300 million strong?

The Census Bureau officially pegged the resident population of the United States at about 297,900,000. The bureau estimates that with a baby being born every 8 seconds, someone dying every 12 seconds and the nation gaining an immigrant every 31 seconds on average, the population is growing by one person every 14 seconds. The United States will hit 300,000,000 sometime next fall.

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Seattle's 28th straight rain day

click image to enlarge

The rain continued unabated for the 28th straight day today, as Seattle geared up to break the record for the most consecutive days of rainfall. The good news is the mudslides have slowed down, and the Green, White, Cedar, and most other rivers are receding...


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Scientists creating a human-rabbit hybrid

Scientists are about to create a human rabbit hybrid. Stem cell experts want to create a rabbit-human embryo. They say this hybrid will hasten research.

British scientists are seeking permission to create hybrid embryos in the lab by fusing human cells with rabbit eggs. If granted consent, the team will use the embryos to produce stem cells that carry genetic defects, in the hope that studying them will help understand the complex mechanisms behind incurable human diseases.

The proposal drew strong criticism from opponents to embryo research who yesterday challenged the ethics of the research and branded the work repugnant.
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Oops! 18 civilians killed in Pakistan.

As American military and intelligence sources giddily leaked information Friday about the death of bin Laden lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri, the rapidly emerging evidence showed that while the technology guiding the missiles to their targets was faultless, the intelligence on those targets was not. You think?

Pakistani officials said there was no evidence any 'foreigners' (shorthand for al-Qaeda fighters), were among the 18 victims. Just hapless civilians in the right place at the wrong time.

Tensions between Washington and Islamabad have grown in recent weeks as American troops have stepped up operations against militants.

Pakistan has already lodged a protest with the US military six days ago after a reported US airstrike killed eight people in the North Waziristan tribal region, a barren, deserted area of mountains south of Damadola.

The President and military officials seem to believe--and it is solid reasoning--that if we bomb enough houses, eventually we will kill a member of al-Qaeda.


Ayman al-Zawahiri: Still alive and well
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Seattle rain: 27th straight day

Seattle had our 26th straight day of rain yesterday and we're now less than a week short of the 1953 record of 33 rainy days. Daily rainfall records have already fallen in Seattle.

The biggest problem is that the saturated landscape can't hold much more water. "What we need is a reprieve," Tony Fantello, maintenance and operations manager for Pierce County Water Programs in Tacoma, told The News Tribune.

I wrote a piece in praise of the rain a few days ago. However, I wouldn't mind a "sunbreak" or two (our term for no rain and few clouds). On the other hand, we've gone this far. Let's break the record and really have something to remember and kvetch about.
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Collage: Portrait of President Abe Lincoln

click portrait to enlarge
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Keep On Blogging

Democrats complete a sweep of three branches of government

It's all over now except the vote, and perhaps a pointless filibuster. We have blown the Senate, The House, The White House, and now The Supereme Court. Even if President Bush leaves the White House early (an increasingly likely prospect...and not just statistically!), or if we win the 2008 election, we'll have the President's two relatively young appointees.

It's on now to the midterm elections and to find a Presidential candidate who might actually win. I am one of the fools who believe we could retake the house. And maybe the Senate if some more crazy stuff comes out.

Elizabeth Holtzman (our ex Congressperson in NYC) published an article in The Nation this week speculating that impeachment itself is not as insane as some would have us believe. It's pretty to think.

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Letters, a short story, and memories of Paul Bowles

Click all images of the manuscripts and letters to enlarge...

Paul Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999), was a powerful novelist and musician, who often seemed to be in the right place at the right time. He met with, partied with, and worked with people like W.H. Auden, Leonard Bernstein, Christopher Isherwood, Orson Welles, Virgil Thompson, Gertrude Stein, Jack Kerouac, Truman Capote, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg, as well as a few truly masterful Moroccan storytellers, whose work he translated and helped popularize in the west. He was married to Jane Bowles, an excellent writer as well, who Tennessee Williams, John Ashberry and others consider one of the most underrated American writers. It was an odd marriage indeed, but somehow it worked. Jane served as the model for one of the main characters in The Sheltering Sky. At least one movie has been made about their marriage.

Paul Bowles wrote classic 20th century novels like Let It Come Down, The Spider's House, and The Sheltering Sky. He also published fourteen collections of excellent short stories, as well as translations of several native Moroccan authors, most notably numerous novels and collections of the strange and compelling writer Mohammed Mrabet (who people often claimed didn't exist and was merely an alter-ego of Bowles). Bowles also wrote a truly crazy autobiography, Without Stopping, and a masterful travel book: Their Heads Were Green, Their Hand Were Blue.



I was (and am) a big fan. When we started Scape magazine in 1981, I contacted him, and begged for stories, photos, anything. To my shock, he answered with a warm note. And then, to really knock my socks off, a few weeks later, he sent me a story for Scape (to us! Instead of Anteus, or The New Yorker, or The Paris Review!). These are scans of some of the notes from him, as well as the story he sent to Scape.

I blew my one chance to meet him. In 1982, Keelin and I were traveling in Europe, and spent a week in Morocco. In Tangier, I was dog sick with food poisoning (contracted in Granada, Spain) and could not pull my act together to spend any time with him...











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a note from e e cummings

While I worked at Carl Fischer in New York (77-82), I acquired this letter of the great American poet e.e. cummings. We were cleaning out the copyright files--purging contracts and documents for books and music that had been out of print for decades. No one wanted things like this, so I picked up this, a couple of letters from Theodore Roethke, and other ephemera.

This letter has been sitting in a ziplock bag with my photos for about 23 years, and I broke it out today. I also dug out three short letters (to me) from the great American novelist, short story writer, and composer, Paul Bowles. I will also be reprinting his original manuscript that we later published in our journal, Scape.

---click e.e.'s letter to enlarge---

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Poem: The Bay Of Delusion

Between what we do
And what we'd like to think we do
Lies a vast bay of denial and delusion

We make believe
There is war in our bones
That growth is the child of destruction

That we are the chosen ones
God's boys and girls given carte blanche
To make war

We make believe
We are right or wrong
That it doesn't matter

In this world
And we'll take a flier
It doesn't matter in the next.

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Joni Mitchell's lyrics to God Must Be A Boogie Man

God Must Be A Boogie Man

He is three
One’s in the middle unmoved
Waiting
To show what he sees
To the other two
To the one attacking--so afraid
And the one that keeps trying to love and trust
And getting himself betrayed
In the plan--oh
The divine plan
God must be a boogie man!

One’s so sweet
So overly loving and gentle
He lets people in
To his innermost sacred temple
Blind faith to care
Blind rage to kill
Why’d he let them talk him down
To cheap work and cheap thrills
In the plan--oh
The insulting plan
God must be a boogie man!

Which would it be
Mingus one or two or three
Which one do you think he’d want the world to see
Well, world opinion’s not a lot of help
When a man’s only trying to find out
How to feel about himself!
In the plan-oh
The cock-eyed plan
God must be a boogie man!
- Joni Mitchell
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