Back to Gomorrah? No thanks

Because I'm crazy, I register on all kinds of weird websites that any ordinary people should stay away from. Like Classmates.com, an elaborate scam designed to collect email addresses and lifestyle information under the guise of connecting alumni of high schools and colleges. For free, you can put your name and a few biographical facts (or fantasies) on their site, so that other pathetic dweebs from your school can find you. But if you buy a premium membership, you get much-expanded "biographical" pages where you can put up lots of evidence that, no matter how long it's been since high school, you are still a total loser. What fun!

Because my (shudder!) 30th high school reunion is coming up, I have received several automated emails, ostensibly from a member of my class, one Chet Hawkins. Back then he was a good-natured, somewhat goony looking footballer. (Then again, back then I was a crabby geek who labored in crypto-fag organizations like the choir and the drama club.) Chet tells me (and everyone else registered on the fateful site from our class) that a 30th reunion is being organized and I should be sure to stay tuned for news.

Well, I've tried hard on this site to defame that horrifying collection of split-level houses called the Clear Lake (Tex.) area, not only by explaining that the filthy, violent pornography I've published was, in part, all about revenge fantasies based on my hatred of the place, but I've also tried to save news articles about how horrible the place is -- in fact, it's even more horrible now than it was then. Back then, the worst thing that happened was a drunk driver going off the road. Now it's vile mass murders, chief among them being the infamous incident a few years ago in which that psychopathic housewife killed all her kids, but also including comical, run-of-the-mill, tabloid-worthy husband-killings and wife murders.

So I don't have a huge urge to go back there to, like, see the place. And I definitely don't feel like going back to justify my meagre existence to my classmates. Oh, you own your own empire of Chevy dealerships? That's neat, Biff! Me? Oh, I'm a part-time church secretary.

Yeah, sure, I totally want to go back there for a high school reunion!

Appalling use of a pumpkin

This is just the sort of thing that makes you embarrassed to call yourself a Christian. I mean really. The insides of the pumpkin "represents the sin in our life." Well, Emmalea (!!), I got your pumpkin sins right here. Haven't you ever heard of pumpkin pie? I'll bet you just throw away the insides, don't you?

Pathetic.

Privileged youths worship at feet of Eggers

“After watching Dave’s reading, after watching him kick his coat against the lectern, carve out a pair of breasts in the air with his hands, pick at a piece of tape on the stand at least once every five minutes for the duration of the reading…I came away feeling like I knew the guy much more than the other authors I’ve seen this fall,” said Ryan M. Riley ’06.

That's from a Harvard Crimson story (link courtesy Gawker) recounting the Cambridge advent of Gen-Y messiah Dave Eggers. No further comment from me is needed, I think.

Satire, dead or not?

Quite nice flibbit addressed to the driving public. (I just made up the word "flibbit" -- but you know exactly what I mean, right? A satirical piece designed to hold up to gentle ridicule a section of the populace.)

Then there's the woman who gives people casettes entitled "Road Sage." Whenever this woman decides that one of her friends is a bit too angry when driving, she buys this "Road Sage" cassette for them. It's her way of making the roads safer.

Dear friend,

Thank you for picking me up at the airport yesterday. What with the driving rainstorm, all the airport construction, and the trouble with your broker on the phone, I understood what a great favor it was.

With all these distractions, the fender bender we had with that nasty woman in the sports car was certainly understandable. Drivers these days just don't realize that just because we have a big SUV, we can't see everything! If we could, we would be gods and wouldn't need to drive at all. As it is, the height and expanded cargo space of your Ford Monument Pro makes us feel like gods. But gods don't get into fender benders with nasty little red sports cars.

If she had only realized this, she would not have tried to pass you in a lane that had only just that moment become clear. It wasn't your fault that she zipped into it at the same time you changed lanes. I thought your maneuver was very skilled. For a moment there I thought we were going to turn over and over and over and skid on the passenger side down the fast lane of 101 up and through the guardrail and into Richardson Bay. But your driving skill prevented this. Nice bit of driving there!

