Wow, when they said Burning Man, who knew they really meant...

In essence, the outline of the city streets forms the Wiccan symbol for the goddess. We find the same symbol used for the trademark of the highly Satanic video game Quake.

That's just one point made in the extensive and highly entertaining page propounding the theory that the annual Burning man festival is actually crammed with Satanic symbolism and ceremonies.

Memories stirred up

The impending sit-down with my older brother raised memories of some other characters from my past, notably the kid -- he was in my grade but twice my size -- who bullied me all through elementary school. I googled him a couple of years ago and found only a reference to someone of the same name hosting a "Christian Businessmen's Bible Breakfast." Perfect, I thought -- he must be a shopkeeper or, at most, the owner of an auto dealership. But I googled him again last night, and guess what? The motherfucker is an architect -- and he went to fucking Princeton! Unbelievable. I was depressed for the rest of the day.

In more pleasant thoughts, I scanned the favorite movies page of my friend Marilyn -- she's now keeping a daily blog of her life as a romance book writer -- and saw that one of her faves is The Trouble with Angels, a Catholic girls-school comedy starring Hayley Mills as chief troublemaker and (inevitably) Rosalind Russell as the Mother Superior. This was followed two years later by a sequel,Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows, which was a road movie with the nuns taking their charges across the country in a yellow school bus. It's kind of fun -- in one scene, they stay overnight at a Catholic boys' school run by Van Johnson, and the boys throw a big party where the entertainment is -- stay with me here -- a band featuring Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, songwriters for the Monkees. Later Rosalind Russell single-handedly faces down a motorcycle gang.

The difference between SF and SJ

"People make jokes about San Francisco. We don't want them making jokes about San Jose."

That's Bill Buchholz, pastor of the Family Community Church in San Jose, Calif., blurting out his homophobia. No, Bill, of course not. You don't want anyone thinking San Jose is like San Francisco.

Here's a clue, Wilhelm: When San Jose gets a first-class opera company and symphony; when it gets a major league baseball team; when it gets a $6.5 billion convention and tourist industry; when someone builds the most photographed bridge in the world leading to your town; and when somebody writes a better theme song than "Do You Know the Way to San Jose?" -- then people might start getting a little confused. Till then, I think you're safe, pal.

Bad form shown in suicide

Keeping with today's airborne theme, here's a story about a man who committed suicide by jumping from a biplane he'd rented for a "birthday ride". Probably the guy -- an 88-year-old man recently diagnosed with cancer -- imagined a graceful, unimpeded fall. But the pilot fought to keep him in the plane, and when the guy did manage to jump, he ended up hitting power lines on the way down, "severing" his body and knocking out power to 4000 customers. I guess the pun his son made about "going out in a blaze of glory" was unintended.

Points subtracted for 1) involving someone else in your suicide; 2) inconveniencing other people; 3) making a mess.

Money changes everything

According to this news story, an 18-year-old British woman auctioned her virginity on the web. She said she needed the $15,000 (!!) for college tuition, reportedly followed through, but hated it.

That's a lot of money, but you know, 44-year-old engineers will pay through the nose for just about anything. I guess it upped the ante when she said she was a lesbian.

In the stratosphere

Condemned by many mainstream theologians and mocked by literary critics, the "Left Behind" series of right-wing Christian novels climaxes today with the 12th and supposedly final volume (though at least one prequel is said to be in the works). Two million copies of "The Glorious Appearing" were ordered by bookstores. Combine that with the proceeds from the Mel Gibson flick, and that's about a billion dollars spent on right-wing Christian crap in two months. Meanwhile, in California and most other states, art, music and even sports programs are being cut so Republicans can brag about "lower taxes."

I may just be pretending not to get it

Jokes have long been used as conversational tools to define in-groups and out-groups. If you want to know what 5th graders think is the most uncool thing to be, listen to the jokes they tell. When I was a kid we repeated a lot of jokes about "pollacks," though I would have been hard-pressed to explain what a pollack was, what a Polish name looked or sounded like, or even where Poland was on a map. Ten years later when I was a student at the Univ. of Texas, we made the same jokes about "Aggies," the students at the state agricultural school. The very same jokes. Which tells you that the jokes aren't really about people from any particular locale; they are just jokes about the stupid.

Then it got to be uncool to tell jokes about other groups of people; the sign that you were a politically correct, enlightened person was the ability to keep a straight face, if not a disapproving expression, if someone told, say, a blonde joke. This gave rise to another joke:

Q. How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. That's not funny.

Flash-forward another couple of decades. I was a manager at a software company, and among my minions was a desperately untalented and frightened woman whose increasing anxiety about her job was expressed by making jokes at my expense. She took note of my failure to react to these sallies, and when a new director came along and took over my department, she used his welcome lunch to loudly remark, "Finally, someone with a sense of humor." I wanted to say, it's not that I don't have a sense of humor, you ass, it's that your efforts to ingratiate yourself at my expense are pathetic, not funny. But I didn't have to say that, because we got rid of her a month later. (Four months after that, the new director got rid of me, so maybe the joke was on me after all.)

This brings me to my older brother. When I was a little kid, I admired his comic ability, which I desperately tried to imitate. Since I was utterly unable to distinguish myself in other ways, I took it upon myself to be the class clown, with varying success.

Neither my brother nor I have ever ceased using humor as a way of making our way through social situations, though I feel he does it to keep everyone at arm's length, whereas I do it to disarm people and make them like me. The last time we encountered each other, at dinner at our mother's house several years ago, he kept trying to inject little jokes into everything. I sat there with a dismayed expression.

Thinking about all this today, I realized what a complex social intereaction joking behavior is, allowing people to demonstrate and sometimes re-negotiate their status in the group. If one person in the group is the butt of jokes, obviously he's of low status. But what if one person takes it upon himself to be the funny one? He might have medium-to-high status, if others find him entertaining; but if everyone pointedly refrains from laughing at his jokes, he's risked and lost status, an experience I've suffered many times. Unless a line is truly funny, most people can choose whether or not to respond with laughter, so that the attempt to be funny may be met with a reaction just as pointed.

