Headline of the month

Woman's Dying Wish: Bush Defeat

MIAMI BEACH, Fla. -- A South Florida woman who died this week had an unusual last request. Instead of flower or contributions in her name to a charity, she asked those who loved her to try to make sure President George W. Bush is not re-elected.

Loved ones said that Joan Abbey was committed to her political passions, even in death. ...

What the --??

From this story on the death of a guy who was riding one of those menacing little "pocket bikes" -- minature motorcycles illegal to ride on streets or sidewalks -- comes this weird detail (about 3/4 of the way down):

Ali Bhatti, 20, said Mr. Pomar's father was "absolutely distraught" when he arrived. "He threw himself down next to Dante in the puddle and started drinking the bloody water, just drinking it."

The Pomar family is from Argentina, the story reports, just in case you were wondering where that practice comes from.

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?

Kerry's official campaign slogan is "Let America be America again" -- the title of a Langston Hughes poem. Here's the text of Kerry's convention speech -- which he rushed.

Tod Koppel rides along

A new Get Your War On was released Tuesday. Not the best collection. Last month's was better.

Mister 20th Century

I don't want to hear another word about how Kerry wrote his convention speech longhand.

Meanwhile, after three or four days of peace and near-solitude, conventioneers were set upon by lots of protests today.

Stay up late

This Guardian article about a new stimulant, Provigil (get it? Pro Vigil) was reprinted online in Salon. It's supposed to be some kind of scandal, but I haven't mentioned it to a single person without that person remarking, "Just tell me where I can get some of that." Don't worry, it shouldn't be long before ads for Provigil start showing up in your spam email box.

The best thing about the Provigil site is the customer testimonial page, with endorsements like this:

My life was uh, basically a non life. It was basically uh working and sleeping—that's all I did. I got up on the mornings that I had to work and went to work and barely made it through the day and uh, people heard "I'm so tired" come out of my mouth probably about 50 times during the day.

And don't miss the picture on the Patient's home page -- that is one wide-awake mail room boy.

Nice looking job

I'm looking for something full time, otherwise this desktop publisher job would be perfect for me. I know the organization, too -- they're great.

Three thousand people see F 9/11 in Crawford

Irrationally continuing to follow this story, I pass along this link to a report from Bush's homeland, where thousands gathered to watch the M. Moore documentary. Moore himself stayed in Boston, hobnobbing with pols and celebrities. I saw an smidgen of TV interview where he promised to show up at the GOP convention as well -- "I already have my credentials, me and my 15 bodyguards!" -- as well as in Florida on election night, and once Kerry takes the oath of office, to turn his critical lens on him.

Dept. of schadenfreude

Just because it's on the internet and the writing is AP style, don't assume any of this is true. But it does make for some nice dreamy reading: Sullen, Depressed President Retreats Into Private, Paranoid World. Strange -- if it is true, it's almost enough to make you feel sorry for the guy. And if it's not true, then you feel even worse for reading such yellow journalism.

I don't know if it's true or not. But quotes like this:

Some on Ridge’s staff gripe privately that Ashcroft is "Bush's Himmler," a reference to Heinrich Himmler, Chief of the SS (the German Police) under Adolph Hitler.

... are really too over the top. Like the Republicans even know the names of Hitler's staff.

Never anthropomophize the Olsens

Completely bizzare headline: Eating Disorder Scandal May Humanize Mary-Kate for Young Fans. The story is about how "Instead of rejecting their fallen teen idol, many of Mary-Kate's young fans have embraced her vulnerability, forging an even deeper bond with the star."

This put me in mind of a thing I read someplace recently, in which a New Yorker writer was kvetching about his relationship with then-editor Tina Brown, and a fellow staffer counselled, "You must always remember: never try to anthropomorphize Tina."

In the case of the Olsens, isn't the paradoxical relationship their fans have with them -- projecting all their dreams an anxieties on these perfect, yet supposedly "real" girls -- the whole point? The only way they could become even more "human," and thus even less normal, is if they murdered their parents in cold blood.

In other scandals, the Khouri tale continues to unravel. Not only has the woman's ostensibly non-fiction book been recalled by its publishers -- partly because she "appears to have been living on Chicago's South Side for the entire period of the early- to mid-1990s covered in the book," according to the Chicago Sun-Times -- but is also being sought by the FBI in a fraud case. But the most deflating quote came from a neighbor:

"She was a nice girl. She used to send articles to the Reader's Digest," said neighbor Mary Mehia.

Ouch.

