Hoppy birdy

Today is my birthday, the first one I've spent alone in many years. With Cris still up in Canada, it's been just me and the cats for almost three weeks, and today was no different. I have been spending a lot of time "ripping" music from my CDs onto the Mac using the itunes software which converts the tracks on a CD to .mp3 files. I now have "2.1 days" worth of music, more than 800 separate tracks. The only trouble is, I have no iPod to take with me on my upcoming trip, so all the fooling around with my CDs and iTunes has been rather pointless.

I did get birthday wishes at morning prayer, and a card from Christine and from my mother. I thought of going to a movie, but I stuck around during the afternoon, waiting for UPS to make a second attempt to deliver my replacement credit cards. (I lost my wallet last week.) They didn't. So I thought to myself, "I am sort of piddling away my birthday, without much of an opportunity for thought or contemplation, why not go meditate."

Instead of going to Hartford St., though, I went to the church, hauled out the cushions, and sat in the dimly lit sanctuary. I sat for ten minutes or so, stretched, changed positions, got sleepy, took a short nap, then sat for real for about twenty-five or thirty minutes -- enough to feel like I had almost gotten to center on my breathing. Almost. I didn't come to any big realizations or anything, but at least I felt a little bit slowed down. I've been kind of tense lately for some reason.

It rained on and off all day -- not hard steady rain, just a pelting shower, then nothing, then another shower. Kind of enjoyable, really.

It'll be really nice to get up to the mountains -- somewhere I can listen to the rain without most of the noise being the sound of cars going up a wet street. At Holden there are no cars and no streets! Only a few trucks and a single gravel road. And nowhere to go if you aren't hauling something, so no traffic and no reason for there to be noise. Just the sound of the rain.

Time for a bad pun

A friend sent me an email message about saving some natives in the Amazon called the Xavante:

Slide Show and Discussion about Efforts by the Xavante Indians of Brazil to Protect Their Land and Culture

Tuesday, May 20, 2003, 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm, at the Tides Center Room 542 at the Thoreau Center of Sustainability in the San Francisco Presidio (Lincoln Blvd. & Torney Ave.)

Philip Klasky and Aryeh Shell will show their slides and discuss their trip on a cultural exchange with the Xavante Indians of central Brazil.

The Xavante face the threat of a multi-national corporate attempt to construct the Hidrovia Project - a 1,200 mile industrial waterway that would strip the land of forests and minerals and plant soybean for export. The Xavante are reaching out for international allies in their struggle to protect their land and rich traditional culture.

For more information and directions call (415) 752-8678 or (510) 594-1377. Sponsored by the Institute for Deep Ecology and The Cultural Conservancy.

I can only assume that the slogan for this effort is "Xavante be alone." (Ka-pow! goes the rimshot.)

Tomorrow's my last full day alone in the house before Cris comes back from vacation. It almost doesn't count, because our housekeeper comes in tomorrow. Not only can I not put off cleaning up the place until Cris gets back -- I have to put things away before the housekeeper comes. In fact, I really should get started on it now. Tonight is garbage night too, so I have to take down the recycling and all anyway.

I spent much of the last few days putting together the latest issue of my church's newsletter -- a project I started so I wouldn't have to work on my book. Many are the things done for the sake of work avoidance.

Mystery

I've just come from a really amazing event -- one of those things that goes on under your nose all the time but which I never knew about. Someone at St. Gregory's, where I go for morning prayer, mentioned to me that the Orthodox cathedral in San Francisco -- their Easter is a week after the Roman one, so they're in the middle of Holy Week -- has a service called "Liturgy of the Twelve Gospels." According to my friend, all four gospels were read in succession. This seemed rather too long to be possible, but I went over to Holy Trinity Cathedral tonight and was handed and candle and told that the custom is to stand for the whole thing, but I could sit down if I really needed to between the readings. I asked if it were true they did all four gospels, and the guy said, no, they only read the portions from the four gospels that constitute the passion narratives -- divided into twelve segments, thus the "twelve gospels."

