The email forward we'd like to get

Thanks to S for the heads-up on this week's New Yorker column listing fun hoaxes:

Go to a frozen-yogurt shop, order a medium cup of vanilla, and then punch your index finger through the bottom of the cup so there appears to be a human finger in the yogurt. After demanding to see the manager, threaten to sue the yogurt chain for ten million dollars, making sure to tell him that you know Larry King. Note: Keep your finger very still during all of this, because if it wiggles even slightly this hoax has no chance whatsoever.

Order a bowl of chili at a fast-food restaurant. When the chili arrives, angrily complain that there is no human finger in the chili, despite the fact that you specifically ordered one. In the ensuing argument with the manager, shout the words "chili" and "human finger" for all in the store to hear. You will probably not get ten million dollars this time, but if you play your cards right the manager may pay you a little something just to get you to leave.

. . .

Convince the leaders of the world’s only superpower that a Middle Eastern nation is loaded to the gills with weapons of mass destruction. Tell them that some broken-down old vans there are "mobile weapons labs," and persuade them to spend billions of dollars on an invasion and an occupation. After they scour the country for the weapons and come up empty, shrug your shoulders sympathetically and take over the oil ministry.

Good stuff.

Today's news

So I was thinking about what a frivolous blogger I've become lately. I seem to be eschewing most political commentary in favor of insights that amount to "neat-o, huh?" Then, listening to the radio this morning, it occurred to me that it really could have been a rebroadcast of last week's news or last month's and I wouldn't be the wiser:

Car bombs kill lots of people in Iraq

Bush is still pushing to decimate Social Security despite the fact that most people think that's a horrible idea.

The Republicans are trying to change Congress' rules and accusing the Democrats of being partisan for objecting.

Religious fanatics are taking away my rights.

And so on. I think the lack of novelty is wearing on me. I'm running out of ways to say "I hate Bush and the radical right for trying to destroy so much of what I value in my country and government." I mean there are only so many synonyms for "fuck you."

Some things are just not a good idea

Here's a really bad idea, courtesy of WaPo's recent story about my last "hometown," Madison, WI:

On this day, blind people representing various organizations are spread in a circle at tables beneath the Capitol dome. I approach Ralph Barten of Ladysmith, Wis., who is representing the Wisconsin Coalition of Blind Hunters. Sure, people who are blind can hunt in Wisconsin, Barten tells me. In fact, he says, last year the state legalized the use of laser pointers on guns and bows for blind hunters.

What you do is take a sighted companion, who describes where the animal is, and you shoot it. With a laser, it's a lot easier for the sighted person to know when you've got your shot lined up right.

"Some companions just say, 'There's a deer to the right,'" says Barten. "But good companions can make it really exciting, with great descriptions of what's happening."

When I lived in Wisconsin, every year a smattering of people would die from shooting each other in the woods during hunting season and from driving their ATVs across thawing ice after last call. I'm not much of a social Darwinist, but I'm really thinking "natural selection."

Here's another great bit from the article:

The magazines and trade associations that rank cities for one thing or another constantly mention Madison, Wis. A visitors bureau handout lists 65 accolades from recent years, including "Best Places to Live in America" (Money magazine), "Best Walking Cities" (Prevention) and "Best College Sports Town" (Sports Illustrated).

According to America's list makers, Madison is also one of the friendliest, best-designed, healthiest, most literate, best-wired little cities in the country, with the best biking, canoeing and hotel rooms under $125.

It takes Michael Feldman, who hosts the public radio show "Whad'Ya Know?" from Madison's convention center, to put the boosterism into perspective.

"If you don't factor in the weather, Madison is number one for everything," says Feldman. "If you do consider weather, it's 159th."

Have I mentioned how much I love LA?

Geekier than thou

Okay, despite being at least as geeky as Yelladog and Norbizness, Yella tagged me for this one. (By way of explanation, Yelladog's post starts: "Norbizness does what the geeky guys like us who always get picked last for kickball do. We just say 'Fuck it, no one has to tap me for this quiz. I tap myself.'")

A. Top Five Lyrics that Move Your Heart:

1. Famous Blue Raincoat--Leonard Cohen
It's four in the morning, the end of december
I'm writing you now just to see if you're better
New york is cold, but I like where I'm living
There's music on clinton street all through the evening.

I hear that you’re building your little house deep in the desert
You're living for nothing now, I hope you're keeping some kind of record.

