Wednesday, November 30, 2005
ON THE ROAD AGAIN
I'm in Boston for the week for some depositions. Early morning at the Westin Hotel in Copley Square presents a moment for some disconnected blogging.
COFFEE. My friends know me as a Food Philistine. I tend to judge food by quantity rather than quality in an age when sophisticates focus on culinary realms that are beyond my ken. The one exception to this is coffee. I love good coffee and every morning I'm at home grind my own beans. Thus it is that I have come to judge business hotels by the quality of the little in-room coffee service almost all thankfully now provide. I am pleased to report that the Westin in Boston has very tasty Starbucks in the guest rooms. Yum.
BOSTON. Why do the lefties have all the beautiful cities? San Francisco, Seattle, Boston -- the three most attractive cities in America, and just as pinko as you could want. While Houston, arguably the urban capital of the Bush cabal, is (while a truly great place to live and work) nothing to write home about in the pulchritude department. Oh well.
READING. Although I'm having to work a lot on this trip, the flight up and the time before I went to bed last night did provide a bit of time for recreational reading. Before I left, I finished A Peace to End All Peace, about the foundations of the modern Middle East in the collapse of the Ottoman Empire during and after World War I. As I mentioned earlier, this is a really good book -- well documented and detailed -- that sets out just how the artificial boundaries of the countries we now find on the map of the Middle East were determined. This trip presents the opportunity to get a good start on Howard M. Sachar's 1000-page tome, A History of Israel From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time. Published in 1976, it predates the sad conquest of American academic Middle East studies by Edward Said and the pro-Arab multiculturalists. Thus it can chronicle the heroic founding of Israel without being crippled by the current miasma of post-modern relativism. So far, I've gotten up to the beginning of World War I, so the book has served as a fascinating supplement to the one before, providing me with information to fill the huge gaps I had in my knowledge of the founding of the modern Zionist movement.
BLOGWEB. My recent burst of writing here has been noticed by my friend Michael Dougan, and that attention has then spread to software artist and guitar virtuoso Alex Bunardzic. Ain't the web great?
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 5:14 AM
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