Rule #2 of Three Kings: You can say “don’t tell anyone about Three Kings,” but, hell-o, every one of you and your bosses has seen it. WTF]

    • Speaking of Trains…

    The Amtrak I took from DC to NYC this afternoon hit a person on the tracks, just north of the North Philadelphia station. While it took them nearly half an hour to inform us, it was immediately apparent to those of us in the first car that the person had died. Nearly two hours later, another northbound train stopped alongside, and TV news helicopters hovered overhead as all 2-300 of us climbed aboard.
    Many people began trading our respective fragments of information. They’d seen a knot of policemen on the tracks, but had heard only there was “an obstruction” and a “mechanical problem”; while we’d been told immediately that the train had hit “a tresspasser,” later overheard to have been a “suicide,” but we never saw any sign of the accident. Finally, once the second train was underway, a conductor announced there had been “a fatality.”
    In awkward cell phone conversations, we all tried to explain our delay, conflicted over sounding either too callously selfish or too fascinated.
    [update: The Inquirer mentions the suicide in “Accident, derailment delay SEPTA riders.”]

    Bloghdad.com/Proclamations

    “Our armies,” [British Lt General Stanley Maude] declared [on 9 March, 1916], “do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors, but as liberators.” Within three years, 10,000 had died in a national Iraqi uprising against the British rulers, who gassed and bombed the insurgents.
    — Seumas Milne in the Guardian
    Harper’s published The Proclamation of Baghdad (circa 1916) in the May 2003 issue, but, remarkably, I can’t find the complete text anywhere online. So I transcribed it and put it alongside GW Bush’s unsettlingly similar televised address to the Iraqi people from 10 April 2003. [Thanks, Roger & Harper’s for bibliographic information]
    Read the Proclamations of Baghdad here.
    And I hereby proclaim these proclamations to be the launch of greg.org Features.

    Introducing greg.org Features

    I swear, I wrote this on the train, before seeing Jason’s latest post. If only I’d waited till I got home, perhaps I’d just switch to Movable Type/TypePad and forget the whole thing:

    Sometimes, my posts get a bit long. (Usually, I notice this when a reader–invariably not from The New Yorker–asks if I’m auditioning for The New Yorker.)
    Sometimes, actual interviewing, research, reporting will yield far more information than will fit in a post.
    Sometimes, there may actually be a lot to tell.
    Sometimes, a topic or theme stretches across several posts, and it makes sense to group them together.
    Sometimes, I’ll start with a simple link, and before you or I realize it, I’ve got an 800-word…something.
    It used to bug me when such too-long posts would break up the flow of greg.org. Fortunately, this era of renaming your problems away offers the solution: now, on greg.org, a too-long post is not a bug, it’s a Feature.

    Movie and Art Roundup

    I’m in the last minute throes of editing the AM screenplay before dropping it off for a serious reading. Here are some movie and artsite suggestions to occupy you. A little “Look over there!” handwaving, so you won’t notice a slight drop in posting in front of you.

  • A Mighty Wind is pretty damn good. But just as the line is very fine between driving an 80’s Volvo and driving an 80’s Volvo ironically, the distinction between a folk music reunion concert parody and a PBS fundraising drive is almost imperceptible. (two words: bladder management).
  • We saw the poster for it at the movie theater and dismissed it ‘cuz I’d never heard about it, but reading the story behind The Real Cancun made me, um, free my mind. 1) it’s made by Real World creators Bunim/Murray, which is about as much credibility as you can hope for in the reality genre, and 2) the reason I’d never heard of it is because they shot it a month ago and finished editing last week. It opens Friday. I’m sure it’s already out on DVD, though, somehow.
    Some fine art weblogs have come my way:

  • artnotes, by one Ariana French, who comments on a steady stream of interesting artists and happenings, and
  • Esthet, a Tokyo-oriented, photo-oriented weblog. Esthet’s Lil is inspired by a photography collector I also admire, Thomas Walther. Walther has an first-ratecollection of work by famous artists and photographers, but his eye also wanders to anonymous, “artless” snapshots, which more than earn a place alongside the “great” photographers’ works. There was an exhibition at the Met, and a book, which rocks. [thanks, Jason and Tyler]
  • PQ+ a photo and poetry and speaking out site by photographer and artworlder Paul Khan. Here he is visiting Takashi Murakami’s Hiroppon studio in Brooklyn, for example.

    • Bloghdad.com/Brewster_Kahle

    Danny O’Brien quotes Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle: “What happens to libraries? they burn,” a pretty nihilistic-sounding comment if it’s taken to be a comment on Iraqi libraries burning.
    And Cory Doctorow points to a librarian’s-eye critique of blithe, “oh, just reprint it all” dismissals of burning by people who “should know better.”
    But so far, all I can actually find about this “quote” from Brewster Kahle, is this ancient (1996!) Slate article on the looming, Borges-ian threat of a web archive, i.e., never being able to forget anything, ever. According to the oh-so-long-ago peace, love and cyber-utopian understanding paradise that was 1996, this kind of (admittedly traumatic) institutional slate-wiping is necessary “to rid yourself of the past so you can go forward.”
    Perhaps the rhetoric’s just a bit, er, overheated. It was 1996, after all. But now that we’ve actually had a good, old-fashioned library-burnin’ or two, are we prepared to entertain the possibility that an ahistoricist, culture-be-damned imperialism may actually be boldly revolutionary and forward-thinking? Just playin’ Rumsfeld’s advocate here…
    4/22 Update/Clarification/Retraction: If your main goal is just email *volume*, you probably can’t do better than to unintentionally sound like you’re slamming/questioning netgods Brewster Kahle and Danny O’Brien. If, however, you actually *care* what people think, and you also happen to be a longtime worshipper/groupie of said gods, you should quickly add context when it’s provided.
    More later, (gotta drop the car off for service) but start by checking Danny’s original interview with Kahle, and the original quote, which is much better than the abbreviated version (and not just because it calls a spade a spade on the Bush library burning issue).
    http://www.oblomovka.com/entries/2002/12/05#1039148760

