the OOO theme song comes on

DJ Spooky, “Object Unknown”

refrain: “I’m seeing objects, objects…”

It’s almost like DJ Spooky is teasing me with these lyrics, one stanza after another.

big NBA shock

Dallas 122-L.A. Lakers 86

Dallas massacred the Lakers. I can’t believe it. Farewell to Phil Jackson; I never imagined him retiring on anything less than another championship note.

The Lakers won the last two NBA championships, in case it slipped your mind. They won’t win this time. They are eliminated, 4-0 at the hands of Dallas with its history of talented teams choking in the clutch. Wow.

This is the weirdest and most interesting NBA playoffs we’ve ever seen.

Even weirder… Who will Dallas play in the West Finals? The winner between Memphis and Oklahoma City. No joke. (If you’ve been asleep on the NBA for awhile, Oklahoma City is the team formerly known as the Seattle SuperSonics.)

if you like world music

One of my most treasured CD’s since the early 1990’s is Zakir Hussain, “Magical Moments of Rhythm.”

HERE. (I recommend sampling the 3rd song, “Sultan Khan,” though they don’t let you hear Zakir going totally bezerk on the tablas in the sample like he does later in the song.)

This came at the recommendation of my youngest brother, who was a University of Iowa radio station d.j. for awhile and a pretty good authority on music of the Middle East as well as India and Pakistan.

In that capacity, he was able to get me the free tickets to Ravi Shankar in Iowa City in 1993, which was an almost disturbingly good concert. None of us who went could think of one thing that should have been different about it. Better yet, Shankar was nice enough to grant my brother an interview for his radio show the next day.

missing that little sweetheart

But she’s in good hands with Wafaa in Cairo.

birthday coming up

Less than 90 minutes away.

Oxford food

Tim Morton, an Oxford alumnus himself, writes and says I should have eaten Chinese at the Opium Den.

And you know, I seriously considered it, walking indecisively past it about three times. In the end I thought the name was probably a bit too gimmicky.

I ended up instead with the most mediocre Italian dinner of all time and a shocking final tab of 30 quid. It was a truly pathetic dinner, and I was ashamed of myself for ending up with such an unsatisfying first meal here.

caught part of a concert

Just strolling at random, I happened to see that there was a concert inside the Bodleian Library by violinist RUTH PALMER.

The concert had already been going for half an hour, but her very nice manager agreed to let me go in at the intermission for a discount.

Lovely concert. All Bach, solo violin. The first half and second half were held in different rooms of the Bodleian, and the encore (nice touch) was held outside in the mildly chilly quad.

Very much enjoyed it.

why Obama is *so* re-elected

As stated on this blog previously, I thought Obama was going to win a second term anyway, just because of a weak pool opposing him. (The same logic governed my prediction in early 1995, against everyone around me, that Bill Clinton was easily headed for a second term. It was one of the best and seemingly riskiest predictions I ever made.)

But now I think Obama could almost survive a deep second recession, if that’s what things come to.

You can win a war and still lose an election for economic reasons. See George Bush Sr. Or see (even more surprisingly) Winston Churchill.

But this week Obama didn’t do something measly like win a war– he actually merged with the “dragonslayer” archetype. I can’t think of any parallels in human history at the moment. There have been other defeats of horrifying individual enemies, such as the Roman victories over Hannibal and Attila, but Rome wasn’t really a democracy at either of those stages and so there weren’t the sorts of electoral repercussions that we are likely to see with Obama. [ADDENDUM: And of course, the Romans didn’t actually succeed in bringing about the deaths of either of those figures. But the threat they posed was stopped with sufficient abruptness that it was something like deaths in the two cases.]

Sure, there are still plenty of people around sniping at him, demanding more proof than a birth certificate, and all such ploys. But just look at the sorts of reactions he’s receiving this week from New York police and firefighters, and you’ll see the sort of unparalleled psychic breakthrough he’s made with the electorate (and he had plenty of votes in 2008 to begin with).

Yes, there are a few things that have disappointed me as well. I’m just talking here about the 2012 election, and I really think Obama has it in the bag. The Republicans may as well run Sarah Palin and get it out of their systems, because I suspect that getting something out of their systems is the best they’ll be able to do at this point. They’ll probably be facing Hillary in 2016, so they ought to start working on that puzzle instead.

Oxford

It’s my fourth time here, but the others were all day-trips. You can’t really savor the atmosphere of a place when you’ve never fallen asleep there deep in the night and then tasted the fresh morning air.

Actually, I’ll be spending five nights here.

On almost every trip to London I end up having multiple meetings at Paddington Station. That’s because I’m usually so busy in London that the only way I can possibly see someone is on way out to Heathrow before departing. Today, of course, it was a matter of waiting for the train to Oxford, but I had two great conversations out there.

The conversations are almost always launched at that Costa Coffee in there, for the purely accidental reason that it’s so easy to say “meet me at the Costa next to Track 1.” No one can possibly miss that place. As a result, that little non-descript chain coffee outlet is utterly saturated with memories for me from across the years.

Had a completely mediocre dinner here for an outrageous price. There must be good food in Oxford somewhere, right? I’ve never even stayed here as late as dinnertime on my past visits, so I really have no idea.

In fact, I’ve never seen Oxford in the dark at any time. Always sunny and mid-day when I’ve been here before.

not sure I would have released those videos

It piques one’s curiosity to watch bin Laden watching himself and Obama on television, sure. But I’m not sure it was a good idea to release those videos yesterday.

The obvious speculation is that the Pentagon did this to try to remove a bit of the bin Laden mystique. The problem is that the sword cuts both ways. By lessening the mystique, it also makes it feel more like they sent a hit squad of 25 Navy SEALS to gun down a pathetic old washed up shut-in who was doing nothing but reliving his past glory days on video. (I enjoyed the line in whichever newspaper that he looks like an aging actor imagining a comeback.)

Granted, that’s not what he was. He was something much worse, and I don’t mourn his disappearance; indeed, I’m greatly relieved. But I do question the release of those videos.