Lately my brother's been sending me email, trying to convince me he is no longer the objectionable fundamentalist stooge he was twenty years ago. he's even offering to come to town to prove it to me. I just hope he doesn't try being funny.

DIY

Got another rejection today from an agent. "Liked your writing ... Better than most submissions I receive... but not passionate enough about it..." She meant she wasn't passionate enough about it to even read the whole book. I'm starting to wonder if I don't need to do another rewriting of the whole book. Sigh.

That hasn't stopped me from publishing my own work, of course. But since the advent of the personal computer, nothing ever has.

Lazy Saturday

In the photoblog links to the right, several new pictures of the garden and the cat. This is not the same cat who caused all the ruckus last week. This is the good guy whom the devil-cat got in a fight with.

Last night, I put in a full 8.5-hour shift at the l.n.c.b., the first time they've called me in in a month. I thought my favorite customer was going to be the guy who got a stack of poetry books, but then he tried to pay by check and his check was refused. He left saying he would return, but of course he didn't. So favorite customer honors went to the guy who bought Henry Miller's Sexus and two different books by Balzac.

The shift lasted from 4 p.m. to 12:30 in the morning. Man, that's a long time on your feet, even with an hour break in the middle. When I got home, I had to put two big pillows in the bed for my legs, so I could fall asleep with my legs elevated just to get the blood out of them. In the middle of the night, I woke up enough to kick the pillows off, then went back to sleep and slept until 9 a.m.

My good friend Marilyn, who has moved from explicit erotica into the more erotic-romance genre, now has a blog -- stop by, then go to Barnes and Noble and get one of her books. They publish some of her new stuff exclusively.

Remembrance

This is the 5th anniversary of the death of my ex-lover Stephanie. She would have been 35. I still think of her all the time; not a week goes by that I don't have a memory of her, and sometimes a fantasy involving her. I recently got in touch again with one of her former friends and co-workers, who wrote, "That girl is still so alive in the memories of all of us who loved her so fiercely, and i still have the blue fun fur coat (speaking of fierce)!"

Don't cry for me, Great Neck

Gawker has potentially identified the "semi-successful mid-list writer" whose article Monday on Salon caused such apoplexy among writers who hadn't even published one book, let alone five. It's bisexual author Amy Bloom.

You think you've got problems, Ms. Writer? Check out this blog entry by novelist Pamela Ribon, who is despairing of selling her second work. (Link courtesy Bookslut.)

Oh Christ

As I've mentioned in the past, my part time job is church secretary. One of the first things I do every morning is check the church voice mail. This morning there was an automated message from none other than Mel Gibson, asking me to pass along to "your pastor" his sincere thanks for "your support" of his film, and mentioning that "your church can reserve a private showing of my film as part of your Easter celebrations."

Significant in the message is that the promo mentioned "your pastor," pointing to the fact that despite Gibson's echt-Catholic treatment of the Bible story, most of the film's support has been among Evangelical Protestants.

First as tragedy, then as farce

Questionably biblical history is due to repeat itself later this spring, as the producers of Monty Python's Life of Brian plan to re-release the satirical movie as a response to Mel Gibson's sanctimonious gore-fest.

And speaking of Australians -- yes, I've been waiting for this moment -- drag queens in Sydney staged a protest at a local department store after one queen was kicked out for having a too-short miniskirt. I want to live in a place where the skirts are so short the department stores have to make dress code rules to deal with the scandal.

The publishing biz

Recover from your fit of apoplexy over the "Confessions of a Semi-Successful Author" troll on Salon.com by reading British, gently satirical comix on the publishing biz on the Guardian's site.

Land ho

Feel like building something? Hankering for wide open spaces? Tired of your effete blue-state lifestyle? Several Kansas towns are giving away real estate to would-be homesteaders.

'Biblical' plague coming to Washington

No, it's not lobbyists. It's not political reporters. It's not summer interns. It's cicadas. (Link courtesy RandomWalks)

For those who are tired of the Washington Post's registration screen, here's the whole article (it's not long):

Infestation of Brood X Cicadas Forecast

Millions of cicadas are expected to infest the nation's capital and parts of Maryland and Virginia this spring. Periodical cicadas, who've been underground for 17 years, will tunnel out of the ground, fling their winged bodies through the air and sound off day and night. Bug experts say their coming will be of biblical proportions.

Some cicadas emerge annually in the eastern United States. Others come out every two to 13 years. But this variety, known as Brood X, invades every 17 years.

The last time they covered the Washington area was in 1987, when remnants of cicadas covered roadways and sidewalks. Residents pulled them out of their hair. And the bugs drove some outdoor events, such as weddings and graduations, inside.

When exactly they emerge will depend on the weather.

The Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History is planning a cicada exhibit in May, complete with sounds and live specimens.

I can't wait for Al Franken to go on the air about that.

Yikes

A report says two out of five non-combat deaths of US soldiers in Iraq are suicide.

Fun with top-level domains

The fact that I used to work in the high-tech industry is shown by my occasional posting of topics like this: There are several proposals for new "top-level domains" -- those letters that appear in every internet address (both web and email) like .com, .org and the like. You probably know that there are a whole raft of country-level domains like .uk for the UK and .tv for Tuvalu. There are also a few special ones like .biz and .aero, which I have never actually seen used. So I'm not sure why they think these new proposed domains like .asia and .tel will be popular.

However, there are two proposals which are bound to attract lots of website developers and sponsors. The first is .cat which I think is intended to be for "catalogs." But I have the feeling that millions of pet owners will rush to register their pet's names, so I might have a website called milagrito.cat. This is on the model of the .tv domain, which is supposed to be for the flyspeck nation of Tuvalu but is mostly used by television producers, with proceeds from domain name sales going to the tiny country.

