More May Day footage

BradBlog has more coverage of May Day in LA. I find the protesters who were interviewed mostly unsympathetic actually. They sound like they're acting out a scripted parody of SDS or something, but try to get past that to see the last few minutes of the tape when people are running down the streets of LA followed by a mass of riot police shooting at them.

I know it may seem like I'm giving the LAPD's May Day target practice more blog coverage than it's worth, but when the cops start firing on a peaceful protest including the media people covering the event it just reminds me way too much of Naomi Wolf's article on fascism in the Guardian that I blogged about last week. If you haven't read Wolf's article, take the time to do that today. Then watch that video clip at BradBlog and tell me it can't happen here.

Moving right along

From today's White House press briefing:

Q Any results of the meeting today between Mr. Bolten and Senator Reid?

MR. SNOW: Not that we're going to announce. It was a good meeting. So Josh met with Harry Reid and Senator McConnell, and they will continue to meet.

Q So no movement at this point.

MR. SNOW: I'm not going to characterize. Both sides had an opportunity to express their views, and exchange views, and all that sort of thing, but I don't think -- what we've all agreed to do is to conduct these in a way that is going to allow those involved to go ahead and do their business and not to try to litigate through the press, but allow them to go ahead and move toward a bill that is going to meet the requirements the President laid out, and at the same time is going to give the forces what they need.

Q Does "good" mean that it's leaning your way at the meeting?

MR. SNOW: The "good" means I'm not going to characterize, period.

Q Is there another meeting today, or is the next one tomorrow?

MR. SNOW: I don't know what the schedule is, in terms -- again, we're sort of meeting at -- we're responding to members of the House and when they want to talk, we're making our people available.

Q Are there other meetings, like Portman and Hadley, off in separate sessions with other people?

MR. SNOW: Not that I'm aware of today. Now, again, as I said, there are going to be times -- and certainly there are going to be phone conversations. I know Rob has been in contact with some people. There will be some meetings where we have one, two, or all three of the negotiators on Capitol Hill, but there are certainly going to be opportunities to talk by phone, and so on.

That certainly fills me with confidence that we're moving toward a solution.

Some people call me the space cowboy

Some call me the gangster of love.

The woman, who had been trying to end the relationship over the last several weeks, was questioned and released.

I don't wonder.

Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown

Today's LA Times has an article on my fine city's efforts to "instill a more pedestrian culture" through fancy porta potties. Cara Mia DiMassa (Addam's Family anyone?) reports: "Though the luxury public toilet has become a status symbol in cities around the world, in L.A. it's a slightly complicated tale--one of the city's efforts to create a more pedestrian-oriented life, but also a story about its bureaucratic struggles to achieve that goal."

I myself was completely unaware that the public toilet had become an "urban status symbol," but apparently the company with LA's fancy-pissoir contract, JP Decaux, has a long list of distinguished cities among its clients. San Francisco has 22 coin-operated APCs (automated public conveniences) and they give free tokens to the homeless who account for a third of the customers. London, Singapore, and Athens have 500. New York has been shy about giving any one company a monopoly on such a lucrative recession-proof business. But that's not the only thing stopping them from jumping on the baño bandwagon. The parks commissioner, Henry Stern, explains that there is a trifecta of toilet "misuse": people commit crimes, do drugs, and have sex in public toilets. New York won't be party to encouraging that sort of behavior.

In the role of dad on a family road trip ("you should have thought of that before we left") Stern admonishes, "People have to exercise restraint, and people have to know when to go. This is not something that was discovered in the year 2000. It was a basic part of the human condition, and people out on the streets should make arrangements to take care of the physical needs."

If the answer in New York is "just hold it," Los Angeles' extravagent outhouse situation is just as telling a reflection of our city. Six months ago, the first five luxury APCs were installed downtown. The plan is to install up to 150 throughout the city. How's that working for us? Well, only one of the five installed six months ago is operational. It seems that the different city departments that have to communicate to get the units working (sewer, power, water, phone) aren't cooperating, and of course, everyone is blaming everyone else. You can, however, track progress through blogdowntown's Toilet Watch.

Un-fucking-believable

I'm just grateful that I was able to get a PhD with these meager A-cups. I'm smarter than I look really.

More rubber bullet footage

Via BlondeSense comes a link to CNN's footage hosted at Think Progress.

Who is Bruce Bartlett?

Well, he worked for the Heritage Foundation at one time. He was a policy analyst in Reagan's administration, and he worked for Jack Kemp as well. He wrote the article that inspired Bob Dole's flat tax plan. In short, he's a conservative's conservative. AT present he's a writer with a column on Townhall.com.

And who is he encouraging his readers to vote for in the next presidential election? Clinton that's who. Because Clinton is the most conservative of the democrats running, says Bruce. First of all, it's a "real act of courage" for Hillary to not apologize or admit wrong-doing in voting for the war in Iraq. And then there's her domestic policy:

On economics, it is reasonable to assume that Sen. Clinton’s policies would not be altogether different from Bill Clinton’s. This is not a bad thing. On trade, his record was outstanding and on the budget was far better than George W. Bush’s. While Clinton raised taxes in 1993, it should be remembered that he cut them in 1997, including a cut in the capital gains tax. On regulatory policy, Clinton was no worse than the current administration and probably better on net.

When I try to explain to people why I didn't support Mr. Clinton in his second presidential run, I always mention capital gains tax cuts and NAFTA (and welfare "reform" and broad wire tapping provisions). It's nice to know that at least one conservative has noticed as well.

The comments thread is at least as entertaining as the editorial itself. I particularly like the claim, "As for domestic policy, she runs as a centrist and will govern like a Marxist." Would that it were so. I'd vote for her.

Why people call them pigs

Yesterday was May Day, and also time for the annual immigration marches. Here in LA police took advantage of the light turn out to assault demonstrators. Much as I hate to do it, I include links here from FOX, which seems to have the best coverage if only because one of their camera people ended up getting knocked over, shoved and yelled at. I'm not ashamed to say the video clips made me cry. Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying that the demonstrators were all easy going and that the police didn't feel provoked, but the video clips make clear that the police were firing rubber bullets on people who were running away and clubbing people who were not using violence of any kind. Next year we all have to go to the May Day demonstrations folks.

And while we're on the subject of gender politics

This is mildly interesting. Type in your URL and it gives you a ratio for usage of the words "he" and "she." I'm a respectable 34/66.

Disturbing story of the week

This just blows my mind on so many levels. It's like what if Baudrillard became a surgeon or something.

Mission accomplished

The State Department is reporting that terrorism rose 25% in 2006. There were 3000 more attacks and 5800 more deaths than in 2005.

And the really insane thing is that you just know that the Republicans are going to try to use these figures to claim we need another Republican in office (or really I should say the "hawks" will use the report in this fashion since some of the Dems seem just as invested in the notion of a global war on terror.

Really it's madness.

Things I will not eat

Via Boing Boing comes a video of perhaps the most disgusting meal I've ever been exposed to. I would probably starve to death if sustanance depended on eating that.

Sartoral genius

Okay, I do have to give the devil her due and say that Hillary Clinton has some brilliant folks dressing her these days. Yesterday she managed to make the entire field of candidates look like her back-up band. Genius.

More reasons not to like Clinton

This just plain scares me:

SEN. CLINTON: Well, Brian, I think that, as a senator from New York, it is something that I've worked on very hard ever since 9/11 to try to convince the administration to do those things that would actually work to make us safer. And I think there's a big disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality.

You know, we haven't secured our borders, our ports, our mass transit systems. You can go across this country and see so much that has not been done. The resources haven't gotten to the front lines where decisions are made in local government the way that they need to, and I think that this administration has consistently tried to hype the fear without delivering on the promise of making America safer. And its foreign policy around the world, as you've heard from all of my colleagues here, has also made the world less stable, which, of course, has a ripple effect with respect to what we're going to face in the future.