    Bloghdad.com/British_Museum

    Sue Ellicott writes in the Washington Post about how the British Museum (known, before last week, for having “the greatest collection of Mesopotamian antiquities outside Iraq”) mobilized during wartime. They quickly programmed lectures, gallery talks, and panels to meet the sudden surge in visitor interest in Assyrian and Mesopotamian art and culture.
    And speaking of the British Museum: In the NYT, John Tierney looks at the Looting Formerly Known As Capitalism, Thank You, specifically, Lord Elgin’s “buying” the Parthenon frieze, which, inconveniently for present-day archeologist ideologues, saved it from destruction by the Turks. Or someone. I’m still waiting for Jeff Jarvis to slam France for not giving the Louvre back to Egypt. Or to the Pope.

    Bloghdad.com/Gangsta_Life

    The NYTimes‘ man in Baghdad, John F. Burns, talks to Newshour about the shakedowns and threats from his Iraqi Information Ministry handlers in the last days of the regime. Apparently, they were not all as funny as al-Sahhaf.
    [4/19 update: In Sunday’s Times, Burns hits for the fence with a looong article on the thuggish nature of Saddam’s whole crew.

    Bloghdad.com/Some_Looting

    Arts Journal has an extensive round-up of coverage of the Iraqi National Museum and libraries looting/burning (Including LAT‘s Christopher Knight’s view of Bush admin. views of art/culture, which coincides with my own.It doesn’t include Pfaffenblog’s extensive discussion of possible pre-war collector lobbying at the Pentagon.) [via MAN]
    Frankly, I’ve been surprised by the rather glib indignation of some peoples’ reactions to this issue (and I don’t mean Rumsfeld’s; his dismissiveness is entirelyto be expected.) If you’d suggested–two years, a year, even two months ago– that cuneiform diaries would become a poisonously partisan issue, you’d have been laughed out of whatever chatroom you’d wandered into. (If you’d said it in any more substantial forum, you’d’ve been hauled off in a padded wagon.)
    But here we all are, screaming across the barricades, trying to spin a cultural tragedy (which has a primarily long-term impact on capital C Civilization, but almost no serious direct effect on any individual human alive) into instantaneous political pointscoring (which is designed to serve, above all, the ego and immediate wants of the person spinning). It’s like listening to ImClone derivatives daytraders arguing over the state of basic science research.

    Bloghdad.com?/Reel_Bad_Arabs

    This is probably a fence-sitter between greg.org and bloghdad.com: A Guardian interview with Jack Shaheen, who’s spent 20+ years studying Hollywood’s depiction of Arabs. His massive survey, Reel Bad Arabs, came out in the US in 2001, but is just reaching the UK. In his analysis of over 900 films, he finds negative stereotyping to a degree that’d now be unthinkable for other groups (unless, of course, they’re making mad bank off their own stereotypes, a la My Big Fat Greek Wedding).

    And everyone complained Lucas was mindlessly stereotyping JEWS. Hugh Griffith and Watto, image:jitterbug.com
    And people criticized Lucas for his crafty Jewish traders? (Or was it his Inscrutable Asians? Or his…)
    Ben-Hur‘s Arab Friend was played by Hugh Griffith, left, image: jitterbug.com

    But seriously, setting aside David Russell’s Three Kings (which Shaheen adised on, btw), if the best you can hope for from Hollywood’s is the Ben-Hur treatment–where the Arab sheikh is a Brit (named Hugh Griffith) dipped in a tub of bronzer–you know there’s a problem. Of course, the Jews got stuck with Charlton Heston, so it’s lose-lose for everyone…

    On Soul Searching

    For his article in Wired, “Inside the Soul of the Web,” Michael Malone spent 24 (cumulative) hours watching the randomly selected stream of Google searches that is broadcast in the company’s offices. If it’s not really informative, it’s inevitably interesting–and sometimes moving. (thanks, Jason)
    Jennifer 8. Lee did essentially the same story last November, for the NY Times. [who seem to be monetizing their once fee-avoiding deeplinks. But, as Google helpfully points out, the article is here, for free.] We recall that the scroll is called LiveQuery, the map is called GeoDisplay, and Google has eerie, almost predictive power (PredictivePower?).
    Almost. “That is a paradox of a Google log: it does not capture social phenomena per se, but merely the shadows they cast across the Internet.
    ‘The most interesting part is why,’ said Amit Patel, who has been a member of the logs team. ‘You can’t interpret it unless you know what else is going on in the world.'”
    So unless you knew it was a question on Millionaire the night before, a quiz show which aired consecutively in five time zones, the meaning of five spikes in the frequency of “carol brady maiden name” searches would be lost on you.