2. Don't Go Back to Rockville--REM (A natural for anyone who grew up in Rockville)
At night I drink myself to sleep and pretend
I don’t care if you’re not here with me
'Cause it's so much easier to handle
All my problems if I'm too far out to sea

3. Fourth of July--X
On the lost side of town
in a dark apartment
we gave up trying so long ago

4. Just Like Anyone--Aimee Mann (the whole damn album has great lyrics really)
So maybe I wasn't
that good a friend
but you were one of us
and I will wonder
just like anyone
if there was something
else I could've done

So maybe it's true that
your cry for help
was oh, so very faint
but still I heard
and knew something was wrong
just nothing you could put your finger on
and I will wonder
just like anyone
just like anyone

5. Wish You Were Here--Pink Floyd
And did they get you to trade
Your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
And did you exchange
A walk on part in the war
For a lead role in a cage?

How I wish, how I wish you were here.
We're just two lost souls
Swimming in a fish bowl,
Year after year,
Running over the same old ground.
What have we found?
The same old fears.
Wish you were here.

B. Top 5 Instrumentals:

Oy, I can't even really answer this one. How lame is that. I like the Cocteau Twins and Killing Joke and some other bands that are more music than words (Felt, etc.). I love the soundtrack to Betty Blue. But you know, for the most part I'm a rock and roll kind of gal. And a word person.

C. Top 5 Live Musical Experiences:

1. The show that most changed my life was my first real punk show in a club: the Dead Kennedies and Half Japanese at the 9:30 club in Washington, DC, December 1980 (or thereabouts). That was when I realized "hey, I'm not depressed--I'm angry!" Within a month I had a skinhead girl hairdo and was wearing private schoolgirl kilts, combat boots, and homemade band tees all the time.

2. Sharing a joint with Ranking Roger at the English Beat show at the Ontario (1981? 82? somewhere in there).

3. Seeing Iggy Pop at Hammerjacks in Baltimore (a club immortalized in John Waters' Serial Mom where L7 played as the fictitious band Camel Lips). Hammerjacks is a total Baltimore heavy metal club and the women's room at the Iggy show was astonishing to me--a sort of anthropological experience. More aquanet (and vinyl hipboots) than you can imagine. If you'd lit a cigarette in there, the whole place would have gone up in flames.

4. Hunters and Collectors at the 9:30 club. I don't remember when this was--maybe 1984. They were a huge band playing in a club with a tiny stage--horns, more than one percussionist and a found object "drum" set that included an automobile exhaust system.

5. Okay, I know this is the one that's going to make all of the hipsters stop talking to me. But I admit seeing Hole, Veruca Salt, and Mazzy Star (sometime in the late 90s in Madison, WI) was one of the most notable shows I've been to. Watching Courtney Love punch a fan in the eye and then bring him on stage to apologize for grabbing her tit--what can I say--it was memorable. As a runner-up I offer the 1980 or 81 punk rock show at Arlington's Branding Iron Beef House (the bands I remember are Madhouse and No Trend, but there were others). This one was notable because they called the cops on us--I think because it was a straight edge show and they weren't making alcohol money. Multiple cop cars, a paddy wagon and a K9 car all came to break up a show that was only one step up from a party in someone's parents' house basement. Pretty funny.

D. Top Five Artists You Think More People Should Listen To:
Yes, I know--I am old. These are pretty much all defunct bands. What can I say? They are still worth listening to.

1. Scrawl. Three women from Ohio. I like 'em a lot. They just aren't well known.

2. Hunters and Collectors

3. Unrest

4. The Go-Betweens (who are the one band actually in existence on this list). What can I say--I love pop music. Anyway, I didn't realize they were touring until finding their link. Come to realize they're coming to the Troubadour next month. Fun.

5. X-Ray Spex. Okay, I know a lot of people do listen to them, but more people should. How can you not love little Polystyrene singing "Oh Bondage, Up Yours" with braces on her teeth.

E. Top Five Albums You Must Hear From Start to Finish:

1. Okay, I know this one will probably surprise some of you, but Quadrophenia is definitely one of the five.

2. Faith--The Cure (music to slit your wrists by, I know)

3. Closer--Joy Division

4. White Light/White Heat--Velvet Underground

5. The Fan and the Bellows--The Chameleons

F. Top Five Musical Heroes:

1. David Bowie. Anyone who can inspire my ardor/crush consistently over a 25-year period deserves hero status.

2. Lou Reed. I just love him, okay?

3. Iggy Pop. He wins my survivor award. That he could still have so much energy and be so buff after living the life he's lived is pretty incredible.

