The Diary of A Simple Man

Today was the best Thanksgiving I've had in...I don't know how long. Years. I hope yours was great, too, if you celebrate it.

A very nice weekend. On Saturday we took Sebastian to a penguin class at the zoo - he got to see them and draw them. I picked up a cap at the gift shop that actually fit my head, for a wonder.

Later, Sebastian and I drove up to Boston. We got choreg and lahmejun from a couple of Armenian markets in Watertown, then went over to my parents' place.

We had a nice family get-together at my sister and brother-in-law's new place (they have a harpsichord, which sounds amazing - I played the one song I know, and it came out great) and then drove home.

It was pretty late, but Sebastian stayed awake through the drive. He'd read the first Harry Potter book all the way to Boston, and finished it on the way home.

On Sunday we went to Foxwoods with Teri's mother. I hung out with Sebastian while they gambled. We went back and forth several on some people-movers (like the ones they have in airports). Then we spent some time at the arcade. After dinner at the Hard Rock cafe, we headed home.

I was pleased with myself tonight. Sebastian was watching a live-action Scooby Doo that he's seen before, but I insisted on a family movie night; we had Mary Poppins from Netflix. Neither he nor Teri had seen it before, and in no time he was laughing and laughing. Teri really liked it too, although she fell asleep before the end. Now Sebastian is interested in reading the Mary Poppins books.

Now everyone is asleep. My computer is still in the shop (I hope it will be ready tomorrow), so I'm going to sleep too. Good night!

Posted via LjBeetle

Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website by Daniel Domscheit-Berg

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


A difficult book to judge. In large part, it seems to be one side of a battle over a broken relationship. Not knowing the other side, how am I to judge who's right? And why should I bother?

In this particular case, the dispute is between the book's co-author, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, and famed Wikileaks director Julian Assange. I'll credit Domscheit-Berg and/or his co-author Tina Klopp (who I presume is a ghost writer), with showing some restraint; they paint Assange as an arrogant and irresponsible egomaniac, but you can see them trying hard not to seem too obviously one-sided.

As for the truth of the details, how the hell am I to know? It's believable that Assange is an asshole. On the other hand, that's just if you go by Domscheit-Berg's word. Frankly, there are a million stories like this out there: a working relationship gone sour. I've had a few of them myself. Unfortunately this one isn't terribly more interesting than, well, any of mine for example! It's only the celebrity of Assange and Wikileaks that got this book into print.

There are two things that could have redeemed this book. One would have been great writing. I can't speak for the original German edition, but the translation in the English edition was merely workmanlike. Oh, it was handled well enough that it didn't jump out at me as a translation; whoever went over the translation did a good enough job, as far as that goes (and incidentally, I used to touch up and in some cases re-write poorly translated articles for a magazine myself, so I have some experience in this area). But the writing simply isn't anything special. Nor is there, for example, any particular humor to the book.

The other potentially redeeming factor would have been some really insightful details about the workings of Wikileaks. There's some of that here, and it is somewhat interesting. If it's credible (and I have no particular reason to doubt it) then Wikileaks is in a real technological pickle. But again, although I support openness and the stated principles of Wikileaks, technical issues don't mean a lot to me here.

The book is remarkably current. It's about issues that took place as recently as five or six months ago. That's a bit jarring! It gave me the feeling that I could have been reading the whole thing on some online forum.

I also have to say that I can't help but feel a little bit taken advantage of by Mr. Domscheit-Berg. His book seems to be little more than a veiled continuation of a running battle with Julian Assange. Okay, if his account is accurate, then Assange is an irresponsible egotist and bastard. But I wasn't involved in this battle, and why is Mr. Domscheit-Berg making money off of me in pursuit of his war? Apart from anything else, that seems a highly ironic act for someone who professes such high ideals.

Incidentally, the book was a birthday gift from my sister and her husband. I'm quite sure they hadn't read it themselves. It was a thoughtful gift - if you're reading this, sis, I hope this review doesn't hurt your feelings - because I am interested in openness, politics, and Wikileaks. I just wish Domscheit-Berg had produced something more worthwhile and in-depth.



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It was a lovely day. Teri and Sebastian woke me up for breakfast and gave me beautiful cards. My parents and my sister and her husband came down from Boston for a cook-out. We had a downpour (with lightning and thunder) after I lit the coals, but I dragged the grill under some thick leaf cover. The weather was strange, with the sun bursting out several times in the middle of the storm. But it stopped raining completely in time for me to cook.

I wish every Father's Day could be like today!

It was a nice, relaxing vacation. I took a lot of pictures. I'll write more about it later.

I was determined not to waste another summer Saturday, so I got us all in the car and we drove to Mystic Aquarium this afternoon. Google said it would be an hour and a half, but we made it in just under an hour. I hadn't realized it was so close!