So for three hours I sat, stood and knelt -- there were a few prostrations where my Zen practice came in handy -- and listened, not only to the readings (which were all chanted) but to the small choir doing this great music. The choir must have sung two solid hours out of the three. There were bells and incense and processions and the center of the iconostasis was open. All in all a wonderful experience. I was exhausted afterward though I did more sitting than standing, it seemed.

Too close to home

Sen. Rick Santorum (Penn.), third-ranking Republican in the Senate, has committed this month's Republican gaffe:

"If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual [gay] sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything," Santorum said, according to the AP.

Santorum spokeswoman Erica Clayton Wright said the quote was accurate "only in the context related specifically to the right to privacy in the Supreme Court case." The senator, she said, "has no problem with gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender individuals." Washington Post story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7390-2003Apr21.html

Can I just say a few things about that?

The implied right to privacy, which was established by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade, does indeed pertain to the privacy that people can assume "in the bedroom" or around sexual topics -- especially in married couples, a distinction that forms part of the state's case in the Texas case that's currently being decided in the Supreme Court. In the arguments in that case, lawyers and justices haggled over whether there was a difference between a married heterosexual couple having anal sex, and a gay (presumably unmarried) couple doing the same. Apparently it's all right for married straight people to buttfuck, even to Republicans.

But the senator is way off base in saying that if the justices decide for the queers it means "you" (presumably he meant straight married people, since in the Republican world that's the standard) "have the right to bigamy, polygamy, incest and adultery."

Let me draw a few distinctions here. For one thing, the arguments in the Lawrence case made clear that both the justices and the lawyers on both sides wished the court to decide narrowly on the issue, and not on bigamy, incest and the rest. Second, the arguments themselves addressed specific issues of why the issue of consenting homosexuality was different from those other issues. And third, that fucking Republican is just trying to make the same tired Anita Bryant argument that opening the door to homosexuality will lead inevitably to the downfall of society. How do I know that? Because unless he knows even less about constitutional law than I do, he can't possibly believe what he's saying. Therefore he's just making a political, rhetorical point -- and isn't there enough of that shit going around these days?

Then there's that last bit: The senator, she said, "has no problem with gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender individuals." Oh really? I'm just guessing here, but I'll bet there is at least one, and probably more, gay person on his staff. And I'll bet some of his relatives are queer too. It always seems to work out that way, anyway.

Blooming today

The dentist's receptionist called to remind me I have an appointment at 10:00 on Thursday. It's a good thing she called. I have left off all calendars, appointment books and PDAs; the most I have to remind myself of things is a little post-it stuck on the kitchen calendar. But I didn't have one for the dentist.

1:40 pm, and the breeze has sprung up, the clouds beginning to roar in from the ocean a few miles away. It's been cool all day, though the sun has been out for a couple of hours; but now it will be really chilly for the rest of the day and into the evening. Down in the still-sunny garden, I can see that long stalks of grass are beginning to go to seed. I ought to go down there and take off the seed tops before they dry out and spread.

Blooming today are the poppies, the cherry trees, a bearded iris, a few calla lillies (most have gone), some geraniums, a few posies, the pink foxglove along the back fence, one white rose, and a long stalk I don't know the name of that has a bursting many-petalled purple flower. And, of course, the bougainvilla, which always has blooms. And the lavender and the jasmine and some little violets. And even more small flowers I don't know the name of.

Bumblebees float in and out of the poppies -- a haiku begging for a last line.

For me, the big looming thing in my mind is how close now my writing retreat is. Less than two weeks and I’ll be on a train to Seattle. I haven’t even tried to work on my book during the time Cris has been gone. If I weren’t going on the retreat, I’m sure I would be pressing harder, but franly I’ve been pretty lazy. Since coming back from Phoenix all I’ve done is work on the newsletter, read, and go to church. And I went to see Laurel Canyon. It was enjoyable except for the excessive focus on the young couple, especially on the boy doctor's flirtation with a colleague. I actually got up and went to the bathroom during one of their scenes; they had about as much chemistry as an eggplant and a house plant. By contrast, whenever Francis McDormand was on the screen, I was riveted. It’s extraordinary just to watch her face.