So here's an idea: sell .cat domains to anybody who wants them, but donate part of the proceeds to the SPCA.

The other big winner is bound to be .xxx which an entrepreneur is suggesting would be great for sex websites. But some are warning that right-wingers would immediately insist that all sex-related sites be forced to move to an xxx domain, making it easier to monitor, restrict and censor them.

Sitting it out, ditto

A gorgeous sunny day, not too hot, perfect for a mass demonstration. Just before 11:00 a.m. I saw large groups of people, fresh from the Muni Metro and BART, making their way along Church St. toward Dolores Park, where the anti-war rally was to be held prefatory to the obligatory march to U.N. Plaza.

I was going the other way. I spent the day hiding from the sun, the crowds, the helicopters, the photojournalists, the street-yoga-for-peace twisters, the ersatz drummers (see 5th picture), etc. etc. I'm supposed to be working on the church newsletter and also closely reading the submission by one of the women in the writers group I just joined. (Her book is five times better than mine and both excites me and makes me despair of my own. After reading her pages I want to go back and totally rewrite mine.) We're meeting on Tuesday night and I need to give my critique.

Sitting it out

Hundreds -- only "hundreds" -- are protesting today in San Francisco to mark the one-year anniversary of the Iraq war. For radical-friendly reports, go to SF Indymedia; for the straight poop, go to the local paper's website.

Even though a year ago, I was down there demonstrating, I skipped it today; as I wrote a friend, "I don't know what I'd be protesting." I'm not sure what they want -- for the U.S. to get out of Iraq? That would be an unmitigated disaster. Just as a comparison, people in Kosovo are still gleefully killing each other, and that's with an international peacekeeping force. Imagine what people in Iraq would do without a stabilizing force -- it would turn into Somalia, notwithstanding all the U.S. money invested in the country and the consequent interest in keeping it stable. The corporations and banks need Bush's occupation to keep the place stable enough for them to make megabucks; any safety and stability that comes with it is just a beneficial and PR-friendly side-effect. If they could make money off anarchy, believe me, they'd pull out in a fucking second.

Love, Love, Love

I usually don't do something like this, but I'm going to include the entire text of the New York Times story on Courtney Love's big night. Everything about it is just so classic, from the Times' calm acknowledgement that this was a "classic specimen of punk rock misbehavior" (you sense them straining against the style book's leash to put a 'u' in the last word) to V.V. columnist Michael Musto's approval of same to the lovely phrase "tranquilized Rapunzel." Sounds like a good title for her next album. Of course, you can view the story, along with a nice picture of Ms. Love looking totally smashed, at the Times' website -- for a week, until they put it behind the pay-per-view firewall. This post is so you can view it for free after that.

New York Times -- March 19, 2004

From Flashing Letterman to Being Flashed a Badge
By SHAILA K. DEWAN

Perhaps Courtney Love's Wednesday should be dipped in gold and mounted on the wall at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as a classic specimen of punk rock misbehavior.

Ms. Love stood on David Letterman's desk and bared her breasts to him; tried unsuccessfully to talk her way onto the stage at Irving Plaza; drank Cristal in a V.I.P. room at Plaid; and ended up early yesterday at the Ninth Precinct station house, under arrest on assault and reckless endangerment charges.

The police said that while performing at Plaid, she hit an audience member, identified by officials as Gregory Burgett, 23, of Kentucky, with a microphone stand. The owner of the nightclub said Mr. Burgett was cut on the brow and received three staples at Cabrini Medical Center.

The episode was not altogether surprising for Ms. Love, 39, whose most public moments have veered from extreme pathos -- like the time she read the suicide note of her famous husband, Kurt Cobain, on MTV -- to angry feminism to catfights to incoherent ranting. The drama began during the day on Wednesday when Ms. Love invited the paparazzi to photograph her in the window of her SoHo apartment, where she strummed the guitar like a tranquilized Rapunzel.

Later that afternoon, at a taping of the "Late Show With David Letterman,'' Ms. Love talked about the drug charges she faces, and repeatedly lifted her shirt, with her back to the audience.

Ms. Love's intermittent belligerence is well documented - her numerous brushes with the law include arrests on charges that she had punched fans and cursed at flight attendants. She has pleaded not guilty to the federal and state drug charges that she faces. But on Wednesday night, people who saw her said, she was in high spirits.

Marc Spitz, a senior writer at Spin magazine who is acquainted with Ms. Love, said that before her appearance at Plaid, he saw her at the Vines concert at Irving Plaza, where he said she asked to perform an impromptu set. "She was really, really excited to play, like amped," he said.

He pointed out that Ms. Love, whose band, Hole, broke up, has not had an album in more than five years. "I'm sure there's a lot of pent-up energy," he said.

Ms. Love and her band then went to Plaid, on East 13th Street in the East Village, for an unadvertised performance to promote her new solo album, "America's Sweetheart." By the time the band arrived at the club, after midnight, news of Ms. Love's mood had preceded her. "You might not want to stand there," someone told Michael Musto, the gossip columnist for The Village Voice, he recalled. "This is where she's coming through, and she's kind of on a tear tonight."

When she arrived, Mr. Musto said, she asked where the stage was, even though it was clearly visible. "She looked like she was feeling no pain," he said, "but I wouldn't expect anything else from a punk legend."

The club's crowd included Boy George, Natasha Lyonne and "Amanda Moore, who's a supermodel," said the spokeswoman for Plaid, who spoke on the condition that she not see her name in print.

"It's a rock 'n' roll crowd, a hip, groovy crowd," she said. "It makes sense for someone with a new album to want to play for this crowd, for, like, street credibility and just a buzz-creation type of thing."

Several people who were at the Plaid concert said they had noticed nothing amiss. "I was in the V.I.P. area, and Boy George was wearing a very big hat, and I couldn't see over him," one person said.

The spokeswoman for Plaid said that the stage was very small and that the mike stand fell, or was knocked over. "It wasn't like she hurled it at people."

