Archive for April 7th, 2004

Passport is where? And gad - taxes!

Wednesday, April 7th, 2004
Webloggersí portal Living in China
and the Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club will host a meeting in
Shanghai at Saturday evening and Sunday morning 17/18 April that will
coincide with the Bloggercon II that will take place at the Harvard Law
School in the United States. At the third floor of Sashaís you will be
able to follow three of the more interesting sessions through a webcast
(audio only), follow examples of live-blogging from Sashaís and Harvard
on a screen and participate in chatrooms surrounding the meeting at
Harvard. You can find the full schedule here and bring your own laptop:
Sashaís has its own free wireless connection??? In another part of the
room you will be able to meet foreign correspondents, media people and
webloggers from Shanghai, Beijing, Suzhou, Hangzou and San Francisco.

What will Shanghai be like? Auden & Isherwood, 1938: “And the well-meaning tourist, the
liberal and humanitarian intellectual, can only wring his hands over
all this and exclaim: ‘Oh dear, things are so awful here - so
complicated. One doesn’t know where to start.’”

Right to start a journey reminded that beginning means NOT knowing.

Bastards

Wednesday, April 7th, 2004
NYT - WASHINGTON, April 7 ó “After days of intense combat in both Shiite and
Sunni cities in Iraq, the Pentagon signaled on Wednesday that it would
probably delay bringing home as many as 25,000 soldiers from the First
Armored Division as scheduled, even as the new troops meant to replace
them are arriving.”

The Korea and Vietnam era drafts caught three of my four brothers, and myself. The next oldest to me served in ‘nam in the 101st. Airborne.
He volunteered for extended bush point duty with the guarantee that it
would shorten his tour. It didn’t. It simply extended his time on ‘search and destroy
missions. Somehow my generally war-supportive parents got through to a
congressional rep and finally got their son sprung. I did my
Vietnam-evading time in the cushy Air Force
with a four year hitch. After 36 months, orders for an ‘early out’ were
issued and withdrawn and reissued. I can’t do justice to the despairing
rage that I felt at those two instances of being jerked around, the
first much more serious than the second, and both the stuff of misery.

As Phil Ochs screamed, “Bring ‘em home, bring ‘em home.