I did think it was a little bit of an overreaction on your part, once she had pulled off to the shoulder and gotten out of her car, for you to slam the Monument into reverse and roll backwards over her hood and bust her windshield. I could tell from the way you were screaming I'LL SHOW THAT FUCKING BITCH that you were a lot more bothered than you should have been.

So I thought you'd enjoy this tape. I put it on every time something like this happens to me. The soothing shakahachi flute and background tinkle of a rushing brook evoke a pleasant, meditative retreat, and the calming voice of the narrator, former Cleveland Zen Center roshi Dan Omoke, puts positive thoughts into your mind. So driving isn't such a stress event.

With love,

Shakti

Update: After I wrote that, I found out there really is such a thing as a Road Sage cassette. So maybe satire really is dead after all.

Hanging on to my 24 hr/wk job

Almost unnoticed amid the spectacular coverage of the Southern California wildfires was the news that California's unemployment insurance system is almost broke. One of Gov. Arnold's first priorities will be to ask the federal government to bail it out. And we'll be right in line with Texas and California. Great.

And for no reason in particular, did you know Austin, Tex. has its own Roller Derby-like league, entirely featuring girls who, if they were in San Francisco, would probably be working at the Lusty Lady?

And did you know that this month's literary sensation is a teenage girl whose angsty diary of her highschool freshman year for $100,000? A parody wasn't far behind.

Fires

On the internet, you can find high-resolution pictures of the wildfires in southern California. For those with high bandwidth, this video segment of a helicopter view at 6:00 a.m. this morning, broadcast on a SoCal TV station, is electrifying.

And there's a live video feed from KCBS-TV, on which you can sometimes hear the helicopter pilot laconically talking to his editor or dispatcher. I heard him say, "Yeah, man, I thought this thing was gonna be lying down by now, jeez!... (pause)... Yeah, ha ha! There is no good news!" Corrected link: Go to the KCBS site and click onthe "Live Webcast" link.

Autumnal moment

My friend Jessica Prentice, a food activist as well as a wonderful cook, writes a monthly column that combines a creative approach to cooking and gardening with an activist's awareness of agriculture, water politics and culture:

The push towards industrialization and centralization of the food industries has been touted as our great benefactor -- as if now that we are no longer spending our days canning tomatoes we have so much more time for other, loftier things. But it seems to me that we only have more time for more disconnected and meaningless work, which we have to do in order to survive in this overly commodified culture of ours, where everything has a price and every price is a premium. At least if you spend your day canning tomatoes, you have a real, tangible, and immediate sense of accomplishment -- you have made a concrete step towards providing for your family for the winter. But in our busy workdays, too often it feels like the hurrier we go, the behinder we get.

In other words, I'm not sure that it's working. Are we happier? Are we better off? Are we more secure? Are we safer than we've ever been? I buy canned tomatoes at the grocery store like everybody else, but I am not quite sure whether they represent a great boon or a deep loss, or a little bit of both.

That's from her latest column. She's a terrific writer!

Mmm, doughnuts

Had a great night's sleep. Feeling much better today. Dreamt that Cris and I had come into possession of an aging six-story apartment building on the edge of downtown of a small city. I was gong around meeting the residents.

Now here's a great story:

Naranjo reveals himself to be both ruthless killer and forlorn teenager. He closes his letter with a quotation from Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" about the inevitability of a tragic destiny, then he follows it with: "P.S. LONG LIVE GLAZED DOUGHNUTS & DREW BARRYMORE."

You have to love a mass murderer who spells "doughnuts" all the way out instead of just writing "donuts."

Woman at the well

An article from an Anglican paper quotes the former head of the Anglican church, who says he knows of a recently-minted English priest who used to be a prostitute. I haven't heard of any threatened schism over her. I guess a reformed prostitute is less threatening than an unapoligetic homosexual.