Mr. Musto, too, said he did not believe Ms. Love meant to hurt anyone. "It was just kind of a punky gesture."

Peggy Millard, the owner of Plaid, said Ms. Love, who played a cover of "Voices Carry," as well as several songs from the new album, had carried on because she did not realize anyone was hurt.

"She was very upset," Ms. Millard said. "She didn't realize she had done anything wrong."

Ms. Love and the police even reviewed a videotape of the performance, but it did not clearly show what happened, the spokeswoman said. The police allowed Ms. Love to send a Love-like decoy out the side door of the theater, where news photographers waited, while she went out the front and got into a police car. She was released at 7 a.m., freeing her for a performance last night at the Bowery Ballroom. Both charges against her are misdemeanors.

Ms. Love arrived at the Bowery Ballroom just after midnight, two hours after she was scheduled to on. Taking the stage she said, "if any of you guys plan on getting injured, please move outside and get arrested.''

Mr. Burgett could not be reached for comment, and Ms. Love's publicist released a statement that read, "We believe she will be vindicated."

She may indeed - after her 1995 arrest on charges that she punched several fans at an Orlando concert, the judge dismissed the case, ruling that they had been exposed to no more violence than might be reasonably expected at a rock 'n' roll show.

Everyone there has nice feet

I just stumbled across an awe-inspiring modern artifact: a summary log of a call-in radio show. I had no idea such logs existed, and the idea that they're actually slapped up on the web is mind-boggling. I'm trying to figure out why they're posted on the web. But anyway, here's an excerpt. The host of the show is named Steve; I'm not sure who all the other characters are.

2:35 Steve shot his wad at Jeff during the break. Jeff seemed concerned.
2:36 Maybe Steve is allergic to Wendy's perfume.
2:37 Buzz had some perfume issues with Johnny B's hot jalapeño of love, Chris Torres, the traffic reporter.
2:38 Steve found a big hair on the console. That's gross.
2:39 Nobody has an agent whom they can call to complain. Steve is Buzz's agent.
2:40 Kevin has the ugliest, grossest feet of all time.
2:41 Wendy knows too many things about Kevin. She listens to him too much.
2:42 Buzz has some funky feet. He's sensitive, so he rarely wears sandals in this country. He feels good about his feet in a foreign country.
2:43 Steve has seen everybody's feet here, and they're fine.
2:44 Steve has nice feet, but he chooses not to show them to the world. He does have the space for the sixth toe. You've got to have really bad feet for Steve to comment on them.
2:45 Steve has seen Dan's feet, and they're fine too. Buzz says they've been up lots of people's asses.

Isn't that amazing? It's like one of those things they put in the front of Harper's, right before the "Index."

NPR affiliate fires host as profanity hysteria takes hold

In the aftermath of the Janet Jackson Super Bowl halftime tit release, Republicans were quick to foment radical changes in how the FCC deals with broadcast naughtiness. The FCC raised the fines for an illegal incident by a power of 10, so now every radio station in the country has someone with a quivering finger poised over a MUTE button. In an southern California public radio station, one host's MUTE finger wasn't quick enough, so she was fired from her $150-a-week gig. Once cooler heads prevailed, they offered her her job back, but she told them to stuff it, saying her firing "has everybody in a white-hot panic." And in an op-ed in this week's Time, she comments on the issue.

The funny thing about this? The f-word was uttered in a radio story on knitting.

There's no such thing as a small part

You know those weird Japanese game shows that have made their way onto U.S. television? One cable channel, Spike TV (was TNN), for example, broadcasts a game show with satirical English dubbing that doesn't even claim to be a translation of what the hosts and contentants are actually saying. And it's funny in a sort of drunken-silly way.

Now there's a live-show version of this phenomenon. They're called the Tokyo Shock Boys, and they're touring Australia. (It's been a long time since I got any mocking references to Australians into my blog; this will have to do.)

Setting hair on fire, hammering sharp objects up noses, supergluing genitals to chairs, and sitting in drums of dry ice: these activities take a toll on the human body. Danna almost died from lack of oxygen doing the dry-ice stunt six months ago. "Yes, it can be bad, but we love to perform," says Danna's pink-haired partner, Nambu.

But who needs that sort of thing when we've got Courtney Love? The 39-year-old singer put in a hard night of fun, beginning with a guest shot on Letterman where she jumped on his desk and bared her breasts, then went to a club and brained a patron with a microphone stand, and ended up in jail. (Same picture here only much larger, and make sure you read the end of the story.)

For fans only

The guy who does Waiting for Boof, a blog about the San Francisco Giants, can write, is informed and knowledgeable, and is funny. What's not to like? But be warned: If you haven't followed the Giants fairly closely for at least a couple of years, it'll be like reading somebody else's high school yearbook.

Cluelessness of the week

The recording artist Curtis Jackson, known as "50 Cent," freely acknowledges he's a homophobe, but goes on to say, "But women who like women, that's cool." Thank you, Mr. Cent. You've got your finger on the pulse of the nation.

In other news, here's yet another brutal murder in the suburb where I went to high school, just outside the gates of the NASA center near Houston. The Clear Lake area, a godforsaken paved-over cow pasture that was supposed to be so cute and safe, has in the last few years turned into a cauldron of violence and degradation.

The scratching and the biting and the blood all over

Christ, what a day.

I went to Morning Prayer and to work as usual. At work I began my usual day, and about 10:00 a.m. I called a prescription in to the pharmacy. Then I phoned Cris to see if she wanted me to pick anything up there on my way home from work.

Barely had we started our conversation when Cris started screaming bloody murder: “No! No! Noooooooooo!!! Noooooooo!!” Then she dropped the phone.

Not sure what was happening, I hung up and dialed 911 and told them what I had heard. It could have been murder, it could have been Al Qeada for all I knew, but it sounded really bad. After I got off the phone from them, I knocked on my boss’s door -- she had just started meeting with a couple of people -- blurted that I had an emergency at home, and dashed off.

