Hotel number three

I'm now in Washington, DC, on the 9th floor of a luxe business hotel, the only fault of which is that the desk is too high relative to the desk chair -- for me, at least. The Marriotts I stayed at had a little pull-out lower desk that was just right for the laptops.

Across the street there are several buildings with many massive satellite dishes on their roofs. I figured they were embassies with secret spy missions, but I was disappointed to note that one of them is actually the local branch of CBS News.

Perhaps entraced by this atmosphere, I dreamt last night that I had done a performance piece in which Colin Powell was going to appear.

Somebody's auto-advertising engine needs a tuneup




This was one of those automatically generated advertisements that gets generated based on what's on your blog. This was on a blog where the poster had just quoted some punk dictum about "Punk means confronting your racism," etc.

I wonder what kind of racism is available at shopping.com -- maybe some of those outré A&F t-shirts.

The state of American fiction

Have you been reading the Miss Snark blog for the last week or so?

In case you came in late, she's a literary agent with a killer blog in which she gives amazing, invaluable information about the writing biz, especially for beginners. She's generous with the information but does not suffer fools gladly. That said, she sounds a hundred times nicer than certain people.

This week she's doing her "crapometer" exercise, in which she invites writers to send in the synopsis of their novel. She will read and evaluate and gently make fun of it for the enlightenment of all.

First of all, she deserves combat pay for going through literally dozens of multi-page synopses of novels, most of them bad, and for paying attention to each one and giving it a fair shake. Secondly, she shows herself to be an excellent reader with an eye for what works and what doesn't, and thirdly, she is articulate and precise enough to point out exactly what's wrong, sometimes sentence by sentence.

But most of all, this exercise has revealed the shocking state of American fiction. Now, I have no doubt that almost everyone sending in stuff to her like this is an amateur. But the ratio of interesting stuff that has a chance in hell of ever being published to ridiculous total bull is about 1:12. If this is any indication of what an agent goes through day after day, I'd say the agents of America are performing a valuable service. They're like forensic readers, dealing with all the shit turned out by people's word processors.

Let me just quote a few words of one head-rotatingly bad synopsis:

In the following weeks, Jol discovers the Rapax's torture has destroyed his ability to use Rage. Worse, every time he sleeps, he is forced out of body to sites of other Rapax attacks. One Rapax and its skinflier--a toothy, stingray-like pet--sense Jol during these visitations: the Rapax tastes its father's magic in Jol's skin; the skinflier smells a Moon tattoo Jol can't see. Once Cat is better, Jol leaves and tries to repress everything but the desire to reach the courts--until this Rapax leaves one victim alive. Jol rushes to the rescue. It is a trap. He is captured and tortured for revenge.

E-fucking-gad. And a lot of these synopses are these weird-ass fantasy stories. Why in the hell do the talentless geeks of America choose that genre to jack off with? Why don't they choose, say, the western, or the scuba-diving spy story? Or better yet, why don't they just get the hell away from keyboards with letters on them and go shovel snow or do something else useful?

Something better

Courtesy of the enchanting but not nearly often-enough-updated Girl Friday blog comes this local restaurant review video -- local for Minnapolis, that is -- featuring two cheerful midwesterners. The gal, Lori, has real screen presence.

Plus:
Violet Blue's best books of 2005
Even though they are stuck in Barstow, Calif., the locals are planning New Years Eve fun, but the cops are ready for the desperate thrill-seekers.

Marriott number deux

From Baltimore we went by train to Trenton, a grey and apparently depressed town but, as I kept telling my co-workers, it looks like Paris if compared with Detroit. We spent six hours with no lunch break, from 10:30 to 4:30, inside a grey cube farm office of the State of New Jersey IT department. Now that's entertainment.

Then we checked into a hotel downtown. As far as I can tell it is the only hotel in downtown Trenton, which would explain why there are giant MARRIOTT directional signs all over a 20-block area, hanging on what are obviously city-owned utility and traffic signal poles, pointing the way to the hotel. One of my co-workers was so intimidated by the urban environment that he insisted he would have dinner in the hotel restaurant rather than venture out on foot. Big scaredy cat.

Drizzly and cool here -- almost identical to the weather in SF, says a pal who YIMed me.

Business trip

I'm on a business trip for the d.b.t.s., staying in a clean, comfortable, and wonderfully anonymous business hotel in Baltimore. I love business hotels! And this one, a Courtyard by Marriott, is new and especially nice.

Friends will know of my near-fetish for anonymous motels and hotels. I aways imagine furtive sexual affairs go on in them when, in reality, it's mostly a lot of television zoning-out and exhausted sleeping by the guests, and back-breaking labor for the housekeepers. I always leave a big tip for them, every day, because I am a bourgeous businessman who does little actual work while they bust their asses every day. Besides, a more-than-decent tip on your first morning, and every day thereafter, ensures you have plenty of towels, toilet paper, and whatever else is supplied in the room.

Tip the people who help you! Taxi drivers, housekeepers, doormen, waitstaff -- that's hard work, and you know they're getting ground down by the boss or the company day after day.

So I won't be posting that much while I'm on this trip.

Another NSA site

Courtesy BoingBoing (where there's a photo), here's more free information about the NSA and its listening stations. This piece, from Sunday's NYT, is all about the listening station in Sugar Grove, WV. NB: Very large photos on that page.

Previously: Menwith Hill, an NSA listening post in England

NSA, National Security Agency, Big Brother, First Amendment

The friendly confines of Borders

I just spent 2 hours in the Borders store at 3rd and King. It has a big cafe space in one corner -- the store is so big the cafe is on the other side of the block, at 3rd and Townsend. As with all Borders there's a T-Mobile wireless signal, but because there are all these condos in the building right upstairs, there are all these free unprotected wireless signals also available in the Borders cafe. Just in case you have to hang out down there before a ballgame or before getting on the train (the ballpark is catty-corner and the Caltrain station is a block away at 4th and Townsend).

SF saves a cinema landmark

Local alternative school New College will save the Roxie Theater -- a small neighborhood cinema where films have been shown since 1909.

This is fantastic -- a piece of real SF history, and not just hokey Gold Rush stuff or history of straight society, but real bohemian history -- the Roxie has hosted tons of independent film, has been the spot where many foreign films played in the U.S. for the first time, and has hosted many live appearances by filmmakers such as Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog.

Altogether silly

This pleasantly lite news story about a man who wants to develop a Christian nudist resort contains the memorable assertion: "There is absolutely no relationship between nudity and sex." (Thanks, Jym.)

I think someone wants an excuse to build a multi-million dollar resort over some orchards and everything else has been tried. When the nudist scheme goes belly up -- now there's an enchanting image -- the resort will be "sold" to a management company who'll run it like any other hotel.

Then there was this piece in the Chronicle this morning about how the whole "war on Christmas" load of crap was so successful this year, the American Family Association, an anti-gay, supposedly Christian, right-wing pressure group, is testing the waters for another, even larger non-sequitur: no more Christmas gifts. Even other foamers think the idea is silly; a spokesperson for Concerned Women for America said such a scheme would "punish retailers" including believers who own small businesses.

True -- the foamer groups can't do anything without the support of the Christian Bookstore owners. But this idea has already been proposed by someone on the other side of the Christian spectrum, Bill McKibben, writing in -- of all places -- Mother Jones. I wish the Chronicle reporter had gotten a reaction quote from him -- that would have been interesting.

Desperately thinking about Christmas

By this time of the month people seem compelled to offer up a holiday thought, usually while making it crystal clear that someone as cool as they are not religious, no sir, especially not Christian in, you know, that way.