I spent yesterday evening wrestling with my Gateway laptop -- now four years old -- trying to finish an issue of the church newsletter I produce. The removable CD drive is sometimes recognized by the CPU, sometimes not; I still haven't figured out how to make it see the CD drive. I was trying to get some graphics off a CD. And MS Word did a major barf in the middle of the job and I had to restart and then wait over an hour while the system performed a rigorous "disk check." I finally finished around 1:30 in the morning. Then I redid a couple things when I got up. Finally I dropped it off to be duplicated.

Then, later in the day, I realized I had fogotten to put in a sidebar to someone's article. Well, I'll fix it in the second print run. The first one had to be done for this Sunday.

Huh?

A singer-songwriter named Elliot Smith, whom I'm not young enough or hip enough to have heard of, killed himself yesterday.

Smith was found by his live-in girlfriend Tuesday, Los Angeles County Coroner Records Supervisor Marsha Grigsby told AP Radio. He sustained a single stab wound to the chest that appeared to be self-inflicted, she said. -- AP Story

He stabbed himself in the heart so that his girlfriend would come home and find the body? Talk about hostile! Like I said, I never heard of the guy, but listening to the NPR profile on All Things Considered as they talked incessantly about the guy's music and what a sad but cool guy he was, I was still back at the part about the girlfriend discovering his body. Wonder what their relationship was like.

Fear of man-eater grips Ulster

I don't know what to make of this story from the Belfast Evening Telegraph. It seems to be about an escaped lion or tiger, but they never actually say. They say a "big cat" or "wild cat" is "roaming the countryside" -- no explanation of how it got there, or who is "responsible for releasing" the "wild animal." They don't even say precisely what it is -- unless "big cat" is a more specific term in British.

This vagueness makes you wonder if there really is a "big cat" out there at all or whether instead it's a rural myth like Bigfoot. But the most bizarre image is that of children scampering home from school over the Irish dales fearful of a lion.

Update -- Oh, all right -- a search reveals an earlier story saying it is a puma, or cougar. And it's been on the loose for months! How strange.

Try it like this

I'm going to try a slightly larger font size in my blog. Comments? Email me at toobeaut at yahoo dot com.

(Actually, I would be happy if any readers emailed. me -- especially if I don't know you. Between a hundred and two hundred people read this blog every week, and I don't think I know most of them. So feel free to say hello.)

The millionaire behind the Anglican anti-gay clergy movement

Seems like there's always a Republican millionaire lurking behind so much of the reactionary social movements and events these days. Millionaire Darrell Issa bankrolled the petition-gathering for the California recall. Wayne Huizenga spends his billions from AutoNation, Waste Management, Inc. and Blockbuster Video stores on the Republican Party and religous right causes.

Now the UK newspaper The Guardian has revealed that Orange County millionaire Howard F. Ahmanson Jr. is paying for conservatives in the Episcopal Church to raise a fuss over the denomination's first openly gay bishop.

But that news isn't new, it turns out. A search turns up this article from the 21 Sep 03 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Apolplecticized

My friend D. has a great blog entry today about being tormented by silly naive privileged kids in their 20s who think the world revolves around them and their gated communities. Read it instead of this today.

Take me out

I'm sure most of the people who read this don't follow baseball, but you might have heard of the incident in a crucial game where a fan, trying to catch a foul popup, ruined a play by the home team. Now it seems Hollywood is interested in the plight of the hapless fan.

Meanwhile wags suggested the guy might want to join the witness protection program, and columnist Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post suggested:

Somewhere, Steve Bartman, the 26-year-old Cubs fan who knocked The Foul Fly Ball out of Moises Alou's glove in Game 6, may have sung, "Take me out of the Midwest, take me far from the crowd. Buy me some airfare and fake ID. I'm real sure that I'll never come back."

