Just in case

This sex party takes place in total darkness, so:

People that have siblings should set up some kind of a call out code in advance... If you are concerned because this is a 'family affair' (and you know your sister/brother/first cousin/dad will be there) you may want to choose a "code word" that you could say before engaging in any activity. If you hear the code word, you know to move along. (Bananaslug, kumquat, or something like that is a good codeword).

Yeah, you could do that. Or you could just fail to utter the code word. So your dad can say "bananaslug" all he wants to, but if no one answers back, then he'll never know, right?

The possibilities for comedy in this are enormous. First of all you've got a room full of people -- supposedly carefully 50-50 boys and girls, though God knows in San Francisco that's harder than it sounds -- in total darkness, saying "Banana slug" and "kumquat" and "defribrilator" into the darkness.

"Penguin."

"Tar paper."

"Barbara Bush."

"What? Your code word is 'Barbara Bush'?"

"Hey, if you don't like it, then don't have safe sex with me."

"Hey, everybody! His code word is 'Barbara Bush'!"

"Shut up, man!"

Second, the party "will mostly be established couples looking to expand their sexual experience." Let's think that through. Dick and Jane go to the party, arriving with Don and Judy, Rob and Laura, Shlomo and Becca. Why do they all want to have sex in total darkness? I'm trying to think of the reasons. Let's say he wants to have sex with two girls at once. Or he wants to suck cock. Or he wants to watch her do it with a girl.

Okay, fine. Now it's six hours later and they're in a cab on the way home, discussing their adventures. Unless they were tethered to each other the whole time, there's no way to verify what either one did.

"Dick dear, did you finally suck a cock, like we discussed?"

"Oh, yes, Jane, and what an experience it was!" (Totally lying.) "I completely see what you mean now about the gagging thing. I will be much more careful about that from now on! And how about you? Did you manage to get it in both ends, like you said you wanted to?"

"Oh, yes! It was heaven!" (Totally lying) "I wish you had been able to see me...."

But this is my favorite guideline: CRAWLING IS SAFER.

Don't be crabby

All the kittens you'd ever want (v. large page with many photos; courtesy Metafilter)

On first visit as President, Bush can't pronounce "Nevada"

Get a load of the Swedish model whom Tiger Woods has gotten engaged to. Cris's comment: "Geez... Was that really necessary?"

Comparisons to Mai Britt are allowed. And while we're at it, check out the whole Swingin' 60s Chicks website.

Finally, consider this startling picture of Japanese royal Princess Sayako, daughter of the current emperor. She's wearing a suit with a cape that makes her look like a cross between a superhero and Joan of Arc (the bowl haircut doesn't help either). Being a royal must entail a lot of fashion pressure. It's too bad because Japanese youth have the best fashion imagination in the world.

The horrible "threat" to "families"

"The homosexual activist movement," said James Dobson, founder of the Christian group Focus on the Family, "is now closer than it has ever been to administering a devastating and potentially fatal blow to the traditional family."

That's from today's AP story headlined (awkwardly) Getting Gay Marriage Nationwide Complex.

Mark Morford, writing on SFGate last week, attacks this view with heavy sarcasm:

An enormous and quivering chunk of the BushCo-voting nation cowers in inexplicable horror. And almost every one of them is vowing, right this minute, to vote for Bush in the next election, if for no other reason than because he's a none-too-bright born-again Christian who will protect them from those icky homos and will invoke God's name as it's supposed to be invoked.

Just what does a potentially fatal blow to America's families look like? Well, if I were an evil, powerful mad supervillain and wanted to "administer a devastating blow to the traditional family," here's what I'd do:

• I'd put families in ugly, treeless anonymous suburban developments
• Both parents would have to work 50+ hour-a-week jobs [permalink] to pay for the debt incurred by their $50,000 wedding, buying and furnishing their dreamhouse, and compensating for their absence by buying their children all manner of electronic crap
• I'd destroy drama, music and arts programs in schools, so that the kids would have nothing else to do but play with the electronic crap
• At the same time I'm forcing both parents to work, I'd take away workplace protections for women and stop employers from having to pay overtime
• I'd create a culture of double standards where it's okay for "adults" to drink and handle their problems with prescription medications, while insisting their kids "say no to drugs"
• I'd do everything to destroy nature and cover the landscape with malls and highways, making it so unpleasant to walk or bike anywhere that people are forced to spend enormous amounts of time in cars, thus increasing their consumer debt while further destroying the environment, and incidentally pushing the country into wars to protect its access to oil resources

Gee, I don't think homosexuals are responsible for any of that, are they?