You know, it's okay, people. Nobody is religious these days, and nobody expects you to have deep thoughts about Christmas per se -- whether it's a religous version, or merely a capitalist one, that comes to your mind. Write about the nutty consumerism, write about the way all the quasi-religious symbolism is exploited in the name of profits, but going out of your way to make clear your own personal rejection of all that is stupid about it sometimes seems like you're protesting just a little bit too much.

And yet, the text from Isaiah, the one quoted in Handel's "Messiah," is moving. If you want to have a nice Christmas experience that doesn't involve buying anything or going to church, read that, and maybe Truman Capote's story "A Christmas Memory." Dylan Thomas or "A Charlie Brown Christmas" is optional.

Then you're done. Go to the beach with the wind in your face and walk it all off.

'Christmas-challenged'

Start with this pre-Christmas tsuris report from Jackadandy, then a more peaceful scene, yet also involving flowing water, from Marilyn. Myfanwy gets trad-European, and then finally read Violet Blue's Sexiest Geeks of 2005.

North Pole calling

Here's a service Girl Friday hasn't thought of: Parents pay a commercial service to stage phone calls from Santa for their spawn. Even Alexis, who has many powers, could probably not pull off sounding like Santa, but the concept of outsourcing can be applied in many different ways. Just get some avuncular bums off the street to man the switchboard -- keep feeding them spiked apple cider -- and voila, you've got Santa on the phone.

"Santa": Hey kid, is Mommy's purse there? Do you know what a credit card is?

Kid: Sure!

"Santa": Now get out some of the credit cards -- the gold and silver ones...

Kid: This one says 'Plat... Plat...'

"Santa": Platinum! Yeah, that'll work. Now you know Santa sometimes has to get present for good little girls on Amazon and shit, so you just read that credit card number off for Santa, okay?

See how it works? Sure-fire business plan, y'all.

Today's snooping

Moved by this big story from Sunday's LA Times on a secret Scientology retreat near Hemet, CA, I came up with this Google satellite shot of a site that matches the description in the article. As usual, TerraServer offers a clearer view, albeit black-and-white.

Notice also, in that LA Times story, all the accompanying material on the right side of the page -- they've been covering this story off and on for 15 years.

Is author of highly praised fiction debut "at the top of her field"?

Courtesy Galleycat, this Wash Post story about "A Thousand Years of Good Prayers" author Yiyun Li and her immigration troubles. Her debut short story collection was highly praised by the NYT, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, SF Chroncile and others, but this didn't help the immigation service to conclude that "she was an artist of 'extraordinary ability,' defined in Title 8, Code of Federal Regulations, Part 204.5(h)(2) as 'a level of expertise indicating that the individual is one of that small percentage who have risen to the very top of the field of endeavor.'"

Jeez, whattya have to do to get a green card around here?

Shh!

All the talk lately about spying and the NSA, and then today we got this story from the Chronicle about governments upset at Google for showing satellite photos of secret sites.

Like what? Well, here's an article about the secret Echelon program. Among its revelations:

The largest overseas station in the Project P415 network is the US satellite and communications base at Menwith Hill near Harrogate in Yorkshire. It is run undercover by the NSA and taps into all Britain's main national and international communications networks.

It took less than five minutes to find a satellite shot of this NSA monitoring station "at Menwith Hill near Harrogate in Yorkshire."

But there's no need to rely on that blurry bit of data; the place ain't exactly a secret:
Menwith Hill Station -- many good photos
Menwith Hill, "the Original Big Brother"
Menwith Hill on Wikipedia

This put me in the mood to listen to The Conet Project, an exhaustive 4-CD set of numbers stations -- shortwave spy broadcasts. NPR's "Lost and Found Sound" series did an episode on the numbers stations in, it looks like, 2000.

Lit up

Literary leftovers:

• The NYT on new, "more exportable" German novels. Also, a former publisher has become an agent.
• Rodney Whitaker, author of many books including those under the pseudonym Trevanian, died. His most famous book was "The Eiger Sanction."
• Galleycat notes the NY transit strike; literary agent Miss Snark stayed home, and I imagine most of the publishing world did too. In any case, I have little expectation of news of my novel, which is making the rounds of publishers, before Epiphany.

Still subversive

Badger goes to an office Xmas party:

Later Rudie pegged me again while lamenting the fate of a friend of his whose wife refused to have 14 children or even three and told him she was stopping at two, she was 35 and wasn't going to DO that... and how sad for him, he had no way to make her do it and could only hope wistfully for twins. Then he looked across at me making a sort of rude motion with his chin and saying that I might think differently. I grinned evilly into his eyes and said that technology would someday help his friend to get pregnant himself and then he could have as many children as he wanted. It was lovely, like a cartoon where someone is knocked out and their eyes turn into little x's.

And also:

And of course I was wondering madly. How does no one talk about differences? And that we're all from various countries? and politics? and what are everyone's perceptions of each other's region/language/class/caste? I was curious as hell. It's not like I can tell from accents where people are from in India.

Yes! I always want to know the sociological-personal details. Is the influence of American and European companies on their newly middle-class employees lessening class at those companies? How do people deal with that? Are there anti-discrimination hiring laws?

It's not like I would mind if I were in, say, the Ukraine and someone asked me, What is up with all the overly demonstrative Christianity in the U.S. anyway? or You know, you guys are always talking about human rights, but I noticed all the people stranded in New Orleans were black, so just how advanced on human rights are you anyway? or Does everybody in the U.S. have a gun? I can't think of a single "embarrassing" or even aggressive question about the U.S. I wouldn't try to answer if I thought the questioner really wanted to know my thoughts.

But on second thought, perhaps there's something privileged about my own status as a white male American that makes me think I have all the questions and all the answers, when in fact my understanding of the caste system in India is actually just about nil and I wouldn't be able to ask an intelligent question anyway.

WTF of the day

Courtesy Salon comes this utterly weird reference by David Carr, NYT movie critic:

Steven Spielberg's "Munich" finds itself in a seemingly endless spanking machine.

Oh really? A quick search finds the RoboSpanker, a band or something (I don't care) called Spanking Machine, and this late 18th century description of such a device:

The following contrivance would, in a measure, obviate this inconvenience:---A machine might be made, which should put in motion certain elastic rods of cane or whalebone, the number and size of which might be determined by the law: the body of the delinquent might be subjected to the strokes of these rods, and the force and rapidity with which they should be applied, might be prescribed by the Judge: thus everything which is arbitrary might be removed. A public officer, of more responsible character than the common executioner, might preside over the infliction of the punishment; and when there were many delinquents to be punished, his time might be saved, and the terror of the scene heightened, without increasing the actual suffering, by increasing the number of the machines, and subjecting all the offenders to punishment at the same time.

Yes, everything more scientific back then when the guillotine was all the rage. But back to the film review... a film which "finds itself in a seemingly endless spanking machine."

I think Carr has been obsessing too much about Judith Miller.

Today's science news

Oh sure -- the judge ruled "intelligent design" is not science. Okay, it could have gone the other way, but everyone in this country has not gone completely insane, thank God. As for the right-wingers whose whole motivation is simply to use such cases to chip away at the First Amendment -- here's a big UP YOUR HOLE WITH A MELLO ROLL from me. Maybe you can talk about it in church on Sunday... oh, wait! You're not having church on Sunday anymore. Well, good luck.

No, the science story I really want to talk about is this piece (courtesy BoingBoing) about how Stalin wanted an army of superhuman ape-men "insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat."

