James and Katriona McGregor are now offering their house in Islay for holiday rentals. Their web site gives full details. The photos of the house, and of Islay itself, look stunningly beautiful.
We’re definitely planning to have a week in Rome next year, but Islay is starting to look very attractive for another break.
EmotionEric.com. A simple idea: Eric takes requests for emotions, then acts them out and photographs himself doing so. The simple ones, like “Suave” and “Perturbed” are amusing, but some of the later ones, like “Realizing that Dan Quayle is your father” and “Answering the ‘does this make me look fat’ question” are bizarrely funny.
As a follow-up to my entry from November 30th (“Bait-and-switch War”), I found an article in The Guardian (“Fighting the wring war” by Jonathan Steele) that talks about the same issues:
“The toppling of the Taliban may eventually prove to be the best thing to have happened in Afghanistan for a decade. But it was not an initial aim of the US-led war.”
I found this article through the web site The Smirking Chimp, a site dedicated to collecting news about George W. Bush that shows him in the worst possible light. A worthy cause. (The title of the site is a nod to the Bush or Chimp? web site, which points out how much Bush looks like a chimpanzee.)
Abi today writes about how she–as an American–feels about the atmosphere we found when we were on holiday there in November. I’m so glad we’re so much in agreement on these issues. (But then that’s probably why we’ve been married for over eight years now: because fundamentally, we think very much alike, and hold very similar social and moral values. And this despite Abi being Catholic, and me being an atheist! I suppose this bodes well for consistency when it comes to raising Alex.)
The Media Workers Against War web site features an article by the brother of one of the people killed on September 11th. He is thinking along the same lines, too:
The United States should try to examine economic, military and political policies to understand how they bring about anti-American sentiment. The U.S. should change these policies in order to ensure peace and justice for America and the world. The current reliance on military force does not confront the conditions that foster terrorism.
This may be a crucial conceptual barrier for the collective American consciousness to break through: not everyone likes America, and what it (now) stands for.