I drove home as fast as I could, breaking a great many traffic laws and possibly damaging the engine of the car. I know I looked at the speedometer once and it said 105. I think I was in 4th gear at the time, so that might not have been good for the car (which has 5). I didn’t notice what the tach said, but I do remember the engine revving pretty high.

I pulled up to the house as two police cars were pulling away. So then I knew that Cris hadn’t been murdered but that she undoubtedly had had to break up a fight between the cats Milagrito and Six.

This whole thing has been building for weeks. We’ve been keeping them apart because Six freaks out so badly when he sees Milagrito. (Six freaks out because he is new and was raised by a friend of ours who has gone nuts; we took the cat when this person went into the nuthouse.) The cats had never actually been face to face; we keep them separated by at least a closed door, and usually two closed doors with a room between them. What happened is that the housekeeper ignored what Cris had just said to her and opened the basement door, and Milagrito charged in, as he often does. Cris had let Six explore the house because she feels sorry for him. Six saw Milagrito bolt in and instantly attacked him. Cris had to break up the fight and got seriously bitten and scratched.

She phoned the doctor’s office to see what she should do, and the stupid receptionist, who is always brusque and dismissive, immediately misunderstood the problem. She gave Cris the runaround until Cris asked to speak to the other woman who works in the office. This incident, more than anything else -- the housekeeper’s error, my dangerous crosstown trip -- made me furious. I took Cris to the doctor’s office and while she was in the examining room, gave the woman a talking to. For her part, Cris complained directly to the doctor about her. It’s not the first time she’s been a problem.

I was on an adrenaline high from breaking the receptionist’s balls if from nothing else. And there was still the question of whether or not Milagrito was all right, since he had run out the back door when Cris broke the fight up, and he hadn’t shown up by the time we left for the doctor’s office. We stopped in at the pharmacy on the way home and I got Cris an ice cream cone. I also made her laugh by recalling the last time something like this had happened. “Psycho plus Gutierrez equals cat biting incident,” I said. I was referring to the incident several years ago with Cris’s sister and the cats of another sociopathic woman we know, in which Shirley ended up being bitten.

We got home and Milagrito showed up, looking a little frightened but not wounded, thank God. Cris had several bad bite wounds and some bad scratches but she came out the worst. She has to take antibiotics, and if it gets infected, she has to go into the hospital. Six, of course, was completely copasetic.

Since we didn’t have to take M. to the vet, I went back to work. The boss had left for the day so I didn’t have to explain things to her. But I left early because I had to go back to Parnassus Ave. to the dermatologist to see about the various poxy skin conditions I have. He removed a mole that had started growing on the side of my face, and told me the rash I had on my chin might be a fungus or even ringworm (I wonder if I once touched my face right after cleaning one of the cat boxes. We have three of them.)

So I walked out of 350 Parnassus for the second time that day, this time with a bandage on my left temple. By this time I felt calm, the surgery notwithstanding; or perhaps the ordinary excited reaction my body might have had to the surgery merely used up the rest of the adrenaline I had, but in any case I felt calmer than I had all day.

As for the housekeeper, Cris said she had yelled at the woman, and then flung at her: "Clean up the blood!" Reflecting later in the day, Cris mused, "Any conversation you have with your boss that ends with the words 'Clean up the blood' is not a good day."

Now in flesh appearing

More is about an actress who knew from the day she was born that she craved the spotlight... and found, instead, how often and how easy it is to trip on life's red carpet.... Success and fame notwithstanding, a gaping hole persisted -- begging more! -- at Yeardley's center, and it took years for her to discover the perils of trying to fill up the inside from the outside."

Does that ever sound terrible. It's the solo show written by and starring Yeardley Smith, who voices Lisa Simpson on the animated TV series. (Link courtesy Gawker)

Bada bing!

Someone on Craigslist is advertizing for a "Sopranos" date. I think that's very funny -- and not a bad idea, come to think of it, regardless of whether or not that ad appeals to you. it's a much better idea, anyway, than a "Sex in the City" date. And I'm not sure I would want to go on an "Oz" date with a guy, though no doubt there are some who would.

Creative splurge

About 9 days ago I went to a concert. One of the people on the bill was this Armenian composer who presented his arrangements of several Armenian folk songs. During one song I got such a strong visual image: of low golden sunlight on a barren plain lighting up a collection of isolated buildings that turn out to be a monastery of some sort. (Actually I think my mental image was set more in Siberia or someplace a lot farther north than Armenia, not that I know anything about Armenia other than it's down by Turkey somewhere.)

Sekretnaut, with whom I was attending the concert, had mentioned to me previously about how, during a Vipassana retreat, it was not uncommon to have one or more extended flashes of creative inspiration during the nine days. They even had a standard name for it, which I forget -- something like a "creativity dump." I knew just what she meant because I experienced such a flash of inspriation myself back in July 2002 when I was doing all that Zen meditation -- one day during a day-long sit, I suddenly focused completely on my book, all these ideas welled up, and without trying to I solved several problems with the narrative and with characters that I had been working on for months without much progress. So I had such a flash of inspiration during a single musical number during this concert. It was such a strong image that I feel like turning it into a novel, notwithstanding the other novel I thought I was going to start this spring.

Of course, if I paid attention to every strong idea I had for novels, I wouldn't have time to write them all even if I worked eight hours a day on nothing but. Nonetheless, I'm tempted to just go for it.

Film noir

A friend came over to eat sushi and watch Yojimbo, the great samurai film by Kurosawa. But she brought the DVD, and we don't have a DVD player. (Or actually, we do, but it's never been installed.) So she called local video shops until she found a VHS tape, and dispatched me to fetch it.

Me (entering video store): My friend called to see if you would hold something? "Yojimbo."

20-year-old clerk: Hmm? Who'd they talk to?

Me: I don't know. Aren't you holding it?

Clerk (looking at shelf): There's nothing here by that name. Let me check the database...

Me: "Yojimbo."