That would have been awesome, comrade. Then they could have kicked the shit out of the Nazis even faster. Unfortunately, they might not have stopped at Berlin. I can see them now, scaling the Eiffel Tower.

How successful authors impress their kids: by appearing on The Simpsons

Courtesy Publishers Marketplace, this LA Times Service story on several famous authors looping parts on The Simpsons for an episode to be broadcast in 2006. The excited writers included Michael Chabon, Tom Wolfe, Jonathan Franzen and Gore Vidal.

"We started with the idea of Moe as Charles Bukowski," explains Matt Warburton, who wrote the episode. "We brought Lisa in as the person who discovers in scuzzy, barfly Moe something that we've never seen before: a poet."

Meanwhile, backstage at The West Wing, writers were trying todecide whether to dread or look forward to the moment when they have to deal with the death of John Spencer, the actor who played Leo McGarry on the long-running TV series (which, by the way, jumped the shark a couple years ago with that President's-daughter-kidnapped sequence of episodes).

Detente in Xmas "war"?

As you can see from this photo from the website of the Desert Trail, a newspaper published in Yucca Valley -- a desert town near Twentynine Palms -- we may have a resolution of the "war on Christmas": "Both sides were well-represented in the Twentynine Palms Winter Light Parade."

In other words, they aren't calling it a Christmas parade -- but they have Santa and Mrs. Claus.

Stupid Xmas gift of the year

You could get someone a Hello Kitty iPod "Be@rbrick" -- that's "bear brick" -- a pink plastic teddy bear that has a holder for an iPod. Whether the bear, or be@rbrick, is actually an iPod player/charger, or just a holder -- this cNet page calls it a "stand" -- this is the perfect cute, stupid and useless gift for your teenage girl giftees -- if they have pink iPod Minis.

Meanwhile, who could resist this story:

The types of mutilation are varied and creative, and range from removing the hair to decapitation, burning, breaking and even microwaving.

No, that's not the latest scadal from Guantanamo, Abu Gharib, or various CIA black sites in Eastern Europe. It's a description of the Barbie doll abuse surprisingly common among girls who own the famous doll.

"Whilst for an adult the delight the child felt in breaking, mutilating and torturing their dolls is deeply disturbing, from the child's point of view they were simply being imaginative in disposing of an excessive commodity in the same way as one might crush cans for recycling," said a researcher.

That's just what rendition is -- recycling!

Poor sense of direction

Not trusting commuters to be able to understand light rail system maps, the Houston transit agency printed mirror-image maps for riders going in the "other" direction -- and just confused people more.

Our local paper

It's fashionable to bash the SF Chronicle, but I've always defended it. I've always thought it does a decent job for a paper in a comparitively small market. But recently I've started to have problems with the way it does things.

Today's thing is actually nothing the Chronicle did wrong; it's merely a matter of tone. As The New York Times released a series of investigative stories about a teenager with a webcam who was pimped online, the Chronicle runs a story on bloggers promoting themselves with branded merchandise.

No, there's nothing wrong with that; it's a lightweight story with weak but perceivable business and technology links, though whether or not bloggers sell a few t-shirts makes absolutely no difference to anybody. The Times story, on the other hand, is not only much more serious, lengthy and studiously researched, it really documents several larger trends in the world of the 21st century: unsupervised kids with lots of expensive technology; the way the sex trade constantly pushes economic and technological boundaries; the persistence of pedophiles; the contrast between the kids' seeming sophistication and their naivete.

But the Chronicle: bloggers are selling t-shirts, get yours now.

Previously: Chronicle entertainment reporter not skeptical of J.T. LeRoy hoax
Chronicle blowing its near-monopoly?

San Francisco Chronicle, bloggers, webcam sex, online prostitution

Rainy days and Sundays

Busy rainy day, with a hell of a lot of time spent at church either rehearsing or performing with the choir. I joined the choir a few months ago and am one of the few people who can croak out the tenor part -- though I prefer the baritone. It's nice to be needed, I guess, and the ratio of basses to tenors is about 5:1, so I do feel like I should show up. It sure made for a busy day today, though.

During the afternoon I got a very little bit accomplished on my book. What was more important was getting back in the swing of working on it, prepartory to the week between Xmas and New Years, which I have off. If I can get some momentum going by next Friday I should be able to write a couple of chapters.

The gloomy weather and the feeling of obligation made me a little depressed today, but I have finally woken up to the fact that I get a little depressed every year around this time -- it's entirely seasonal -- so as long as I remember that, I don't feel too bad.

And now that all the singing is done for the day, I actually feel pretty good. I just wish I had a day off tomorrow. Maybe I'll get up late.

Chronicle chimes in on J.T. LeRoy hoax

Nine weeks after San Francisco novelist Stephen Beachy blew the lid off the J.T. LeRoy hoax -- demonstrating that the author of LeRoy's books was not a 20-something ambisexual former truck stop prostitute-turned-novelist, but a 40-something San Francisco woman (who herself has several aliases including Laura Albert and Emily Frasier) and/or her friends -- the SF Chronicle has chimed in with a is-he-or-isn't-she article that does much more to keep the ambivalence alive than to settle anything.

The Chronicle article references the New York piece but gives it equal weight with others -- most of whom, like LeRoy's new publisher, have a vested interest in continuing the hoax -- who claim LeRoy is real. The only new contribution made by the Chronicle article is the specious suggestion that belief in the LeRoy story is somehow linked to an appreciation of high art. Greil Marcus is quoted:

"What it all signifies to me is a deepening mistrust of the imagination, or the driving out of fiction by nonfiction," Marcus wrote in an e-mail this week. "People will read fiction about a gender-confused teenage or preteen parking-lot hustler -- but only if they can believe that what they are reading is true. Then they can celebrate the person as an artist while avoiding having to actually engage with art."

You know what this reminds me of? The Fox News hoax about the "war on Christmas." The reasoning goes like this: If you don't believe in Santa Claus, or Jesus, or J.T. LeRoy, you're somehow depraved. You don't have a true appreciation of seasonal joy/spirituality/art. You are unwilling, or unable, to confront the deep truths enshrined by these belief systems.

Well, I saw through Santa Claus a long time ago. I still believe in Jesus. But J.T. LeRoy -- I guess my problem is that I don't need there to be a white trash, self-educated former prostitute-turned-novelist. I just don't have any investment in that story.

Previously:
Reality comes crashing down on "J.T. LeRoy"
Doubts lead to cancellation of LeRoy gigs

Struggling youth and the people who struggle with them

Be sure to read this piece on Salon about struggling underprivileged youths and their "mentors," which are like the Big Brother/Sister program. The writer, Martha Baer, is a friend; see links to other articles by her at her website.

One of the interesting facts the piece hints at, but doesn't address directly, is the way AIDS has affected the working class population -- not the middle-class Castro District gays but the working class, ethnically-diverse, possibly closeted gay and bisexual men who don't live in the gay ghetto. The girl who is the subject of the piece is the daughter of a gay man dead from AIDS, but her whole social background is a completely different context: working-class, ethnic Daly City; heterosexual drug-using broken families; people with court dates and parole officers -- the landscape of the TV show "Cops." Yet the girl moves to "as close to the Castro District as" her father's ex could afford to move, and lives for a time in this middle-class gay environment: but Martha's story isn't really about that, "a story in itself."

I find myself drawn to these fish-out-of-water sitcom-ready situations, and wanted to know more about that part, but Martha's piece is really about the sense that the girl's whole background and social context conspires to drag her down despite the best efforts of Martha and the other middle class people in the girl's life.