Moore in Boston

You know, I'm not a big fan of Michael Moore. I'm really not. Yet I keep blogging his exploits, because he keeps saying compelling things. here's a section of Salon's DemoCon blog reporting on Moore's speech to an activist Democrat group. Among the highlights:

• Moore admonished the crowd that it would take unrelenting hard work to remove the Bush administration in November. "They will not go easy. Believe me, they're better fighters than we are. They eat hate for breakfast. They're going to fight, smear and hate all the way. So we have got to get out there and counter it with the truth." The right-wing likes to claim the flag as its own, added Moore, but they're not true patriots -- "they're hate-riots."

• Even though the movie has already made more money than any other Disney film released this year, Moore observed, the company decided to dump the film. Moore said it took Canadian journalists to figure out why. He credited newspeople from the north with breaking the story that a wealthy Saudi family owns 17 percent of Euro Disney, after saving the company's troubled division with a $300 million bailout, in a deal brokered by the Carlyle Group.

• "You know the thing I hear over and over from people who see my film is, 'I never saw those black congressman (protesting the 2000 presidential election) being shut down one after the other on the floor of Congress, I didn't see that riot at the Bush inauguration, I never saw any amputees in military hospitals complaining about the war.' So our humble plea to those of you in the press is, 'We the people need you to do your jobs.'"

Bananas now second-best slipper

Courtesy BoingBoing, today's mind-blowing 21st Century product: Ultra-Slippery Foam, designed to be spread indoors or outdoors on surfaces from linoleum to grass. Once your enemies are in it, they can't get out: no traction whatsoever. Wow.

Look, if it's fiction, just say so

Major literary scandal blowing up in the Commonwealth, as publishers withdraw from stores a tome by Norma Khouri, an Arabic author whose supposedly autobiographical work focuses on a tribal "honor killing." The author has now "gone to ground," as the Sydney paper puts it, while a Jordanian feminist says, "This woman has ruined our cause."

In a word: Animatronic

Hillary Clinton's frightening appearance before the DemoCon last night was all the more bizarre for the contrast with her husband, whom she introduced. She was like an angry robot running on 125% of normal power. Bubba, on the other hand, was like the abusive father who comes home after rehab and promises that everything will be better from now on. He had everyone crying and gnashing their teeth by the time he was done. Every person in the hall, and every sympathetic Dem watching on TV, had two thought balloons floating over their heads:

1. I hate him for lousing up what might have been.
2. He is so fucking human -- especially in contrast to his wife.

Afforestation in the DPRK

Kim Jong Il's blog seems to have gone silent, but now the nation itself has launched its first website -- in English! (sort of):

[Visiting a factory, Kim Jong Il] was very pleased to see that the workers of the factory who are boundlessly loyal to the Party and revolution are making brilliant achievements daily in the herculean undertaking of building a great prosperous powerful nation and are keeping the factory and workplaces clean.  ...

Over the past years the factory created over 800 hectares of forests of economic value in nearby mountains and tended the trees with care. It is now benefiting greatly from afforestation. Expressing great satisfaction over the fact that the employees turned out as one in the afforestation campaign and were fabulously successful, he highly appreciated their patriotic performance.

Sounds sort of like "Mad Libs," doesn't it? Just switch all the adjectives, verbs and nounds around, it means exactly the same thing.

I have a dream

No sooner did the Democratic Convention coverage and associated noise begin in earnest than I began to feel like those guys in the new Taco Bell commercials: "I'm full!!" Makes me wish I had taken vacation this week. The only thing I really liked in the newspaper this morning was a chart comparing box office figures for comics-related feature films. Each film was shown as a circle along a timeline starting about ten years ago. "Spiderman 2" is the size of Jupiter; "Catwoman," which just opened, is still merely Earth-sized in comparison. Sitting lonely in 2001 was the wonderful movie Ghost World, which had the misfortune of opening the weekend right before Sept. 11. (But the whole website is still up at that URL! So great!) Its little circle was the size of Mars.

Without reading anything else from the great media monster, let me offer my predictions -- call them dreams -- for the rest of the year.

• During John Kerry's acceptance speech, the teleprompters go blank, and he winds up improvising a speech that electrifies the nation. Michael Moore cuts a TV commercial contrasting this moment with George Bush's "My Pet Goat" stupor.
• During a rally in late August, Ralph Nader gets klonked in the head by a thrown Fudgesicle, and realizes the error of his ways. On the morning of the day Bush is set to accept renomination, Nader announces he's pulling out of the race and endorsing Kerry, and the news story dominates the rest of the week, forcing Bush off the front page.
• While dressing down a welfare mother at top volume, Bill O'Reilly has a brain hemmorage live on Fox News. Brains leak from his eardrums and his eyes pop out like John Cassavetes exploding in the last scene of "The Fury".
• Right-wing Christian mouthpiece Ralph Reed is caught in flagrante in the back room of a gay leather sex club, and videotape is on half the blogs in the world a week later. Trivia: In the film, Reed is getting it from Jack Ryan, the erstwhile Republican who was forced to pull out of the Senate race in Illinois after his divorce papers, showing a predilection for sex clubs, were publicized.

