Southern California is burning – sudden and intense changes…

Posted on October 22, 2007 by Michele

Wildfires, burning out of control, are continuing to threaten thousands of homes in California. A lot of people are going to lose theirs today. You can’t help but to have this incredible sense of the fragility of everything. As human beings we are wired to think that everything will stay the way it is, safe from sudden and intense changes…

We’ve had a very dry summer and the global warming is not helping. It is pretty scary to watch (even on TV) a fire that “jumps the freeway”. In my last post, I said that we have only one season here but I have to correct that because we have four: the earthquake season, the mudslide season, the fire season and the last but not least the Oscars season – each as unpredictable as the others in its outcome.

Just found these images (above) by Pooya Monajemi on BBC. Like Dante, we may all need our guide getting us out of Hell. “What region of the earth is not full of our calamities?”Virgil

swiming pool, wildfires, california

The arbitrariness, the randomness of it all is astounding…”You did or did not escape the fires?” That could be the current definition of a Californian. The two images (above) from yahoo say more about these devastating fires.

I took the picture above from my car, trapped on the closed down freeway 14 near Sand Canyon, a couple of hours ago – I still have the smoke on my hair.

Ahmadinejad, Bush and Sarkozy: fatal combination

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Michele

How unlucky can you be to have these three as your presidents? I am iranian by birth, american by choice and french by nostalgia; these three guys are today at each other’s throats. Sarkozy is still the more tolerable of the three (which is not a big accomplishment).

I actually think that he can do something for france (that will be another post, another day) but now his foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, wants to bomb Iran. Bush is as trigger-happy as always and Ahmadinejad wants to wipe Israel from the face of the earth. I just read on today’s LA times that he is a hero to the underrepresented muslim/arabs of this world and has the audacity to go to Columbia university and be jeered! I am waiting to see him on Charlie Rose tonight; his second 60 minutes gig was as ridiculous as the first one: bad questions, worse answers (and lots of giggles!) NY times has this article about the subject. Life is tough…

“At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.” Aldous Huxley