I went over to St. Gregory's to help them clean up from their Easter fiesta. They throw such a big shindig that they leave the whole church a mess from Saturday night to Monday. (They don't have an Easter service on Sunday morning -- just the vigil service on Saturday night. Daring!) So there are streamers, empty champagne bottles, little plates full of Chex Mix, discarded programs everywhere -- it's like the aftermath of any huge party. Along with a dozen other people, I spent about two hours putting the place in order, and felt very virtuous afterward -- as it's not my church, I just go there for morning prayer. I thought I ought to do something out of gratitude for the morning prayer service. How many places, outside monasteries, can you go and have sung morning prayer every weekday morning?

Who to pray for? Let's see...

Two competing world views: While the Pope, in his Good Friday message, asked people to pray for victims of war, George Bush asked people to pray for coalition troops.

That says it all, doesn't it?

More focus on the fundies

Did you see the Washington Post story about the Muslim DoD employees who are upset that Franklin Graham was invited to hold a Good Friday service at the Pentagon? Graham, the son of Billy Graham, has called Islam "an evil religion." (Another story.) He's also the head of an aid group champing at the bit in Jordan, waiting to get into Iraq to deliver aid and incidentally evangelize the population.

For a larger perspective, here's an excellent article about fundamentalist Christian influence on the Republicans (and vice versa -- really it's just a bunch of conservative shits like Karl Rove and Ralph Reed who are manipulating evangelical Christians to serve as a power base for their own greed and ambition). Writing from the perspective of a Southern Baptist who feels his denomination has been hijacked by politics, the author explains the links between the GOP and the Southern Baptist Convention. Excerpt:

The separation of church and state, long central to Baptists, is of little interest to the fundamentalists: In 1998, Richard Land, at a strategy meeting with Republicans and members of the religious right, told the Republicans, "No more engagement. We want a wedding ring, we want a ceremony, we want a consummation of the marriage."

George W. Bush, former heavy drinker and alleged cocaine user, claims to have been brought to God in 1986 by Southern Baptist evangelist Billy Graham. His 1993 pronouncement to an Austin-American Statesman reporter that non-believers will go to hell infuriated a lot of non-believers, but cemented his now nearly infallible reputation among Southern Baptist fundamentalists – a group that, perhaps more than any other, helped Bush rise to power in Texas.

In the '80s, Karl Rove advised nearly every Republican campaign in Texas, before then a Democratic stronghold. A large factor in Republicanizing Texas politics was the courting of the religious right, a specialty of Rove. He is a Christian of some sort, but he refuses to discuss much of anything with reporters, especially the specifics of his faith. Those specifics would clearly reveal much about the man often dubbed "Bush's brain."

Breezy day

I got back from Phoenix on Tuesday, and just hung out with the cats for pretty much the next 48 hours, except for going to church several times. Yesterday it rained pretty much all day, and I went out at 1:00 to have my Talk with Steve H. about the job at St. G. It wasn’t a very businesslike conversation; he just sort of free-associated through lunch about the job and the staff there. When it came down to cases, I was finally able to tell him about my summer schedule and so forth. As far as I can tell, he seems to be thinking like I’m just going to go ahead and take the job; he didn’t give me any reason to think otherwise.

He’s going to Talk to the rectors.

My aunt Millie, whom I thought I would have to help move away from Phoenix in the dead of summer, wrote me and said she’s going to spend May 15 - Sep. 15 in Portland. So I won’t really have to worry about coming back from Holden and going to help her move in July when it’s the worst down there. That's a relief. I'd like to help her but anything's better than July or August in Phoenix. Except maybe August in St. Louis.

Last night there were several alarms. The feral yellow cat is back on the roof, and it kept (seemingly) asking for help. But whenever I would go up on the roof, it would run away. Then at 4:00 a.m. I thought I heard a scream outside -- it seemed so urgent that I threw on my clothes and some shoes, got the gun, and ran out on the street. Nothing was happening, of course -- I may as well have dreamed it. Perhaps I had. Then I woke up with a start at 6:30 for some reason. And I couldn’t really go back to sleep. Finally I got up and fed the cats and did a load of wash and got dressed and went to morning prayer.