This is where she wants to put her efforts? Does she really think that border controls and metal detectors can make America safe? Oh dear.

My favorite unelectable candidate

I've always liked Kucinich but I like him even more after this:

MR. WILLIAMS: A second show of hands question: do you believe there is such a thing as a global war on terror?

Let's try Congressman Kucinich. Why is your hand not up?

REP. KUCINICH: Because the fact of the matter is that the global war on terror has been a pretext for aggressive war.

As president of the United States, I intend to take America in a different direction, rejecting war as an instrument of policy, reconnecting with the nations of the world, so that we can address the real issues that affect security all over the globe and affect our security at home -- getting rid of all nuclear weapons; the United States participating in the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Biological Weapons Convention, the small arms treaty, the land mine treaty; joining the International Criminal Court; signing the Kyoto climate change treaty.

But here's the really scary thing: Clinton, Edwards, and Obama all raised their hands. I want to like Obama. I even want to like Edwards (I admit I do not want to like Clinton) but why do they make it so hard?

Why I'm not a "liberal"

The first in a series of posts on yesterday's Democratic debate. From the transcript posted at the NYT:

MR. WILLIAMS: Senator Clinton, overall, is Wal-Mart a good thing or a bad thing for the United States of America? (Laughter.)

SEN. CLINTON: Well, it's a mixed blessing.

MR. WILLIAMS: How so?

SEN. CLINTON: Well, because when Wal-Mart started, it brought goods into rural areas, like rural Arkansas, where I was happy to live for 18 years, and gave people a chance to stretch their dollar further.

As they grew much bigger, though, they have raised serious questions about the responsibility of corporations and how they need to be a leader when it comes to providing health care and having, you know, safe working conditions and not discriminating on the basis of sex or race or any other category.

And here I am reminded of a business class I took a bazillion years ago. It was an introductory course and it was taught by a complete and total tool--a guy who quoted The Greaseman and who wore flip-flops to class. Anyway, in addition to being a tasteless and classless racist, he was just a moron. Sadly, he was also my instructor. One day he was raving about the virtues of capitalism and what a great system it is because we make so much stuff. We've got stuff. Lots of stuff. Way more stuff than communists and socialists could ever dream of. Well, I raised my hand and said something about homeless people or something like that--the poor--something. And he said, "I'm talking about production. You're talking about distribution. That's a totally different matter." Thus endeth the debate.

I am reminded of this because the shortsightedness of, let me say, many liberals (I was going to just say "liberals" but that might not be entirely fair) bears a striking resemblance to flip-flop man's economic autism. First of all, it's a system; you can't disconnect distribution and production. Why was Walmart able to supply those goods so cheaply? Why do food coops often charge so much? Give it some thought Hillary. Are you saying that on a small scale underpaid workers with no insurance selling sweat-shop produced goods is okay?

And second of all, we just don't need so much stuff. Why do we need 8000 kinds of soap for chrissakes? With shea butter. Without shea butter. Pomegranite scented. With moisturizing beads. Why is this an unqualified good?

Don't get me wrong. I like stuff. But enough already.

Why you should support Obama over Clinton (and Edwards)

Okay, this is the last of the debate posts. Here is one of the most telling moments in my opinion:

MR. WILLIAMS: Senator Obama, if, God forbid a thousand times, while we were gathered here tonight, we learned that two American cities had been hit simultaneously by terrorists, and we further learned beyond the shadow of a doubt it had been the work of al Qaeda, how would you change the U.S. military stance overseas as a result?

SEN. OBAMA: Well, the first thing we'd have to do is make sure that we've got an effective emergency response, something that this administration failed to do when we had a hurricane in New Orleans. And I think that we have to review how we operate in the event of not only a natural disaster, but also a terrorist attack.

The second thing is to make sure that we've got good intelligence, A, to find out that we don't have other threats and attacks potentially out there; and B, to find out do we have any intelligence on who might have carried it out so that we can take potentially some action to dismantle that network.

But what we can't do is then alienate the world community based on faulty intelligence, based on bluster and bombast. Instead, the next thing we would have to do, in addition to talking to the American people, is making sure that we are talking to the international community.

Because as has already been stated, we're not going to defeat terrorists on our own. We've got to strengthen our intelligence relationships with them, and they've got to feel a stake in our security by recognizing that we have mutual security interests at stake.

MR. WILLIAMS: Senator, thank you.

Senator Edwards, same question: God forbid, two simultaneous attacks tonight, we knew it was al Qaeda. What would you change about U.S. military stance overseas.

MR. EDWARDS: Well, the first thing I would do is be certain I knew who was responsible, and I would act swiftly and strongly to hold them responsible for that. The second thing I would do, and some of these have been mentioned already, is find out how that this happened without our intelligence operations finding out that it was in a planning stage.

How did they get through what we all recognize is a fairly porous homeland security system that we have in this country that has not been built the way it needed to be built? You know, did the weapons that created this -- these two simultaneous strikes come through our ports? Were they in one of the containers that have not been checked? How did these weapons get here? And how do we stop this from happening again? I believe -- and this goes to the question you asked earlier, just a few minutes ago -- global war on terror. I think there are dangerous people and dangerous leaders in the world that America must deal with and deal with strongly, but we have more tools available to us than bombs. And America needs to use the tools that are available to them so that these people who are sitting on the fence, who terrorists are trying to recruit, the next generation, get pushed to our side, not to the other side. We've had no long-term strategy, and we need one, and I will provide one.

MR. WILLIAMS: We're out of time. Thank you.

Senator Clinton, same question.

SEN. CLINTON: Well, again, having been a senator during 9/11, I understand very well the extraordinary horror of that kind of an attack and the impact that it has far beyond those who are directly affected. I think a president must move as swiftly as is prudent to retaliate. If we are attacked and we can determine who was behind that attack, and if there were nations that supported or gave material aid to those who attacked us, I believe we should quickly respond. Now, that doesn't mean we go looking for other fights. You know,

I supported President Bush when he went after al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. And then when he decided to divert attention to Iraq, it was not a decisions that I would have made had I been president, because we still haven't found bin Laden. So let's focus on those who have attacked us and do everything we can to destroy them.

So let's recap: Obama would first make sure we could properly attend to the victims and the emergency in the United States. Then he would investigate to make sure the country isn't in further danger and to "potentially" take action. Then he would work on diplomatic relations to coordinate an international response.

Edwards would somehow magically "be certain" he knew who is responsible and then he would "act swiftly and strongly" to hold them responsible. He would also work to strengthen intelligence (read: spy more) and fix our "fairly pourous" Homeland Security. (National identity cards anyone?)

Clinton would also "swiftly. . . retaliate." In particular I love the point where she says she understands the horror such an attack can produce and so...she would "retaliate."

Hmmm...disaster relief and diplomacy...versus war...versus war.

First up against the wall

Okay, maybe evil does exist. I've been wrong before. (Thanks to the Snack Pack for the link.)

Dictionary shmictionary

In the latest episode of "don't let the language get you down," the administration is claiming "sectarian violence" has declined dramatically since troop levels have been increased in Iraq. If this seems counter-intuitive to those of you who log onto your news source every day to read of more carnage...well, trust your instincts. Bush and company are not counting bombs as violence:

President Bush explained why in a television interview on Tuesday. "If the standard of success is no car bombings or suicide bombings, we have just handed those who commit suicide bombings a huge victory," he told TV interviewer Charlie Rose.

Well, shit, let's go all the way and call suicide bombs and exploding cars a raging success why don't we? That will take the wind out of those extremist sails.

"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows."

