After a spring of almost daily rain (I know, I know, I shouldn’t complain), I couldn’t waiiiit for warmer weather. It’s finally here! Here’s to: roses, sitting outside, blue skies, and jellies.
The Fan of . . . challenge is hosted by Jez.
Category: plans
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Here for the Mendocino Film Festival. Saw a documentary yesterday: Salvatore, Shoemaker of Dreams. Seeing another documentary this morning: Patrick and the Whale.
This afternoon, seeing a Nicole Holofcener movie (She is this year’s Rogue Wave honoree) and The Forger (German film).
Tonight: A Bunch of Amateurs, a British documentary about a small amateur filmmaking club struggling to survive.
Posting for Six Word Saturday.
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The players were doing a relay race now, but Ezat’s gaze drifted into the distance, as if seeing his own road ahead — his twelve attempts, the container of diapers in which he’d made it onto the ferry, the forty-eight hours he’d spend trapped inside, the church in Italy where he would take refuge from the police, the train ride without a ticket to France, the freezing alleys of Paris, the Champ de Mars where he would stand trembling in ecstasy, Hamburg where he would be granted asylum, where after two years he’d learn enough German to start university, his past as inscrutable to his classmates as his future would be to his family in Iran, living alone in body and in mind, the cold of the River Elbe in winter seeping into his bones.
— The Naked Don’t Fear the Water, p. 266 -
Posted as part of Silent Sunday.
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If there’s one thing going for Matthieu Aikins (going for him in a big way), it’s the dreamlike feel of the narrative:
Matthieu’s friends chicken out. He goes back to Kabul, aching with frustration. His friends will try another way to get out of Afghanistan.
He then ends up making some complicated travel arrangements: Istanbul, Venice, Trieste, Llubljana, Van. He flies out of Istanbul, disembarks in Venice, takes the train to Trieste, spends the night at a friend’s house, then takes the bus to Llubljana, where he catches a flight to Istanbul. At Istanbul, he undergoes some things: he is searched by a man wearing gloves (UGH), he is interrogated and put into a waiting room. He becomes friendly with a man who tells Matthieu that he has been in the waiting room for six months (Waiting Room = Oxymoron, lol). He tries to distract himself by reading Toni Morrison (Beloved) He is sent back to Llubljana.
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Why There Are Words (WTAW) launches its Betty imprint, dedicated to publishing books by women for everyone, today. Read more about it here.
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Her Frida Kahlo rose, which self bought from Cloverdale Nursery ages ago, is finally coming into its own. This year, it’s been blooming continuously since April.
The pictures she takes of her front yard roses are taken on the fly: her street is a very busy street, cars zoom by starting at 6 a.m. (and this despite a “traffic calming project” that’s taken two years to complete).
To take a picture of her front yard roses, she has to crouch in full view (She really should build a fence, have to save up for it). Hence, they’re never all that sharp. You take what you can get.
The blooms have the most delicate stripes, which you can only fully appreciate from the side (and aren’t even all that apparent in this photo).
Posting for Cee’s Flower of the Day.
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Spies, Lies, and Algorithms maintains that US special forces almost captured bin Laden in the December following 9/11. The CIA traced bin Laden and about a “thousand of his men to a maze of tunnels and caves high in the icy peaks of the Hindu Kush.” Yet, even “with bombs pummeling Tora Bora from above,” bin Laden slipped the noose. He would elude American agents for 10 long years.
What followed was the arduous task of sifting through “phone calls, emails, radio signals, tweets and text messages” — 1.7 billion of which were intercepted every day. It turned out this was all futile effort, because after Tora Bora, bin Laden and his “trusted lieutenants had ditched their cell and satellite phones” and for the next 10 years would rely solely on trusted couriers. “US airplanes dropped flyers with bin Laden’s face behind bars and offered a $25 million reward for anyone who helped turn him in,” but the trail still went cold.
In the end, the break came from a tip from a detainee: the name of a courier. Other information came from what detainees did not say. When they ran the courier’s name past Abu Faraj al-Libbi, al-Qaeda’s third in command, Faraj al-Libbi denied ever knowing him. They ran the name past “another senior al-Qaeda leader in custody, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who downplayed the courier’s importance.” Then “KSM returned to his cell after questioning and communicated to other prisoners that they should not mention anything about this courier.” American interest in this “courier was now sky-high.”
Eventually — this took years — they were able to identify the courier’s real name and discover what kind of car he drove: a white Suzuki. Tracking the car was what eventually led them to the compound in Abbotabad.
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Her Betty Boop rose, which has survived over a decade of neglect, is about to bloom. It’s in the backyard, trapped behind some overgrown holly trees. Self went tramping around back there this afternoon, trying to assess damage.
Not too bad, as it turned out.
Posting for Cee’s Flower of the Day.
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Self couldn’t wait to get back so she could start photographing her backyard again.
Backyard euphorbia. Posting for Macro Monday.
Kanlaon 