Great piece. Read it.

John Spencer

Actor John Spencer, who played WH chief of staff-cum-VP candidate Leo McGarry on "The West Wing," died today of a serious heart attack. Spencer's character also had a heart problem and, like him, was a recovering alcoholic. But the most arresting bit of information was that as a teenager he played a love interest on The Patty Duke Show. I'd like to see a picture of that.

Says here that Spencer was also a native of Paterson, NJ, the home of famous poets William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsburg -- but he is not even listed on this page of famous Paterson natives such as Lou Costello, Chuck Connors and ballplayer Larry Doby.

Smoke clearing at snowed-in editor's house

Congrats to Myfanwy* Collins -- whom I met at the Squaw Valley Writers conference this year -- for completing her guest-edited issue of Smokelong Quarterly. The flash fiction online litmag has beautiful design and graphics, and I'm looking forward to reading the stories.

* (pronounced mi-FAWN-ee; of Celtic origin)

It's Bad Behavior Friday™!

A 29 year old man was arrested in Fairfax, Va. with a bag full of stolen books. His scam? He sold books on eBay and stole books to fill orders.
(Courtesy ShelfAwareness)

A Sf Chronicle consumer advocate was trying to get to the bottom of a mysterious email from the local DSL provider, SBC/Yahoo. He called SBC many times but five times was connected to helpless, and clueless, customer service reps in India.

In Fort Worth, Tx., a locally produced reality show called "Cheaters" created a confrontation between a woman who was secretly seeing a police captain and the woman's estraged husband. The TV producers didn't know, however, that the woman had gotten a restraining order against her husband, who had assaulted her twice early in the year. The resulting melee ended in charges against the show's producer and three others, as well as a felony charge for the husband who, by confronting his wife in the confrontation staged by the show, was violating the restraining order. The police captain was suspended and demoted.

Snacking youth

Today at the d.b.t.s. we hosted a fourth-grade class from a nearby public school. They came over at 10:30 and left at 1:15, and during that time they built graham cracker houses using gummy white frosting for mortar and M&Ms and Gummi bears as decorations; received and played with presents the company had purchased and I and my co-workers had wrapped yesterday; held mock business meetings; and ate the late-arriving pizza.

Twenty-seven fourth graders, and I have to say they were totally great. Despite all the sugar we were feeding them, despite the utter lack of any educational content to the day (the mock business meetings they convened in the conference room had something to do with building robots who "wrecked houses," played hockey, and watched children), they were all sweet and good-natured and polite and completely non-violent. So it was fun to have them around.

Ford reverses ban on ads in gay pubs

Twisting, twisting in the wind, the embattled Ford Motor Co. -- the brainchild of a mouth-foaming anti-semite -- has said it will reverse its decision to drop ads in gay publications.

The automaker claims there was never really a ban on ads to gays -- they just wanted to trim costs.

Ford now hopes to end an embarrassing public relations problem that left many puzzled. ... It was Ford's support of gay causes that led the American Family Association to call for a boycott. The association cited what it called Ford's "extensive promotion of homosexuality," including the company's training in tolerance of gays and ads designed specifically for gay audiences.

After Ford learned of the boycott, company executives began meeting with the association, which then agreed to temporarily suspend its boycott. The two sides talked on and off for six months. Two weeks ago Ford said Jaguar and Land Rover, but not Volvo, would stop advertising in gay publications. The family association claimed victory, but Ford said the decision was only a way for the company to cut costs.

In its letter on Wednesday, Ford said, "It is clear there is a misperception about our intent."

You almost feel sorry for them, trying to weigh the relative merits of pissing off the 15% of the population who are fundies, or the 15% of the population who are queer. They probably realized gays have more disposable income and are much more likely to buy Jags and Volvos.

Xmas feeling

If you're in a Christmas-y mood and feel like singing some Xmas carols, come this Sunday night to my church:
> Sunday, Dec 18th at 7:30pm
> St. Francis Lutheran Church
> 152 Church St. at Market St. in San Francisco
> MUNI: KLM lines to Church St. Station, or 22 bus to Church and Market

Mmm, time travelling

Today's headline that sounds most like the premise for a Monty Python skit:

Humans In England May Go Back 700,000 Years

Bit much, isn't it? If you had the choice, I mean. I'd rather go back, oh, maybe 125 years.

More book biz

If you're a writer of books you owe it to yourself to follow a small number of sites and blogs to inform yourself about the business. The post of the day is Galleycat's take on the economics of large sales for The Historian and similar books following it.

Everyone's looking for the next DaVinci Code, the book that sells not only to inveterate readers and to thriller fans, but to everybody and their mother and their mother's book group. (That book's been going strong for, what, something like three years, and more than 25 million copies are in print.)

When I was working for Borders 18 months ago, people used to come in and complain they couldn't find the paperback of The DVC.

That's because there isn't any yet, I said.

Why not? they said. They seemed annoyed, and even suspicious, that they had to pay full price, as if the store were perhaps hiding paperback copies so they could charge for the hardback. (And the hardback was selling for 40% off, so it was something like $16 -- little more than a trade paperback.)

I really had to think about my answer. The notion that publishers sell as many hardbacks as possible, and only then start selling the paperback version of the same book, was evident to me by the time I was a teenager. But I talked to several Borders customers during the nine months I worked there who didn't get this basic precept and, when it was gently explained to them, instead of saying "Oh I see" would get even more pissed off, as if this was somehow a whole conspiracy against them, the readers.

But the point is that these conversations with uninformed customers were a sign that word of mouth for the book was so strong that it was reaching people who weren't even familiar with bookstores.

Anyway, I started this post saying there are a few online sites and blogs writers should read all the time, so here goes:

• Galleycat and FishbowlNY (the latter oriented toward the larger media industry, but where else would you see a posting about the worst copy-editing miss ever?) on the Mediabistro site
• Miss Snark, a literary agent blogging anonymously about the biz
• Publishers Marketplace, which lists book deals
• Book Standard -- fairly dry publishing industry business journal, but the commentary section has some good readable stuff.

Read those every day and you're going to be pretty informed for somebody who doesn't work in the industry.

Litblogging my way to heaven

Courtesy Mediabistro's daily news blatt:
Cynthia Ozick profile in the NY Observer
Thriller writer Scott Turow interview in Mediabistro itself.

Thanks to the talented and attractive Michelle Richmond, whom I met at Monday's Fusion City event, for linking my summer project, The Secret Diary of a Prisoner in the Creative Writing Gulag, my satire of Lynn Freed's piece in the June Harpers about how awful it is to teach creative writing to American college students.

On Publishers Marketplace they list book deals. This was my favorite today:

Croatian and Korean rights to Brenda Shoshanna, Ph.D.'s THE ANGER DIET, to I.E.P. and Inner World Publishing, respectively, by Prava Prevodi in Croatia and Best Agency in Korea, on behalf of Noah Lukeman at Lukeman Literary Management.

Hmm, the anger diet for Croatians. If they follow that, the entire nation of Croatia is going to be mighty skinny by this time next year. Oh, wait, didn't they have that war thing? Maybe they're already skinny!

Most boats lifted

Interesting fodder for socio-economic arguments, especially in the wake of Katrina: a study of wages in California in the last 25 years found that the tech boom helped most workers -- except for the bottom 20 percent, since demand for lower-skilled workers went down.

Yes, a lot of restaurants and retail spurred by the boom do employ low-wage workers, but their wages remained flat; they have 5 percent less "purchasing power."