I didn’t eat until I went to get my blood drawn. The Russian immigrant phlebotomist was able to find a vein where no one else had -- on the outside of my ... what do you call it, the part of your arm that’s opposite your elbow? -- and diagonal. I’ll have to remember that for the next time. The last two times I had my blood drawn they had a devil of a time finding a vein.

So after the rain stopped around 10:00 it was an absolutely gorgeous day, though it got very windy in the late afternoon. I spent all day working on the church newsletter, so I can get another issue out before I go to Holden. Around 5:00 I went for a walk on the hill and it was really blowing hard. I hardly got back before it was time to go to Maundy Thursday church. And there was hardly anybody there but the music was beautiful and simple and the atmosphere was very meditative.

Then I got some sushi and brought some home to the cats. They sniffed at it, and then I remembered to rinse it off. They only like it when it’s rinsed, the picky beasts.

Happy garden

I'm back from a few days visiting my aunt in Phoenix. We went to a ballgame -- the Diamondbacks absolutely stink, so suddenly and completely that the people still haven't learned how to boo -- and to see "About Schmidt." I echo the comments I read in reviews that say no matter how well done everything about the movie is, you never forget for one second that it's Jack Nicholson up there. I wonder if previous generations had the same trouble with Cary Grant or James Stewart. (John Wayne, on the other hand, never pretended to be anyone other than John Wayne, whether he was playing a cowboy or a soldier.) Contrast this with Nicholas Cage's twin performance in "Adaptation;" not only did I forget it was Nicholas Cage, but I forgot that it was the same actor playing both twin brothers.

Obligatory Iraq-related links: Scott Rosenberg ponts out in his Salon blog that the U.S. was certainly quick to protect the Iraqi oil ministry while looters sacked every other public building. He links to this excellent Washington Post article from Sunday:

"The bombing was terrible for sure, but it is not ruining our city like these looters are," growled Sherko Jaf, a dentist, as he watched a band of young men hauling rolls of carpet out of the 10-story Foreign Ministry building and placing them inside a yellow dump truck. "How will this ministry ever work again? You know, even if we don't have Saddam Hussein, we will still need a foreign ministry."

...Some Iraqis, however, question the allocation of U.S. forces around the capital. They note a whole company of Marines, along with at least a half-dozen amphibious assault vehicles, has been assigned to guard the Oil Ministry, while many other ministries -- including trade, information, planning, health and education -- remain unprotected. "Why just the oil ministry?" Jaf asked. "Is it because they just want our oil?"

After coming back from morning prayer, I spent an hour in the garden reading the paper and pacifying the cats. I had brought the cordless phone down there in case someone called, and it was a good thing. My mother rang, wanting to know the lowdown on my aunt. She wants my aunt to move to Portland because she judges my aunt's situation in Phoenix not to be good. I kind of agree but told my mother it wouldn't help to pressure the aunt (her half sister), that she had to reach her own conclusions about where to live. She agreed but is fretful; it's her personality. I owe my fretful bossiness to my mother and my judgemental side to my father; between the two characteristics, it's a wonder anyone can live with me. After the call I just sat down there enjoying the beautiful garden, including the cherry trees that Cris planted for my last birthday. One is doing better than the other, but I finally got the second one to start budding again.

In a little while I'll go to talk to someone about a job. I'm not saying any more for fear I'll jinx it.

'My butt was clenched for days'

I wasn't trying to find a war story, but this one is just too good. It's a reporter's notebook-type tale from a British reporter, Chris Ayers, who was "embedded" with the U.S. Marines. Excerpts:

"I realised why some journalists choose to become full-time war correspondents: the thrill of writing an I-nearly-died-a-gruesome-death story is almost unbeatable. It requires, however, that you nearly die a gruesome death," he added.

"To get another story on a similar scale, I thought, I would have to go through the whole nearly-dying thing all over again. And what if I did actually die? Surely only a disturbed person would put themselves in mortal danger simply for front page bragging rights?," Ayres said.

...
Ayres also described coming across gung-ho US journalists, some with US flags on poles. "One US writer, a pale, bespectacled and rather geeky figure like me, kept saying: 'Let's giddyup, motherf***er!'," he said.