All right, enough imaginary schadenfreude. All I really want is for Bush to lose and for THEM ALL TO GO AWAY.

And the 'Arial' font might have been invented by a Plath relative

Never be afraid of making mistakes. You never know where they might lead you.

In my teenage years I inadvertently stumbled across experimental literature through popular fiction. Having read Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan of the Apes and Warlord of Mars, I eagerly picked up another Burroughs novel. It was called Naked Lunch. It took me longer than you might think to realise it was by a namesake.

That's from an autobiographical essay by British writer Jake Arnott, who also says he reckoned the Beatles' song "Paperback Writer" referred to the person who wrote the lurid copy on the back covers of books.

Walgreens psychedelia

In the surest sign yet that my generation is now in charge and utterly past it, the local Walgreens has taken to playing late-60s rock on the Muzak. Not Muzak versions of 60s records, but the actual recordings. While I was picking up a prescription this afternoon, I heard Hey Jude -- the whole thing -- Take a Little Piece of My Heart, and If You Come to San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair). Then I picked up my high blood pressure medication.

'A petting zoo where the animals have opposable thumbs'

Here's a wonderful profile of Miriam Toews, author of A Complicated Kindness, an autobiographical novel of life in a northern Canadian Mennonite community. Says the protagonist:

"We're Mennonites. As far as I know, we are the most embarrassing sub-sect of people to belong to if you're a teenager ... A Mennonite telephone survey might consist of questions like, would you prefer to live or die a cruel death, and if you answer 'live' the Menno doing the survey hangs up on you. Imagine the least well-adjusted kid in your school starting a breakaway clique of people whose manifesto includes a ban on the media, dancing, smoking, temperate climates, movies, drinking, rock'n'roll, having sex for fun, swimming, make-up, jewellery, playing pool, going to cities, or staying up past nine o'clock. That was Menno all over."

And also from The Guardian, this profile of author Edward Abbey.

Happy plastic fantastic birthday to Marilyn!

Today's the birthday of one of my favorite people in the whole world, and a terrific writer to boot. Give her the present every writer wants -- buy her books.

Looking for a real job, still, again

As readers of this site know, I moved everything to a different directory because I didn't want propspective employers to uncover my secret life. However, any prospect of employment, other than the part-time job I've had for a year, was starting to seem very unlikely, and I was ready to uncover everything again. Then yesterday -- after ten years there -- Cris was laid off from Sybase (along with her whole group and goodness knows how many others). So I'm really going to have to find a job now.

In the news, Salon reports "F 9/11 making GOP nervous". Wouldn't it be pretty to think so.

People I know who are writers

My wonderful friend Jessica Prentice, whose book "13 Moons" has just been accepted for publication, is a kitchen genius in addition to being a great writer. She has two cooking classes open in August. Even if you can't go, or can't cook, sign up for her monthly newsletter and get a feel for her writing.

I went this evening to A Clean Well Lighted Place, San Francisco's best and most impressive independent bookstore, to hear Stacey D'Erasmo read from her new novel A Seahorse Year, which she described as a domestic drama centering on a schizophrenic teenager and his extended family of gay parents and their significant others. I knew about the reading two weeks ago and should have mentioned it here, because it wasn't well-enough attended. (But it'll be broadcast, along with some silly audience questions from me, on Writers Voice Radio, a new local show. I seem to be the master of silly audience questions. When I saw Kim Addonizio at the same store a couple months ago, I flummoxed her by asking her if she wanted someday to be poet laureate of the U.S.)

Then at the reception afterwards, I got into a conversation with Ellen Ullman, author of the recent novel The Bug. She told me it was based on her time at Sybase, the large database company she worked for in very early years and I worked for in its middle years. Eventually the party devolved into a joking conversation about politics, of course.

That was a lot of fun. I was feeling in the dumps earlier in the day, and talking to other writers was very energizing.

Ronstadt the rabble-rouser

Linda Ronstadt was fired from a gig at a Las Vegas casino on Saturday night after praising filmmaker Michael Moore, then frog-marched out of the place. In this article, the casino management defends its actions, saying the problem was that she "upset" the audience so much to the point where they angrily tore down her posters and (according to the AP story on Salon.com) "tossed cocktails into the air." My God, she made them so mad they spilled their drinks!

