Over at Teekay’s

David Rieff, while always a lucid observer, can be an exasperating writer because he confounds expectations of consistency. Having championed an impassioned liberal interventionism during the wars in former Yugoslavia, he today appears considerably more skeptical about the possibilities of outside involvement, humanitarian or otherwise, in such conflicts. Whatever one may think of his prolific output, every once in a while he writes something that is just utterly brilliant. One such piece is his review of the Phillips and Diamond books on Iraq in the 1 August issue of the Nation, titled No Exit Strategy. Go there and read it — right now.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine reports today (story by subscription only) that Vardan Kushnir, “Russia’s biggest spammer,” was killed with several blows to his head last week. He ran three language schools, the “Center for American English,” the “New York English Center” and the “Center for Spoken English,” which all inundated Russian e-mail accounts with unwanted advertising, or spam. If the media speculation about his killers is correct, we have 17.6 million suspects — that’s the number of e-mail addresses in Russia.

Somebody recently told me a joke that the only product Microsoft could ever make that wouldn’t suck was a vacuum cleaner. I tend to agree.

I’m currently working on a project document for a client based on a previous document that wasn’t very expertly done. (Basically, no styles were used and no numbering — they just indented stuff manually and added numbers to it. Which is as well because it doesn’t screw up the formatting — or so one might’ve thought.) I did all the headings properly, marking them as “heading 1″ and “heading 2″ and so forth, without worrying about their formatting — I just wanted to get the logical structure right.

I added some text to each section, including some copy-and-paste, double-checked that the heading numbering was OK, saved and quit. When I re-opened the document a bit later, all the headings were screwed up.

So I created an empty document and just typed up the headings, initially without applying any styles. I then marked all headings at level 1 and assigned “heading 1″ to them and did the same with level-2 headings.

Same result: the numbering would just shift around, with some level-2 heds showing up as level 1. It drove me nuts, and I must’ve lost a full hour.

So I did something I never thought I’d do: I used Apple’s Pages. I had opened it once or twice before, decided it looked very nice and also pretty useless for my purposes because I don’t do page layout, just word processing. And guess what? It imports Word docs just fine and, more importantly, a doc with several levels of headings created in Pages can be exported to Word with the levels intact!

In other words, you need an Apple product to fix a functionality of a Microsoft product. Great!

It’s been ten years…

…that we haven’t managed to grab Karadžić or Mladić.

…that we haven’t managed to fire a single one of those at the UN who were responsible for the pervasive complacency, callousness, or criminal neglect at the organization.

…that we haven’t managed to provide a decent life to the survivors. (I mean, it doesn’t bring back any of the dead or even alleviate the pain of the survivors, but couldn’t we at least make sure that they all get a decent pension every month?)

…that we haven’t been able to establish the extent to which the Serbian government was complicit in the genocide.

…that we haven’t been able to give any sort of meaning to the phrase “never again.”

The voters of Luxemburg have delivered the first popular “Yes” to the European constitution, which nonetheless is fairly comprehensively dead, or at least on life support. The verdict was surprisingly clear, according to wire services, with over 56 percent approving a document others aren’t even bothering discussing any more. Ultimately, it’s an exercise in futility but may still give some hope to federalists that they’re project hasn’t been defeated.

We live in scary times indeed when the news of around forty dead in a spate of bomb attacks on London’s transport system is greeted with relief — relief that not more people were killed, that not more damage was done, that this wasn’t the big one everyone had been dreading. Analysts are talking of a “message” sent to the G8 leaders — the most powerful men on earth — and of a “wake-up call;” while no doubt true, this also begs the question, what would the real thing look like if this was merely designed to send a signal?

The truth is, and this has been stated many times before, that as open societies we cannot control every single suspect or check every single passenger on the subway. Israel and the tactics it employed is a good example that even using fairly coercive means will not in itself stop determined terrorists.

There is no obvious way out of that situation at all: there will always be people, and even if they’re only a handful, who will take joy in killing innocent people and attacking our way of life.

This may be the wrong moment to complain about such matters, but Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, just gave a statement in Singapore on the events in London a few hours ago. He condemned it by saying that this was not an attack on heads of states but on ordinary, working-class Londoners.

Like, it would have been okay if the attack had been on class enemies?

Came back from Dublin — lovely town, first time there, want to go back — to my little town in Germany to find a small brass band (maybe five guys) at the corner of my street. They were just street musicians, of whom there are way too many here, most of them total crap. These guys though were good and had an appreciative audience for their little harmonies. But what made me first smile and then whistle the tune for the rest of the afternoon: they were playing the Prelude to Tannhäuser.

Only in Germany.