Monthly Archive

I knew when we moved that it would be kind of nice to have a YMCA just a couple blocks away. Little did I suspect how much use I’d get out of it, though. The key factor here is one of the perks of membership: free childcare for an hour and half during the morning. Because of this, heading over to the YMCA has become a morning ritual for Ella and me, usually five days a week. There are three nodes of happiness:

1. A break from childcare. Not that it’s wearing on me that early in the day, but the early break means my batteries last that much longer. And the exposure to a daycare-like situation is definitely good for Ella.

2. Exercise. Insert the standard comments about how exercising gives you more energy throughout the day here. After a few weeks of it, I can definitely tell the difference in terms of energy, strength, and overall sense of fitness. Not much change in weight yet — appaerently there’s some evidence out there that one also has to adjust diet when losing weight? Gah, I hope not.

3. Susanna Clarke. After a couple false starts at reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, I’m finally halfway through and going strong, by listening to the audiobook version on my iPod while toiling away on the elliptical machine. The world is full of audiobooks that are worthless because they have a lousy reader. This, thankfully, is not one of them. 31 hours of audio means it’s gonna last for a good while yet. And the nature of the book, rife as it is with footnotes, asides, meandering descriptions, and Victorian flourishes, means that when my attention wanders for a minute or two, as always seems to happen when listening to a novel, chances are that I haven’t missed anything particularly essential to the plot.

I didn’t blog on Charles Taylor’s capture when it happened, but thankfully, the event was decently covered in the media — a healthy change from the treatment Liberia usually gets.

So anyway — Yay! He’s in the hands of the Sierra Leone Special Court. Might be tried there, or in the Hague — that’s the current source of debate. That Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf called for his extradition at all came as a welcome surprise. After all, she had visited the U.S. just prior, and had been decidedly noncommital on the issue. Other than a few members of Congress who have been on the Taylor issue (sometimes “a tad overzealously”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/2003/11/boba_fett_repor.html), the U.S. government hasn’t been particularly enthusiastic about stirring up Taylor trouble by reeling him in. The State Department seems to have been happy with him boxed up in exile, not causing (as much) trouble. The White House, predisposed against the International Criminal Court, was disinclined to support any action that might lend it credence. And if the conventional wisdom, that Taylor has CIA connections from back when he was the alternative to President Doe, holds any weight, then there’s another bunch of folks with no desire to see him on the witness stand.

But Johnson-Sirleaf asked for him anyway. Good for her. When I first heard that he had flown the coop in Calabar, I would have bet real money that that was the end of it — that he’d turn up again in one shady country or another, someplace harder to extract him from, and that he’d live out his days there, Idi Amin-style. Turns out he even made it to the border, but no further.

Now the long, long wait for the trial process to turn up anything worth writing home about. In the meantime, here’s my main question: why isn’t “Douglas Farah”:http://www.douglasfarah.com/ being interviewed, quoted, or otherwise turned-to every single day on this issue? Am I just in on the wrong news outlets? You’d think someone with some things to say about “the possible connections between Taylor and Al Qaeda”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/2004/06/the_charles_tay.html would attract a little more attention.

Oh well. They got the bastard. That’s something.

One big difference in the layout of the new Polytropos HQ is that the computer desk is in the bedroom. It used to be in the main room, which made playing music easy — the computer speakers were decent enough for the job, and the computer is where all the music was, anyway. Ever since moving I’ve known that some sort of solution would be needed to play the music from the computer on the stereo in the living room, since the alternative — taking physical CDs out of the big CD binder and putting them into the CD/DVD player — wasn’t going to happen all that often, in practice.

I realized yesterday, when we had some people over and I was wanting to put on some dinner music, that in the two months since we’d moved I had just sort of stopped listening to music very much. And that was appalling. So after a flurry of online research to confirm what I already suspected, I went out and got an Airport Express. It’s plugged into the outlet near the stereo; standard RCA cables connect it to the receiver. Took 5 minutes to get it talking to the wireless network. As I write this, I’m sitting at the laptop on the couch, accessing the shared music library on the desktop in the bedroom, and playing the music through the stereo speakers. The new[1] Franz Ferdinand album sounds very fine, as have the new[1] Belle & Sebastian and Neko Case. I declare myself quite chipper, indeed.

fn1. I realize it’s probably not new any more, but I’m always a few months behind on music these days, and it’s new to _me_ dang it!