This just in

I have some new pictures up. (Thanks to Catherine for taking them with her swell digital camera and then sending me a CD of them.)

Incoming!!

It's going to happen. Really soon. You know it is.

The annual not-news story on just how much, in today's money, it would cost someone to actually give their true love all the presents cited in "The Twelve Days of Christmas." Every damn year they haul out this piece of crap, update it, and hand it out to chuckling anchors at local news stations, where it is read just as if it is the cutest thing imaginable and has never been heard of before.

Kill me now.

Let's see... What other poxy repeats are we treated to every year at this time? The just-past stupid news story about the President "pardoning" a Thanksgiving turkey. Traffic reports centering on access roads leading to shopping malls. Anti-fur demonstrators. Nervous reports on whether retail sales are up to expectations. All culminating in the ridiculous play-acting on Dec. 24 in which TV weathermen pretend to use "their" weather radar to track Santa's progress.

It's bad enough that worthy stories are crowded off the news because they're too much trouble to investigate and too controversial to broadcast. But when the opposite happens -- when the news fills up with junk on slow news days -- the television newscasts are still just as long. The amount of news expands to fill the time allotted; and if it's broadcast on a news show, it's "news," right?

This just in: there really are such things as reindeer.

Bush's mouth works both ways

I just caught up to this: A Washington Post story from Saturday, 22 November in which Bush blurted out something that was actually liberal and inclusive, and got roasted by fundies for his trouble.

"The Christian God encourages freedom, love, forgiveness, prosperity and health. The Muslim god appears to value the opposite. The personalities of each god are evident in the cultures, civilizations and dispositions of the peoples that serve them. Muhammad's central message was submission; Jesus' central message was love. They seem to be very different personalities," Haggard said.

So said a fundie clergyman. I wonder what his training was like. On the other side:

Sayyid M. Syeed, secretary general of the Islamic Society of North America, responded to Bush's statement with a single word: Alhamdullah, Thanks be to God. "We read again and again in the Koran that our god is the god of Abraham, the god of Noah, the god of Jesus," he said. "It would not come to the mind of a Muslim that there is a different god that Abraham or Jesus or Moses was praying to."

Dept. of Schadenfreude

Louisville Courier-Journal, 24 Nov 03

Pornography foe arrested on prostitution charge

A vice chairman of a Louisville anti-pornography group was arrested Saturday night on a prostitution charge.

Police took John W. Riddle, 65, into custody after seeing him in a car at 17th and Rowan streets with a "known prostitute," according to the arrest report. Riddle, of Clay Avenue in Okolona, is a vice chairman of the anti-pornography organization COMPASS. ...

Riddle had a bottle of Viagra in his possession, according to the police report.

Hail Lennon

Sdaeh rieht edih dna nur yeht semoc niar eht nehw, niar

-- John Lennon

That's John Lennon (RealAudio clip, 5 sec.) at the end of the great Beatles record Rain (RealAudio file, 2:57 -- courtesy Northwestern Univ.). So beautiful! The backwards bit is a recording of the first line of the song, "Rain, when the rain comes they run and hide their heads." Come to think of it, it's about as easy to understand as anything recorded today.

I'm having a little Beatles spasm. After listening the other day to the All Songs Considered special on the Beatles' "Let It Be" sessions, I'm heavy with appreciation and nostalgia for the Fab Four.

My personal Beatles highlights:

Feb. 9, 1964: The Beatles are introduced to the American public on The Ed Sullivan Show. I'm 8 years old, and I take my cues from my rapt 13-year-old sister. We love them.
 

Summer, 1964: I spend most of the afternoon walking up and down a street in Florissant, Mo. singing I Want to Hold Your Hand.
 

August, 1964: My 18-year-old brother goes off to college and gives his baritone ukelele to my sister. She learns to play it and, eventually, so do I. Beatles songs figure large in our repertoire.
 

July, 1965: Help! is released. [Caution: Unbelievably lame MIDI version of "Help!" at that link.] When the words THE BEATLES appear in the opening titles, I give my best Beatle-fan scream, just like I was in Shea Stadium. Unfortunately, I'm sitting with my now-14-year-old sister in a suburban movie house. She almost punches me.
 