Only ten more days of baseball

I'll be glad when the World Series is over. I've been enjoying the end of the season and the playoffs a great deal -- too much. All I want to do is watch whatever game is on. And the games have been riveting, stupendous. But I can't get anything else done.

More than anything, I haven't been able for the last six weeks to concentrate on my writing. Although I dropped my bookstore job to give myself more time, I have been wasting that time. And the more time I spend away from writing, the worse I feel -- more depressed, more easily intimidated. I just spent a half hour reading pieces on Salon by Ann Marlowe, whom I had never heard of before. When I googled her, I found she was a prolific freelance writer, and this fact just depressed me. Even though her Salon pieces on sex and romance are vague and poorly supported, and I could see myself doing a better job with the same topics, the operative fact is that she had the ideas and got them published. Which is much more than I can say.

I feel like I need someone to come and hit me upside the head and yell, Write, you dummy! Ignore everything else! Just do your work!

Today's damn new thing

As my grumpiness threatens to become a character trait, like that of Dennis the Menace's neighbor Mr. Wilson, I note with displeasure the advent of a new breed of spam: Comment spam. Comment spam is like email spam, but instead of going into people's email boxes, it goes into the comments areas of people's weblogs. To understand the problem, just look at this thread from the blog Making Light.

By the way, I put in a shift at the l.n.c.b. today, and I had to define the word zeitgeist for someone. Not a twenty-something co-worker, but a woman my age who was purchasing books. She was the third person that day to buy a certain self-help book, I forget what; and I said something about how the topic of the book must be in the zeitgeist. She didn't know what that meant. When I defined it, she said, "Oh, you mean the collective consciousness." Yes, I guess in California we would say that.

Stop that Goddamn noise

In my latest incarnation of middle age, the Blue Angels annoy me tremendously. They visit San Francisco every year for "Fleet Week," an event supposed to evoke San Francisco's former relationship with the Armed Forces. For three days -- one of rehearsal and two of performance -- they perform aerial maneuvers over the center of town, which consequently resembles the capital of a war zone. Such noise!

Last night Cris and I went to the Berkeley Repertory Theater to see The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci. If you were thinking of going, skip it. This is the second show I've seen at the Berkeley Rep -- the first was Homebody/Kabul -- and both shows featured mediocre acting. There wasn't a single standout performer in this show, which was also marred by too-busy direction and an overriding feeling of cuteness and we'll-do-this-because-we-can stage business.

At home the next day, Cris and I riffed on a satire called "The Notebooks of Jerry Bavinsky:" Lousy traffic on the Cross-Bronx Expressway today, as usual. The four things wrong with traffic? One: yer stuck!

Go Bunting

I've just realized that if you just think of everyone as having been a "fringe candidate" in the recall election, the world is a little easier to take today.

So here's today's favorite fringe non-candidate: Sarah D. Bunting, curator of the estimable Tomato Nation website. Her recent essay Yes You Are (a feminist) is something that needs to be said and read.

Yes. You are. You are a feminist. If you believe in, support, look fondly on, hope for, and/or work towards equality of the sexes, you are a feminist. Period.

I don't know how many times my jaw has dropped to the floor when some friend (always female) denies being a feminist. And they always mean that they are not the kind of angry womens-studies tofu-cooking proto-lesbian-feminist they were afraid of in college. Yes, I know you're not one of those, though there certainly isn't anything wrong with being like that, at least as a phase. But don't tell me you don't believe in equality before the law for men and women; don't tell me you don't have a vision of a just society.

Why the recall succeeded, and why I voted for it

If you can stand one more word of political retrospect -- they're spending an hour with Green Party candidate Peter Camejo on a local NPR station right now, so I don't see why I shouldn't join in -- let me say why I voted to recall the duly elected governor of California, the aptly named Gray Davis.