Satire is dead

Staff suicide wipes the smiles off faces at "The Daily Show;" the suicide was a receptionist and former intern. (Courtesy Mediabistro.)

A Wisconsin radio station has sold naming rights to its newsroom to a local bank, so:

What listeners will hear on air is something like, "Now from the Amcore Bank News Center, here's WIBA's Jennifer Miller," said Jeff Tyler, vice president of Clear Channel Radio-Madison.

This is a trend which has legs. Imagine a church, for example, selling the naming rights to the pulpit. "Now from the Jack-in-the-Box Pulpit at Gethsemane Lutheran Church, here's Pastor Rick Munson with today's sermon." You think that won't happen? A RADIO STATION SOLD NAMING RIGHTS TO ITS NEWSROOM. The apocalypse is coming, and is indeed now here.

Update: GOOD FUCKING CHRIST, people, I WAS KIDDING. And yet:

Disney offers preachers prize money to mention "Narnia" in sermons

Kill me now.

Trippy

Tonight to the new "Fusion City" event at the Edinburgh Castle tavern, where three out of the four featured readers -- Kim Addonizio, Charlie Anders, and Katia Noyes -- were friends from different parts and times of my life. And when someone pointed me out and said "He used to do Frighten the Horses, then Daphne Gottlieb, who also appeared, quinted at me and said "Oh yeah, we must have read together once at Red Dora's Bearded Lady," a dykey cafe and performance space that closed at least five years ago.

Kim Addonizio just got a two-book deal for new novels!

National Book Award finalist, Guggenheim Fellow and author of LITTLE BEAUTIES Kim Addonizio's MY DREAMS OUT ON THE STREET, a bittersweet love story between a young homeless woman and the husband she's long since lost (but is truly meant for), again to Marysue Rucci at Simon & Schuster, in a "good deal," in a two-book deal, by Rob McQuilkin at Lippincott Massie McQuilkin (NA).

When I congratulated her, she looked at me funny and asked where I'd heard it. Publisher's Marketplace, I said. That's where a "nice deal" is under $50,000, a "very nice" deal is 50-100K, and a "good deal" is 100-150K. Way to go Kim!

What was trippy about the evening was host Kate Braverman, who performed poetry to trancy music with a rock beat. So psychedelic -- it was like 1968, and the red curtains hanging on the wall also gave a mid-century feel. Next month she's doing something on Wm. Vollmann's Europe Central, which I'm reading now.

Chronicle blowing its near-monopoly status?

The SF Chronicle, which dominates Northern California (a huge area* the size of New England plus much of New York state -- how many major newspapers are published in that area?), is in financial straits despite its prime position.

The internet is part of the reason, particularly Criagslist, which siphons off classified advertising -- and who knew until now how important those classified ad dollars were to daily newspapers? -- as well as cable TV news. In addition, I think extended commutes are to blame -- who has time to read the paper before getting in the car? -- as well as corporate cutbacks that have people doing the work of two or three people.

For more than you ever needed to know about the Chronicle, see this American Journalism Review article.

* I even made a map. Curiously, I just had a conversation with someone joking about where "Northern California" ends as you traverse the central part of the state. "No one," commented my interlocutor, "wants to claim Visalia."

Bare shoulders on a cold evening

At last night's Writers with Drinks show I sat at the bar, as usual. You can hear fine there, on account of the excellent P.A. system, and it's fun to scope out people in the mirror. Besides, the visuals of writers reading are usually the least important parts.

Last night I was distracted when not one but two women came in, doffed their coats (there's no coat check, so where do the coats disappear to? No idea) and emerged wearing bare-shoulders outfits. One was in what I might call a modified bustier, white -- on a cold night in December, and they don't close the door to that bar. The other wore something that fit tightly around her torso and completely bared her shoulders, and she chose to sit right next to me, or in front of me if we were turned sideways facing the stage. She was very huggly-snuggly with her husband all night, so I only stared surreptitiously at the first woman, who was with a female friend. Tall and lanky, she stood fearlessly in her revealing costume and faced the stage with a hard expression. But the only interaction I had with people was when they would lean over my shoulder and order drinks. By the time I was on my second drink I was pretty buzzed, and I considered turning to some fetching lass who was pressed up against me and saying, "You know, we'll probably never be this close again," but even as I thought about saying it, it sounded stupid.

For the second half I moved up to the side of the stage and stood half-sitting on the edge of the pool table (they let you do that, which in any bar where respectable pool players meet is verboten) much closer to the stage. This was a great WWD evening -- all the funny readers were extremely funny, and it got better and better as the evening went on. So the last reader, Karen Joy Fowler, completely convulsed people. Of course, we were all pretty drunk by this time -- I know I was -- but it was a funny story anyway that she told, and it wasn't easy following a suggestive story about a boy and his unicorn.

Afterwards briefly connected with Liz and MC Charlie, but all they were on their way to another engagement, all their friends wanted to go eat, and I just walked home tippsily. That's one of the things I really like about that gig, it's only about 2/3 of a mile from my house.

In her cups

Badger posts about bras.

Have you looked at Marilyn's site lately? She must have gotten some intense New Yorker CD product for her birthday, because she's been posting season-related covers and cartoons for weeks now as illunstrations. I particularly loved this one from 1925 (!!).

What's cool lasts

Forty years ago today, on 9 Dec. 1965, "A Charlie Brown Christmas" premiered on CBS.

The "Peanuts" comic strip showed kids in all their geekiness, anger, joy and rage, their weird fantasies (in this case projected onto the dog), their insularity from adults. As a kid I totally identified with Charlie Brown, and I was thrilled that there was an adult out there, somewhere, who didn't have to pretend that life was perfect for kids, who understood that childhood was sometimes simply miserable.

Don't forget to check out the immortal mash-up of "A Charlie Brown Christmas" with Outkast's "Hey Ya!"

Girls gone wild

In news from the high school I graduated from, six of ten varsity cheerleaders have been kicked off the squad for drinking on a school bus on the way to an away football game. The best part of the story is the attitude of total denial of the mother of one of the remaining rah-rahs:

"Those removed from the squad were all really good girls. I know them personally. They are honor students from good families and did a lot for school leadership." In addition, she said, the Clear Lake cheerleading team as a whole is a group of talented athletes whose dedication to hard work has earned them a national title.

Indeed -- if getting drunk before "performing potentially dangerous flips and lifts" has got them this far, why argue with success? All I can say is, this never would have happened when I was at the school (*cough*) thirty-one (*ack*) years ago. The drinking age in Texas then was 18.

Previously:
Girl from neighboring high school was Advocate's gay teen diarist last year
Residents of Clear Lake area couldn't hack Hurricane Rita evacuation

Clear lake High School, chearleaders, teenage drinking

Patti ♥ Frank

Today on Fresh Air Terry Gross ran an interview with Patti Smith in which they discussed Robert Mapplethorpe's photograph of Smith for her first album, Horses.

Telling the story of how that photo came to be, Smith said those were her usual everyday clothes but the pose with the jacket slung over her shoulder was -- wow! -- in tribute to Frank Sinatra in the last scene of The Joker Is Wild. (Also: NYT review)

Thank you ma'am, may I have another!?

In yesterday's mail came two more rejection letters from Noo Yawk editors, forwarded by my agent. These included the hoped-for St. Martin's. Both editors included gnomic expressions of appreciation and ultimate rejection which my agent termed "sort of 'not for me' takes." Beyond that they aren't really worth parsing; neither had the "almost there" feeling I got from one or two previous rejections.