We didn't see all that much of the aquarium itself. Sebastian refused to touch the mantas in the petting tank. He touched a starfish, though, I think. We saw a white beluga whale, and some sharks and jellyfish.

Teri wasn't feeling well, so Sebastian and I went to the XD Motion Theater by ourselves. The line was long, and we were in it for at least 30 minutes. Unfortunately we were the last two in our group, so when we got into the theater we couldn't sit together (there are only 18 seats!). He was in the leftmost seat in the back row, and I was in the rightmost seat in the front row. I kept looking over at him and waving when I could.

The show itself...well, it was a bit cheesy and computer-generated, but okay. The 3D effects just didn't work for me much. Maybe it was my glasses, although other 3D movies have worked tolerably well for me. The chairs jerked around very violently, and I didn't like that much.

But when the lights came back on, Sebastian was crying and had a very scared expression on his face. The 3D creatures had really scared him. He and I hung around the Titanic exhibit for a while after that while he recovered; he was really interested in the video they were showing of the undersea wreck.

The aquarium was going to be closing soon, so we hurried over and met Teri near the gift shop. Sebastian had a bit of a scene there. He was crying and begging for two different stuffed animals, a manta and a penguin. They were just too expensive for us to buy both of them, so I hustled him out of the shop and Teri bought him the penguin. It was a little embarrassing, although it wasn't a real scene.

He got over it pretty quickly, and we made it home in about an hour. Oh, Nibbles Woodaway (the big blue bug that overlooks I-95 in Providence) had a giant Awful-Awful in front of him, and was wearing red-tinted sunglasses. Sebastian told us that they were 3D glasses, and he was watching a 3D show: us, the cars driving by him on the highway.

(I just found out that Newport Creamery is doing a promotion in conjunction with Nibbles. They have a special Nibbles Woodaway Awful-Awful, vanilla with blue jimmies and blue food coloring. I have got to get Sebastian to the Newport Creamery in Greenville to have one!)

He stayed up a bit late, I read to him, and he fell asleep. Not a perfect day, and Mystic was very expensive, but I'm glad we did it. We really need to do things. I want to find other places to take him. Soon I'll try to take him to Westport, the town where I grew up.

Weird Easter.

On Saturday Sebastian was being a bit loud, so Teri and I took him to the playground. It was a bit cold, and there weren't many kids around. But the few who were there told us that there was going to be an Easter Egg hunt soon at the church down the street.

Sebastian wanted to go, so we took him. I felt a bit weird - me being an atheist and all - but it's not like we had to join the church or anything, or even give them our names. It was a Catholic Church, incidentally.

We have an advantage in that we look quite Catholic, incidentally - Sebastian and I look like big Irish redheads, although of course I'm not Irish at all and Sebastian only has traces of Irish ancestry from Teri. Teri IS part Irish, and she could certainly pass.

It was a decent hunt. They'd put out a lot of plastic eggs with candies in them, plus a few odd religious tattoos. There were two separate areas, one for children 6 and younger, the other for older kids. Teri was quite impressed at the quality of the candy in the eggs: it was all brand-name stuff. Sebastian picked up a huge number of eggs, and there were plenty for everybody.

Hmm. You know, it strikes me that the demolition of American neighborhoods and communities has probably greatly enhanced the growth of churches, particularly churches that include "tight" social networks (I might say, more "cult-like" churches). But I digress.

Later that day Teri took Sebastian back to the playground for a play date with his "best friend" from school. While they were playing, a little girl wanted to play with Billy. Apparently this hurt Sebastian's feelings, but she eventually decided to play with both of them and peace was restored.

Anyway, we spent much of the weekend with stairflight. On Sunday morning we dropped her off at the bus station, and then headed over to my cousin's house for Easter. My parents and my brother and his family were going there, too.

When we got there, we had a really nice surprise: my aunt and uncle were there! They live in Florida, and we don't get to see them very often. My mother in particular was so surprised and happy to see her sister.

Sebastian was in heaven. He does live a lonely life - there are no kids in our neighborhood that he can play with - and now he had FOUR other kids to play with. So he ran around and they all had a ton of fun.

In the meantime I helped my cousin's wife beat a few tough areas in Zelda: The Legend of the Wind Waker, and told them about the Wii.

When the time came for us to go, Sebastian almost threw a fit. He cried and cried, and begged to be allowed to stay - or even to sleep over! He needs a little brother or sister so badly, or at least a good bunch of friends in the area. Teri told him that we had to go right away, at which point he shouted (as I wrote earlier) "Then I'll run into the woods and let the coyotes and wolfs [sic] eat me!". At which point he dashed off towards the trees.