First of all, almost all of those who voted for Davis last year did so holding our noses, as a straight-party Democratic commitment. The same went for Al Gore: We didn't like him, but the alternative was (and is) much, much, much worse. Davis, who is the only man alive who can make Al Gore appear charismatic and animated merely by standing next to him, wasn't to blame for the lousy economy then and he isn't to blame now. But it would be nice to have someone in office who ever had an original idea.

Then this story appeared on Sept. 12: Davis denies parole for woman who killed her abuser. This was the last straw for Cris, and I had to agree with her. Republican coup or no, this guy Davis was simply a waste of space.

So we voted for the recall. And I suspect lots of people had similar reasons.

But why, Cris asked me yesterday, throwing down the newspaper in disgust, did so many people vote for Ar-nold Schwartz-en-eg-ger?

Here's my theory: People nowadays are generally suffering from a fairly high level of anxiety, about everything from the economy to saturated fats; this nervousness translates into hair-trigger tempers, bad moods, and a need to stifle these feelings by overeating, overspending, driving too fast, smoking cigarettes, watching too much television, and generally doing things that give a momentary sense of relief from the anxiety. This is why people buy cheesy snack crackers, watch "Law and Order" for three hours straight, and surf the web for free porn -- they want distraction from their ... well, misery is too strong a word. Say, malaise.

So people are habituated to grabbing for the closest shiny new thing in hopes that it will give them satisfaction. And Arnold, scary and glamorous in a peculiarly southern California way, was just one more shiny thing to grab at.

Looked at this way, surely Cruz Bustamante, though he tried mightily to escape from the shadow of the Democratic machine he's spent his life serving, as has Davis, did not have nearly the appeal of Arnold. That's why the "fringe candidates" got so much attention. In fact, Arnold was a fringe candidate. He was merely a very famous and well-financed one.

There'll always be bean-counters

The news that a well-known Vegas performer was mauled by a tiger on stage has been treated in every conceivable way by both journalists and satirists, but I never thought I'd see a story like this: Illusionists Brace for Fallout: "Two possible repercussions: higher insurance and wary venue owners." Come to think of it, I guess chainsaw jugglers everywhere are taking a long, sober look at monster.com.

And by the way: Two years after Sept. 11, 2001, Vegas casino operators are barely making it

My career in public broadcasting

When I was 20 and halfway through my B.S. degree in Radio-TV-Film from the Univ. of Texas, I wandered into the public TV station in Anchorage, AK and said I wanted to volunteer. The first day, they had me do voice-overs, right on! That night, you could hear my voice during the closing credits of each show, telling what was coming up next. I showed up the next day ready for more; I showed up every day for the next three weeks, but they never gave me a single substantial thing to do after that. I said what about the voice-overs; they hemmed and hawed, but never let me do them again. I don't know why they couldn't have said they just didn't like the way I did them. After three weeks I gave up and went away and spent the rest of the summer working at McDonald's.

This incident, which except for a few stints answering phones during pledge drives, comprises my entire career in public broadcasting, despite the fact that when I was a teenager my career dream was to be an announcer at a Pacifica radio station. This abortive attempt to break into radio, with everyone basically looking the other way when I came into the room, was one of the things that convinced me that other people just know how to make their lives happen, and the rest of us don't.

Now comes Ira Glass, host of the fabulous NPR show This American Life, explaining how his first steps to NPR stardom were to intern at a public radio station. He must have been smarter at it than I was.

More Glass links: A 1998 interview in Mother Jones. A 1999 profile on Salon. A 1999 interview in Horizon magazine. A 2001 interview in the magazine On the Page. A 2003 interview by Teen Ink.

Snapshots of the American mind

Cindy Sherman is one of my heroes. If you missed the short piece (r.r) in the NYT Magazine this Sunday, it's still available online, including a long-lost Untitled Film Stills out-take.

More Sherman: at Masters of Photography; and many links here.

