Here I am in new environs. This posting will have the mundane but necessary function of guiding you through my new abode. It starts from the middle. We skip the entry and the front door as I simply did not photograph it. Maybe a sense that the name "Oakcrest" written on the translucent door window would invite mocking comments. Or maybe just a haste to drag you into the very inards of my world. What you see here is the living room with emphasis on the windows and the Audio-visual equipment. Should you wish to escape this second picture shows you the way towards the corridor. One could argue that the breadth of this hall is space wasted. To be frank, in my previous space this hall would have made up a bedroom. Still should you wish to leave here is the door. So, you are still here. Let us then turn towards the food preparation laboratory. To reach it we have to go past the dining room. One is linked to the other and both are connected to the living room as is plainly evident from this next picture. To the left side of the dining room just before the windows there is space for a bookcase. Unfortunately it simply did not fit the stairs up to my aprtment. It patiently waits dismantling and reassembly. Glory and curses to IKEA. So you arrive to the dining room, which has pretty decent light. In fact the apartment in general has very good light, which I am afraid may mean that I will be warm in the summer. Contributions to global warming are expected as an airconditioning unit may be purchased. Smaller than my previous kitchen, this one is less kitsch and at the same time has at least as many cupboards and storage. Overall an improvement though I will miss the in-kitchen table. On our way out of the kitchen we get the opportunity to look at the living room from the very corner of the dining-space and get the full size of the windows looking on oak. I should be getting pictures of the mountains to the north-east. Yes I can see them from my windows. I lack balconies though. We move to the bedroom. This is the view from the bathroom accross the hall and into the bedroom. As you can see the light is pretty good in this area of the apartment as well. The bedroom is also used as an office and yet it does not seem as if this makes it crammed. So this is it. I may post more as paintings go up the walls and as my desk and bookcase are positioned in place. More of the bedroom will also follow. For now a break. Health.

The early morning rise has its rewards. You see a world untouched yet from the fretfulness of the day that runs on coffee. I drove N to the airport and then took the bus to campus. Some work to be done on my course and a medical kit to collect for the field -school. Even as I ride the bus I feel my self getting aggravated by the bumps on the road shaking my note-taking tablet. Even as the day grows older I feel anger seeping in me. I have to wonder whether life is mostly a process of anger management. The ones of us who do it best are the either successful or quietly irrelevant. Those who fail are incarcerated, killed in a blaze of rapid machine gun fire or simply rise to become Attila the Hun. The day however, is still young and the sun pierces the dense forest on the hill to my work. Not a bad moment even if I feel the urgent need for sleep, or maybe more coffee. I have arrived at the office and among other things I am once again facing a naked door. Someone removed my name tag from the door. It is the second time and it is a bit annoying. You assume that once you got your F you turn to self-reflection and work harder. I need to be careful however, who knows how one moves from stealing name tags to shooting the professor. Maybe this will be the next form of academic attire. Please excese the gratuitous use of sexy bullet proof vest model.

There is something reassuring in seeing an electorate learn. The French are certainly still in an existential crisis regarding the direction of their republic, they have nevertheless learned an important lesson: if you do not want the fascists in the game and if you want to have a choice between slightly different visions of the future, you need to vote. Apathy is not a political statement. With participation in the order of 80 t0 85% the French have made this Sunday a celebration of the political process, with football games on the side as a refreshment to boot. So Lyon is winning the championship for this year in France and the Sego-Sarko shootout will entertain us in two weeks time offering a true clash of distinctly different ideas rearding France's future direction. Whether we like the two clashing visions or not is another story. At least for now we can be consoled in the existence of la différence.

To return to a tired subject I will quote people I normally dislike, the Economist: "Americans are in fact queasier about guns than the national debate might suggest. Only a third of households now have guns, down from 54% in 1977. In poll after poll a clear majority has supported tightening controls." I will stop at this point writing about guns in the US. I am not exactly sure what prompts me to even bother. Maybe the feeling that this constitutes one of the more egregious violations of reason on the part of our neighbors in the south. For now then lets leave it at that and focus on writing a biography of a medieval Byzantine bureaucrat and meeting my students for punch and chatter. The new big question is the following: how to put the life experience of your friends in a biography of a medieval man and make it relavant. To offer a hint, it is the big man in the City whose life I find useful for historical analysis.

Tim Kaine noted with an air of righteousness worthy of a medieval pope that he has "nothing but loathing for those who take the tragedy and make it political." Well, not that it matters, but I have nothing but contempt for people like Tim Kaine. People who have been instrumental in converting the term "political" into a slur only to themselves score points in a political board-game. By making this statement Kaine was embarking in this most "Bushian" of activities: pre-emptive strike. Not politician of note in the US made a statement linking guns and the crime on VTech's campus, not one, that itself a sad reminder of the collapse of meaningful debate in the US, and of the sterilization of politics from anything like substantive discussion. Yet the Democratic governor struck and made a hyper-political move by attacking those who had not expressed themselves, i.e. the cowed, defeated majority of Americans who want gun controls. Like a nasty tyrant unleashed on the hopeless majority, Kaine created a false enemy and then savaged that imaginary foe, so as to strike a chord with the demented pro-gun electorate he serves in Virginia. As if the gun-control majority has not been savaged enough over the years by representatives too weak to take a stand and legislate. It is Kaine who deserves loathing for libelling the gun-control majority and scoring political points with the gun-totting nuts. It is Kaine who is a sad reflection of what the future of the Democrats and the country as a whole looks like. I would be ready, if not too happy, to accept this type of Democrat if at least they were truly liberal in issues of class, if they represented an odd gun-slinging ABBA-style scandinavian economic vision. Yet I think that we can safely discount this. Just because Webb is a populist, it does not mean we are in for a new New Deal. Be pessimistic people, Tim Kaine is evidence of days to come. And I loath the days and the governor.

