More reasons to disdain the French

Okay, I admit it. I don't disdain the French at all. In fact, I just got out of a two-hour work meeting that I disrupted three times with my snazzy pen that lights up in red, blue, and white, and plays Les Marseilles when you click it. Hurrah for tourism kitsch and basically anything that keeps me mildly entertained during meetings about meetings. Yeah.

The only real solution to my work load currently is to undertake some sort of human cloning project. Blogging will likely be of the light "get a load of that--har, har, har" variety until 1.work lets up a little and 2.the rain lets up a little. Thinking about Gonzales or the Iraq elections during the dual deluges makes me want to lie in traffic too much.

So...har, har, har. Here's one for you:

Excerpts from the Sunday LA Times' dueling obituaries piece, "Sontag vs. Derrida: A Deconstruction Derby":

You should feel dumb because

[Sontag was] "the most intelligent woman in America" (New York Daily News)

[Derrida was] "the smartest man in the world" (Raphael Simon, The Times)

And because

Sontag was 33 when she published her first famous essay collection, "Against Interpretation"

Derrida was 37 when he published his first three major philosophical tomes, including the essay collection "Writing and Difference"

It was the hair, apparently

Sontag was a "strong-featured beauty with a trademark streak of white shot through her unruly black hair (New York Daily News)

Derrida was a "snowy-haired French intellectual" (Associated Press)

The president says he's bummed out

No

Yes (Jacques Chirac)

Had to share obituary pages with

Jerry Orbach, actor

Christopher Reeve, activist/actor

Probably wishes hadn't said

"The white race is the cancer of human history."

"The least bad definition of deconstruction is a certain experience of the impossible."

Contrarian comment about Sept. 11

"Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards."

"The brevity of the appellation (Sept. 11, 9/11) points out the unqualifiable by recognizing that we do not recognize or even cognize that we do not yet know how to qualify, that we do not know what we are talking about."

Say what?? I guess that's one way to avoid the death threats Sontag had to deal with after her statements on 9/11: be so inscrutable no one even knows whether you're a "patriot" or not.