Career changes R us

The recent unplesantness in my adopted home state probably has nothing to do with it -- all those automated campaign calls notwithstanding -- but it looks like Al Gore has decided on a career change. Gore in Talks to Acquire Cable News Channel, says the Boston Globe link from Romenesko). Al Gore the owner of a news network, however small? Then what's he going to do if he runs for office again -- put it in escrow? Unless Gore is giving up politics, it doesn't make sense.

Also from the Globe, another article on the Episcopalians who want to turn back the clock to 1928, negating this summer's confirmation of a gay American bishop. The reactionaries want permission to ally with more conservative dioceses outside the U.S., saying they don't want to be associated with the American church anymore. The mainstream conservatives say unity is more important. Meanwhile, the Roman Catholics are quick to stick their oar in, saying the American church's approval of bishop Robinson threatens moves toward unity. What moves? The Catholic hierarchy has been drifting away from its own people for fifty years now. They should worry about unity in their own denomination.

And finally, who could resist a story about something called a Whizzinator?

Another divisive election

She said current leaders are "middle-class elites" who came of age during the 1960s. "It's a straight-line development from the 1960s 'free love' era," she said of [the] election. "They listen to NPR. They don't watch Fox TV."

No, it's not a comment on the California debacle. It's a conservative Episcopalian characterizing the majority of Episcopalian leaders who approved the election of a gay priest as bishop. All she left out was the cliche about how liberals drive Volvos. I think that's because people in Dallas don't even know what a Volvo is.

But imagine the mentality of someone who disdains NPR over Fox. To the extent she is aware of a difference between the two networks, she actually prefers the one that expresses a clear bias to the one that strives for objectivity. She prefers the one that stresses noisy, antagonistic pundits over the one that stresses admittedly twee humor and culture programs like "My Word." We might guess that she feels more comfortable watching Fox, and uncomfortable listening to NPR. Just what kind of person is that? It's not merely a matter of taste -- as in, one simply prefers listening to Mexican oom-pah music over salsa. It's someone who prefers the demonstrably dumber thing -- and parades that preference as a badge of identity. Pathetic.

Faulty recall

To do today: Call up friends and pretend to be one of the canned automatic calls now being received by Californians to ask them to vote no on the recall. So far I've received calls from Bill Clinton, two congresswomen, and the wife of Gov. Davis. I'm holding out for a call from Nao Bustamante, but in the meantime, be sure to call your friends, especially those who don't live in California, and speaking in the appropriate accent, give their answering machines a political message. Because everyone is screening their calls til Wednesday.

Hello, this is Bill Clinton. I'm calling to ask you to vote no on the recall tomorrow, Tuesday, October 7th. After impeaching me for fooling around with that woman -- Miss Lewinsky -- you'd think the Republicans would want nothing to do with some other charismatic son of a bitch who can't keep his hands off the chicks. But no, they are shameless. Put a stop to this charade, and vote no on the recall.

Hello, this is... Al Gore. And I'm calling to ask you to vote no on the recall in California. And after you vote no, you just don't vote for governor. You save that vote for 2004. You put that vote in a lockbox.

Hello, this is Jimmy Carter. After watching the Braves get their butts kicked by the Cubs yesterday, my heart is broken. I feel just about as bad as I did in 1980 when I lost to Reagan. So don't break an old man's heart again. Even though in Georgia we wouldn't let someone like Gray Davis run a junior high school, he's got to be better than that idiot Schwartzenegger. So vote no on the recall, and I just might get it up to watch the Falcons play this Sunday.

Hi, this is Martin Sheen. I'm not the president, but I play one on TV. And I'm even more liberal than my character, who's still in office long after my friends the Clintons have left. If California elects Arnold Schwartzenegger -- Jesus, that takes a long time to type out -- the governor, I just may get the idea that I could go ahead and run for president for real. Hell, Reagan got elected twice, and the second time he was so far gone mentally that he couldn't remember to put his pants on over his ass instead of on his head. Anyway, I'm calling to urge you to vote no on the recall. Fun's fun, but even I know the difference between fantasy and reality.