"Most of the time, I had no idea where I was or what our unit was doing, adding to the difficulties of filing stories. The worst times were when we moved at night and our driver used night vision goggles to see. My buttocks remained firmly clenched for days on end.

Fed up

It's a good thing the war is almost over. I'm tired of the whole thing. Today there's only one more city left to conquer -- Tikrit -- and the news media is treating it like the Super Bowl, using words like "showdown" and "last stand" and so forth.

Meanwhile, as "saltyvicar" pointed out in his eminently readable blog, 3.3 million people have been killed in fighting in the Congo. (I first typed "ethnic fighting." But who the hell knows why they're killing each other? There's not a single U.S. news organization covering the war there, as a google news search will quickly show.)

So I'm giving up on war coverage for a few days. Today I'm going to try to write a little, and tomorrow I'm going to Phoenix for a few days to visit my aunt. Meanwhile Cris will also leave tomorrow for another 17-day vacation, the second half of her "sabbatical."

She's been speaking longingly and half-jokingly about going to Paris again, where we went a year and a half ago for her birthday. So last night I had a dream about having dinner with her in Paris. The restaurant had this odd split-level arrangement where we had to sit beneath a pane of glass where others could look down on us. That's probably because I've lost all ability to speak French, an ability I never had much of in the first place eighteen years ago, when I learned it by laboriously going to Saturday morning French classes at City College for two semesters. This left me with a bare conversational ability that quickly left me as soon as I came back from a three-week trip to Europe, the purpose of the studying.

I've always been terrible at learning languages. I lived in Japan for 22 months and never learned to speak the language aside from the kind of shop and taxi language I learned in the first two weeks. And I took German for three semesters in college, to fulfill a requirement, and almost nothing remains of my near-conversational ability in that tongue, either. Now the whole time it turns out I should have been learning Arabic. Then I could get a job rebuilding Iraq!

Our dear little blonde is safe!

The national spasm of emotion over the capture and subsequent rescue of missing Pvt. Jessica Lynch has gone to a new level with the news that Hollywood producers are already planning a TV movie. I am so fucking tired of hearing about this girl who didn't do anything except get captured and fortuitously survive. Meanwhile, her colleague in the unit, Shoshanna Johnson, is still missing, and do we hear a peep about her? Says a lot about the relative values this society puts on a 19-year-old blonde chick vs. a 30-year-old black woman.

Iraqi free speech

One of the best ways to get an overview of what's happening in the war is the BBC's reporters' log, which contains excerpts from BBC dispatches from all over the world. Today it contained this gem:

One of my close Iraqi friends went up to an American marine and said to him: "I'm going to exercise my right of free speech for the first time in my life - we want you out of here as soon as possible."

(Scroll down to the report datelined "Baghdad :: Andrew Gilligan :: 0530GMT " on 10 Apr 03)

And the view from Get Your War On is always refreshing.

So what do you suppose Dick CHeney is thinking right now? 'Thank God, my decades-long dream of liberating the Iraqi children has been realized! Now, to cure AIDS!' Then he'll roll up his sleeves and think, 'OK! Let's get moving on that ROAD MAP FOR PEACE! That's something I give a flying fuck about!'

Spring days

The weather is so gorgeous that I've been trying to spend a little less time on the internet and television lately. I've gotten a little bit of work done on my book. I haven't covered a lot of ground in the second draft, but I do feel like I really have a handle on what needs to be done. I've probably done only about a fifth of the rewriting that needs to be done.

Here's a link you shouldn't miss, though -- all about how the DofD prepares the battlefield MREs for the troops.

God's on our side, of course

Suddenly everybody is wondering what role Bush's religious faith plays in U.S. foreign policy. The BBC casts an amused look at the ubiquitous religious culture of the U.S. and of Presidents in particular, suggesting that Bush's born-again beliefs conceivably influence his willingness to start a Mideast war. The New York Times Magazine covered similar ground last week, albeit from a closer perspective. (Archived version) But Sunday's Guardian has a more alarming, direct, perspective:President Bush is under pressure to clarify his position on the role evangelical Christian aid groups are set to play in post-war Iraq. Responding to criticism that workers from at least two evangelical groups whose leaders have denounced Islam are massing in Jordan to bring a Gospel message to Iraq's Muslims, the White House attempted to distance itself from the idea that the war is a crusade to convert the nation to Christianity.