Summer 1965: The falsetto coda of "My baby don't care" at the end of Ticket to Ride clues me in that something strange is about to happen to the Beatles and pop music.
 

1966: After listening all last year to Beatles '65 -- the U.S.-only LP that combined a number of pre-Rubber Soul B-sides and singles -- my sister and I dig into Rubber Soul. I'm now 11; I find the hint of psychedelia contained in the distorted album cover photo, the slightly irreverent use of the word "soul," the use of a sitar, and the misogyny of Run for Your Life all vaguely threatening.
 

1968: Hey Jude becomes the longest number 1 single ever; still, it plays on AM radio. I sit down one evening and count how many choruses there are at the end: the total is 17, I seem to remember.

Things get a little fuzzy after that, because for a long time I was too cheap to actually go out and buy Beatles records. I still don't have all of them. But I have to add:

1981: By now I am a performance artist in San Francisco. Inspired by the Annie Leibowitz cover of John and Yoko, I write a song, Be My Yoko and with another local performer, Lynn Grasberg, put together a show of the same title. It was about two artists who live together and have an obsessive relationship and aspire to be each other's muses like John and Yoko. Perhaps coincidentally, it's the only performance of mine my sister (by then married) has ever seen. She really liked it.

Hollywood apocalypse

Quite a day for celebrity scandalmongers. Michael Jackson surrenders on child molestation charges (giving his spokespersons an opportunity to use the word "scurrilous" -- is that word used under any other circumstances?). He was released on $3 million bail.

Phil Spector was finally charged with murder in the death of B-picture actress Lana Clarson, and is bizarrely claiming the woman's death was a suicide -- even though it took place with no witnesses, in his house, with his gun ("I don't know where or how she got the gun").

(Meanwhile Apple has released a new, Spector-less version of "Let It Be" entitled Let It Be...Naked. That ellipsis is really troubling. I don't know what is supposed to come to mind when they see that word "naked," but what could the dots mean, other than to force the reader to dramatically pause before the final word of the title? Could they have done anything cornier? Why not call it "Let It Be the Way It Was Supposed To Be"?) (Do follow that last link; there's a lot of amazing links on that page, including samples of the "naked" tracks as well as a fantastic two-hour radio doc on the making of "Let It Be" with outtakes and lore galore. I listened to it the other day and I was happy the rest of the day.)

And just to close this issue once and for all: Paris Hilton is dismayed that her now-infamous sex video was released on the internet. Just for the record, anytime some who has changed his last name to "Thrasher" is involved, you can probably predict a deal will go bad.

Still here

I haven't had a lot of opportunities lately to blog or even surf the web. Busy at work, and in the evening. But I just wanted to check in and say I'm still around.

My great friend Christine is visiting in town, and we went to a Robert Gluck reading at the Jewish Community Library, where our friend Lisa Bernstein produces events. Back in the late 80s (!!) Christine and I performed together as part of a group called "Short on Attitude," and Lisa was one of the performers who appeared from time to time in our pieces.

Fifteen years later, I'm primarily a writer, Lisa's primarily a singer-songwriter, and Christine's primarily a painter. But instead of talking about art, tonight we all sat around after the reading talking about taking care of our now-elderly parents and wondering who was going to take care of us in thirty years. Well, we talked about art too.

Greet the brand new day

Yes, we're all sick by now of the Jessica Lynch media blitz, but the Salon article by Eric Boehlert provides excellent analysis and wrapup. It answers the question, How do warmongers feel about Lynch now that she's saying things like "The Army used me"? How did Lynch keep from being manipulated by ABC interviewer Diane Sawyer? And best of all, what is the connection between Lynch and Paris Hilton? (The answers to the last question are multiple, including the fact that they're now each best-known for grainy, spooky-green video appearances.)

In case you missed the Paris Hilton mania -- now fading -- that was the talk of the blogosphere for the last ten days, here's a quick recap. Heirress Paris -- heir to the Hilton fortune, celebutante of the year, and nascent television star -- performed raucous sex with her boyfriend, on tape, a few years ago. The tape has gotten out, as tapes have a way of doing, and now lawsuits are being flung back and forth, even as cynics suggest the whole thing is just publicity for her upcoming television show.