4. Ian MacKaye. What can I say--I'm from DC.

5. Exene. Because she's just so fucking cool.

I'm tagging Prof. B and Elise and Chris--that is unless they've already been tagged--an unfortunate possibility when you are the last kid to get picked for the softball team.

The scene tonight

In the checkout line at Follow Your Heart. The cashier says to the guy in front of me, "So do you get recognized often?" The guy in front of me says, "All the time." The cashier says, "Yeah, I was going to go up to you when you were in the store, but then I figured I'd just wait until you came up here."

Myself, I restrained the urge to say, "Who the fuck are you? I have no earthly idea."

I did ask the cashier after he left. Apparently he's some Fear Factor guy (his name already escapes me). I suspect I am turning into my dad, who had a studied ignorance about pop culture ("The Beatles...who are they" kind of thing). I was better at recognizing politicians when I was in DC than I am at recognizing stars in LA. I only ever know I've had a star sighting because someone else tells me so. On the other hand, when I ran into Russ Feingold in DC National Airport, I had to go up to him and tell him how much I admired him. Pretty funny.

Amityville Horror

Okay, I know that it's symptomatic of something really wrong with me that I am compelled to mention this rotten movie in two separate posts, but I forgot to note below the one semi-interesting thing about the movie. I didn't notice when the first version came out lo' those many years ago, what a critique of the American dream the movie is. It's pretty funny. They buy this house because it's a bargain and it's their dream house. Then they can't move because "everything we have is in this house." Mr. Family Man goes nuts and becomes increasingly psychotic and scary and whenever Mrs. Family Woman tries to talk to him he rolls his eyes around like a spooked horse and says things like, "This is the life we've dreamed of."

Me? I'm a renter, thank you very much.

Hot off the Internets

What do Mike Nichols, Walter Cronkite, John Cusack, Tina Brown, and David Mamet have in common? They all have posts on the new Huffington Post. Interesting...

Botero does Abu Ghraib

Art for a Change has the story of Fernando Botero's Abu Ghraib series. The fifty paintings were inspired more by the written descriptions of the torture than the images. The exhibit opens in Rome, travels to Germany and then will come to the United States wherever someone is brave enough to host it.


(Thanks to Chris for the link)

And now for something completely different

It's raining today. I'm thinking that puts us less than an inch from breaking the all-time record. It feels very much like a rainy Monday here at work--the kind of day that makes you think: Is something retrograde or what?

I have a couple of posts coming down the chute today at last. In the meantime, let me confess that I went to see Amityville Horror last night (it seemed like a reasonable way to commemorate Mothers Day). In the theater was an entire family including small children and baby. Truly an amazing choice for a family film, I need to say. B and I marveled at why on earth you would want to take small children to a movie in which the entire dramatic action is motivated by a demonically possessed stepfather who wants to murder the children. Pretty incredible.

Solitude

My houseguest is gone and I have spent the day reading, eating strawberries with brown sugar, napping, and tidying my apartment. I don't know when I became a person who needs so much solitude--I grew up in a family. I had brothers and sisters. I shared a bedroom and liked it. I have lived with roommates and lovers, and yet, here I am--someone who needs so much quiet and who starts to feel like the oxygen has been sucked out of the room after too many days in a row with people.

I had a dream while I was napping that while I slept men moved into my apartment. I woke up and my things were all scrambled around the apartment, broken and shoved into heaps (oddly, there was a Christmas tree, askew in the corner weeping tinsel all over the floor). At first I thought there had been an earthquake, and I marveled that I could have slept through it. But then the men returned, hefting their own furniture. One of them started unpacking his clothes into a dresser drawer. "What are you doing here?" I asked him, "I live here."

"Oh no," he shook his head at me with a menacing smile, "They found out about you. They know about the research with the praying mantises."

I protested that I had never done research on any sort of insect--my degree is in the humanities--but they wouldn't listen. "Have you ever been engaged?" one of them asked. I told him that, in fact, I'd been married. "We might be able to work out a way for you to stay," he said.

This was the point when I left the apartment and subsequently woke up.

Yeah. Do I find it notable that female praying mantises are known for killing their mates by biting their heads off after sex? Sure I do. My subconscious has a wicked sense of humor, I'm thinking.

All of which is to say I feel like I won the lottery just to be able to sit quietly in my place and putter around with only Nic the cat for company. P, I and I are going dancing tonight and that should satisfy any need for human contact.