The domestication of happiness. It could be a title of a Ph.D thesis. A semicolon would be essential and the inevitable gerund structured subordinate clause would appear. Thus "gendering the house," or "housing serotonin," would be added to create catcy and sexy title that all hiring committees associate with cutting edge BS and automatically respect. Be that as it may - an expression I had to hunt down like a Seljuk raiding party in the open plateau of Anatolia after unarmed Byzantine peasants, throughout the breadth and length of my own thesis pages - it seems that domestic bliss matters. I have always been a proponent of this version of higher existance and it now appears that others are going through the same realization. The past two days have not been bad. What with the nice sunny skies and announcements from beyond the oceans that domestic happiness has been successfuly reproduced in controlled laboratory conditions, what with the reading of a good book and the steady if tedious progression towards the reading of a German article, I have been feeling well. It also helped sitting out and drinking quality Belgians. Now, a new day, a move for coffee and here we go.

So here I am once again angry. Angry at the inability of a whole culture, a literate culture at that, to deal with facts. Guns dont kill people, people kill people is the comment, and yet there is not way any European, knowing fully well that we have 100 times fewer gun deaths than the US, will ever be convinced by the fatuous argumentation coming out of the mouths of pundits all over the US political spectrum. Naturally, I am not concerned about the conservatives. By now the word conservative, when dealing with US politics, is synonymous with two not necessarily contradictory notions: a) idiocy, b) hypocritical and highly immoral dedication to profiteering. What is thoroughly problematic is the response on the so-called left; the Democratic response. Or should I say, lack there of. There has been a loud silence on the democratic side. The party of the "reality based community" has entered as a result of its electoral strategy a period of numb silence on the issue of guns. Because Democrats need to win in the south and Montana or some other godforsaken place the Democratic party is increasingly falling under the spell of pro-life, pro-gun bible thumpers with a penchant for economic populism. OK I am being a populist myself here. Webb may be all that but he is eloquent and the closest you could get to a New Deal Democrat. It seems, however, that this will lead to the ultimate castration of the truly liberal North Eastern and Californian voices. Not that those really exist in the Democratic party. Ultimately the question is: how much will we sacrifice for class to re-enter the US political discourse. It seems that a lot is the answer. And it is not even guaranteed that the reintroduction will take place. So meanwhile prepare yourselves for more gun deaths and dumber responses to the problem and don't coun't on a health system to be there for support of the victims.

This list does not appear in chronological order and may even not be complete. It is, however, as complete as I could make it. Those are the films N and I watched in the course of the past six months. It includes some real flops, but also pretty decent cinema. I think we will keep this up.

1. Malena
2. Jesus Camp
3. Children of Men
4. Good Shepherd
5. Le Couperet
6. The Missing
7. The Lives of Others
8. Pan’s Labyrinth
9. The Science of Sleep
10. Shortbus
11. L’emploit du temps
12. Death of a president
13. The Departed
14. Stranger than Fiction
15. Wag the Dog
16. Half Nelson
17. Hustle and Flow
18. Crash
19. The Good German
20. The Holiday (super flop)
21. Tideland
22. Blood Diamond
23. Don Juan De Marco
24. Pirates of the Caribbean
25. The Saint (flop)
26. Snakes on a Plane (absurdly bad)
27. Z
28. Death of Mr Lazarescu
29. Fuse
30. 300 (So much wrong with it)
31. Casino Royale
32. Crank (silly)
33. Bon cop Bad cop
34. Souvenir from Canada
35. Volver
36. Borat
37. Only human (Seres Queridos)
38. A simple Curve
39. The Illusionist
40. Howl’s Moving Castle
41. Tristram Shandy
42. Un fil a patte (Why did Béart do that?)
43. The Confederate States of America
44. Do the right thing
45. Scoop
46. The decline of the American Empire
47. The Smell of Canfora the fragrance of Jasmine
48. Marie Antoinette (flop in cool dresses)
49. The prairie home companion
50. The Oh in Ohio
51. Hedwig and the Angry inch
52. A very long engagement

It started as an innocent trip to the grocery shop and it ended as a lucious meal. The magic of trout cooked in aluminum with lemon, ginger, garlic and parsley unleashed itself on my pallet. It was enough to make the evening pleasant, the siple creature that I am. Since last night things have gone downhill. The cold I was almost avoiding has taken over me and my nose is sore from its intimate affair with tissue. Still hopes are up that I will be able to run on Sunday. For now bedtime

Live - Shop - Work. This is the advertising gimmick offered by Crossroads, a housing, office, and shopping development at the Northwestern corner of Cambie and Boradway in Vancouver. The location is indeed great and the suites are bound to have decent north shore views, at least until some one else decides to build a highrise just next to them. What is, however, pathetic is the accurate in terms of description, but vile in terms of its implications for modern humans, motto chose by the advertisers. I mean, this is a building placed on a major crossroads location. Instead of emphasizing the great location, the food and etertainment aspects of life at "Crossroads," instead of highlighting the aspect of meeting people, interacting and creating meaningful relations in a nicely urban setting, in a city, which is well designed in terms of the combinations it offers for life work and play in tolerably humane conditions, the advertisers chose: Live - Shop - Work. It is as if human life is all about shopping and working. As if the first thing you should be doing after the end of work is shopping at Lululemon and Wholefoods and then going home. No interraction with people, why do that? No enjoyment of a great city and its opportunities. No, you have to live so that you work so that you shop and keep the building boom alive.