Potato I have

From the Economist’s obituary of Naguib Mahfouz:

He was a perfect gentleman: self-effacing, tolerant to a fault, and a consummate listener. Into his 70s he prowled far across the city on solitary early-morning walks, typically ending up in one of the many cafés where he was greeted as a returning son of the quartier. Into his 90s he rarely missed his weekly gathering of intimates at some public watering hole. There he soaked up the endless tales of woe, the political gossip and wicked jokes that provide the spice of Egyptian life.

I don’t read many novels lately, but his Cairo Trilogy is back on my shortlist.

From a short profile of an actor I like a lot, Forest Whitaker, who’s just finished playing Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland:

On the whole, though, I think we’re dictated by our structure, our past, our environment, our culture. So once you understand the patterns that shape a person, how can you not find sympathy?

Ghost Dog is one of my favorite movies, and while it is solidly Jarmuschian, I can’t imagine the film without Whitaker. This year he’s taking his first-ever ongoing TV role, in The Shield; maybe I’ll dig around to see if French cable has picked it up.

(via rw)

Here’s an amazing feat of the hands and brain: this guy transformed the Paris métro ticket into an X-wing fighter. (via BoingBoing)

BoingBoing has frequent posts on papercraft. After seeing Le Chateau Ambulant, I was wanting a related activity to do with my daughter … and saw this castle papercraft project (free! well, uh, … ink). We started together, she would cut out some of the simple parts, but now she “really likes to watch.” We’re about halfway through, page 14 I think. It’s amazingly time-consuming. All the instructions are in Japanese, but no problems so far.

I don’t think I ever heard about papercraft before the BB posts. It’s strangely attractive, it’s concrete and physical, it forces me to slow down and it doesn’t involve a keyboard.

I found a fine article about Miyazaki by Margaret Talbot, one of the few people to manage to interview him. Along the way, I discovered the New America Foundation, which looks like a place where I could seriously spend a lot of time reading; check out the list of the best articles of 2005. Its Board of Directors is chaired by James Fallows. And from its mission:

Now, more than ever, our nation needs a robust public debate, one that does justice to the complex challenges and opportunities of this unfolding era. […] The purpose of the New America Foundation is to bring exceptionally promising new voices and new ideas to the fore of our nation’s public discourse. Relying on a venture capital approach, the Foundation invests in outstanding individuals and policy ideas that transcend the conventional political spectrum.

The Talbot article was originally published in the New Yorker, but they seem to have very perishable links.

It’s been out for six months in France, but we three just finally saw the new Miyazaki film, Le Chateau Ambulant (Howl’s Moving Castle, Hauru No Ugoku Shiro) on Saturday. It’s the fifth Miyazaki title we’ve seen; if anyone knows of anything as wonderful as his films, please do share. The things sticking with me right now include: the collapsing of age through the shifting presentation of Sophie (somehow cubist for me); the crumbling, petering-out of the castle going up the mountain; the hilariously diminished Witch of the Waste (Sorcière des Landes); the green sticky ooze of pouting; the interdependence of the cursed.

Before seeing Miyazaki, but as an adult, I saw several animated films that I liked, that impressed me with their production qualities, that gave me a good laugh. But none that I wanted to watch more than once or twice, certainly none that left me moved and preoccupied in the way his more complex films do. And I’m delighted that they also captivate our five-year-old daughter, as they have much that I want to pass on to her: stories that are beautiful and magical and optimistic, in which the physical world is prominent, that show that how people treat each other and their world is important, with heroines who are real and imperfect and strong. Stories that will grow with her, cartoons that are not very cartoonish.

Today I showed my daughter a picture of the man who makes all these movies we love so much, and she spontaneously said “Thank you, Miyazaki!” I repeated after her, and said a silent prayer that his latest is not his last — he’s a huge part of our shared story world.

I took this survey a few years ago, but don’t find my score at the moment (it was pre-blog). Taking it again I don’t think there is much of a change from that one, but I sure wish I had scores from my teens/20s/30s.

Today it is:

• Economic Left/Right: -4.88
• Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.33

There are a graph and a rough “scatter table” of bloggers’ links on this Tim Lambert page, from late 2003; there is heavy clustering in the same lower-left quadrant where I find myself, but who knows what that means, the sample is anything but random. There is also some discussion of whether the survey is accurate/useful/etc.

Here is a self-described “better political compass;” those scores are not directly comparable, though I was much more centrist here (numbers in parenthesis are -1/1 normalized):

• left/right: -2.8628 (-0.1723)
• idealism/pragmatism: +0.8226 (+0.0495)

Both of these surveys were like almost every survey I take, in that I get caught up in trying to understand what the question is “really” asking, everything seems to depend on some definition or other, and I wonder how the heck these things can really account for all my mental jumping around. Though strangely, page six on the first survey was very black-and-white for me: I clicked right through those without hesitation, thankful for something simple.

Last October in Monterey, California.

From an Easter egg hunt at Parc Montsouris (some nice park photos here, #1073-#1094, from Andrew Boucher). Official Parc Montsouris pages in French and English are unfortunately pretty drab, but have some historical information.

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging! (leaving this test post as a marker of my migration to WordPress)

In an unprecedented post-festival meeting with the press, the Cannes jury discussed their choices. Re: Palme d’Or recipient “Fahrenheit 9/11″, jury members said “it was a unanimous choice based purely on its strength as a film, not a political statement.”