As an aside, I finally finished Middlesex, which I cannot recommend highly enough. It was so good. I have Saturday, the latest Ian McEwan, on deck, but I'm worried it will be a disappointment.

I'm also really excited that Jeanette Winterson has a new novel, (Lighthousekeeping). There are a couple of extracts on her site:

Chapter 1--Two Atlantics

My mother called me Silver. I was born part precious metal part pirate.

I have no father. There's nothing unusual about that--even children who do have fathers are often surprised to see them. My own father came out of the sea and went back that way. He was crew on a fishing boat that harboured with us one night when the waves were crashing like dark glass.
His splintered hull shored him for long enough to drop anchor inside my mother.
Shoals of babies vied for life.
I won.

I lived in a house cut steep into the bank. The chairs had to be nailed to the floor, and we were never allowed to eat spaghetti. We ate food that stuck to the plate--Shepherd's Pie, Goulash, Risotto, scrambled egg. We tried peas once--what a disaster--and sometimes we still find them, dusty and green in the corners of the room.
Some people are raised on a hill, others in the valley. Most of us are brought up on the flat. I came at life at an angle, and that's how I've lived ever since.

And so on. I'm hoping maybe it's a return to the sort of novel The Passion is and away from some of her more recent books, which, slave to narrative that I am, I haven't enjoyed as much.

A new PR guy may be in order

Via Oliver Willis comes this graph that charts public approval of Bush's social security plan alongside his "where are the tee-shirts" US tour. Let's just hope he determines to take all of his bright ideas on the road.

BBs

Remember the oreo clip that dramatized the absurd nature of the US budget using oreo cookies to represent dollars? Well True Majority has a new one about our nuclear arsenal. Making the world safe for mankind is a tough job--it's expensive and it requires a lot of weapons.

Nick the cat

I have finally figured out what is wrong with Nick the cat. Once upon a time, when he was a wee kitten, he was sweet and sassy and well adjusted, but over the years he has become obese, asthmatic, and at once depressed and hostile. I had always chalked this up to his dysfunctional family dynamic. His parents are divorced, for some years things were pretty rocky and overly dramatic. I thought he needed Catanon. Andrea, on the other hand, says he's my familiar and he manifests all of the emotions/stresses I don't let myself express. So when I moved to LA I had a seamless transition, while Nick had to be put on tranquilizers.

This week I have had a houseguest, which anyone who knows me understands is challenging for me. I have only had to apologize for being a bitch once. Nick, on the other hand, has attacked said guest twice and drawn blood. This would lend credence to the "Nick as familiar" theory.

But, thanks to the link C sent me this morning, I can say with some confidence that Andrea and I were both wrong. It seems clear that Nick is possessed.

It's official

After three and half years, I think I am now officially a Los Angeleno. For the first time since I've lived here, I found myself happy that it was cloudy and rainy today. The thing about the upper midwest, where I was living before I moved to LA, is that it's the seasonal affective disorder capital of the United States. I thought I'd had a lifetime's supply of overcast days. Of course, it's not often rainy at sunny at the same time in Wisconsin, as it has been here today. In any case, I'm hoping the rain will clear some of the smog out of the sky.

My sister had a British friend who lived here for years. When she moved back to DC, she explained that she just couldn't take it anymore. She woke up one morning and thought to herself, "Not another goddamned beautiful day."

In other California news, the Senate is moving to ban online hunting. I confess I didn't even know there was such a pastime. I find it bizarre in the extreme that once a person tires of downloading porn and playing poker, you can kill things from your desk. From the bill:

For the purposes of this section, "computer-assisted remote hunting" means the use of a computer or any other device, equipment, software, or technology, to remotely control the aiming and discharge of any weapon, including, but not limited to, any firearm, bow and arrow, spear, slingshot, harpoon, or any other projectile device, to hunt any bird or mammal.

Strange times indeed.

Headline of the day

First Lady's Comedy Skill Well-Kept Secret

Yeah

Ew

I know it is terribly hypocritical of me to be blogging this after complaining below about the dearth of "real" news in Yahoo's "popular stories" category, but I feel compelled to comment that finding a severed finger in a freshly purchased pint of ice cream is really, really gross:

Clarence Stowers said he bought a pint of frozen custard at the Kohl's Frozen Custard shop on Sunday and opened it at home. He saw an object in the custard and put it in his mouth, thinking it was a piece of candy, a Wilmington television station reported Monday.