Undaunted, she pulled the same stunt the next night. A San Diego critic wrote this account of Ronstadt "splitting the audience in two" after she dedicated her hit "Desperado" to the portly documentarist.

That's swell -- but I think it's just one entertainer speaking out about... another entertainer. I wonder if people would have been as exercised if she had taken it upon herself to speak out directly against Bush or the Iraq war, rather than simply praising another entertainer for doing so.

Poetry world exposed!!

Courtesy of the Publishers Marketplace newsletter -- maybe the best $15/month a writer can spend, after getting email -- here's a great Boston Globe story about a website, foetry.com, which "reads like a cross between the Drudge Report and Consumer Reports."

Internet was down all day at work yesterday, so no blogging. Sorry.

The nine hundred and first post

Still working on that HTML project I've been mentioning from time to time -- and I will be, for the foreseeable future. Even though I bought (bought!) Dreamweaver to help iron out the rough spots, the HTML I'm cleaning up is so full of junk that it takes me up to an hour to do a single file. And there are still about 140 files left to go.

This weekend I got even less done on that than I expected. The client discovered that the CDs I prepared worked badly on Mac OS 9 and under, so I had to manually cut 100 CDs on my Mac G4. That took most of Friday and all of Saturday -- except for when I was exercising or doing errands. I didn't do anything remotely resembling leisure this weekend, unless you count the exercise. It seems like more of a chore than leisure.

Sunday evening I took Cris and her aunt to the park to feed the pigeons, squirrels, feral cats, skunks, rats, bluejays -- god, what else... There are probably some raccoons around too. It's a regular Wild Kingdom out there. I didn't see any skunks this week but I saw three last Sunday. Cris said she saw eight (!). Face of a rat, coat of a cat, and a tail like no other. Stupid and timid. Just don't corner any.

You can call me that, but it'll be $50 extra

Really funny piece in the Onion headlined Bill Maher Spends All Night Arguing With Republican Hooker.

When Dobson informed Maher that it would be $500 more if she stayed the evening, Maher agreed to the fee, and reportedly continued to introduce various topical discussions, at one point lifting Dobson's head from between his legs to ask a pointed question.

"He was like, 'How can a whore support an administration that legislates against her own livelihood?" Dobson said. "And I was like, 'Don't call me a whore.'"

Yeah, I wrote some porn stories that read just like that.

And here's a funny piece that only reads like an Onion satire: : Three men were cited for disorderly conduct in St. Paul, Minn. when one of them began having a loud, off-color cellphone conversation and the other two objected, and an argument began. (Use bugmenot.com for userid and password for that news site, and others.)

Republicans 'stole election,' but strike allegation from Cong. Record

In a bizarre day in the U.S. House of Representatives, Republicans enacted a bill "barring any federal official from requesting that the United Nations formally observe the U.S. elections on Nov. 2." Along the way, a Florida representative went off on the majority party:

"I come from Florida, where you and others participated in what I call the United States coup d'etat. We need to make sure it doesn't happen again," Brown said. "Over and over again after the election when you stole the election, you came back here and said, 'Get over it.' No, we're not going to get over it. And we want verification from the world."

That was Rep. Corrine Brown, D.-Fla., who is about to get a better wig. Brown is well-known for sticking her shooting off her mouth, but still, it was a shame that Republicans found her comments so offensive that they were ordered stricken from the Congressional Record.

Satire dies another death

The engaging blog The Minor Fall, The Major Lift (what does that mean? I don't know) alerts you to this priceless bit of pre-apocalyptic news: the producers of Big Brother are going to combine their concept with that of "American Idol" and add a lot of sex. The result will be -- well, read it and weep.

The contestants will be screened 24 hours a day as they produce their own X-rated porn film. The five men in the show, including one Briton, will be judged on their abilities to perform sexually with the women. Those judged to have done most poorly will be voted out, one by one, until a winner emerges. He will be awarded a full-time contract with a porn film producer.

The mind reels as it considers the phrase "those judged to have done most poorly."

Cultural conservatives lose their Waterloo

Mark today as the day liberals and progressives won the culture war. Hateful shits badly lost a vote on a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. (Actually, they were voting on a procedural issue, not on the bill itself, but the vote effectively dooms the bill.)

Soldiers give F9/11 a chance, dislike it

Really terrific piece in Salon in which a journalist tests Michael Moore's assertion that troops love his anti-war film. He takes four active-duty soldiers -- two of them Iraq combat vets, two others who were sure they'd be sent soon -- to a showing at a theater near their Georgia base.