So let's run it down:

                Lynch        Hilton

                -----        ------

hair            blonde       blonde

net worth       $500K        $500M

video:

  quality       grainy       grainy

  distribution  television   internet

  subject       war          sex

exploited by    war machine  Hollywood

victim quotient high         zilch

future          physical     psycho- 

  outlook         therapy      therapy

 

So why do I love the internet? Because of the way it allows us to bring together these two seemingly
disparate figures, the children of Disney and Coca-Cola.

But reflect: Nowadays if you are a filthy rich, slender young woman, you go on TV as someone posts your sex tapes on the internet. Thirty-five years ago, John Lennon would have written a song about you. (I was reminded of this a few days ago when a Texas millionaire who knows Prudence Farrow was aquitted of murder, and now Farrow is said to be in possible danger.) Just another reason why it's hell to be a member of Generation Y.

Just like royalty

This week I got another quarterly royalty statement, along with a check, from my publisher. The statements are perfectly clear, with figures for number of copies sold for each of the two books of mine they published in 2001, along with a "return reserve" just in case those books they "sold" to stores don't actually get sold but get returned. Then the check they send, along with the statements, is for an amount that is completely different than the amounts on the statements -- sometimes more, sometimes less. It's a mystery to me just how it all works, but I'm glad to see each of my books has sold about 2800 copies.

I got a nice fan email the other day, too. There's nothing like having a total stranger write you that he really digs your book.

More Republican Foot-in-Mouth disease

Those nutty Republicans just can't stop making pointed comments at the expense of their enemies. In a pale imitation of Pat Robertson's bomb-toss [Click here if that link breaks in the future] about nuking the State Department, presidential governor Jeb Bush -- who also happens to be the governor of Florida -- joked that San Franciscans may be 'endangered'. SF mayor Willie Brown responded with a complex remark relating to an alligator (an "endangered" species) and his local political troubles.

In other news

Someone forwarded me this flibbit, the most important part of which is:

Openly Episcopal Man Joins Village People
Controversy Threatens to Tear Disco Band Asunder

For the first time in their three decades of existence, the disco band The Village People have inducted an openly Episcopal man, igniting a controversy that threatens to tear the fabled group asunder.

Holding a press conference in New York City today, The Construction Worker, a prominent member of The Village People since its inception in the 1970's, urged "tolerance and understanding" for its latest member, The Episcopal Guy, who joined the group over the weekend.

"From the start, The Village People have been all about inclusiveness," The Construction Worker said. "And introducing The Episcopal Guy as our latest member is part of that tradition."

Different from you and me

Tina Brown, the former editor of Vanity Fair and (disasterously) Talk, has a new weekly column in the Washington Post. Many have assailed it, saying it's vapid and silly. But I find this kind of stuff fascinating (from a column about Martha Stewart and her appearance on a Barbara Walters interview):

These lapses were reminders of the offense that really got Martha into trouble in the first place -- a crime of lifestyle. Her mistake was all about how rich, driven people behave on the eve of the Christmas holidays. They take off on private planes for fashionably secluded destinations in a frenzy of personal shoppers, shouting into their cell phones at their assistants with last-minute instructions while simultaneously stabbing at their BlackBerries with orders to buy and sell stock. At such moments, bad decisions are made -- especially when the only guy left in the broker's office is the terrorized party boy Douglas Faneuil, who swiftly flipped to become a witness for the prosecution.

Martha's crime of lifestyle was then compounded by her crime of character. Like most CEOs, she has a hard time admitting a mistake, all perfectly understandable if you move in the circles of, well, Barbara Walters. This was implicitly emphasized when the TV diva asked the domestic diva, "Do you feel that some people are delighted by your downfall because, as one reporter put it, 'Little Miss Perfect has fallen on her face'?"

"I haven't fallen on my face yet," replied Martha, a little too swiftly.

"I thought it was brilliant," Westchester County District Attorney Jeanine Pirro told me at a Manhattan event to celebrate the creation of a David Boies Professorship at Yale Law School. "The statement upfront in the show that she couldn't talk about her case is the best thing you can have for a criminal defendant if you have an interviewer who will throw you softballs. Today's world is not about facts, not about evidence. It's about whether or not the jury likes you. The media is getting to be more important than the court system. People thought of Martha as arrogant, controlling and cold, and she had everything to gain by going on with Barbara in her big sweater and her clogs."

Of course, this is interesting not only because of what it says about media and Stewart, but what it says about the writer, Tina Brown -- especially what she leaves in and out when she quotes someone. That last bit about the "big sweater and clogs" is a coded message to women (and gay men) everywhere: frumpy equals human, therefore sympathetic.