Curiously, with each rejection I appreciate my agent more and more. She's like Charlie Brown tearing down the field toward Lucy holding the football. This time for sure!

Meanwhile, there's a lot of wrinkled-forehead discussion in the news and in blogs about the state of publishing:
9 Dec 05 New York Times: Janet Maslin on "so-what" books
8 Dec 05 Galleycat: How novels are doing; also here
7 Dec 05 New York Times: How novels are doing

Previously: It's not you, it's me

Mouth engaged before brain

Headline: Iran President Wants Israel Moved to Europe

Hmm, now that's thinking outside the box. Perhaps we might see future headlines reporting on the mind of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

Iran President Orders Nation to Laugh at TV Comedies Whether They Are Funny Or Not

In Beautification Effort, Iranian Desert Will Be Renamed Iranian Forest

Iranian Chief's Energy Plan Has Some Hot Summer Weeks Moving to January

I have trouble with the 21st Century

I was initially excited by these photographs at The Morning News website. Then I read the interview with the photographer and found she staged them based on scenes in her own life.

WTF?! These aren't artsy photographs that are obviously staged; they give the appearance of candidness. (Is that a word?) But they're not candid, they're entirely staged. And even the interviewer seems to have been mislead by the exhibition title.

What they really are are idealized images set in some strange upper-class setting where all the people wear expensive clothing and partake of rich desserts yet are not fat. Fuck, next time I'll just page through Vogue.

Another bubble popped

It's a sad thing when your heroes sell out. Courtesy Metafilter:

Jack White has just written a song for Coca-Cola. End of. He ceases to be in the club. And he looks like Zorro on doughnuts. I don't believe in adverts. He's meant to be the posterboy for the alternative way of thinking.

Coca-Cola man. Fucking hell. And OK, you want to spread your message of peace and love, but do us all a fucking favour. I'm just not having it. It's like doing a fucking gig for McDonald's.

It must be even worse when you're a 1980s rock star whose 2000s rock star hero has sold out. The speaker was Oasis guitarist Noel Gallagher attacking White Stripes member Jack White for writing a song for a Coke ad.

Unfortunately the article goes on to point out that Gallagher himself is not above accepting a little coin from sponsors:

Noel and his brother Liam are believed to be pocketing a six-figure sum from Toshiba for endorsing its 803 MP3 mobile phone. Toshiba is sponsoring the current Oasis tour and the phone is being sold with a memory card carrying the video of Oasis' single 'Let There Be Love' and five songs recorded at an Oasis gig.

And that "six-figure sum" is in pounds sterling, which means you can double whatever it is. Let's all sing:

Money changes everything
Money, money changes everything
We think we know what we're doin'
That don't mean a thing
It's all in the past now
Money changes everything

Twenty cops cavorting

Official SF is agog over a website, now taken down, complete with video clips of cops blowing off steam by mocking city residents of various stripes. Video clips archived at SF Gate include:

... an officer ogling a woman he has stopped for a traffic violation. One shows two officers attempting tai chi to vaguely Asian music. The two later go into a massage parlor and radio dispatchers try unsuccessfully to reach them -- the suggestion being the two are having sex with masseuses. One video, with the theme to the old TV show "Charlie's Angels" as the soundtrack, shows various officers saying, "Oh, captain," and flicking their tongues suggestively.

You get the idea. The mayor said this was the "tipping point that will lead to changing the culture of the Police Department." Ironic, isn't it, that of all the the depredations of the last 25 years -- police riots in the Castro, an abysmally low murder conviction rate, the indictments two years ago of the (then) police chief and several high-ranking officers -- what will (supposedly) finally lead the city to do something about out-of-control cops is a bunch of p.i. video clips.

Her lips aren't the only part that's tight

In an entry headlined No Question Natasha Is Tight-Lipped, NY Daily News columnist Lloyd Grove provides some inspiration to Bush administration spokespersons looking for alternative ways to answer questions.

Any female crushes? "I can't go there."

What about non-Neeson male crushes? "I wouldn't share that with my shrink, let alone with the readers of the Daily News."

Oh, so she's seeing a shrink? "I don't have one right now."

What's the one thing people don't know about her husband? "You think I'd tell you that?"

So much more entertaining than McClellan!

Q. But how do we know they weren't tortured? They claim they were.

MR. McCLELLAN: I'm sorry?

Q. How do we know they weren't tortured?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, we know that our enemy likes to make claims like that.

Q. I want to go back to David's question about whether or not the administration is looking into any new ways of monitoring rendition activities in other countries that --

MR. McCLELLAN: I answered his question and I'm not going to --

Q. You didn't answer that question, Scott.

MR. McCLELLAN: I'm not going to talk any further about it.

Dept. of There's No Such Thing As Bad Publicity

Having learned from the mistakes of the past, right-wing Xtian pressure groups are refraining from organizing a boycott of the gay cowboy film Bareback Brokeback Mountain.

Yes, we learned that lesson with Basic Instinct:

"Basic Instinct" protests

"Basic Instinct" arrests

"Basic Instinct" opening

Among other effects, our protests created a huge amount of advance publicity for the film, which went on to huge box office.

Doubts grow on Kansas professor's story of beating

As I predicted Monday, the missing and non-jibing details of a professor's beating, supposedly at the hands of young men who were angry at his anti-creationist comments, are causing more and more people to doubt his story. Read the update at the Lawrence, Ks. paper, and be sure to read the reader comments that follow it.

Previously: Professor claims beating after he mocked creationists (last item)

Connecting to teenagers

My friend Katia offers another post about her adventures touring and promoting her book Crashing America. In her latest adventure she goes to SF's School of the Arts, reads her book and does a Q and A.

In this and a previous post Katia comments on connecting to young people over her book's protagonist, a 17-year-old dyke street punk, and about how meaningful it is to her to make these connections to teenagers who, in some ways, resemble her character. This is a meaningful and usually emotional process, this way of actually connecting to teenagers when they and you (the adult) both drop your guard and open up. As a former high school teacher, I know how moving this can be. it's great to have Katia reminding me of it.

The place to be Dec. 13

This month's RADAR reading series hosted by Michelle Tea is huge:

the RADAR reading series
a showcase of underground and emerging
writers and performers

at the San Francisco Public Library
Main Branch / 100 Larkin Street
downstairs in the Latino Reading Room
6pm sharp * all ages

Tuesday, December 13th

featuring

Kim Addonizio, who has written several books, including four poetry collections, most recently What Is This Thing Called Love; who has been a National Book Award Finalist as well as a recipient of NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships; and whose first novel, Little Beauties, was recently published by Simon and Schuster. Kim Addonizio lives in Oakland.

Patrick Califia, author of several books of short fiction, a couple of novels, and an out-of-print book of poetry; whose work focuses on queer sex and sadomasochism and whose most recent book is the vampire novel Mortal Companion.

Performer, choreographer, teacher and organizer KEITH HENNESSY; who directs CIRCO ZERO in performance-music-circus-ritual-actions for stage, street, and fair; who has lived and worked with a the pioneering collaborative companies Contraband, CORE, Cahin-caha, and cirque bâtard; who co-directed 848 Community Space, a thriving space for experimental culture, for twelve years.

Poet Jocelyn Saidenberg, author of the books Mortal City, Cusp, and, forthcoming from Atelos, Negativity; who is the founding editor of KRUPSKAYA Books and literary curator for New Langton Arts.

Hosted by Michelle Tea. Who bakes home-made cookies for you, the people.
After the readings, a question and answer experience will happen.
Ask a question, get a cookie.