They all disliked it, and stated their opinions in reasonable ways that show Moore erred when he issued his blanket statement about troops loving the movie.

Marks thought the movie was going to be all about Bush; instead, he thought Moore portrayed the Army negatively to illustrate a point. "Toward the end he was saying don't let our soldiers die there while the richer people don't send their kids to the military. At the end he wants you to think, 'These are our kids.' He started off with us as crazy killers ... What are we? I didn't understand what we are."

Hoffman disagreed that the military was composed mainly of poor people. "My dad owns his own company. I joined anyways. It's not all poor people." Garcia said his father is wealthy and lives in Honduras. "But I joined the Army because I wanted to be in the Army."

"Right," Marks agreed. "He could have talked about that football player [Pat Tillman] who died. Instead, he made it seem like everyone who goes into the military is homeless."

I see a new reality TV show in this

Here's an excelent article on one of the guys who plays head games with 419 scammers, complete with a ridiculous picture of himself he made the guy send in. Shouldn't this be a new reality TV show? It could be called "Sting," and the object is to fool criminals into making fools of themselves, and getting caught in the bargain, all for the entertainment of TV audiences.

"F 9/11" mother interviewed

With the release of "Fahrenheit 9/11" in the U.K., the Guardian publishes an interview with Lila Lipscomb, the mother of a dead soldier who appears in the film.

This just in: we won the culture war

As the Senate moves toward a Wednesday procedural vote on a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, even its sponsor, Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., conceded he would at best eke out a bare majority, far short of the 67 votes needed to get the proposed amendment out of the Senate and short of the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster.

"I think the relentless flow of homosexual propaganda in television and movies has taken a toll, so that people feel even defending marriage is an act of intolerance," said Robert Knight, director of the Culture & Family Institute, an affiliate of Concerned Women for America, in explaining the lack of enthusiasm for the amendment the group supports.

That's from a front page SF Chronicle article, which goes on to say: "Polling ... shows the marriage amendment coming in near the bottom of other national concerns" for voters.

Also, the public stoning scheduled for next Sunday has been postponed

An Iowa preacher wanted to have an "old fashioned" book burning, but both the city and county told him to get stuffed. Best sentence:

Breedlove said a city fire inspector suggested shredding the offending material, but Breedlove said that wouldn't seem biblical.

Just another American defending traditional values.

In other news:

A few smaller theater chains are refusing to exhibit "Fahrenheit 9/11." The Michael Moore film gathered $11 million on its third weekend, by the way, suggesting some of the air is being let out of its balloon. But it opened strong in the U.K.

It's the 100th anniversary of the birth of poet Pablo Neruda. They're celebrating in Chile, his birthplace. (Who knew?) Don't miss the parade photo. And speaking of parades, it's "marching season" in Northern Ireland, as minority Protestants try to provoke hated Catholics into full-scale riots by wearing bowlers and orange sashes. Never a dull moment up there!

A year after a mass murder rocked the hateful Texas suburb where I went to high school, police still have little clue as to the motive, perpetrators or solution of the crime. But they have new vague sketches! And by the way -- Andrea Yates and I are not the only famous people from there. Arch-Republican Tom DeLay is the area's congressman -- and he's in a heap of trouble.

It can't get any better than that, even with an Australian story about the world's oldest canine. I'll let you find that one on your own.

Status quo vadis

(I'm not sure that means anything.)

A fan who is a singer-songwriter emailed me to tell me she has a new CD coming out -- I'll link to it once she has it up on her site -- and asked me if I had any new books. I told her about my novel, which I have been trying to get an agent for for a year now. She gave me the name of a contact in publishing, so now I'm sending my manuscript to a guy whose wife works for one of the big publishers. I don't really have anything else going on, so why not. In response to my email, he asked for the whole manuscript, so I got the chance to print the whole thing out for the first time in quite a while. To do so, I took the 24 separate files (one for each chapter) and combined them into one big 1.2 MB file, so that it would paginate correctly. And I was pleasantly suprised that it came in under 500 pages. I was thinking it was 600 or more.

I'll send it off tomorrow. It's a shot in the dark, but it gives me a hopeful feeling. And a friend, Jessica Prentice, came up to me after church and told me someone had accepted her book proposal. That was another encouraging piece of news; that's two friends in a month who have gotten book contracts. Someday I'll get one too.

Forida reverses voter-purging stand

Succumbing to the pounding waves of humiliation and mockery, the state of Florida has decided former felons may vote after all. That takes away the impetus to "purge" voter rolls, which kept thousands of minority voters from casting votes in 2000, leading to W's thin margin of victory in the state and thus the presidential race.