A man's man

In one of my many almost-spam emails today there was an ad for Anita Shreve's latest book, and that got me wondering about Shreve. I've never read any of her stuff, and I wasn't sure whether she was more of a romance-y writer (and thus someone I probably wouldn't like) or more like an Anne Tyler/Barbara Kingsolver type of writer. (My cursory research seems to indicate the former.) In the course of trying to figure that out I came across this review in Amazon:

Another Shreve Masterpiece

I may be a man, and not just a man, but a businessman, and the only times that I am not going over a spreadsheet or quarterly report are when I am on a plane, but that is when I like to prop a cheap airline pillow behind my neck, wrap myself in a thin airline blanket, and dive into the latest Anita Shreve novel.

I usually wrap another dust jacket over the book, something with "Success" or "Winning" in the title, but underneath the fake jacket I am unwrapping the lives, histories, and fates of complicated and compelling characters, and I often finish a Shreve novel in tears at the sheer power of her vivid and powerful descriptions of the turmoil within the human heart, at which point a flight attendant or a fellow passenger will ask if anything's wrong, and I usually reply, "These success/winning/business strategies are just so powerful (sniff)... I can bench 200 pounds." . . .

Good stuff.

It all started with Dr Spock

It's so clear to me now. We have school shootings because we are giving out condoms and allowing reproductive freedom. Why didn't I think of that before.

Bat-shit crazy Christians.

Now that's adaptation

The New Scientist reports that urban robins are singing at night. Either it's too loud for female birds to hear them during the day (and girl robins apparently pick boy robins on the basis of their singing repetoire) or the guys are having trouble meeting girl birds because that's life in the big city:

If this is the case, says Fuller, the night-time singers could be sacrificing other activities such as feeding and preening in order to maximise their singing time.

"There's a possibility these are unmated males that are really struggling. It could be in their best interest to sing as much as they can," he says.

. . .

Several studies have already shown that urban noise is causing city birds to change the characteristics of their song. A study in December 2006 showed that birds across Europe sing at a higher pitch to avoid being drowned out by the low-frequency din of traffic.

Other birds just sing louder. In Germany, some nightingales sing so loud they break European sound pollution regulations.

Somehow I have this vision of a cluster of German boy robins hoisting tiny beer steins in their wings as they belt out their tunes.

(This link and the following come courtesy of this week's Activate.)

Site of the day

JewTube. It's mostly music videos and clips from Israeli Idol, but even so it makes me wish I could speak/read Hebrew. The site is part of a Jewish book site which includes a grab bag of other goodies like a blog, Ofrah's Book Club, and a collection of procrastination-worthy links such as Jdaters Anonymous, whose blogroll is one of the funniest I've seen in a good long while (including Chai Expectations and Jewbiquitous). Anyway, I'm not much of a Jew (don't believe in God, think gefilte fish and tongue are disgusting, and find the concept of a bris barbaric), but something resonates inside me when I see a blog whose tag line is "my life--what were you expecting?"

The F word

Last week when I was listening to the Gonzales hearings it occured to me, yet again, how much further down the slippery slope toward fascism we have slid. An amendment to the Patriot Act made it possible for the executive to fire the attorneys without oversight by Congress. With the checks and balances removed, the executive branch quickly took action to eliminate dissenters from the judiciary. And now when we're trying to shut the barn door after the horse has run away, they are lying about it. Brazenly.

The Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC does a fine job illustrating how a fascist regime develops. The top floor of the museum is devoted to Germany before the Final Solution--the erosion of legal protections, the rise of xenophobia--and it's hard not to think about it when listening to Gonzo say "I don't remember" for the ten thousanth time and realizing that most fellow citizens still care far more about American Idol than the US Constitution.

So the thrust of Naomi Wolf's article from The Guardian this morning, "Fascist America in Ten Easy Steps," is not shocking. Though I admit I learned some things from it. (I did not know, for instance, that so many embedded journalists have been fired on by US troups.) Anyway, thanks to C for the article. It may not be shocking but it certainly is distressing.

This paragraph in particular gave me pause:

History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani--because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.

What to do now?

Must-sees

First, Hot Fuzz. So, so good.




Second, Poison Friends, a movie about a grad student friendship gone way wrong, featuring a charismatic intellectual who gets off on manipulating his friends. Directed by no less than Pierre Bourdieu's son!

I know I am a terrific geek, but I confess to an intellectual crush on Pierre Bourdieu.

Pic of the day

From the NYTimes:

Checks and balances, foxes and hen houses

Truthout is blogging the Gonzales hearings as they progress with tidbits like this at 12:45:

According to C-SPAN, Gonzales has said "I don't recall" some 55 times so far ... and there's still a long way left to go today.

I have been listening here at work but I don't know how much more of this I can take, frankly.

"To be sure, I should have been more precise when discussing this matter. I understand why some of my statements generated confusion, and I have subsequently tried to clarify my words."

What you're trying to say, AG, is you're a liar. You lied and then you got caught lying.

I have a hard time imagining how a person could demonstrate more disdain for the Constitution. Though I'm sure Gonzales will show us if we give him the chance.

The 80s revival

I have been doing my best to stomach the resurgence of these


and these


but this is just a bridge too far.

If we are going to enter complete Groundhog Day hell, can we at least get some good dance tunes out of it?

(The original for those of you too young to remember.)

QOTD

George W on SCOTUS' "all your embryo are belong to us" decision:

Today's decision affirms that the Constitution does not stand in the way of the people's representatives enacting laws reflecting the compassion and humanity of America.

Bitch PhD, as you might expect, has a cogent post on the issues. The quote of the day, in fact, comes from the comments thread.

Unbelievable

Even I, cynic that I am, am mind-boggled by this.

Longevity

The Norwegians have recently discovered what the Jews have known for centuries--that there is a link between survival and humor. Andrea sent me this article on a study by a Norwegian researcher that concluded that people with a good sense of humor live longer. Apparently the more central a role humor plays in your life, the more years you'll spend on the planet. I, who have often said that I can survive anything as long as I have my sense of humor and my Mastercard, feel that I am bound to live a good long time. Perhaps the fact that I surround myself with punsters will make up for a lack of exercise.

Third war's the charm

Our government is founded upon the intelligence of the people. I for one do not despair of the republic. I have great confidence in the virtue of the great majority of the people, and I cannot fear the result. Andrew Jackson


I belong to an organization that has a truism: "Insanity is doing the same thing twice and expecting different results." And this is the line that came to mind when I read this morning that the Dems have decided it's not a good idea to limit Bush's ability to go to war with Iran. To be more specific, the House is contemplating an appropriations bill that would hemorage another 100 billion dollars into the war effort. The bill would require troops to be out of Iraq in 18 months, which of course, the executive branch finds appalling.

I tell you the whole thing makes me sick and angry. And to think I was actually contemplating a blog entry this week on Hillary being wrongly maligned for her stance on the war. [The NYT has a side-by-side comparison of the candidates vis-a-vis the war, and their Hilary quote:
VOTED YES IN 2002, NOW OPPOSED

If I had been President in October of 2002, I would have never asked for authority to divert our attention from Afghanistan to Iraq, and I certainly would never have started this war.

got me curious what exactly she did have to say in 2002 when she voted yes on HJ Res 114.

Salon had an article last month lambasting her for her refusal to admit she was wrong on her initial support of the war, and rather than finding it convincing it actually made me concede that Clinton has been more consistent on her war position than I initially granted her. In her speech on the resolution she says:

...I will take the president at his word that he will try hard to pass a U.N. resolution and will seek to avoid war, if at all possible....I urge the president to spare no effort to secure a clear, unambiguous demand by the United Nations for unlimited inspections ... A vote for [the resolution] is not a vote to rush to war; it is a vote that puts awesome responsibility in the hands of our president and we say to him: Use these powers wisely and as a last resort.

Which brings us to the issue of Iran and the Democrats decision to give Bush a blank check to go to war. Hell-oooh??? It revolts me that we're not even talking anymore about the US's dogged refusal to learn from history. Now we're talking about some sort of mass amnesia regarding five years ago. Maybe the Senators could take the memento approach and start tattooing important facts on their forearms ("Don't give president authority to go to war!")