I was paralyzed with laughter and pity, but Teri chased him down and grabbed him. We let him play a little tag, and then a little soccer, but it was getting late and we really had to go. So we ended up having to grab him and drag him by main force to the car. He got angry and tried to hit both of us, but once he was in the car he calmed down and was good. The traffic on the way home was pretty awful, but eventually we got home; Sebastian was asleep, of course, but Teri managed to carry him into the house.

We still have a lot of Easter eggs. We'd planned to do an Easter Egg hunt at our house in the back yard on Sunday morning, but we were too rushed and it was too cold to do it. So we'll probably do it sometime soon, weather permitting.

And that was our Easter weekend!

First, I'd like to wish a very happy birthday to unquietsoul5, and many happy returns.

Second...I took a walk through the past on Saturday with Sebastian, and I'd like to remember it.

I've told him a lot about my maternal grandparents. Unfortunately I don't really remember my paternal grandparents; they died when I was quite young. But I've told him a lot about Ma and Hyrig, and their house in West Roxbury.

We had a lot of fun in that house. Kids could run all around the house through the hallway, and we did, often. Particularly during large family get-togethers, which happened often. We'd listen to Armenian music, eat Armenian food, and me and my brother and sister and my cousins would run around like crazy. Sometimes we went down to the basement, which was pretty much finished with carpets; my grandfather kept a lot of oriental rugs down there, too. They had shelves with tons of canned foods, as do (did) many people who survived the Great Depression.

The place was magical. On the second floor the roof made the ceiling slope in on the sides; two small doors in the sides of the two bedrooms led to crawlspaces in the attic. The house was filled with all sorts of unusual and interesting things. And I only regret that I can't capture the smell of the place.

Not to mention the wonderful things that my grandmother cooked.

The house was sold in the 1990s, by the way. I was living there at the time; I stayed with my grandmother after I graduated from college. All in all, I lived there at least six months or more.

I've told Sebastian a lot about that time. And when I went up with him this Saturday, he told me that he wanted to see it; that he was going to live there when he grew up, and I'd be living there with him.

We go near West Roxbury on the way to Brookline, so I said "what the hell!" and went up a road that I hadn't been on in a decade. I found Joyce Kilmer Lane quite easily, but had to call my mother to make sure that I had the house number right; I knew that I was looking at the right house, but it looked impossibly small. And it couldn't have been that I'd grown since I'd last seen it; after all, I lived there for six months or more when I was in my twenties, and if anything I've shrunk since then.

But that was the house, for sure. I took a couple of photos while Sebastian watched; I had to explain to him that we couldn't go in, which bothered him a little (it bothered me, too).

Then...I was in a nostalgic mood. We weren't far from an old bakery that's a favorite of my family, Hanley's. Parking was a real pain, but eventually I managed to find a spot at the nearby commuter rail.

Stepping in was like stepping back into my childhood...or even further back, into the forties. Apart from the modern clothes that the girls bhind the counter were wearing, the whole place could have been lifted bodily from fifty years ago and transported there overnight.

We got four muffins and three half-moons, and took them over to my parents' place. They were just as good as I remembered.

I have to remember not to wait so long before I go there again...

Long weekend. Short post. Boredom anticipated.

For readers, that is. Sorry.

Who am I kidding? Unless someone is holding a gun to my head, I'm not going to be brief.
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We all slept. Sometime in the night I was woken again; the power had come back on. Back to sleep until morning, and my vacation was over.

Announcement: You're going to see less of me online here. That's because I need to spend more time working, and less time writing. I will try to find some way to make posts from home in the evening, but realistically there's no way I'll be able to write as much as I have been - not without cutting deeply into my sleep time, and that's something I cannot do. I desperately need sleep.

I will also have to use that meager free time in the evenings to do political writing, when I can. Yes, that means that I will be writing a lot less. No, I'm not happy about it. But I don't have a choice.

More and more of my posts here have been friends-only; that will continue.

This is an exception because I know that some non-LJ friends read my journal. And I'm only writing this now because it's absolutely dead here, thanks to the holiday. Even so, I'll keep this short and find some sort of work to do. I could always clean my cube, I guess.

The "killer storm" dumped about 9-10 inches of snow on us yesterday morning. Teri and I shoveled out the driveway, her car, and our front walk. Unfortunately my car was on the road overnight, so I got a $50 ticket. Fortunately we were given some money for Christmas, because I'd feel awfully stupid being taken off to jail for a parking ticket.

I hate being desperately poor.

I did not go to work yesterday because my father's cousin Mary passed away on Christmas Eve, and her wake was yesterday afternoon. It was a terribly sad day, even more so because her mother had died only a few weeks before. Mary was awfully nice; one of those rare people that everyone just naturally likes. But at least she's out of pain now.

I wish I could see extended family at other times, and not just wakes and funerals.

Other news: Sebastian is well, and Teri is too. She and I went for her first workout at the health club recently; she was a little nervous. I think it will be good for us both, though.