Now if they would just do something about the swamps, the rednecks and the Orlando theme parks.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day

Homeland Security czar warns of "large scale attack". I guess scales would kind of hurt if they fell on you from high enough. Or maybe he means that fish are going to attack. Or maybe he means the scales of justice. Christ, I don't know what he means.

But you know, one of these times, he's going to be "right." Something's going to happen. And unlike what happened with Sept. 11, the govt's going to be able to say, "See, we warned you."

Headline of the month

It's from the BBC, but the story is, naturally, about Australia:

Australia on Angry Kangaroo Alert

The story goes that the kagaroos are starving after a drought. One sentence even uses the phrase "desperate marsupials." I guess it's sad if you think about it, but it still sounds like a premise for a Saturday Night Live skit.

What's worse -- outing, or the closet?

Washington, DC activists are calling for closeted gay congressional staffers to come out and pressure their conservative bosses to vote against any anti-gay marriage lesgislation. But Wonkette has a point: Wouldn't it be better to just make them suffer the living hell of being in the closet and constantly fearful of being outed?

In secret cabal, Edwards debates Reed

In the New York Times' background story on the Kerry-Edwards pick, this reference to a "secretive and exclusive conference," a "gathering of powerful figures in business and politics" caught my eye. This group, Bilderberg, is a favorite of conspiracy theorists and often appears, along with the Illuminati and Opus Dei, in lists of shadowy trans-national cabals.

I love the way the Times just sort of mentioned it in passing -- like, "Oh, you know -- that secret and exclusive gathering of powerful figures." What's scary is that they let Ralph Reed in (18th paragraph).

Meanwhile, in Utah, things were a little more grassroots. There several organizations declared "War on Pornography." But can they be effective if they don't understand how to use such common tools as capital letters and quotation marks?

Just as in the NYT story on Edwards, there's a small detail that just sort of slips by:

Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff and his staff are developing an online child-protection registry that is scheduled to be up and running next year. Utahns will be able to register for the service, which will place their e-mail addresses on a list that prohibits companies from sending pornographic material. Wielding a golden sword, Shurtleff warned any violators that his office will prosecute them.

A golden sword?? Is that standard issue for lawmen in Utah?

Some very athletic lesbians

Congrats to my friend Sandy Emerson and her three teammates who completed the SF-to-LA AIDS fundraising bike ride last month.

Sort of like the Holy Grail

Tony Blair said the WMDs "may not" be found. Not the same as never having existed: they "could have been removed, could have been hidden, they could have been destroyed." Meanwhile, a poll reported on Friday that Americans now believe the war was a mistake, by a 53-43 margin.

New York Post's big oops

Just in case you haven't seen it yet, the New York Post pulled a major clanger today, printing and distributing thousands of copies of the paper mistakenly trumpeting Kerry had picked Gephardt for VP. This ranks right up there with "Nixon Beats Impeachment" and "Eisenhower Appoints McCarthy New Sec'ty of State."

From LA to SF: Fly or drive?

Two writers for the L.A. Times held a race one recent morning. Entertaining story.

"Fahrenheit 9/11" still hot

If you care, M. Moore's anti-Bush screed fared well over the holiday weekend. It came in second to "Spiderman 2," of course, but still pulled in $21 million -- nearly what it pulled in on opening weekend when it led all boxoffice. It's made $60 million so far. Check out this story from Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., including the pictures showing the line outside the theater. And Moore made the cover of July 12's Time magazine.

Unintended satire

This story from the Sydney Morning Herald reads exactly like an Onion satire. The first two grafs:

Every Friday lunchtime, Gayle Rivkin feels a sense of relief. She knows her husband, Rene, will be spending the weekend at Long Bay Jail -- and it will be her only chance for some respite.

She hasn't enjoyed being with him since the former stockbroker discovered wealth and celebrity in the late 1980s.

What's great about this story is that readers outside Australia have no idea who these people are, and that adds the requisite deadpan irony that is the Onion's stock in trade. (Compare with this piece, which leads:

LOS ANGELES—Due to her friends' actions at, or absences from, her 22nd birthday party at the Three Of Clubs Saturday night, Angela Linton was forced to revise her list of friends Monday.

"Last week, I counted Sheila Miller among my very good friends," Linton said. "But I guess she had something a lot cooler to do on the night of my 22nd birthday. Well, I'm sorry, but if she didn't want to see me Saturday, she doesn't have to see me ever again. She's off the list.")