That comes after the Washington Post had this story Friday:

The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's largest Protestant denomination, and Samaritan's Purse, run by the Rev. Franklin Graham, said they are ready to provide emergency shelter, food aid and medical care to Iraq's mostly Muslim population. The announcements raised concerns among U.S. Muslim leaders that the groups intend to proselytize in Iraq.

Picture shows thousand words, also several refugees twice

An L.A. Times photog got fired after editors were tipped to the fact he'd used photo-editing software to combine two shots of the same scene into a more pleasing composition. Under the heading of "smart -- to a point," the lensman produced a more dramatic photo but neglected to edit out some folks in the background who appeared twice in the synthesized image. (Note: If that WSJ link doesn't work, click here for an archived version.)

What surprises me is not that a photographer did this, what surprises me is the unconvincing expressions of shock on the part of the L.A. Times and the photogs quoted in the WSJ story. "If you can't believe what you see, everything is suspect," one frets. "This sort of thing damages the credibility of all of us," says another, probably wringing his hands.

Guys, the horses escaped from that barn years ago. It won't do any good shutting the door now.

Language in the 21st century

This fascinating article on The Register (U.K.) discusses how a neologism comes to light, is quickly taken up by everyone from the masses to Kofi Annan, and then repurposed and redefined by an influential blogger. In the process, the author invents a new word: Googlewash: the redefining of a neologism to the effect that a Google search tends to return the newest meaning.

That's a lot of high people

Two California men were convicted today of producing "a third of the country's LSD" in a decommissioned nuclear missle silo in Kansas. That's something to write home about right there. But it gets better:

Before producing the LSD out of the silo, according to the DEA, the men ran their operations out of Santa Fe, N.M., and produced 10 million doses every five weeks.

Ten million doses every five weeks. Do the math. Accounting for a very few people who do LSD with great frequency -- say, a few times a week even -- most people who ever do LSD probably do it once every month or two, at the most. And yet somebody's consuming ten million doses every five weeks -- and that's only a third of the LSD produced in the U.S., according to the story.

So really there are thirty million doses being produced and, presumably, consumed every five weeks. Say that means between five and ten million people on LSD every week or so. That's a lot of seriously high people. And yet I haven't even talked to anybody who admits to taking LSD in more than five years.

Either there are a lot of people still fooling around with LSD or the DEA's estimates are way off. It reminds me of a late-80s movie I saw about a couple of laid-back drug dealers. The movie opens with the two guys watching a TV news report about a drug bust "with a street value of six million dollars." The two guys break up laughing, knowing the estimate is seriously exaggerated. One of them exclaims, "Six million dollars! Man, I want to live on that street!"

Pomo sentiments

This caption from a NYT photo has an ironic quality: Areas Taken Must Be Secured. It's like the title of a Guided By Voices song.

Also entertaining was this up-close-n-personal piece about a Marine leiutenant who is the company joker:

He seems more cheerful as the surroundings become more miserable. The smell of the camp's trash burning wafted over his cot, and he laughed, imagining telling the boys at home: "No, literally, we lived in a dump."

One of his best friends is in the unit, First Lt. Matt Neely. The two met a year ago, and get together regularly at home in Jacksonville, N.C., golfing on Saturdays, having afternoon beers. Lieutenant Neely is short compared to the stocky Deuce, and other officers have been known to call them "Gilligan and the Skipper." Before the war, they found distraction in the long wait in Kuwait by constantly arguing: What, say, would be the best song to listen to while crossing the Iraqi border? They threatened each other, drew their K-Bar knives on each other so often that no one around them paid attention. ...

They crossed the border. Both selected morbid songs by indecipherable heavy-metal bands mostly unknown outside Germany, with choruses like "Let the bodies hit the floor."

In another piece that shows how difficult it is to write satire these days, a piece today in The Onion headlined Bush Thought War Would Be Over By Now reads like straight news. Well of course he thought it would be over by now.