Clerk: Hmm, we don't have anything by that title.

Me: Want me to spell it? Y-O-J-I-M-B-O.

Clerk: No... It's two words, right?

Me (long pause): No, it's not "Yo, Jimbo!" It's "Yojimbo." It's Japanese.

Clerk: Oh. Yeah. It's in "Asian." Right behind you.

That's about on par with the time I went in to a video store and overheard someone asking for film noir and was directed to the blacksploitation section.

They bombed in Madrid

A Belfast woman moved to Spain twenty years ago to escape sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. This week, she was on one of the bombed trains hit by terrorists.

Suntory time

I finally saw Lost in Translation. Hurrah for Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray -- they're both really funny. And of course it's always fun to make fun of the Japanese, because we still haven't forgiven them for almost taking over the world in the late 1980s. But I thought: What a strange movie for a young woman to make. Sofia Coppola's only a couple of years older than Scarlett J., yet the movie's mostly from Bill Murray's viewpoint, that of a tired guy having a mid-life crisis. On the other hand, only a rich jet setter would make a movie about two Americans in a foreign city who have such an unlimited amount of money and time that their main problem is existential angst.

Liberals get butts in gear

Al Franken and Janeane Garofalo will be two of the hosts on a new "liberal radio" network of 24-hour talk, to launch at the end of the month. You know that already; I'm just blogging it to link to this excellent picture of Garofalo.

Shooter

Those pix on the right side of the page are "syndicated" from Buzznet, a free photoblog site. Not only can you upload your photos and make them availalable on the web for free, but pasting a big of script into your webpage template allows you to "syndicate" the most recent photos to your site. Works great!

But the purpose of this post is to call attention to one of the best of the shooters to post from San Francisco, mewesq, a lawyer and amateur photog. Check out her photos of City Hall interiors.

It's good for something

Sewage treatment plants may one day be generating electricity from human waste, thus saving money for municipalities. No one, however, has come up with a use for the films of Jim Carrey.

Incident in the gutter

I work across from Commodore Sloat Elementary School in the Balboa Terrace district, just off Junipero Serra and Ocean Ave. This morning was street cleaning day, so I carefully parked my car on the safe side. When I heard the street sweeper approaching, I went outside to move my car to the shady side.

Outside, along the fenced school playground, I saw six or seven children with their faces pressed up against the fence, watching the street sweeper approach. At first I thought they were simply enjoying the approach of the giant, whirring machine, but then I noticed the expression of horror on their faces.

Just before it reached them, the street sweeper pulled up short. The driver got out, walked about three feet in front of the machine, and picked up a toy that had been thrown over the fence into the gutter. The expressions on the kids' faces turned to delight as he tossed the toy back to them, then climbed back into the street sweeper and continued on his way.

Classic desert character dies in fire

Internationally known sculptor Noah Purifoy -- whose "assemblanges" of junk typify outsider desert art -- died in a fire last week in his Joshua Tree home. Here's his website with lots of pictures of his work.

Speaking of that desert locale, Twentynine Palms is the name of a new film (see third paragraph) named after and set in the town just east of Joshua Tree.

Jayson speaks

I'm not interested in the whole Jayson Blair story, which I consider an egregious example of the kind of celebrity-loser journalism that raised people like Kato Kaelin and Lorena Bobbitt to a kind of prominence. But if you are, here's a Q and A.

P.S.: The search for Kato's last name led me to this amazing site: Famous Trials, from Socrates, Jesus and Galileo to Lenny Bruce, Charles Manson, and yes, O.J. Simpson.

A case of mistaken identity

Popular blogger Blaize K. checks in with a Spalding Gray-related story. Seems her mother and father were sitting in a restaurant years ago and the father was mistaken by a waitress for Gray, who happened to be performing nearby. The interesting part is that after her husband was mistaken for the monologuist-actor-writer, her mother developed a near-obsession:

Over the years, I saw all of his monologues, all of his movies, read all of his books, and played my "Monster in the Box" tape every morning on the way to work, until it broke.

Think about that for a minute. Every morning the woman kissed her husband, got in the car and drove to work, listening to a tape of the man her husband resembles. You've got to wonder what kind of talker her own husband was.

Tech bust continues to affect San Francisco

In her useful "Surreal Estate" column, Carol Lloyd studies the evolution and devolution of a single piece of commercial real estate in the temporarily-hot Mission District. During the dotcom boom, threadbare arts groups who had occupied former industrial spaces were getting kicked out left and right, to be replaced by tech startups. When the bust occured in 2000 and 2001, suddenly there was a huge amount of vacant space. At the same time, plans for new offices were revamped.

Larry Badiner, acting director for the S.F. Planning Department, says that with a few rare exceptions in which tenants are already committed, all the unbuilt office projects he knows of in San Francisco have been reconceived as housing. "If someone has a permit for office space, chances are they are trying to figure out how to change it," he says.

And in the NYT, middle-aged programmers bemoan their long period of disuse as economists argue over the effects of offshoring and outsourcing.

Last night I had dinner at a restaurant near my old workplace. It was the first warm night of the year, and along Belden Street (see the 4th image on this page) the outdoor tables were packed. I used to eat there with co-workers once in a while when we wanted to splurge. From my seat I could easily see the wonderful deco Russ Building where our offices were.

I got laid off from my last tech job in October 2002 -- which is 12 to 18 months later than a lot of people. I was really grateful that Cris and I both continued to hold onto our tech jobs through the beginning -- dare I say the first half -- of the downturn. And I'm grateful today for my part-time job that nets $1350 a month. That's our mortgage right there.

Fruitcake of the week

A woman camped on the sidewalk outside a Belfast, Northern Ireland TV station in hopes of being selected for the cast of the Irish version of "Big Brother." So what? This contestant is special.

Doris believes she has got what it takes as she has "about 10 different personalities".

I've got an idea. Why don't they just make the whole show with Doris alone? One person with ten different personalities is more personality than the whole rest of the cast usually has altogether.

