Tamanya’s surprise morning tomorrow

She doesn’t know it yet, but she gets to return to Ma’adi and play with her three older cat friends for six weeks.

I’ve really been saved by the babysitters. They’ve been wonderfully generous with little Tammy.

Four or five days ago I would have welcomed the break, since we were at a sort of biting crisis at that point. Now she still bites, but it’s somehow more manageable. And her playfulness has become more intelligent in the past few days, showing a more deliberate sense of limits.

Her new favorite thing is to jump into garbage cans and make a mess playing with the garbage. There have been some pretty bad messes a couple of times.

But I’ve also created a sort of amusement park ride for her. When she climbs into an empty plastic garbage bin, I lift it off the ground and run it through the air for several minutes like a carnival thrill ride. I started gently and slowly the first time, but she wasn’t satisfied: she has the thrill-seeking gene, and clearly wanted more of the ride, so I gave her a spin through the air for several more minutes. And now she demands a few rides every day. She climbs into the little garbage bin and gives certain signals that she wants me to pick it up and whirl it through the air very quickly. It doesn’t seem to make her dizzy. Cats don’t seem to get dizzy easily: hold them upside-down, for instance, and there are no discernible ill effects, whereas some humans would become sick for days if that were to happen.

the declining quality of Expedia

Not all of my friends agree with me, but I’ve noticed a definite decline in quality at Expedia, Microsoft’s highly visible online travel booking service.

Over the years I started using them more and more, simply because I like booking tickets myself rather than waiting several days to hear back from a travel agent. As you all know, I travel quite a lot, and it wasn’t long before I found myself in some elite traveller category designation at Expedia.

But they’ve really been getting worse, I’m quite sure of it.

The most recent example is that they recently sent me a “reminder” about my upcoming trip on Tuesday, and this reminder included a 4:40 AM flight from Cairo to Amsterdam. The problem is, those 4:40 AM KLM flights out of Cairo have not existed since the revolution, for curfew reasons. They’re all 3:00 PM flights now, and Expedia doesn’t seem to have any awareness of this. The only reason I remembered it is because KLM phoned my listed U.S. telephone and left a message on my parents’ answering machine, which they later told me about. How can Expedia not be in the know about a global KLM Cairo policy that has been in place for 3-4 months?

But that’s not even the worst of it. What I really detest is Expedia’s little quirk of sending emails just minutes before your flight that say: “There have been important changes to your itinerary and your airline may have limited options in helping you. Your ticket is now frozen until you phone one of Expedia’s customer service representatives and make alternative plans.”

This is simply infuriating, especially for someone like me who generally travels with email access but not a cell phone (simply because Vodafone Egypt robs us blind on roaming charges and I won’t get burned a third time on that, so I always leave my phone behind in Egypt).

Last December was the worst such case. I was in one of those hours-long snowstorm ticket lines at Charles de Gaulle Airport and got one of those stupid messages from Expedia. I wasn’t about to lose my place in that endless line only to go to a payphone and learn Expedia’s news, which is usually something infuriatingly trivial like: “your flight time is now 7 minutes later than announced” (I’m serious).

Anyway, I’m planning to phase them out. What’s a better online booking system? Anyone out there use one that they’re satisfied with?

McCain chastises Republicans for isolationism

HERE. McCain’s sort of politics (the use of force ostensibly for the good) is a poor fit for the moment, however, and isn’t what the voters are likely to be listening to next year.

People who think only about the past decade or past several decades of history may think of the U.S. as inherently interventionistic. But in fact, national history has long shown polarizations and wild oscillations between interventionism and isolationism. The classic example of this, of course, was when the first American intervention in Europe in WWI was followed by the rejection of the League of Nations immediately afterward. There the two separate national impulses appeared in rapid sequence. Both impulses probably share a common root in political moralism, since with a moralistic stance on anything your reactions are likely to be polarized: sometimes wanting to go out and make things better even if by force, other times wanting to wash your hands of the corruption of others and focus on your own life.

It’s little surprise, with Obama now the owner of 2 or even 3 wars (if you count Libya as the third) that the Republican candidates are trying to position themselves as non-interventionists. It’s a useful option for them, allowing them to distance themselves from Bush and also to make the case for disengagement on the basis of fiscal responsibility, a traditional Republican pillar, at least in theory (they’ve tended to run up giant debts whenever in power since the Reagan years).

Yes, it’s fairly cynical of the Republican candidates given that their man Bush was still in power just 2.5 years ago, and they all spoke regularly in his honor in January 2009. But it makes strategic sense for them to fill that gap in the spectrum, given that Obama doesn’t appear ready to disengage from anywhere, though the mood of the electorate may soon begin to demand it. Somewhat paradoxically, the military elimination of bin Laden may add to the demilitarizing pressure on Obama, since “mission accomplished” sounds a bit less ridiculous in that case, and people have other more immediate worries than chasing Taliban around that they want government to address.

Levi Bryant, The Democracy of Objects

The book is now listed on OHP’s website, HERE.

Levi discusses the book HERE. Actually, he discusses more than the book: he discusses all the things that are right about the OHP project as a whole. As he notes, he is the author of the first book in the series and possibly of the entire press (I’ve lost track of whether one of the other series at OHP has beaten us to the punch; maybe, maybe not). The University of Michigan library is the homeland of the OHP books, so we’re in contact quite a bit with Ann Arbor, which also happens to be the home of our good friend Joseph Goodson.

As the series co-editor of the New Metaphysics series in which this book will appear, I’ve read the entire thing 3 or 4 times. The whole book is very stimulating, but I tend to agree with the majority of readers so far that Chapter 4, in which NIKLAS LUHMANN is the major referent, is especially striking.

And as usual, Levi’s as good as anyone at explaining Lacan. I hope he’ll do a whole book on Lacan someday, in fact, but I think he has other offers from various presses at the moment.