This is from the AP article:

Public opinion has swung the way of Democrats on the issue of the war. More than six in 10 Americans think the conflict was a mistake--the largest number yet found in AP-Ipsos polling.

But Democrats have struggled to find a compromise that can satisfy both liberals who oppose any funding for the military effort and conservatives who do not want to unduly restrict the commander in chief.

Why is it that Republicans are the only ones who seem to have figured out that public opinion will follow them if they lead? Why are the Democrats so retarded???

I really want to believe in democracy. I really do.

Sigh.

It was a dark and stormy title

While I've always gotten a chuckle out of the Bulwer-Lytton contest, the fact that all of the entries are made up takes some of the fun out of it for me (though see this page on the Bulwer-Lytton site which contains actual published gems such as ""She stuck to his prime-grade A tush like shrink-wrap to a rump roast.").

The Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year on the other hand, has only bonafide publication titles competing. This year's entries (see the lower right-hand corner of the page) include a range of future classics such as How Green Were the Nazis? and The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification. And the lists from previous years were enough to make me laugh out loud even today, a Monday made worse by the need to "spring forward" this weekend.

My personal favorite is probably The Art and Craft of Pounding Flowers: No Paint, No Ink, Just a Hammer! but that may just be a reflection of my mood today. (A thanks to Nick for forwarding the URL.)

QOTD

Newt Gingrich to James Dobson, explaining why it wasn't hypocritical of him to be gunning for Clinton even as he was shtupping some chick who was not his wife:

The president of the United States got in trouble for committing a felony in front of a sitting federal judge.... as a leader of the government trying to uphold the rule of law, I have no choice except to move forward and say that you cannot accept ... perjury in your highest officials

It makes me think of the times they arrest people for resisting arrest.

Misappropriation of funds--now that's a different story.

I know you are but what am I?

While I tend to think of YouTube as that great site that brings us classics like this, it is, apparently, ground zero for a virtual "war" between Turkey and Greece with people in both countries volleying nationalistic insults back and forth via online video clips. But Greece has gone a bridge too far in the latest pixelated grenade by calling Ataturk, and Turks in general, gay, and Turkey is banning YouTube entirely. Truly the whole thing is pretty remarkable. It's like what if PeeWee Herman were in charge of diplomatic affairs. Not only are there hundreds of edifying videos like Ataturk is not Gay! and Gay Greece, they each have long threads of "whoever smelt it dealt it" sorts of comments:

I am a gay Turk and am sick and tired of village idiot Turks comming on here and pretending that you cannot be Turkish and openly like bum sex. It is so macho to be a Turk accept when they are busy bumming each other and then pretending that our founder was not a bum bandit.

Makes you glad to be an American; we only have to worry about our Founders being slave owners.

Droppin' of the Carp

One of my coworkers here also lived in Wisconsin for many years. She just visited there over the holidays and brought back this clipping from the Wisconsin State Journal:

They'll Lower A Fish To Celebrate New Year

Some state residents will be celebrating the New Year in a unique way -- by watching a 20-pound female carp lowered by a 110-foot crane. The annual Droppin' of the Carp was begun by Tom Nelson and his wife, Cathie, who got the idea from a New Year's celebration in Savannah, Ga., where they lowered a giant Styrofoam peach.
"We decided we could have some sort of New Year's celebration here in the Midwest," Nelson said. "Being on the river, it had to be a fish."

The couple organizes the event each year on St. Feriole Island. They expect to draw as many people as last year -- about 1,500.

The first year the Nelsons used a 3-foot carp and named it Lucky after they learned the Chinese believe eating carp on New Year's brings good luck. Each subsequent fish has had the same name. This year, Lucky is a nearly 20-pound female carp caught in the Mississippi River in late November by Mike Valley, who has the fish in a freezer at his store, Valley Fish and Cheese.

Valley plans to shellac Lucky and give her a few touchups, including a crown.
It takes about 2 1/2minutes to lower the carp, Nelson said. Those gathered will then sing "Auld Lang Syne," recite the Pledge of Allegiance and sing "God Bless America." Lucky will then return to the freezer until May, when she will be buried and a maple tree planted over her.

I can't think what to say that could improve upon the greatness of the story as it stands, so I'll just leave it at that. And once again I marvel at the fact that I lived in Wisconsin for 11 years.

Unbelievable

This is kind of interesting. Slate paired up with a market research group to graphically display the believability of Bush's Wednesday night "damn the torpedos" speech. Vidlit produced a video of clips from the speech and a focus group, broken down by political affiliation (Dem, Rep, and Ind) was asked to rate the video as it was ongoing using a mouse and a sliding scale. I mean, personally I don't really care about market research personal opinion stuff since 1.I think most people kind of stupid, and 2.I think most market research is poorly designed, but it's sort of interesting in a meaningless way.

Baby blog

A big congratulations to my friends Marc and Christy who just had a baby yesterday. Ollie is already blogging, precotious cuss.

Timeless

Today marks the 230th anniversary of the publication of Thomas Paine's Common Sense, Wonkette reminds us. Of course, we love Tom Paine. And while we favor The Crisis, Common Sense does have its particularly salient passages:

Men of passive tempers look somewhat lightly over the offences of Britain, and, still hoping for the best, are apt to call out, "Come, come, we shall be friends again, for all this." But examine the passions and feelings of mankind, Bring the doctrine of reconciliation to the touchstone of nature, and then tell me, whether you can hereafter love, honour, and faithfully serve the power that hath carried fire and sword into your land? If you cannot do all these, then are you only deceiving yourselves, and by your delay bringing ruin upon posterity. Your future connection with Britain, whom you can neither love nor honour, will be forced and unnatural, and being formed only on the plan of present convenience, will in a little time fall into a relapse more wretched than the first. But if you say, you can still pass the violations over, then I ask, Hath your house been burnt? Hath your property been destroyed before your face? Are your wife and children destitute of a bed to lie on, or bread to live on? Have you lost a parent or a child by their hands, and yourself the ruined and wretched survivor? If you have not, then are you not a judge of those who have. But if you have, and still can shake hands with the murderers, then you are unworthy of the name of husband, father, friend, or lover, and whatever may be your rank or title in life, you have the heart of a coward, and the spirit of a sycophant.

In other news, Bush wants to add 21,500 more soldiers in Iraq. AP reports on the announcement which will be made later tonight: "In a now-familiar refrain, Bush was to portray the war in Iraq as "the decisive ideological struggle of our time."

Indeed.

Even my cat is cutting edge

Those who know me, know that my cat is a cat only a mother can love, really. He's obese, asthmatic, and suffers from clinical depression. When we moved to LA he responded to the stress of a nine day road trip and a radical relocation by determining that he was a cat who thinks outside the box, as it were. So he's been on meds for years now. Yes, I am clean and my cat is drugged. So today I see this article in the LA Times, complete with this photo of the day:

As I have often said, it's a good thing I didn't have children.

Yahrzeit

Today is my dad's yarzheit. He's been gone twenty years--rather incredible. I was missing him tonight. I lit my memorial candle and said Kaddish, and I thought maybe I would blog something of his to close out the night. So here are some long excerpts from an even longer letter he wrote my sister when she was in college. It's dated November 1967 and is responding in large part to her increasing political activism.

He writes:

Some people feel one is not worth his salt unless he is a radical at 20 and a conservative at 40. This is a vile canard propagated by the pusillanimous. One need not become a fat cat at forty. See, e.g., Norman Thomas whose big many voice, turning again to childish treble, pipes and whistles in his sounds, to quote the Bard, but who preaches the same revolt against oppression that he sounded with stentorian speeches at the turn of the century. See also Bertrand Russell, William Douglas, and Jake Podofsky. (Jake runs the delicatessen at 14th and Irving Sts.)

