Conduit submitted. Rain. Gorilla.

first -- this is a memo to me: I sent The Conduit to Tor today, standard submission packet --first 3 chapters and synopsis.

It's raining hard and cold out there, which I would gloat in, but I keep seeing people who live out there and then I worry about them, and somehow this gets mixed up in the news of the tsunami. The thing I was going to say -- about gloating in the rain: the way the slap of the wind drives the breath out of my lungs, the way the rain comes right into my eyes because the wind is blowing it nearly horizontal and I can't see -- it's thrilling, because I only have to be out in it for a little while.

And finally, another thing for Anna: the gorilla.

We went to the zoo on the day after Christmas. Emma wasn't really supposed to walk all that much because she has a sore ligament in her knee, but she said she was doing well, and so we went all around it. I'm not really the happiest camper in a zoo. I keep apologizing to the animals. It's not the zoo itself, so much, nowadays -- they really do work hard at making nice places for the animals, and they are actually kind of working on making themselves obsolete by saving habitat and stuff: but there's only so much you can do with the situation, and without the siamangs' manic displays the zoo was kind of subdued in general. So many of the animals are from warm places, and while San Francisco isn't really cold by global standards, it was pretty well not warm.

The zoo has an exhibit called Gorilla World. It's a grassy island with a traditional zoo moat on part of it and a glassed-ion place for people and gorillas to commune closely and other places where they can get pretty close. The island has a complicated set of structures for playing and nesting, and objects that look pretty random, and four female gorillas (they had a silverback male, but he died, I think of age: there's another coming to join them, but he's in preventive quarantine right now). They are large and glossy and distinctive and beautiful in that healthy gorilla way. The zoo says the gorilla females are "lost" without their silverback, and I can believe that they miss him mightily -- they were all kind of slow-moving, thoughtful, sad looking.

One gorilla particularly caught my eye. Literally. She sat down in one of the places where she could get pretty close and she stared at me, not in a challenging way, but with a level, calculating gaze. After a while she looked at someone else the same way. Then she walked to another place and did it again.

By this time we'd moved over to the place where the moat was and she came up around to that side and sat down under an artificial rock overhang with her chin on her fist and studied us again, one at a time, unblinking, contemplative -- if I were anthropomorphizing, even if I hadn't known she'd lost a dear friend recently, I would have thought she had that look that the bereaved have, that the-world-has-ended clarity. After she was done with us, we moved away to another place where I took the two pictures that are in the gallery "Zura at the zoo," within "every picture tells," in my scrapbook gallery that you can get to from my userinfo. After she had sat there for a while she moved over to the picture window and gazed at the people in there, who included a lot of children. She pulled up a big rubber ball and sat on it, and patted the glass.

That's all. That's the gorilla.

I looked at the portraits they have there with their names, and figured out that she was Zura, and I wrote the name on my hand.

Here's where the San Francisco zoo talks about their gorillas:
news about the gorillas
basic facts about gorillas
the story about Gorilla World

How to insult, offend, and injure while "aiding"

So Bush hears about a disaster of unprecedented size, with over a hundred thousand dead, infrastructure broken and swept to sea.

What does he do? Help?

Helping would be to put resources at the command of the UN, which has agencies specifically formed for humanitarian aid, experience, trained people, connections . . . helping would be dispatching a bunch of the military to serve under the UN . . . helping would be giving money now and later to the agencies already in existence, already working on the ground.

So what's the agenda for the US?

The creation of a brand-new structure ("core group"), headed by the United States, with brand-new people running it, brand-new bureaucracy, brand-new startup costs, brand-new opportunities for Halliburton to overcharge.

This is an insult to the members of the United Nations, an offense to the affected nations, and an injury to their people.

It's stupid, and par for the course, and I bet most Americans don't get what's wrong with it.

Kofi Annan is graciously making the best of it, but Andi Mallarangang, the Indonesian presidential spokesman I heard on the radio, was clearly critical, and he's right.

I'm making my little donation to UNICEF. I recommend that anybody who's sending anything send it to an established agency which has a track record of helping out in crisis and dealing with displacement and epidemic:

Red Cross/Red Crescent
UNICEF
Doctors Without Borders
Oxfam
Catholic Charities

And one more thing. Colin Powell, who's lame ducking about now, and who has mumbled something to the effect that "of course the UN is in charge," is making a damned celebrity appearance down there with Jeb expletive deleted Bush "who has experience with helping out in disasters." Meanwhile, Kofi Annan explains to the reporter who challenges him as to why he didn't go there already that he can do his job where he is, and if he personally went to the scene now he would not be able to do his job and he would be in the way.