What to do with that vidPod you're getting for Xmas

In time for the holidays and the dearth of interesting video content they offer, Salon has a new video clip feature. The total best bit is a jaw-dropping Xmas lights display in an Ohio suburb. Requires QuickTime; earphones suggested, or you'll scare the shit out of everyone sitting around you.

This is America

A Houston TV station will air the now-annual Victoria's Secret Fashion Show -- a cavalcade of six-foot-tall models wearing little -- after prime time instead of the nationally-schedule time of 9 pm, ostensibly because it wants to run a bunch of interviews, but really because it does not trust its own viewers to handle the half-naked dames.

And the Chrisitan Right pressure group Focus on the Family will boycott Wells Fargo Bank because of its support of gay-related charities. A bank spokesperson said "We absolutely made a $50,000 grant to GLAAD, and we're absolutely proud of our support for the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community." But another Xtian foamer group, the explicitly anti-gay American Family Association, got Ford to pull its ads from gay magazines.

So fuck off, Ford! Much as I like Volvos (and vulvas), I'm buying Japanese the next time.

And in Kansas, a college professor who mocked the Christian view of creation was reportedly attacked and beaten on a rural road. Here's a local report.

Mirecki said in a phone interview that the incident happened as he was "going out for breakfast, taking a drive and thinking about things." He declined to say exactly where it happened, and the sheriff's department did not release the location, except to say it was south of Lawrence.

Maybe I'm just paranoid, but something sounds fishy to me about this story. The beating allegedly happened outside his small down, on a road the guy had no particular reason to drive on, and no one witnessed the incident. Details are vague -- no description of the attackers' truck. No description of the weapon, "a metal object." Could he have faked the whole thing?

'The frisky underground'

Today the New York Times published a short article about a benefit sex bazarre in San Francisco. It quotes Carol Queen -- who is a terrific person who does more for the alterno-sex people in SF than I ever have or will -- as saying "the Bay Area is the capital of nonjudgemental thinking about sex," and quoted "one of three dominatrixes"* as saying "We're here as a gesture of solidarity." It talked about novelty underwear and "post-it style" pasties, and "anatomically suggestive magenta soap."

El struggle continua, don't it? God, it makes the San Francisco sexual underground sound like a bunch of lightweights. If you read the article closely, you can find a bunch of cool things, like the fact there's a program to help stippers deal with burnout and their income taxes. But the general tone is silly and almost mocking. I would like the rest of the country to see us as dark, menacing and subversive; at the very least, it would be nice for a national reporter to make the connection between this sexual underground and the fact that San Francisco is on the forefront of civil rights for alternative families, from the gay marriage issue to domestic partner rights for mixed-sex couples.

Yes, it's true that many of the people in the sexual underground are actually sweet and dorky. But our actions, our art, and our movement have much larger and more serious implications than panties that say "U.S. Out of My Underwear."

* Now we know what NYT style is for the plural of "dominatrix." Is it in the stylebook, I wonder?

Lowered expectations for authors

Remember the beginning of the 80s? After the 70s and all it had brought and not brought, the "malaise" of the Carter years and the election of Reagan compelled someone, possibly Garry Trudeau, to dub the nascent 80s "the decade of lowered expectations." That's what I toasted to, at least, when I was rousted out of bed on 31 Dec 1979 (I already had low expectations: I had gone to bed early), a glass of champagne was shoved into my hand, and I was asked to give a toast.

At that time I was living on Frederick St. in the Haight in a shared flat -- I seem to remember the rent for my dank room on an airshaft was something like $160 a month -- with another upper-middle-class slacker, a middle-class drug dealer, and a piano teacher who was trying as hard as he could not to be totally gay. The piano teacher, named Danny, had this girlfriend who was a total jewel. She was one of these outgoing, sweet, loving girls who go out of their way to make everybody feel included. (What? You haven't met one of those girls? They aren't very common, but they are a type. They're sweet, relentlessly cheerful, and often are craftsy) Since she was Danny's girlfriend she extended her sisterish affection to all the young men in that flat. When New Year's Eve rolled around, she's the one who got me out of bed where I had churlishly retreated, and gave everyone champagne.

But when I gave my toast -- "Okay... to lowered expectations" -- she said, "No, that's no way to be! Come on, what good things do you want to happen in the new decade?" That's the way she was -- refusing to let anyone feel sorry for themselves. I'm sure she went on to be a therapist, probably an art therapist.

I bring this up because the 00s must be the decade of lowered expectations for writers. Just look at this entry on the site of M.J. Rose, the "Buzz Your Book" person. She quotes a writer who says his philosophy toward marketing his book is Expect Nothing, Do Everything.

Personally, I sympathise with that attitude. When my very first book came out, the editor was full of promises and grand tales of how they were going to promote it. I nodded and smiled as I listened to her, as if I were listening to a maniac prattle to me on a bus. "That sounds great," I said to her, while thinking, "I'll be surprised if even a quarter of that actually happens." As it turned out, my estimate of a quarter was about 24% too high. They did practically nothing. Good thing I hired my own publicist.

Badger would love this

It's TiddlyWiki, a javascript-enabled blogging tool that contains new memes for hyperlinking, tagging, editing and publishing. It's almost frightening to behold. Maybe I'll experiment with it in a new blog.

What Violet did on her vacation

Violet Blue goes to Baja. That girl can write!

Scientology's alien landing strip?

Seen here is an aerial view of bluffs near Trementina, New Mexico, the site of strange circular markings made by the Scientology organization, as reported last week in the Washington Post and tonight on CNN.

According to the news stories, the circles -- which (as seen on TV, which offered a clearer view) are two interlocking circles with elongated diamond shapes within each circle -- mark the spot of an underground vault where the writings of Scientology's founder, L. Ron Hubbard, are stored. Nearby is an airstrip carved out on a ridge -- again, it was clearer on TV, though easy to see in this satellite shot.

Courtesy Gyromancer, a much clearer satellite view of the site.

Weird!

A few odds and ends, because you're leaving early today anyway, right?

Coffee helps "executive memory," study finds.

At a California border crossing, a woman said she was humiliated when a border guard demanded she express milk to prove a babe in arms was hers -- despite the fact she was carrying the baby's birth certificate.

A developmentally disabled boy took a penguin home... Oops, no, it's an urban myth. Cool idea, though. Would be great for birthday parties!

Bad Sex Writing award

The annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award has been given to British food critic Giles Coren for his novel Winkler. The cited passage includes this description:

...she grabbed at his dick, which was leaping around like a shower dropped in an empty bath, she scratched his back deeply with the nails of both hands and he shot three more times, in thick stripes on her chest. Like Zorro.

Read a short description of the ceremony and all the nominees.

It's Bad Behavior Friday™!

A Houston woman has been charged with a class B misdemeanor after calling 911 and telling them her "baby" was trapped in a storm drain. Her "baby" was a cat named Baby. Bonus points for the most creative spelling of a name that sounds like Angelica: "Angelikue."

Also from Texas, we have another in our series of stupid-ass suicides. When a sailor at a Naval Air Station someplace in West Texas tried to shoot himself, he injured himself and two others who tried to stop him. The gun went off as they wrestled for it, and a single shot injured them all. Don't try that at home.

Doonesbury nails Bush's torture past

Is satire dead? Maybe. But how else to better compare Bush's current attitudes on the subject of torture to, as Sunday's Doonesbury strip put it, "a long-forgotten incident on (the) Ivy League campus" of Yale -- alma mater of W and Doonesbury artist Garry Trudeau (as well as, of course, John Kerry). This Editor and Publisher piece interviewed Trudeau and checked the Paper Of Record (the NYT) on the 1967 incident in which members of Bush's fraternity were branded -- with a red-hot coat hanger -- with the Greek letter delta.