I do not hold with those who attack all our institutions. I am not blind to the virtues of other ways of life but I personally feel that what we have in this country is the best way of life thus far evolved by man as a functioning society. I am 100% American. But I am not like those Southerners who loved the Confederacy so much they would not even wear a Union suit. I want my country to present a favorable image, to maintain a posture that I find admirable, and will not yield my right to criticize it when I think it is wrong. I want America always to be the land of the three "P's" -- Peace, Prosperity, and Pfreedom, for myself and my pfosterity. I want America to stay healthy because I know that when the United States sneezes much of the rest of the world catches pneumonia.

Finally, let me only remind you that you ought not get yourself so involved that you jeopardize yourself in your studies. It is essential that you get decent grades, continue your education, and work assiduously toward your career. Sorenson in the Saturday Review last week did not say anything much different from what many other pacifists have said in the past few weeks bu this article was read by millions because he achieved such eminence in his field that his voice was effective. At the big peace march we listened intently to what Dr. Spock said largely because more than half the people there had taken castor oil when Spock told their mothers to administer it. On the other hand, I'll bet you didn't hear one word Tillie Gockenheimer said, did you? And Tillie has been marching in protest demonstrations since Kemal Pasha besieged the poor Armenians in 1916 or whenever the hell it was. But that is because Tillie Gockenheimer dropped out of high school in Pottstown, Pa. when she was 16 and has been working in a brassiere factory in High Point, N. Car. ever since.

There's more, but those are the best parts. Except there is one place where there's a line something like this "7 883347xc (Travis' interjections)" because I must have been sitting in his lap while he was typing the letter. I was two at the time.

That my dad, who was blacklisted during the McCarthy era, could write such a letter, is real patriotism. I'm not much of a nationalist really, but I was, once upon a time a Constitutional scholar and I too love America from Ben Franklin to X. And at the same time, I'm proud as hell to have a dad who was a blacklisted labor lawyer.

It's all so complicated isn't it--our feelings for family and country.

Anyway, it's past my bedtime, maybe I will try to resurrect my blogging spirit for the new year. I can't promise anything though. I've made enough of those that didn't come to fruition in terms of my poor neglected blog.

Labor begets labor

I just got back yesterday from a trip to upstate New York where I was connection-less. So now I'm catching up.

I was staying at my sister's cabin in the woods, a place so remote that when you search for the nearest Starbuck's, you find there isn't one within a fifty mile radius. (By contrast, there are twenty-four within five miles of my zipcode.) It is, in fact, so remote that when we left (at 4am) to drive to the airport, we didn't pass another car for forty-five minutes.

So I'm glad to be back to the traffic, the smog, and the fake boobs. Gosh I love LA.

But I didn't post just to talk about my trip. Really I just wanted to let out a superior chuckle about this, the report produced by Missouri's Special Committee on Immigration Reform that argues abortion is one of the root causes of illegal immigration. It seems we are aborting our labor force and so we must look south for more workers:

There's a lot of editorial comment there that I couldn't really stomach," Rep. Trent Skaggs said Monday. "To be honest, I think it's a little delusional."

All 10 Republican committee members signed the report, though one of them, Rep. Billy Pat Wright, said Monday he didn't recall it connecting abortion and illegal immigration.

Emery, who equates abortion to murder, defended the assertions.

"We hear a lot of arguments today that the reason that we can't get serious about our borders is that we are desperate for all these workers," Emery said. "You don't have to think too long. If you kill 44 million of your potential workers, it's not too surprising we would be desperate for workers."

These anti-choice folks really do have an "if the only tool you have is a hammer" way of thinking about anything that's going on in the country. It's pretty astounding.

Some things should be regarded as "givens"

Shakespeare's Sister calls our attention to this gem from shrub's Saturday radio address: "[A]ll Americans can take pride in the example our democracy sets for the world by holding elections even in a time of war."

Just how low can we set the national pride bar, do you think? Gee, I'm so proud that we don't suspend Constitutional democracy and institute martial law. And you know what else? I'm really proud we let women vote here (and drive cars!). We rock!

More good news

It seems John Bolton is back on the job market.

Everything old is new again

In yet another demonstration of the US's astounding ability to back the wrong horse, Daniel Ortega was elected president of Nicaragua this week. The Independent's coverage of the campaign reads like a near-parody:

His campaign flag and theme tune, he insists, said it all. The old red-and-black flag and silk scarves of the Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional (FSLN) were still on show, but alongside them were flags and banners in Ortega's new favoured colour--shocking pink--chosen by his wife and meant to symbolise the new Ortega's softer, gentler side.

The old FSLN anthem, which included the words "let us fight the yanqui, enemy of humanity", could still be heard during his campaign, but it played second fiddle to Ortega's latest theme tune--a Spanish version of John Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance", which calls for reconciliation and whose refrain is "We all want to live in peace". It also gave a Washington Post headline writer the chance to come up with "Daniel Ortega, from Lenin to Lennon".

Something about fuschia-clad Sandanistas singing Lennon songs really seems like a moment right out of Delillo to me.

And if the Independent's coverage reads like a postmodern novel, the BBC's is like the political equivalent of the musical reunion tour:

So who has become the principle agitator-in-chief for those opposed to Mr Ortega?

None other than Lieutenant-Colonel Oliver North, the public face of the Iran-Contra scandal in the days of Ronald Reagan's presidency.

"If Ortega wins," he said on a two-day visit here. "He will have key regional allies... who together could create problems aplenty for the US and its democratic Latin American allies."

"Today, Nicaragua looks like a case of back to the future," Mr North added.

Wow. The eighties revival is clearly far, far more pervasive than I had imagined.

VOTD

Via After School Snack comes the video of the day.

Read of the day

Garrison Keillor's piece for the Chicago Tribune yesterday.

This paragraph almost made me cry:

People still care deeply about our government, despite every invitation to disillusionment. This is the astonishment. For my generation, the first big blow was the failure of Washington to get to the truth about the assassination of John F. Kennedy and then its inability to change a disastrous course in Vietnam. You stand at the majestic polished wall with the 57,000 names on it, and you look across the river to Arlington, and here, within one mile, are two enormous aching sorrows, and a mile behind you is the U.S. Supreme Court, which threw the election of 2000. Some people killed our president and got away with it; men were shipped off to die in a lousy war promulgated by Democrats afraid to be called weak on communism; and an election was stolen, no protest. And yet we still stroll down to the church and cast our ballots. We live on hope.

Schadenfreude

The Dems have the Senate. It's official. Allen conceded.

My favorite part of the article is this bit:

Allen was comfortably ahead in polls until August, when he mockingly referred to a Webb campaign volunteer of Indian descent as "Macaca," regarded by some as a racial slur. The incident, caught on videotape, became international news. Some former football teammates from the University of Virginia also charged that Allen had commonly used a slur for blacks--something he denied.

I guess we're talking about the word "nigger" here, a term that is apparently so sensitive the paper cannot print it even when printing it to make reference to its use as a word (what the Chicago Manual refers to as "words and phrases used as words" (7.62). What I wonder about is how exactly he was accused or able to deny the accusation when the word itself can't actually be used. "No, I never used that word, which I cannot use here to deny that I used it."

Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out

From SL comes this collection of Rummy classics. Ah the passing of an era:

"As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns - that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know.”

"I'm not into this detail stuff. I'm more concepty." In an interview with the Washington Post

"It is unknowable how long [the war in Iraq] will last. It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months." To U.S. troops in Aviano, Italy

"Needless to say, the President is correct. Whatever it was he said."

"We do know of certain knowledge that [Osama bin Laden] is either in Afghanistan, or in some other country, or dead. And we know of certain knowledge that we don't know which of those happens to be the case."

"Well, you know, something's neither good nor bad but thinking makes it so, I suppose, as Shakespeare said."