"I thought it was candy because they put candy in your ice cream ... to make it a treat," Stowers told WWAY. Stowers said he spit the object out, but still couldn't identify it. He went to his kitchen, rinsed it off with water--and "just started screaming."

I really hate that--when what you think is candy turns out to be a severed body part.

Presents for mom

I love this one

...Someone waits for me...

US News has a story this week on low income college students (thank you Susan for the link)--a "rare and invisible minority" they call them, which I think speaks volumes in and of itself. The article ends with two tables--one on Pell Grants per college and one on universities that are replacing loans with grants. The section title? "Where the Poor Are."

INSTITUTION (STATE) PELL GRANT RECIPIENTS PCT. OF TOTAL UNDERGRAD ENROLLMENT

Univ. of Calif.-Los Angeles 35.1
Univ. of Calif.-Berkeley 32.4
Amherst College (MA) 15.8
Columbia Univ.(NY) 14.9
Univ. of N.C.-Chapel Hill 13.2
Univ. of Mich.-Ann Arbor 12.5
Yale University (CT) 10.1
Williams College (MA) 9.4
Princeton University (NJ) 7.4
Harvard University (MA) 6.8

Source: Century Foundation, figures from the 2001-2002 academic year

DEBT RELIEF
These schools have replaced loans with grants in their neediest students' financial aid packages. Princeton has done so for all students receiving aid.

INSTITUTION
Dartmouth College
Harvard University
Princeton University
Rice University
University of Maryland-College Park
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
University of Virginia
Yale University

More on the wild pigs

In mid-April, I wrote a post about the wild pig hunt on Santa Cruz Island and what a potent metaphor it is for those fatal missteps that start a chain reaction of destruction. Well, the pig hunt continues and AP has the continuing story. They expect it will take two years (using marksmen, trained dogs, infrared sensing devices and GPS systems) to kill off the island's wild pig population. To refresh your memory, the pigs are being killed in the name of the fox population. The fox population is threatened because they are preyed upon by the golden eagles. The golden eagles were initially attracted by the feral pigs (which had once been regular old Wilbur-type pigs but had gotten loose and gone wild). The golden eagles would have been the natural prey of the bald eagles, but the bald eagle population was eradicated by DDT.

Got all that? Well, here's a little slice from today's story about the whole clusterfuck:

Federal and state law prohibits relocating the pigs, which may have pseudorabies and cholera, to the mainland. For the same reason, the carcasses of the dead pigs will be left on the island to rot. Sterilization and contraception aren't practical because the plan would fail if biologists miss only a few pigs--the fast-breeding pigs can rebound from a 70 percent population reduction in just one year, according to Galipeau.

"I'm trying to protect the natural system--not what humans handed us, but what nature handed us," he says. "Sometimes you have to do the same amount of disruption that damaged a place in order to restore it."

Critics have argued that, after so long on the island, the pigs belong as much as the foxes.

One group, the Channel Islands Animal Protection Association, was formed in the mid-1990s after the National Park Service poisoned nonnative rats that were damaging vegetation on nearby on Anacapa Island.

In the current case, the association believes the golden eagles were attracted not by pigs but by the rotting carcasses of feral sheep from an earlier eradication program in the 1980s. They believe the golden eagles discovered the 4-pound foxes--not the pigs--and stayed.

And here I am struck by three things. Of course, there is the continuing epic absurdity of humankind's outstanding ability to really mess things up. And then there's the whole prospect of contraception for wild pigs, which conjures a host of disturbing questions and images for me. And finally, there's the feral sheep phenomenon. I don't know why that makes me think of a Monty Python skit, but it really does. I can just see John Cleese in a kilt fleeing from a herd of wild sheep.

Changing genres

So I've been thinking I've been trapped in a bad indy movie lately--one of those ones with smart looking folks dressed well in relationships that are, by turns, exhilarating and agonizing, and in either instance, carried out in very clever dialogue.

Today, we changed genres. M, G, L and I went to Gladstones for lunch. Looking smart, sounding clever, and feeling exhilarated and agonized. We ate mountains of food that still too closely resembled the living sea creature donors (lobster heads and oysters and such) in a table overlooking the beach. On the beach, happened to be Riordan's birthday party. Which meant we were overlooking not only bright tables of elbow rubbers but also the entertainment which consisted of trapeze artists and aerialists in all sorts of costumes.

I have often asked lately: who's writing this script, and now I know: Greenaway and Fellini.

If I believed in god, I would really have to hand it to him. He's a pretty funny guy.