 
Aside from the frisson of pleasure one experiences from seeing Bush's words come back to haunt him (if indeed he is "haunted" by what appears in Doonesbury, which I doubt) the questions I have to ask myself are, why am I laughing at jokes about torture? Is it that the actions of our own country to trivialize torture have made it something appropriate for even the Sunday funnies? How ironic is that?

Also: Today's Yale Daily News reports on the cartoon and recalls its story on the 1967 incident

Attention writers

Miss Snark says "Japan is getting to be a very hot topic."

Who knew?! All you ex-TOEFL teachers, get your butts in gear and grind out those proposals for memoirs on your time teaching English or meditating in Japan.

Soundtrack

In case you were lacking recommendations for seasonal music, Slacktivist attacks the whole issue of Christmas music at length. His previous post was also about Xmas music.

I'd say he got carried away a little, but hey, it's the internet. Space on the internet is infinite.

Another brave one

I just stumbled across a feature on Advocate.com called High School Diary -- apparently each year they pick a queer teenager who writes a few columns about being out at their school. Last year's columns were written by Paige Palmer, a student at Clear Creek High School in League City, TX -- which I attended for my first two years of high school ages ago. Here are her articles:
Aug. 2004
Oct. 2004
Feb. 2005
Jun. 2005

Previously: SF Bay Guardian, 23 June 1999: Katharine Mieszkowski writes about a queer girl at another high school in the district, Clear Lake HS, from which I coincidentally graduated.

Shocked, shocked

Police discovered strippers performing lap dances and serving alcohol in an RV near a Tampa stadium during a football game; it was at least the fourth game this season the vehicle, emblazoned with the logo of a local strip club, had worked the parking lot. Several people were arrested, including one customer caught smoking a joint.

Absolutely on the money was police Sgt. Bill Todd, who said:

I don't understand what justification they think they had, bringing this to a family environment like a Bucs game.

Now that's an interesting way of putting it. Sort of like WMDs were the justification for the war in Iraq? Hey, pal, this is America -- profit is justifcation enough.

The only Xmas movie I'll mention

Gawker says Woody Allen's movie "Match Point," which will be put in "limited release" on Xmas*, is "good, really good." The film was shown in Cannes in May; here's Roger Ebert's positive appraisal.

Allen better hope it's as good as people are saying it is. He ran out of last chances a long time ago.

* This means it will probably be shown only in New York and LA -- if a film is released in NY and LA for at least one week during a calendar year it's eligible for the Academy Awards for that year.

Previously: Melinda and Melinda: so bad I wanted to be sick

Early 70s feeling

People say "the sixties" ended at Altamont, but in fact the notes of the sixties echoed for several years. Today Flavorpill SF touted a showing of the 1970 Antonioni film Zabriskie Point and linked to two pieces of period material concerning the stars, Daria Halprin -- daughter of SF royalty, her father was (and still is) a famous architect, and her mother, dancer and choreographer Anna Halprin was famous for helping create the alternative arts scene of the 1970s in SF; the girl later briefly married Dennis Hopper -- and Mark Frechette, a gorgeous, "troubled" young man who died five years later in prison, where he was incarcerated after robbing a bank near the Boston commune where he lived.

This mind-blowing interview with Halprin and Frechette is from a 1970 one-issue zine called Pluto. It perfectly captures the post-Altamont mindframe: equally self-absorbed and self-important on the one hand, bratty and nihilistic on the other. It helps you understand why the heightened "consciousness" of the 60s never amounted to anything.

Where's Daria today? Following in her mother's footsteps as head of the Tamalpa Institute, apparently one of the last outposts of the New Age 70s:

Tamalpa Institute, founded in 1978, offers training programs and workshops in the Halprin Process, a movement-based healing arts approach that integrates movement/dance, visual arts, performance techniques and therapeutic practices. This approach supports personal, interpersonal and social transformation, teaching new models for health, psychology, art and communication.

Shudder.

Today's satire, today

Writing in the New York Times, Campbell Robertson gives the celebrity breakup of Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey the full Monday morning quarterbacking pundit treatment, complete with the furrowed-brow single sentence paragraph:

Were we, as Americans, misled?

In The Onion, the best bit is perhaps the pumpkin pie chart showing "What Are We Giving Thanks For?" The Indians, for sharing their land; panda weddings.

Meanwhile the online personals company that runs on the Onion's site, plus Nerve and SFGate and God knows who else, Spring Street Networks, continues to feature that girl (left) who wants to hang out "in some moss by the water."

In some moss? I guess Hurricane Katrina wasn't enough for her.

Speaking of Louisiana, the story Goat Attacks Couldn't Keep Her From Church, in the Alexandria, La. Town Talk, is not satire at all.

"I don't know how I was able to get in the car that fast. I think God must have picked me up and put me there."

That's not satire, folks. That's the news.

Too much information

Badger posts on the phenomenon of finding out people's secret attitudes and wishing you hadn't. It reminded me of this guy who was a "team-building" consultant at a large company I once worked for. He went around from department to department leading these so-called team-building exercises and getting people to open up to one another, but what really happened is that people found out that their co-workers were racist or that they didn't like someone else's religion or had other objectionable attitudes. Every single department the guy went to, people worked together worse when he was done with them. It took months before management took complaints seriously and got rid of him.

Military ethics officer's suicide raises questions

Col. Ted Westhusing, 44, was no ordinary officer. He was one of the Army's leading scholars of military ethics, a professor at West Point who volunteered to serve in Iraq to teach his students better. He had a doctorate in philosophy; his dissertation was an extended meditation on the meaning of honor.

So it was only natural that Westhusing acted when he learned of possible corruption by U.S. contractors in Iraq. A few weeks before he died, Westhusing received an anonymous complaint that a private security company he oversaw had cheated the U.S. government and committed human rights violations. Westhusing confronted the contractor and reported the concerns to superiors, who launched an investigation.

In e-mail to his family, Westhusing seemed especially upset by one conclusion he had reached: that traditional military values such as duty, honor and country had been replaced by profit motives in Iraq, where the U.S. has come to rely heavily on contractors for jobs once done by the military.

In June, Westhusing was found dead in a trailer at a military base near the Baghdad, Iraq, airport, a single gunshot wound to the head.

Kiss o'death

A 15-year-old Canadian girl with a peanut allergy died after kissing a boy who had just eaten "a peanut butter snack."

Got braces? Better think twice about giving that blow job. Metal braces can cause microscopic tears in both condoms and flesh, according to a Boston dentist's own press release. I wonder just how she transmits that message to her teenage patients. Does she counsel just the girls? How about the boys who get braces -- does she provide equal opportuntiy counseling? Can you see being a teenage boy with braces -- you're probably totally mortified that you have to have them... and then to top it all off your attractive female dentist tells you, "By the way, just in case you're giving blow jobs, better think twice." Yikes!

Speaking of condoms, a Brazilian singer who promoted the use of condoms to stem AIDS has been disinvited to perform at a concert at the Vatican intended to raise money for Jesuit missions. The performer, Daniela Mercury, reprotedly has worked with UNICEF and the UN-sponsored anti-AIDS program.

Truth in labelling

Seen on Market St. on Saturday, an eight or nine year old boy walking with his late-30s parents; the boy wore a hoodie, probably from Neighborhoodies.com, with the legend HIPSTER IN TRAINING.