Nocturne

Errands, TV baseball -- Giants lost playoffs series, boo hoo -- then a little house cleaning. By then I just didn't feel like doing any work -- any writing, that is. I went to see Casa de los Babys. I thought it was kind of boring, frankly, though it was nice to see all those great actresses together. Marcia Gay Harden was fun as the uptight bitch, though I couldn't stop thinking "Wow, that's Marcia Gay Harden doing a great job acting like a Midwestern bitch." And I've always liked Mary Steenburgen, ever since her Oscar-winning role in Melvin and Howard.

I emerged from the Embarcadero theater and saw, between the buildings of Embarcadero Center, the pastel shades of sunset over the bay. So I walked down there, and out over the bay on the newly completed pedestrian walkway on the side of Pier 1. Only a couple of fishermen were out there, discussing baseball. On the softly lit bay, a tugboat pushed a barge under the Bay Bridge and past the pier, while out toward Treasure Island, another tug towed a barge in the opposite direction. A ferry departed from the Ferry Building next door, heading off to Marin County. There was a haze keeping the opposite shore of the bay indistinct; not fog exactly, more like the haze that's left over when the fog has blown in.

At least temporarily, the film got me out of the funk I've been in for the past week. Maybe now that the Giants have been eliminated, I can start focusing on something else besides baseball. I really do spend too much time watching baseball on television and thinking about the Giants. But I'm not crushed by their elimination; the last two games were great games, and the Marlins are a good team. Ugh, nothing's more boring than someone blogging about sports.

So what am I in a funk about? It really started a few weeks ago when I had a party at my place. A minimal number of people came to the fête, not quite enough to make it a really good party -- though I was, of course, grateful to those who did come, especially N and N, two ex-girlfriends I hadn't seen in a long time. But since then I've been feeling sort of socially isolated, and I've gotten very little writing done, as well. It's just a funk, pure and simple. Awfully boring. A film generally gets me out of it. But it might take a better film than Casa de los Babys. After thinking about it, I realized what is wrong with that film. John Sayles was basically attempting to make an Almodovar film. It has the requisite elements: an ensemble of well-known female actresses in their 40s, an exotic location, a woman-friendly theme (children, adoption and mothering), even a slender, darkly browed nun. But Sayles will never make anything close to an Almodovar film, because: 1. he is American, and 2. he is not queer. Nice try though.

Just how sorry are you, Arnold?

Concerning today's stop-the-presses admission by Arnold S. that he had sexually harassed women on his film sets over the years, my friend Ellen writes:

Ooooh, looks like Arnold is taking it very seriously. Apologizing to women! If he is sincere, he should ask Maria to wear a burrito harness and set up a little press event.

Yes, indeed. Ellen is, of course, referring to my blog entry for yesterday and the famous 1992 performance art piece by Cruz Bustamante's sister Nao.

It really doesn't get any better than this, does it? Don't you know that stand-up artists and comedy writers all over the world are hoping and praying that Schw. becomes governor? We could be in store for years of this.

He's got my vote

I never knew, until the arch-conservative Weekly Standard revealed it today, that California Lt. Governor Cruz Bustamante is the brother of San Francisco performance artist Nao Bustamante. No doubt the rightist rag intended to shock and entertain readers with its description, copied from Nao's website, of her unforgettable performance in 1992 to celebrate 500 years of Columbus discovering America. In the show, she donned an Indian headdress and a dildo harness, through which she inserted a huge burrito and invited male members of the audience to kneel in front of her and take a big bite and then apoligize for 500 years of oppressing native Americans. It was one of the funniest and greatest things I've ever seen.

In the event that this news could possibly dissuade people from voting against Cruz -- a candidate as colorless and boring as Nao is fabulous -- I'm switching candidates and voting for him.