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I have to wait until November for this. bother. ...I notice they've removed this image from the place I found it, a British DVD site pointed to by TOR.n - is this not the final image? or were they not supposed to show it yet? heh heh heh. got while the gettin was good.

(LOTR:Fellowship DVD, Collector's Gift Box version)

to be pricey no doubt, but it will be soooo worth it. 30 minutes of extra footage! hobbits singing drinking songs! elves giving presents! plus: two more discs full of extra features! you can get just that four-disc set by itself if you want, but of course I'm all for the complete box. pillars-of-argonath bookends! a national geographic DVD on making the movie! special game cards! what's not to love?

Went to Joshua Tree this weekend. Cooler during the day than I expected, that is to say, warm but with a nice breeze. We broke in a new National Parks Monopoly game in the evening, as the planetary alignment slowly came into view.

To get there from here, one drives through or near several desert communities. You know one thing that really really really does not belong in a desert? Golf courses. at least golf courses involving grass. When my grandpa was a young man working for an oil company up in a hot, relatively barren region of central California, a fellow worker designed a nine-hole course with the "greens" made of packed-down oil sand. That's the kind of thing you have to have in the DESERT, if you're thinking LONG-TERM.

but of course, since when do humans en masse think long-term? sigh.

though sometimes nature comes up with a poetic-justice sort of reaction. this justice is even more poetic in that it was humans who had the most to do with setting up the situation.

And I wanted to write this on the 19th but couldn't get in:

On Charlie Rose last night - a program I will have to figure out a way to watch more often without staying up till midnight every night - there was an emeritus professor from Princeton named Bernard Lewis who, among other things, pointed out something I hadn't thought about before: at Camp David, if Arafat didn't like Barak's offer, but was really truly wanting peace, he should have made a counter-offer instead of walking out.

Maybe. The problem is, no one there seems to feel they can trust the other side any more. According to my understanding, even Barak was still letting settlers be illegally sneaky. It's starting to make ME tired thinking about this any more.

What I really want is to be given superman-like powers so I can fly down there and MAKE THEM STOP. and trap both leaders in a room together until they work something out. though I might also have to put some sort of barrier in there to prevent Arafat and Sharon from strangling each other.

I did write most of this on the 17th, but put the little invisibility carets around it until I was done, and then the server didn't let me in for several days. :

The thing is, Wolfowitz was right: each side is going to have to give a little. Boo him all you like, but he's right. The settlements have to go. There's no way all Palestinean refugees will be able to return to Israel proper. Jerusalem is going to have to be shared somehow. Israel has to be reassured about safety.

I suppose the reason I went off about this is frustration that after all these years, so many Israelis refuse to see that oppressing a people, whether you think you have good reason or not, simply makes them band together and dig in their heels, especially if they're as stubborn as you are. I heard a Jewish girl quoted on the radio say 'why don't the Palestineans just go to one of the other X Arab countries and leave this one country to us?' Well, for the same reason you want that particular piece of land: they consider it their home. They don't consider themselves Egyptian or Lebanese; they're Palestinean. And they want at least a piece of Palestine to call their own, without interference. I just get frustrated that so many Israelis, of all people, refuse to understand that. My thinking out loud here is of the same tone as seeing a friend doing something self- (and other-) destructive, and trying to talk them out of it. Not that anyone in this particular case has any reason to listen to me.

Oh, and about a sign seen at that D.C. rally yesterday: Sharon is NOT equal to Churchill. Churchill made the incredibly wrenching decision to not warn Coventry that the Nazis were planning a massive air raid, because they couldn't let the Nazis know they'd broken the Enigma code; they had to be able to know when the Germans were going to invade the island. He had to let some of his people be killed in the present in order to save (they hoped) many more in the future - in order to save the most people in the LONG TERM. Sharon either is not thinking long-term, or has sneaky long-term plans involving ethnic cleansing. Because crushing towns with tanks and ripping up all the roads and electric lines and houses in search of "terrorist infrastructure" makes no sense if the goal is long-term peace and reconciliation. He's only ensuring that more Palestineans will be willing to take the places of anyone arrested and killed. Perhaps, instead, the thinking goes like this: If he can turn every single Palestinean, man woman and child, into a bitter angry radicalized terrorist, then he will have an excuse to get rid of all of them.

Let me be clear: suicide homicide is also evil. And the Palestineans who do it are equally stupid, because they are not thinking long-term either. I must admit that Bibi was right about that: the best way to fight is nonviolently, for everyone's sake, even your own. But at this point, it would take a very brave Palestinean to stand in front of an Israeli tank. It seems rather unlikely that the tank would stop.

water? anywhere?

Okay, I'm a chronic procrastinator. I missed catching up with my how-I-spent-9/11 story last Thursday like I planned. I'm waaaaay behind with the screenplay. I finished my taxes last night at 10:30. I need to clean out my Yahoo account before it starts bouncing mail. I need to call or email several friends I keep meaning to talk to on a more regular basis. Et cetera. There are many things I could be doing right now.

But it ticks me off that Bibi is trying to lecture about nonviolence. 'Martin Luther King did not practice terrorism. Gandhi did not use violence,' he said (more or less - I hastily scribbled that this afternoon after hearing it on the radio). Yeah, point. But I don't think either of them would have gone around trying to assassinate their enemies with helicopters amidst crowded streets, either.

Here's some other historical comparisons for you. Menachem Begin got in trouble, back in the day, for attempting to smuggle a shipload of illegal weapons into Israel. Sound at all familiar? I think David Ben-Gurion was in charge at the time. Even earlier, it was Ben-Gurion's group who blew up the King David Hotel because it was a HQ for the Brits. This is off the top of my head; I need to go do my reading. But the thing is, the extremists on both sides here think the same way: defense of what they see as their divine rights, by any means necessary. Self-restraint has not been a hallmark. If Netanyahu's rightwingers had their druthers, they would kick all the Palestineans out of all of Greater Israel tomorrow, and ship them off east to Jordan. If there's any railroad lines between the West Bank and Jordan, they could even pack them all neatly into cattle cars.

Oh, and Arafat is NOT equal to Bin Laden. Bin Laden is (was?) a sociopathic megalomaniac with delusions of grandeur and big worldwide plans. Arafat is not insane, but a sly and ruthless military leader, with a more narrow focus on retaining (regaining) control of his local area and people. He's much more equal to Sharon, except without tanks and F-16s and helicopters and bulldozers.

Ach. They're just going to keep sacrificing their children for the land, both of them, instead of sacrificing land for their children, fighting to the death rather than lose the slightest bit of face. like a bunch of ants.

another voice from the radio: one of the DC crowd said, "We must fight fire with fire." Dude. Water. You fight fire with WATER. An all too scarce commodity in those parts.

Okay, how come I didn't hear about this until two weeks later?! Or this until now? Or this... heh. I am a bit amused by the caption "The space rock 2001 YB5 ... could have wiped out France, according to a scientist in Britain." Do I detect a small note of regret?

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