"That's all you guys do is read these books. You ought to get a life." To reporters during a press briefing

"I have never painted a rosy picture. I have been very measured in my words, and you'll have a dickens of a time trying to find instances where I have been excessively optimistic. I understand this is tough stuff." At Senate hearings, in an exchange with Sen. Hillary Clinton

"I don't do quagmires."

"I would not say that the future is necessarily less predictable than the past. I think the past was not predictable when it started."

For my california friends

Complete election results including ballot measures are here.

And while we're on the subject of gays

I'm really thinking someone needs to rerecord National Brotherhood Week with an "everyone hates the queers" slant. The dems won the House. It looks like they may win the Senate. The anti-choice people lost their battle in South Dakota. We won minimum wage battles in six states. But we'll be damned if we let them homos get married. This much we can at least agree on. (To my Arizonan friends, congratulations on somehow avoiding this stripe of insanity.)

For god's sake, people.

Why my optimism is tempered

The Onion put it best back in February:

"We are entirely capable of bungling this opportunity to regain control of the House and Senate and the trust of the American people," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said to scattered applause. "It will take some doing, but we're in this for the long and pointless haul."

"We can lose this," Reid added. "All it takes is a little lack of backbone."

I know I blogged the story before but I was reminded of it again today. If the dems win the executive in two years, they just better fucking do something with it. I mean, let's not start out with guns blazing about gays in the military, for example. Could we agree to that?

Observations upon listening to the preznit's press conference

Has anyone else noticed that Bush pronounces "I-DE-Ology" the same way some people pronounce "eye-talian"?

And let me say another thing: If we never have another president again ever that is capable of uttering the sentence "This isn't my first rodeo," that will really, really be okay with me.

It couldn't happen to a nicer guy

Rumsfeld is resigning. If I still drank you better believe I'd be pouring out a glass of champagne right about now. The only better news would be if he got hit by a bus.

Voting

Okay, I'm back. I thought for a while there about posting a "Blog Dark" notice like they do in theaters when there's nothing playing. I don't know why the cat had my tongue for so long except for a couple of obvious factors:

1. I got to the point where the news became so depressing that I just took an ostrich approach for a while.

And

2. There was that series of catastrophes--K's accident and hospitalization(s), my accident and hospitalization, his bone graft, my crushing work deadline...and so on. Since I last blogged, he ended up in the hospital one more time for an infection in his arm. He got sent home with a picc line and at-home antibiotics. That's all cleared up now. I made my huge work deadline (without wanting to talk about my work in detail, I'll say that September marked one of the most significant professional accomplishments in my life). It has now been more than six weeks since anyone has been hospitalized, had a surgery, had a biopsy, or any other similar calamity. Work is also settling down to its usual level of stress.

And then there's the whole "balancing work, romance, and writing" equation that is just ridiculous and will not be elaborated on at present.

But here it is, Election Day, and what better time to re-enter the blog-o-sphere? I had to re-acquaint myself with the political public sphere for at least one day so maybe if I weigh in quickly while I'm above-sand it will stick.

Though here's the truth, as I said, I've been assiduously avoiding anything that smacks of the news or current events, and given the mammoth size of the ballot here in LA, I've had to do a lot of homework. Just trying to figure out how to vote on the judges alone is quite an endeavor. And what I've realized is I really am a knee-jerk leftist. If, for instance, a ballot measure is supported by any organization that has "taxpayers" in its name, I'm against it. I don't need to read further.

And here, let me digress and say I am pro-taxes. In fact, I am pro-taxes and pro-big government. I'm a fan of good roads, clean water, public education, health care on demand, care for the elderly, and even public art. I'm all for paying for such things publicly and hiring lots of people and structuring offices to execute those services. Let's hear it for taxes and government.

Which brings me to the issue of voting itself. I used to really like voting. True enough, my first election was Reagan's second term, which was a really, really depressing election for any left-leaning first-time voter. So yes, that one was pretty depressing. But in general, voting itself has always felt really good to me. I'm a sucker for all of that ritualistic citizen stuff anyway (pretty funny for someone with such an allergy to patriotism). Shit, I wrote a whole dissertation on nation-making and representation.

This year though, it just feels pretty depressing to me. It feels like going to a viewing. "Doesn't he look so lifelike?" Or as Andrea said, a birthday party disguised as a viewing [I stand corrected, Andrea actually said a viewing disguised as a birthday party, which makes much more sense. See comment below.] I just can't shake the feeling that our great social experiment is dead and we're just making funeral arrangements at this point. Maybe I'll feel less that way as I re-enter the polis and leave my ostrich ways behind.

Why I was never good at science

I have been accused of "thinking too much" on more than one occasion, and without taking on the inherent value judgment of such a claim, I will say it's not a new phenomenon. When I was a kid in grade school and they taught us about the atomic theory and matter and molecules, I became so fixated on the notion that the vast majority of any object is actually space (this was how I heard what they were saying) that I couldn't move past that notion to whatever was next on the syllabus. Everyone else was talking about molecular structures and I was still thinking "shit, my chair is 90% space!"

Here it is something like 30 years later and I still find it all jaw-droppingly fascinating in a "goll-ee" kind of way.

And now it seems that scientists have found proof that dark matter does exist. Dark matter is like the Racer X to regular matter's Speed. It is almost invisible and it doesn't absorb or give off light. This week's National Geographic reports:

Scientists calculate that dark matter makes up about 25 percent of the universe.

By contrast, ordinary matter—the stuff that makes up stars, planets, and everything on Earth—makes up no more than about 5 percent of the universe.

The other 70 percent of the universe, scientists believe, is made of dark energy, an even more elusive force that is pushing the universe apart at an ever increasing rate.

That is some cool shit, folks.

In context

Okay, Ed sent me the link for the Forbes article on marriage and prostitution and it appears that Salon quoted Noer out of context. The substance of that particular article (the one with the stellar wife/whore coke/pepsi analogy) was a summary of someone else's economic argument. I'm not saying Noer is a bra-burner or anything, just trying to be accurate here.

Who says we want to marry you?

Colin sent me a copy of this Salon.com story. Normally I don't link to salon articles because of the extended hassle to actually read anything on their site, but this one is worth the trouble. Apparently Forbes published an article online called "Don't Marry Career Women" that, despite what you may think, was actually not a parody. The article has since been removed due to pressure from the blogosphere:

Sometime around 5:30 on Wednesday, Aug. 23, two days after its publication, "Don't Marry Career Women" disappeared from the Forbes.com Web site, along with an earlier story by Noer, titled "The Economics of Prostitution," in which he compared "wives" to "whores" and wrote that "the implication remains that wives and whores are -- if not exactly like Coke and Pepsi -- something akin to champagne and beer. The same sort of thing."

I mean, I don't even know what to say. Forbes and Gibson--the boycott list is growing. Really I just keep expecting to wake up to find this whole period of history was a bad, bad dream.

Here's another choice paragraph:

Noer's list went on. Rosie, your riveting bride, will be less likely to bear you children. If she does, she'll be unhappy because wealthier women are "used to 'a professional life, a fun, active, entertaining life,'" and will therefore be dismayed at the un-fun and un-entertaining responsibilities of child-rearing. If you marry one of these witches, "Your house will be dirtier," since studies show that a woman who makes more than $15 an hour "will do 1.9 hours less housework a week." Perhaps the saddest result of your careerist heterosexual union is that "You're more likely to fall ill." That because according to research he's unearthed, wives who work more than 40 hours a week "do not have adequate time to monitor their husband's [sic] health and healthy behavior, to manage their husband's [sic] emotional well-being or buffer his workplace stress."

Okay, I'll grant you the dirty house thing...you got me there.

Seriously, what the fuck is going on culturally that it's suddenly okay to say these outlandish things? It's not like I didn't know people still thought them but I thought we were past the point where it was okay to think them out loud. What do I know?