I'm expressionate about Flash

In looking for full-time jobs, I keep running into this listing for writing jobs at Macromedia:

The Macromedia Flash Instructional team has an opening for an experienced, imaginative, skilled technical writer to lead the development of Flash learning materials and make sure that they deliver an excellent learning experience to Flash customers. The ideal candidate is:
- Passionate about Flash, has experience working as a Flash developer, and is well connected to the Flash development community
- Adept at describing and demonstrating to developers and beginners the concepts, functionality, features, and fine points of working with Flash ...

And blah blah blah. You want to know how "passionate about Flash" I am? This kind of thing is exactly what I hate about corporate websites. You sit there, even with DSL, while it loads. Then you sit there while it plays. Finally you get a choice of things to click on, but when you merely mouse-over a link, shit happens. Click on "Apartment layout," if you get that far, and get dizzy watching the damn thing rotate.

Whoever designed that, I nominate for a job driving a fuel truck in Falluja.

Battle of Baghdad-by-the-Bay

Like most fourths of July, last night was horribly foggy in San Francisco. (That picture shows only the launch paths of fireworks, not the airbursts that are the whole point -- the airbursts may as well have occured in Saturn's rings, for all you could see.) But the fog didn't stop the hundreds of neighborhood thugs and vandals celebrators who fired off enough ordinance -- both fireworks and firearms -- for an Iraqi wedding. "Where are the Blackhawks when you really need them?" I asked, wishing for a disproportionate response. Wearing earplugs, I got to sleep okay around midnight; Cris stayed up trying to calm the cats until the last shot was fired, then crept into bed.

This morning is suitably grey and quiet, though it doesn't seem as quiet as the last holiday at the end of May. But at least I get a day off. I'm banging away on a freelance project, turning really crappy HTML into decent, clean code.

Republicans gathering church phone lists for Bush

The Washington Post reported on 1 July:

Churchgoers Get Direction From Bush Campaign

By Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 1, 2004; Page A06


The Bush-Cheney reelection campaign has sent a detailed plan of action to religious volunteers across the country asking them to turn over church directories to the campaign, distribute issue guides in their churches and persuade their pastors to hold voter registration drives.

Campaign officials said the instructions are part of an accelerating effort to mobilize President Bush's base of religious supporters. They said the suggested activities are intended to help churchgoers rally support for Bush without violating tax rules that prohibit churches from engaging in partisan activity.

"We strongly believe that our religious outreach program is well within the framework of the law," said Terry Holt, spokesman for the Bush-Cheney campaign.

But tax experts said the campaign is walking a fine line between permissible activity by individual congregants and impermissible activity by congregations. Supporters of Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, charged that the Bush-Cheney campaign is luring churches into risking their tax status.

"I think it is sinful of them to encourage pastors and churches to engage in partisan political activity and run the risk of losing their tax-exempt status," said Steve Rosenthal, chief executive officer of America Coming Together, a group working to defeat Bush.

The instruction sheet circulated by the Bush-Cheney campaign to religious volunteers lists 22 "duties" to be performed by specific dates. By July 31, for example, volunteers are to "send your Church Directory to your State Bush-Cheney '04 Headquarters or give [it] to a BC04 Field Rep" and "Talk to your Pastor about holding a Citizenship Sunday and Voter Registration Drive."

I noticed this when it came out a few days ago, but I just thought, "Aw fuck, just more typical Republicans." And I may be the only churchgoer who gets anywhere near this blog. But just think about it. They're consolidating what they think is their base.

Keillor now confirmed anti-Bushite

Garrison Keillor, of public radio fame, has joined the chorus of anti-Bush voices with a new book, "Homegrown Democrat," which he calls "an intuitive book, not a closely reasoned book. It's a sort of stream-of-consciousness political autobiography."

"I want to strengthen and encourage my fellow Democrats because I think they have been so extensively beaten up on, especially on radio, with Rush Limbaugh and 10,000 imitators," Keillor said. ... "I had been expressing myself in the most elliptical way on the radio show, which drew volleys of angry letters from Republicans. So, I thought that rather than snipe by way of fictional characters in the show, Guy Noir or somebody in Lake Wobegon walking into the Sidetrack Tap and unloading on the president, I would simply write a book."

It's even for sale at WalMart.

*** For logins to newspaper sites, go to bugmenot! ***

Conservative senators join 10,000 others
at former Jew's megachurch

Hymns and prayers rarely run more than 10 seconds over their allotted time. Executive producers follow precise cues for mood lights or, at times, a fog machine. The sanctuary stage has the same lighting system as the Kennedy Center and features 92 loudspeakers, more than Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium.