Then there's that tossed-off social reference: "....Westchester County District Attorney Jeanine Pirro told me at a Manhattan event to celebrate the creation of a David Boies Professorship at Yale Law School." Just so you are sure to notice, Brown assures her readers that she's not just popping off about a television show; she's still in the swing of things, because she went to some society event. While a reception at a law school doesn't sound quite as glamorous as the Cannes Film Festival or New York Fashion Week, the inclusion of a D.A. is actually a signifier: true crime is glamorous these days, as you can tell by the obsessive attention being paid to celebrity trials, Martha Stewart's tsuris being only one example.

Finally, there's the phrase "the only guy left in the broker's office is the terrorized party boy Douglas Faneuil." Now probably this Faneuil character is the son of some prominent socialites; otherwise he wouldn't be a "party boy," would he? In any case, the image of some quivering rookie-cum-Master of the Universe "swiftly flipping" (!) to betray the Queen of Clean is priceless.

Something to do

Announcement from the Cartoon Art Museum:

This Friday, Dan Perkins, aka "Tom Tomorrow" and creator of "This Modern World," will appear at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco to talk about his work, answer questions, and sign books. Admission is $4.

If you're interested in attending, please call 415-227-8666, ext. 314 to reserve a seat, or visit the Cartoon Art Museum's web site to learn more about this event.

I just don't get it

I don't understand half of this Village Voice article about a party in New York. For example:

• "Complicating the Friday night fiasco was the abrupt absence of Steven Lewis, the club impresario who recently got out of prison..." The abrupt absence. That's a good trick any day.
• "Lewis quit his consulting position when Plaid owner David Marvisi refused to honor the guest list." There is such a thing as a consultant to night clubs, and the person filling that position was a former nightclub promoter.
• "'We didn't have a bottle crowd,' allows McDaris, a photographer, who moonlights as a promoter at Plaid and Park. 'But that's not what we presented to them.'" What is a bottle crowd? And what does it mean if you say "We were not x, but that's not what we presented to them"? What does "presented" mean in that sentence?
• The guest of honor wrote: "I would urge anyone to avoid that horrid place for f*cking something that a lot of people worked hard on for months setting up..." When he says "for fucking something," I get that he meant "for fucking up something." Maybe they just forgot the "up." But is he saying someone worked for months to put on a book-launch party? What the hell does it take to put on a party in New York, anyway -- do you have to go through the permitting process, or work your way through law school first?

Don't believe hype (including the hype about hype)

One of the first direct conflicts I had with my parents came when I was 10 years old. By then I had already had several years of abject failure at sports and I was starting to get pretty irritated at the way everybody made a big deal about athletics, especially high school basketball (this was a small town in the Midwest, and there weren't many other distractions). One day the local newspaper, the Edwardsville Intelligencer, had a front page story about some high school basketballer.

The sports section was one thing, but the front page? I got so mad I wrote a letter to the editor, saying I was tired of all the attention being shown to sports and that it didn't belong on the front page.

Before sending the carefully handwritten letter, I showed it to my parents. I guess I wanted some compliments about being a ten-year-old with enough gumption (not to mention language skills) to write a letter of protest to a newspaper. But my father, who was in the process of becoming a fearsome grump, handed the letter back to me and forbade me to send it. Didn't explain why, either. But as a pint-sized believer in free speech, I sent the letter anyway -- which they not only printed but answered in the letters column itself. (They explained they just thought it was an important story. Whatever.)

My father was miffed. "Your punishment will be forthcoming," he intoned -- but it wasn't. He never did anything about it, which proved to my ten-year-old mind that he was just a blowhard and that I had been right all along. First in a series of events which taught me the lesson: If you think you're right, then go ahead and do something, and apologize later.

I was reminded of this tender family moment by a story in the Akron Beacon-Journal (link courtesy Romenesko) saying that newspaper readers are sick of front-page stories about basketball phenom LeBron James. As my experience shows, even a 10-year-old can get sick of sports hype; from my adult perspective, I can say, Yes, this adulation of celebrities and obsession with their personalities and personal lives, much less their careers, is a symptom of a sick society. The difference between 1966 and 2003 is only a difference of degree.

Back again

Went on another quick weekend trip, this time to visit my mother in suburban Portland. Nothin' much to report; the rain held off for both our visit and our flights, though it rained a lot in SF while we were gone.