We are all refugee children

I know I've been living under a rock, but I only just heard of Gunter Grass' confession that he was a Waffen SS member as a teen. You know, I so want the world to be more black and white than it is. This news makes me really sad.

Benign

My biopsy results came back negative. I've never been so happy to fail a test in my life.

Barbie's dream tank

Here's something to entertain yourself with for at least a few minutes at work--make your own McDonalds sign. And while you're there, you can fill out the petition for McD's to drop their promotional with Hummer happy meals. (Though it does seem like a why-stop-there sort of issue to me. The girl happy meals are Barbies right now. I'm not really with that either. And then there's just the whole fact of McDonalds...but I digress.)

When the rapture comes...

...you don't even have to get out of your pjs.


Christianity is so freaking weird.

I mean, I know that's not a news flash or anything, but sometimes it just bears repeating. Thanks to C for the forward.

National Brotherhood Week

Here's one of those stories that has a sort of exponential bile-producing effect for me--Wal-mart and antisemitism. As if I needed more reasons to hate Wal-mart, they go and hire a bigoted Black as their PR manager. It reminds me of the infamous Hymietown comment that has made me forever wary of Jessie Jackson. It just makes no sense to be antisemetic if you're Black. You know, if you do a little research on the civil rights movement in the United States, you'll find that Jews were pretty much on the front lines. Not that it makes any more sense to be a racist Jews. Come on folks--we're all mud people in some folks eyes. Sigh.

How it's been lately

Andrea just sent me this in an email with the subject line "Someone else with your schedule."

Don't ask me to be rational

About this. Even though I know that something as asinine as a cartoon contest about the holocaust is pretty much designed to piss off the Jews and I'm only playing my part by getting enraged--oh well. This Jew is pissed off. "Why should questioning the Holocaust be a taboo?" they ask. And I'm brought back to the qotd below: Poor taste is nothing compared to immorality.

It's all so frustrating. It's such a scripted drama. This sort of shit is intended to make people like me say, "Gee we should just bomb the fuck out of those folks." All the better martyr-fodder, don't you know...

Red cape-bull-and so on.

(NB: The holocust may not have actually happened. The holocaust on the other hand...)

Pack up your troubles and smile, smile, smile

Via Shakespeare's Sister comes the news that Walmart's profits declined this quarter--first time in a decade. Not that America is wising up, mind you. It's the Germans. They didn't bite.

On the less jolly side of things is the news that there are as many Wal-mart employees in the US as high school teachers.

And rounding up the Wal-mart olio is the quote of the day, complements of Public Citizen's Wal-ocaust site: Poor taste is nothing compared to immorality.

Photo of the day

So Dell is recalling a zillion laptop batteries because they catch on fire. (And here let me say I am superstitious enough that if my laptop caught on fire I would totally take it as a sign from the god I don't believe in that it's time for a career change.)

The NYT has the story and this is the photo they ran this morning:


And this is the caption: A Dell notebook computer in Thomas Forqueran’s pickup truck caught fire in July, igniting ammunition in the glove box and then the gas tanks.

I know I'm going to hell but I found it amusing on so many levels.

Learning how to live right

So my life, as I've noted frequently recently, has been really event-filled of late--event-filled in the Chinese curse "may you live in interesting times" sort of way. I am really hoping things are mellowing. This week is totally groundhog week. Either K gets his cast off and I get happy biopsy results and the board approves my big project or we head into another who-knows-how-long of work and medical angst.

In the meantime, the Elbow and I rewarded ourselves for prevailing thus far with massages this weekend. He had Lucy Liu's little sister doing the honors, apparently--she danced a jig on his spine, or in his words, "she opened a can of whoop ass" on his back. Anyway, yeah--massages. If I can get out of work early enough tomorrow (and I'm still here right now at 8pm, so that tells you something), I'm going to get a pedicure before my evening meeting. And tonight after I do some more work from home, I plan to install myself in the tub and watch Shaun of the Dead on my Vaio.

In other news, my new car makes me way more ridiculously happy than a thing should. I have never had a new car and not only does it have that smell (who really cares about that smell honestly) it's zippy. Zoom zoom. And it's cute as hell. It looks like this.



All of which is to say, I guess, that I have now been pretty thoroughly corrupted by LA. And it feels pretty good.

Finding your way here

I don't think I've noted it before, but the two most frequent search terms, week in and week out, that people use to find this blog are "pronounce hegemony" and "Brazilian wax."

I really love that.

How you know it's a California election

When Reuters' article about the candidates begins with a line like "Sporting new breasts..."

Which is to say, Mary Carey is running for governor again. She only managed to get 40 signatures on her petition to run as an independent (just 163,960 shy of the required number), so she's mounting a write-in campaign.

Have I mentioned that I love California? I do.

Ill conceived

Some things just shouldn't be regarded as tee shirt fodder. That's all.

Joe quoted

From This Week on ABC: "I am not George Bush. I have been against George Bush on most things."

From today's "I'm a Loser" speech: "I went into public service to find solutions, not to point fingers. To unite, not to divide."

First, let's recognize that it's a really bad sign when you have to tell people "I am not George Bush." Second, if you don't want to be mistaken for GB, maybe you should think about hiring a different speechwriter. And third, when are the hawks going to stop labeling anyone who disagrees with the war--or who runs against them in an election "divisive." Fascism is the system you're looking for if you want national unification. Democracy is about debate.

Dummies.

In sum, I'm glad he lost. But then, I hate freedom, so what do I know?

First thing we do is kill all the yuppies

Picture taken at the Wolfgang Puck's counter today at lunch. I do love California. I really do.

Best Dilbert ever

German engineering in the house

Best forward I've gotten in quite a while. Thanks Ed.

The limitations of the algorithym

Today I got this email from Amazon:
Dear Amazon.com Customer,

We've noticed that customers who have purchased The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster also purchased books by Marian Macsai. For this reason, you might like to know that Marian Macsai's Ophthalmic Microsurgical Suturing Techniques will be released soon.

(For those who don't know it, The Phantom Tollbooth is described here.)

Those crazy open source people

In the course of looking up something tonight, I came across this file not found page. It really did make me laugh out loud (not that I would be caught dead typing "lol").

The word for the day is

draconian


That hour in the life of a man when first the help of humanity fails him, and he learns that in his obscurity and indigence humanity holds him a dog and no man: that hour is a hard one, but not the hardest. There is still another hour which follows, when he learns that in his infinite comparative minuteness and abjectness, the gods do likewise despise him, and own him not of their clan.

Herman Melville Pierre

Never mind global warming and ongoing war...

...what's really important is making sure that young women don't have control over their own reproductive choices. Which is to say the Senate continues to chip away at reproductive rights; this week they passed S 403, which makes it a crime to take a minor over state lines to get an abortion. The House and Senate still have to iron out the details of the bill, but the gist of the thing is as the bill sponsors describe it: the bill supports what a majority of the public believes: "that a parent's right to know takes precedence over a young woman's right to have an abortion." I can't even tell you how much this shit enrages me.

And what crazy logic governs this--if I'm understanding it properly, in Mississippi you can get married at 15 without parental consent, but you can't terminate a pregnancy without both parents' consent. What the fuck is that? So you can be married for years but have to get mom and dad's permission for family planning choices? That's totally insane folks. Completely loony.

Headline of the day

"Bush acknowledges racism still exists"

What I love best about the story is this passage:

Most of the president's remarks were greeted with smatterings of applause, but many in the convention center stood up to clap when he urged the Senate to renew a landmark civil rights law passed in the 1960s to stop racist voting practices in the South.

"President Johnson called the right to vote the lifeblood of our democracy. That was true then and it remains true today," Bush said.

He goes on to elaborate:

"For nearly 200 years, our nation failed the test of extending the blessings of liberty to African-Americans. Slavery was legal for nearly 100 years, and discrimination legal in many places for nearly 100 years more."