And while we're recovering from the other bad news of the day, consider this: beavers are wreaking havoc in Tierra Del Fuego. I want you to call up an old girlfriend right now and say those words.

Body of Spalding Gray found

The decayed body of the actor, who had been missing for several weeks and was rumored to have leapt from the Staten Island Ferry, was recovered from New York Harbor this morning. He had been suffering from depression and the lasting effects of a 2001 auto accident..

I saw Gray perform twice, the first time in about 1980 before he really started getting famous. At the time, I was on the crew of a play at a theater in North Beach, and the actors in the play -- most of them from L.A. and well-entrenched in the acting world -- spoke rapturously of Gray and how he could hold a crowd for hours just sitting in a chair and telling stories. He came to the theater later that summer and gave a weekend's worth of performances. The one I saw was called something like "A Life in the Theater" and consisted entirely of anecdotes about plays he'd been in. It was a marvelous show.

Everyone smiles as you drift past the flowers

These are the glorious days of Spring when the temperature hits a high of 73, the skies are clear, and everything's blooming. Last night, as Cris and I were just walking up 22nd St. in the Mission to a friend's house, the smell of jasmine was positively hallucinagenic. In our garden, which she had spent the afternoon rooting around in, the cherry trees are budding, and we've had dafodils blooming for two weeks.

Every Spring lately, I'm intensely moved, to an almost embarrassing degree, by the simple blooming of flowers, by the beauty and fecundity of life. It doesn't have to be a garden, it could be any street tree on a sidewalk. Everything's coming up.

Speaking of psychedelic experiences, I've been finally getting with the whole iTunes and burning CDs thing (I don't have an iPod), and I've made three different mix CDs of music that is either 60s psychedelia or influenced by it. [I'll update this entry with a link to the track lists once I get home tonight.] I love that nice woozy sound. Come to think of it, a little real psychedelia wouldn't be too bad either. But the springtime is so real, who needs hallucinations?

Texas governor forced to deny sex rumors

Readers may remember the vicious rumor I helped circulate a couple weeks ago about the governor of Texas having been caught... well, just read this story from the Austin American Statesman (Thanks, Wonkette.) or, if you don't feel like registering for their stupid website, just read it here where I have archived it on-site.

Perry's previous strategy of doing or saying nothing that would promote the spread of the rumors into mainstream publications changed this week as he decided to mount a counteroffensive against the political foes he blames. At the Governor's Mansion on Thursday, his 54th birthday, Perry said he decided to speak out to shine light on what he sees as a dangerous new political trend.

The story also says the gov. first heard the rumors from his college-age son and daughter. I'll bet that conversation was real interesting.

"Hey Governor Dad, can I borrow your limo and a couple of Rangers tonight?"

"No, son Griffin, take the Ford Monument Pro. The Rangers just washed it."

"Aw, Dad, I never get to take the limo. The Monument doesn't have the rotating disco ball and the red phone."

"Sorry, son, if there's one thing I've learned in government, it's when I make a decision, I stick to it. Take some female Rangers if it'll make you feel any better. They've got some very interesting pain-submission holds they can show you."

"I hate you! I hate you!" (Runs out.)

"What the hell was that about, daughter Sydney?"

"He's just really upset about the rumors, dad."

"What rumors?"

(Heavy sarcastic sigh.) "Dad, you are just so out of it sometimes."

"Don't talk to me like that, young lady! If you have any rumors to share, let's hear them."

"You know -- the ones about you and your (male) secretary of state, and how Mom found you in bed together, and how she's hired the most expensive divorce lawyer in Austin, and how you tried to have the secretary of state poisoned and blamed it on an attack of appendicitis."

(Sound of head hitting floor as governor falls in dead faint.)

News charges by

Last Sunday the church I attend did blessings of same-sex couples who had been married in the recent marriage madness at City Hall, and we invited media. This morning there's a big story in the New York Times.

The story ends with a conversation-stopping quote from a psychologist:

"This thing started out as one hulking animal plodding through the sanctuary, and has now turned into something that approximates the charge of a herd of buffalo," Dr. Lindner said. "There is no end in sight and the dust is so thick you can't even see the count."

Whoa. Let's see, I think the original metaphor is a combination of "the 900-lb. gorilla in the room" and "a bull in a china shop." Then there's a stampede, and by the time the sentence ends, suddenly we're at a baseball game and a gust of wind has whipped up such that you can't see the umpire holding up fingers to signal the ball-and-strike count.

I stand in awe.

Dept of Schadenfreude

Couldn't happen to a nicer guy: "Symptoms include sudden, severe abdominal pain, loss of appetite, nausea, vomiting and fever." Ashcroft in intensive care with acute pancreatitis. Plus Bush utterly miscalculated with his first campaign ads, and today's job report shows no growth in employment. Looks like the Repbulicans' bad fortune is continuing, ha ha ha ha HAAAAAAAA.

Today's appalling poll

Kerry and Bush are essentially tied -- that's the good news. The bad news?

Bush   - 46%
Kerry  - 45%
Nader  -  6%

The devil wears USB

What we need is a little fun sometimes. And these really are some of the best NY women bloggers (though I wonder whether they really needed more publicity).

Ted Rall comix too threatening to conservatives?

The NYT website booted comics by Ted Rall from its site, saying "some of his humor was not in keeping with the tone we try to set for NYTimes.com." Rall says, in his blog, that the real reason is "because they're annoyed by receiving so many email complaints about my work--all of them motivated by partisan politics."

Star Wars it ain't

In a hilarious column in the Guardian, Tim Dowling offers some Aramaic phrases for the moviegoer, such as:

Da'ek teleyfoon methta'naanaak, pquud. Guudaapaw!
Please turn off your mobile phone. It is blasphemous.

Dept. of schadenfreude

A southern California poacher got his leg caught in one of his own lines and drowned wrapped up in his own lobster trap. Law enforcement officials practically cackled:

"He was trying to conceal his purpose, to thwart the responsibilities of the Fish and Game Department," said Hermosa Beach Harbor Patrol spokesman Paul Wolcott. "He paid the ultimate price in doing that illegal behavior."