Local news: Google is reportedly hiring as fast as it can, and right before they IPO. Only they're not hiring me.

I have been roped into the tribe.net universe. Are you in tribe.net? If so, I'm waiting for the goodness to descend.

Home Sweet Home

Finally, I've found my desert hideaway. Pre-fab houses are back! Wonder Valley, here I come.

Update: Here's a whole website for mod prefab houses, courtesy BoingBoing.

Openly gay priest becomes Episcopal bishop

Links to stories about Sunday's crucial event:

2 Nov 03 Washington Post: Robinson consecrated

2 Nov 03 Burlington Co. Times: 400 protest nearby

2 Nov 03 BBC News: Excerpts from Robinson's speech at ceremony

3 Nov 03 Telegraph (U.K.): Diatribes mar consecration service

3 Nov 03 Guardian: Archbishop of Canterbury's statement

3 Nov 03 NY Times: African Anglicans express anger

4 Nov 03 Christian Science Monitor: A revolt in some pews (analysis)

4 Nov 03 Guardian: Gay bishop insists church will survive

Watch for updates as more stories are posted.

Liberal Christians raising hell

Just so you don't get the idea that the Episcopalians are the only Christians pushing the envelope, two pieces in the new National Catholic Reporter, the voice of the American RC church's liberal wing, are worth noting. St. Louis columnist Jeannette Cooperman writes:

The people streaming into the community center treat their medicines and herbs the way pagans treat fire; alchemists treat the philosopher’s stone; Catholics treat the Blessed Sacrament. One after another, they tell the pharmacist how they store their prescriptions, and they all emphasize that the cabinet is cool and dark, safe from sunlight and bathroom humidity. ...Even the most careful medicine takers are not sure exactly what they’re taking, how it works, why it was prescribed. Still, they insist that they “take it religiously.” Pills are, in ways both subtle and overt, replacing prayer.

And Joan Chittister, feminist and perhaps the country's most famous Benedictine nun writer, writes on food politics:

"No one," Woodrow Wilson wrote once, "can worship God or love his neighbor on an empty stomach." No one, Wilson was warning us, can possibly be the kind of person -- the kind of citizen--we all like to think we're developing in this country: God-fearing and kind, law-abiding and civil. Hunger, by this measure, is as much a political lesson as it is a social one. Too bad we seem to be forgetting it.

Story of the day

Associated Press, 4 Nov 03

Amorous ram blamed for mysterious high-frequency signals

LONDON (AP) -- A mysterious transmission that baffled British intelligence analysts for days was caused by a ram rubbing up against an aerial mast, a government agency said Tuesday.

Scientists at Government Communications Headquarters in Cheltenham, western England, an intelligence-gathering station, were baffled by strange high-frequency noises coming from Scarborough signal station in Yorkshire, northeastern England.

GCHQ's in-house paper, the Daily Observer, said the noises were unlike anything staff had encountered before and an investigating team initially thought they were coming from spies or aliens.

Their investigation found the signal only happened in the day time, went across all the high-frequency bands and only Scarborough aerials could pick it up.

Eventually, investigators discovered that a ram was rubbing its horns against the aerial masts "in between servicing some local ewes," the paper said.

"It's possible the ram was attracted to the mast which may have given off some kind of tingling sensation, but it was probably just a post to rub against," said GCHQ spokesman Bob McNally.

Hey, it's a no-lose situation

The Democrats want to blame Mr. Bush for a weak economy that may be finding its step just in time for next year's election, while Mr. Bush is confronting the possibility of campaigning against a backdrop of American casualties and chaos in the war he began.

That's from a story from Tuesday's NY Times. Way I see it, either the economy stays in the toilet and Bush loses, or the economy gets better and a lot of people get jobs. Talk about a no-lose situation.

Of course, the real bummer would be if the economy improves just enough for some people to get jobs, who then vote for Bush, who then appoints seventeen right-wing Supreme Court justices. That's what I'm afraid of.

Much as people look askance at the putative Iraqi quagmire, I doubt it'll tip the balance against Bush. The only war-related thing that would really turn a lot of public opinion against him would be if he reinstituted the draft.

