Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself *

I said recently that I would stop bellyaching about the air in Beijing until the beginning of next month. Then I woke up and looked out the window this morning. Here we are at 10am, June 19, 2008, fifty days before the Olympic Games are to begin: I guess I had not imagined how "just in time" the air-cleanup plan for the Olympic Games was going to be. I mean, is anyone from the International Olympic Committee getting the slightest bit nervous? *Note for the kiddies: Title is of course from the Atlantic's own 19th-century contributor Walt Whitman. A recent noir-novel allusion to Blake's "Marriage of Heaven and Hell" may have skipped past me, but not this one! Naturally I think of Whitman's next line, "(I am large, I contain multitudes)", after multi-course banquets in the hinterland featuring items whose provenance I can't guess.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2008/06/do-i-contradict-myself-very-well-then-i-contradict-myself/8101/