Nothing done by Solomon, a man with an admittedly obsessive eye for detail, is sloppy. During an announcement about Sunday school, he pats the head of a boy -- but not before he discusses the little gesture with his staff. Then it is repeated in precisely the same way at all six weekend services.

What can I say? It's not my style.

Maybe they'll call it the 'Con Film Festival'

Republicans who are grinding their teeth over "Fahrenheit 9/11" are planning "the world's first conservative film festival". Remind me to miss it.

Excellent thing to do

Michelle Tea sent this announcement, and I'm going to be there. She's got Mary Woronov, for chrissake.

the RADAR reading series
a showcase of underground and emerging writers
thursday, july 8th
san francisco public library, main branch
downstairs in the latino reading room
6pm sharp * free

with:

From Los Angeles, ADELE BERTEI who began writing and singing sea shanties in her hometown of Cleveland, Ohio. Adele has written screenplays for television, directed and edited narrative and documentary films, contributed articles to the now defunct New York Rocker and Vibe magazine, and had a story published in The New Fuck You: Adventures in Lesbian Reading. She is currently working on her first novel and is also frontman and co-conspirator in the L.A.-based band, the Anubian Lights.

MARK EWERT, a Capricorn who has a round bedroom in a turret in a lovely Victorian mansion! He's currently writing a tell-all memoir about his time amongst the avant-garde literati, a piece of which was excerpted in the anthology Pills, Thrills Chills and Heartache. He's the co-creator of Piki & Poko, a fun animated show that's been featured on VH1 and in the pages of Vanity Fair Check out http://www.pikiandpoko.com.

From Los Angeles, FELICE PICANO, whose first book was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Since then he has published over twenty volumes of fiction, poetry, memoirs, had his three plays produced and been nominated for or won many national and international literary awards. Considered a founder of modern gay literature with the other members of the Violet Quill Club, Picano founded the SeaHorse Press and Gay Presses of New York. Picano's most recent titles are the reissue of his three memoirs and The Joy of Gay Sex: Third Edition in 2003. In Spring 2004, Haworth will republish Picano's Sci-Fi masterwork, Dryland's End, and in Fall, 2004, University of Wisconsin Press will publish his autobiographical novella, Fred in Love.

from Los Angeles, MARY WORONOV, author of books including the memoir Swimming Underground, about her time spent debauching and art-making with Warhol and the mysterious and deranged Mole People, and the novel Snake; painter of bright and otherworldly landscaped and star of cult movies such as Warhol's Chelsea Girls, Rock 'n' Roll High School, Eating Raoul, and The Women. In her own words:

Mom and I were poor and kind of harried, until she married Dr. Woronov, after which I was sent to boarding school. When my younger brother was born, I was brought home to Brooklyn, where I went to Packer, a private girls school and then on to take art at Cornell. On a fieldtrip to NYC, I hook up with Warhol doing movies and off off Broadway plays, which I considered art. I married a guy, who directed me in my first real movie in Italy, and left him for another guy who wrote the play I received the Theater World Award for. Romantically unhappy, I went to LA to work for Roger Corman. When I married an agent/race car driver, bringing my acting career to a halt, I started painting again. Divorced for the second time I embraced the Punk scene in a sort of second childhood, and partied for the next ten years doing B movies and very expressionist paintings. Near death at fifty I quit everything, became a health addict, and started to write. Now, I am told that I am a Cult Queen because of all the bad movies I have done. I'm still not sure what this means. I continue to paint, have written six books and five screen plays, and directed soft-core porn for TV to pay the rent. Reading one of my stories from High School, I realize I was always meant to be a writer and now, have very little time.

Hosted by Michelle Tea, who will bake cookies for you. Following the reading, there will be a fantastic audience participation conversation with the writers. Ask a question, get a cookie!

It's Radar's one year birthday, so maybe there will be cupcakes instead of cookies.
No promises, though.

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Ehrenreich joins NY Times

Barabara Ehrenreich, who wrote Nickled and Dimed, a look at how low-wage workers are exploited, joins the New York Times for three months as a guest columnist, subbing for Thomas Friedman, who is less liberal. (Thanks, Jym, via ny.indymedia.org.)

Cosby disappointed in current generation of Black Americans

Performer Bill Cosby, an inveterate champion of education, has been ranting lately about the cultural and ethical condition of many Black Americans, and today he went off again, saying, "For me there is a time ... when we have to turn the mirror around," he said. "Because for me it is almost analgesic to talk about what the white man is doing against us. And it keeps a person frozen in their seat, it keeps you frozen in your hole you're sitting in."