Meme of the month (or probably last month)

I just noticed this a couple days ago: Bleeding-edge hipsters and bloggers are using "teh" (sic) instead of "the" as a definite article -- or sometimes simply as a sort of emphasis. Some examples:

darquerchylde ("Tears for teh nooner... He is possibly needing a new wife at teh moment")

Ultimate Fan Fiction Central (Over the top, utterly crazy intentional misspelling)

Marin's webpaeg (sic -- this guy is very into transposing letters in words)

Zone H ("truelier and she are teh same person")

alanafish ("She's so teh whore")

I'm at a loss as to what's up with all that. The completely insane level of intentional misspelling on the Fan Fiction Central page suggests it's simply an anarchic burst of bratty energy. But the use of "teh" in the phrase "she's so teh whore" seems to be less of a misspelling of "the" and more of a qualifier, as if someone who is "so teh whore" is somehow more of a whore.

You may be wondering what I was doing on all those weird adolescent sites. Actually I found them on Google after noticing "teh" used on BoingBoing this morning ("Choire has teh funny"). I saw it last week somewhere else, and thought it was just a typical typo -- but after seeing it used on BoingBoing, where nothing is unintentional, I knew something was up. But what??

Something to do

I'll be out of town, but I recommend this performance on Saturday, for those who like strange sounds and new music:

Pamela Z
(with special guest Kinji Hayashi)

Saturday, November 8, 2003, 9pm
21 Grand (449B 23rd Street in Oakland)

Pamela Z will perform an evening of works for voice, electronics and video. The evening will include short solo works for voice, processing, and samples, excerpts from large-scale performance works, improvised works, and duets with special guest Butoh artist Kinji Hayashi.

Pamela Z is a composer/performer who makes solo works combining a wide range of vocal techniques with electronic processing, sampled sounds, and The BodySynth gesture controller. She has also composed scores for dance, film, and new music chamber ensembles. Her audio works have been presented in exhibitions at the Whitney in NY and the Diözesanmueum in Cologne. She has toured throughout the US, Europe, and Japan in concerts and festivals including Bang on a Can, the Japan Interlink Festival, and Other Minds. She has received numerous awards including the CalArts Alpert Award, the ASCAP Award, and the NEA/JUSFC Fellowship. She recently gave performances at the Venice Biennale (9.21.03) and at the Reina Sophia Museum in Madrid (10.25.03). For information on Pamela Z, visit www.pamelaz.com

Kinji Hayashi was raised in Tokyo, Japan. A solo Butoh dancer since 1991, has collaborated with numerous artists and groups such as Inkboat, Polish Theater director Miroslaw Kocur, San Francisco playwright Helen Pau , the Asian American Theater Company ,Theaterworks , and Theater of Yugen and has toured with HRG and Harupin Ha in Japan and the US. He has received awards from Dance Bay Area's Commissioning Project, Zellerbach Family Fund, City of Oakland Cultural Arts Division, the Pritzker Foundation, and the American Composers Forum. Caring for turtles is a source of his inspiration in this fast-paced world. www.inkboat.com/inkbio/biokinji.html

An hour out of time

With Katia to see a performance of Arvo Pärt's choral work Kanon Pokajanen, a gorgeous multi-harmonic modern setting of an Orthodox text (that link has the text in English, but the work is sung in Church Slavonic, the liturgical language of the Orthodox church).

Performed by the California Bach Society in the rotunda of St. Gregory's, the work sounded wonderful. The soloists were especially good in that intimate setting. After my long day travelling -- I got up at 2:15 a.m. California time to fly back from Chicago -- I struggled a little against sleep during the first half of the work, but then woke up and fully enjoyed the rest of it. I felt like I could hear every harmony from the inside out.

What a treat it was to see that, and to have dinner with Katia afterward. We hadn't talked in some time.

Back to Sodom

I'm back from a lightning trip to Chicago. In less than 36 hours, two nights of sleep included, Cris and I went to three museums, a play, mass at the cathedral, and had a great dinner at a restaurant called Hillary's Urban Eatery. It was really good!

Then up at 4:15 this morning to catch a nicely empty flight, with plenty of room to stretch out, back to San Francisco. But United has a new pay-for-your-meal plan. Seven dollars got me a cold, stale Asiago cheese bagel, some sundried tomato cream cheese, about four ounces of vanilla yogurt, and four strawberries. Not worth it -- but what was the alternative? One banana -- that was it! A scandal. On the other hand, I was already flying free with my f.f. miles, so can I really complain? Yes, because this is the World Wide Web, the world's biggest complaint desk!

Here's a cool feature article to accompany the opening of the Diane Arbus show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.