Sunday, January 4

Sunday Adventure











Korea

me: you want to go holler at that big buddha?
Karol: yeah what time

Iraqi refugees

"By the end of the US government's fiscal year on September 30, 13,823 Iraqi refugees had arrived for resettlement in the United States, surpassing the target of 12,000," the State Department said in a statement.

It said more than eight times as many Iraqis had been allowed to live in the US compared with the previous year, when 1,608 were admitted.

So in 2007, almost 5 million people in the country are displaced and we're admitting roughly one Iraqi civilian into the US for every 15 that we kill (about 22,000 were killed that year). Meanwhile, Sweden is accepting more Iraqi refugees than the US and the rest of Europe combined.

Saturday, January 3

Any expected deliverer.

If you were to begin a new career as a messiah, do you think you'd write your scripture first or do you wander around in the desert for a while before you start? Or of course you could wait for someone else to write it. This option is risky because it may never happen, and even if it does, people really can't be trusted to get it right unless they're being paid. Face it, people love to blog about a corrupt, sex-addicted prophet, but no one wants to take time to write about saviors that are on their way up. You've got to pay for positive publicity. You need an agent. Someone to contract biographers with names like Ezekiel and Ahmed to follow you around and to codify your teachings; someone to help you choose a color scheme for your tunic and footwear; someone to write your press releases and lobby the local papers to publish blurbs about your good deeds and/or miracles. In the meantime, you go ahead and get the difficult bits out of the way - you spend some time in India, "get noticed", stop eating for a month or two, will yourself blind, visit a few whorehouses, sleep in caves, start a war then end it, gain the trust of a handful of influential but wacky religious leaders (especially that Indian fellow with the withered hand), and you never ever let yourself get caught defecating. Six months later and halfway around the world, your biography/scripture is finished and you have a small but loyal group of followers. They're mostly Unitarians and owners of alternative medicine clinics, but it's a start. You grow your beard long and dye it white for effect.

I have nothing to do here and I want to be home.

"i hold the flame to travis' leg and it goes up like the bonfire... first its just blue flame on his knee, then the paper towel paul is holding catches flame, and its an inferno. everyone starts slapping out the flame (on travis' already scraped up knee), beer gets poured on it, champagne bottles go shattering down the steps. it was an event. paul h looks at me for a second like i'm a psychopath and he never knew it"
-DB