So let me get this straight, Bush made this appearance because he was characterized as indifferent to Black suffering and racial injustice--particularly given the great job Brownie did dealing with Katrina. And so to raise his stock he comes out with a rousing speech on suffrage??? And for this he gets a standing ovation? For fuck's sake people, can we possibly set the bar any lower for President Monkey Boy? Sheesh.

Site of the day

Well, it's been another one of those days where my head has felt like it's going to explode like scanners and I am yearning to bend the laws of time and space. But...I can still laugh. Yes I can.

Phone photo from this morning

In answer to the questions:
Yes those are the twin towers in the left-hand corner.
No I did not rear end him.

And just to prove my point

That I haven't lost my sense of humor, I want to share this with everyone because it's fucking hilarious.

I'm in love with the real world

Okay, I've now had three different people ask me if I'm okay simply on the basis of my online invisibility. I've started to post here several times explaining what's going on with me, but then I sort of questioned my motivations in doing so and didn't finish. Nonetheless, the third time's the charm--so, in a nutshell....

You will recall that at the end of March I posted about my new boyfriend crashing his motorcycle and breaking nearly a dozen bones, having his elbow reconstructed, casts on both arms, yada yada... Then there was that week long work conference of mine and this project I am coordinating, which has a major league deadline looming. That started picking up steam. Then of course, the more recent accident of mine where things that were supposed to hold air (tires and lungs, in particular) did not. In the course of taking care of me, said boyfriend (aka The Elbow) broke a metal plate in his reconstructed elbow and had to go in for more surgery including a bone graft on the fourth. So we have the bone graft, off the charts intense work situation, accident recovery, insurance, need new car, blah blah blah my-head-is-exploding kind of stress. When I went for my follow-up doctor's appointment, the guy wouldn't see me because of my hmo coverage. Then I found out my primary doctor is gone--moved away. When I did get in to see someone new, she told me the medical center discovered a lesion on my thyroid and I need a follow-up scan (which happens Monday). And while I am certain it is nothing, the news had me weeping into my cell phone on the little grass strip in front of the medical offices. Me: "Sob...sob...I'm sure it's nothing...sob..." It's like that. To top it all off, the workgroup for my project is in town, and my body has determined to menstruate fiercely through every conference and workgroup meeting I attend. My kingdom for the red tent.

But, as I wrote to C earlier today, let me not give the wrong impression. Truly I am not feeling sorry for myself. I am seriously contemplating taking up a career change as a country western pop singer, but "collapsed lung" doesn't scan very well and, shucks, I was driving a Toyota.

Really I have lost neither my sense of humor nor my perspective. I'm so very aware that things could be so much worse. I could have easily not walked away from my accident--when you hit a concrete wall at 70 and don't break a bone, you're a lucky girl. I have great peeps in my life who have been helping me in so many ways. My job is amazingly great even if it feels so stressful sometimes it amazes me I don't just spontaneously combust. And then there's The Elbow. (Did I mention below he's calling us a "match made in hospital"? Anyway, any guy who calls you the day after his bone graft from the hospital bed because he's "worried about you" and your stress level pretty much rocks even if he does have bad politics.

All of that said, this has been one of the most stressful periods in a long time. I cannot remember being this stressed out since lo those many years ago when I was married to a complete nutter. At least these days I'm not getting ambulance bills that say "Reason for conveyance: Head in natural gas oven."

So that's where I've been. I'm not sure when I'll be back on a regular basis, but probably pretty soon. I do miss blogistan.

What do tires and lungs have in common?

Both need to stay inflated to be effective, and when they do deflate suddenly, it's a very bad thing. Friday night, I blew a tire on the 405 and completely lost control of my car. I was going 75 or so and I remember thinking, "Okay you're going to crash your car now, so just relax. They say the worst injuries happen because people tense up before the impact." And sure enough, I plowed into the concrete retaining median wall, smooshing my car, my glasses, my phone, and my lung, though I didn't realize the latter for a night. In short, this past weekend things that are supposed to hold air, did not.

I was pretty banged up but nothing seemed broken except possibly a rib, and I know from my experience with my guy, aka "The Elbow," that they don't do anything for a broken rib. I was pretty clear-headed and the EMT guy said I seemed fine to him, but he could take me to a hospital if I wanted. What I now realize is that when you crash into a concrete retaining wall at full speed and pass out--even if it's only for a second--there shouldn't really be a decision-making process about this. You're going to the hospital. But sometimes I'm too stoic for my own good I guess. One of my father's favorite sayings was always, "I cried because I had no shoes, but then I met a man who had no feet," which always made me protest that meeting that man would only make me cry more. It's sad enough to have no shoes but clearly it is worse that there are people with no feet. But I digress. The point is that if you feel like someone threw you down stairs, you should go have medical professionals check you out because when you get thrown down stairs sometimes the insides of you don't fare so well.

So Saturday we went by K's folks. His dad's a doctor and took a look at me and speculated that I had a fractured rib perhaps. He said I should go in and have a chest x-ray taken at an urgent care place. We came home and napped, went out for some dinner and finally Saturday night went by a medical center to get a chest x-ray. They did a chest x-ray and a brain scan and took blood and then the doctor came in with something of a furrowed brow and said they wanted to do a CT scan of my chest because the x-ray was unclear. It could just the angle of the thing, she said, but she was concerned. Of course, it was Saturday night, so as the hours progressed, the ER was filling up with all of the other auto accidents taking place on LA's westside. Eventually they did another chest scan and--what do you know--turns out my left lung is in the process of collapsing. Go figure.

It's a pretty interesting thing really. I didn't know anything about collapsed lungs before this experience. I guess what happens is that your lung gets a little rip in it and when you breath some of the air that you exhale (carbon dioxide, I guess) escapes through that rip and collects in the chest cavity. But it has nowhere to go because the chest cavity is a closed container so it just accumulates there and the more it accumulates the more it displaces the lung itself--thus the collapsing aspect. The particularly pernicious thing about it all is that as the left lung collapses, the heart also starts a-roving, and begins to travel over to the right side of the chest. Hearts are really supposed to stay put. They are not nomadic organs, and when they ramble the aorta and stuff get all messed up (I'm sure there's a good Yiddish word I should use here).

So what they have to do is suck all the bad air out of your chest and reinflate your lung. After a while of being reinflated it reattaches itself to the chest cavity and, Bob's your uncle, you're ready to go.

Interesting stuff.

The long and short of it is that before I knew it they were punching a little hole in my chest and attaching me to a "pleurovac" which sounds like an aquarium or a bong depending on who you ask. I spent a few days fearing the tube would somehow come out and I'd go flying around the room like an inflating balloon when you let go of its neck, but it went fine and I apparently heal more quickly than most people.

I am now at K's, which has become quite the clinic of late, being cared for quite well. (For those of you who are keeping track of such things--yes, this does make the second trauma unit and second totalled vehicle in four months) I have very little energy which is why it's taken me two days to write this and I'm not adding any more even though I have more to say. I'm tired and I need to go lay down for a while. I'm pretty much of a weakling right now.

But it's a good day. I'm wearing pants and I can go to the bathroom unassisted. Oh the simple pleasures.

The sit-com possibilities are endless

Stephen Hawking appears to be the latest in the growing list of Al Gore-esque doomsayers who are looking to global warming as the sort of liberal rapture. He's arguing that we should be looking for homes in space somewhere because a disaster of some kind (global warming, nuclear war, genetically engineered virus...) may destroy earth:

"We won't find anywhere as nice as Earth unless we go to another star system," added Hawking, who came to Hong Kong to a rock star's welcome Monday. . . . Hawking said that if humans can avoid killing themselves in the next 100 years, they should have space settlements that can continue without support from Earth.

And we wonder why reality TV is so popular.

Things that should make you worry

If your office-mate buys one of these.

Public transportation

From the side of a DC bus.