Now the sun's fading faster, we're ready to go


wang gongxin, portrait rights no. 9

* Top ten conservative idiots. excerpt:

"7. The Pentagon

"Best News To Come Out Of Iraq In Ages: It should come as no surprise that the Pentagon last week 'dismissed' a poll of U.S. soldiers fighting in Iraq. The poll showed that 72% of U.S. troops stationed there believe that they should pull out within a year. Only 22% thought that they should stay in Iraq 'as long as it takes,' while one in three want the U.S. to withdraw immediately.

"Clearly these numbers do not bode well for the Bush administration, and the Pentagon must now be scrambling to come up with a way to raise the morale of that large majority of troops.

"So I have a proposal: given her strong belief in the Iraq war, I would like to recommend that Rep. Jean Schmidt of Ohio be sent to Iraq to tell the troops there that 'cowards cut and run, Marines never do.' She seemed pretty firm in that belief on the floor of the House, so I'm sure she'd be glad to take her message to the 72% of American troops in Iraq who want to come home within a year. Come on Jean, put your money where your mouth is!"

* Leonard Cohen wins $9 million judgment. excerpt:

"Leonard Cohen has been granted a default judgment of $9 million U.S. against his former manager, who allegedly drained more than $5 million in savings from the recent Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee.

"The ruling was made in Los Angeles County Superior Court in response to a civil suit that Cohen had filed last August against Kelley Lynch, his business manager from early 1988 through October 2004. The Montreal-born singer, songwriter and poet alleged fraud, negligence and breaches of contract and fiduciary duty on the part of Lynch.
...
"Cohen claims that his retirement fund had been reduced to $150,000 by late 2004. He alleges that he was misled into believing that the proceeds from the $12-million sale of his publishing holdings had been put into a company called Traditional Holdings that was 99 per cent-controlled by his children Adam, 34, and Lorca, 32. Traditional was actually 99.5-per cent-owned by Lynch, who was Cohen's lover for a brief time in 1990."

* "We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. It's just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there. Destiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it were a riddle, and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected." -ben okri