That's a little harsh, his friends say. "'He's an honest, hard-working person,' said John Mills, owner of the fish market, where Willey sold his seafood for the last 15 years."

Ersatz Christianity everywhere

Mel Gibson's movie, The Da Vinci Code and Elaine Pagels' books, among many other influences, have increased sales of religious-oriented books in general. If you're in San Francisco, you can attend a seminar with religious publishing expert Phyllis Tickle at St. Gregory's Episcopal Church on Saturday, Mar. 13. Tickle will put several contemporary trends in context:
- Issues about gay bishops & homosexuality
- Fundamentalist vs. Post-Modern conflicts
- The extraordinary popularity of The Da Vinci Code
- Opus Dei and ultra-Conservative movements
- Mel Gibson, anti-Semitism, and the new movie, The Passion of the Christ
- The rise of new spiritual communities and the decline of traditional denominations
- The fastest growing religions today: Mormons and Muslims

Here's SFGate columnist Mark Morford on The Da Vinci Code, which he calls an "incendiary little page-turner packed like a hot sausage with combustible and wonderfully damning religious fact and insinuation and researched tidbit that all serve to make the church and its more uptight sects cringe and recoil and deny deny deny. So you know it must be true."

Other municipalities look to wed same-sex couples

Portland, Ore. will start issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples today, and municipalities in California are moving forward: Santa Cruz, Oakland, San Mateo County, at least. What's interesting is the degree to which the sentiments of the county clerk make the difference in how quickly a municipality moves. Who knew how important that dull position would become?

Meanwhile, a freethinker suggests: Do same sex unions undermine marriage? We can only hope so.

MDMA study approved

After years of lobbying, researchers have received FDA approval for a study on the effectiveness of MDMA in therapy for people with post-traumatic stress disorder. Sylvia pointed me to this "less media-ish" press release on the study.

New Paltz mayor charged

The gay-friendly mayor of New Paltz, NY, who began performing same-sex marriages last week, was charged today with 19 criminal counts by the Ulster C. D.A. The district attoryney acted even though state Attorney General Eliott Spitzer said yesterday that gay marriages should be legal and that he would take an official stand on the issue later in the week.

If you missed it in the New York Times on Sunday, here's the gay marriage picture of the week, showing two dykes kissing madly in front of a group of sign-toting homophobes. (Be sure to click on "Enlarge this picture" to get the whole scene.)

Forget it, Jake. It's Texas

Another good reason why you shouldn't put the defendant on the stand when she's accused of stabbing her husband 193 times:

Wright contended that her weeklong cover-up -- when she bleached and repainted the house and told people that her husband had disappeared after a fight -- was a symptom of trauma-induced delusions that he was still alive even though he was buried in their backyard.

"It was cleaning," said Wright. "I thought it was dirt and I had to make the house clean because Jeff was going to be mad."

You think she's going to get off? It's Texas. She's getting the needle.

Elsewhere in Texas, the president of Baptist-run Baylor University is outraged over an editorial in the student newspaper defending gay marriage. The president's statement here; alumni react.

Why I voted for Kucinich

Early in the year, before the Iowa caucuses and after I decided I didn't like Howard Dean, Windy urged me to vote for the Michigan longshot and I responded that if it came down to it, I had to vote for somebody electable so that Dean wouldn't get the nomination. But now that Dean is gone, I basically don't have a preference between Kerry and Edwards. Kucinich reflects my views, so I voted for him this morning.

I also voted up and down on a raft of propositions which I only dimly understood, and that's part of the problem here in California, where any nutty idea (or explotative ripoff cooked up by some right-wing cabal) can get on the ballot if its backers pay for enough signatures to be gathered. That's why I never sign petitions anymore.

It sounds like an excellent thing to chant at football games, too

"Yoga is all about becoming more in touch with your body, but on some level, all that really means is becoming more in touch with your sexual organs. Basically, you’re doing sexercises. It takes about six months to understand what they’re talking about when they say 'Lift the pelvic floor,' but once I did, it made my sex life 100 percent better."

And in further adventures apres la revolution sexuelle, a 20-something hipster couple goes to a strip club and basically has no idea how to act. So here is my primer on how to act in a strip club, in a hundred words or less:

How to Behave in a Strip Club

1. You will probably be asked what you want to drink. Order a cheap beer. Don't complain that it costs ten dollars. Don't complain that there is a two-drink minimum. It's part of the price of admission.
2. Look at the strippers. Don't be embarrassed. That's what they're there for.
3. Unless you want to get up close and personal, don't approach the stage. If you do, just smile and chuckle a lot, like you're having a great time, even if some stripper is whacking you on the head with her giant fake tits. Nobody's looking at you. They're looking at the girls.
4. Smile and nod a lot. Act appreciative, even if inside you are thinking "So fucking what." Nobody likes a grump.
5. If it's a lap dance club, you aren't obliged to get a lap dance. Just smile and say "No thanks, baby." This is the one situation you can get away with calling every girl "baby," so enjoy it. If they're persistent, just keep refusing politely. Eventually they'll go away.
6. The dancers will not give you their phone numbers or agree to go out with you, unless of course they are also prostitutes. However, this is unlikely. In any case, no matter how flirtatious they are, all they want is for you to give them money. Go ahead, you cheapskate, tip them. That's what they're really there for, not artistic expression.
7. Done yet? Because that's really all there is to it. If you've been there a half hour, you've seen it all.

This has been a public service announcement.

Start Florida dread early this year

A poll taken the third week of Feburary has Bush and Kerry tied in Florida. But another poll just released has a Kerry-Edwards ticket beating Bush-Cheney. Meanwhile, drums keep beating to dump Cheney.

Yes, let's get rid of Cheney, so he can take his Halliburton job back and reap millions in war profits.