I am happy at others' successes

Congrats to Badger who got a genuine show of publishing interest for her beautiful translations.

Mystery author gets publicity by pretending to shun it

There's a new book called The Traveller by someone calling himself John Twelve Hawks. Now, in order to drum up publicity, the publisher is "admitting" that the byline is a pseudonym, and the real author "will only communicate with his editor on a telephone connection that is scrambled and that he calls on an untraceable satellite set." Pixel Kill suggests: "All a cunning hoax?" (which is an anagram for "A gala Nixon lunch" and "Ann Laughlin Ox CA" -- perhaps the real author is a Republican named Ann Laughlin who lives in Oxnard, Calif.) According to this article, the publisher created an online blog for one of the book's fictional characters. And this screenwriter calls the book "a marketing ploy masquerading as a novel."

Yeah, whatever. I guess now that Harry Potter and the last Star Wars is out, people need something to get all mysterious about. This guy is totally buying it:

In this blog I will be exploring the ideas in John Twelve Hawks book The Traveler, and how to impliment them into your daily life. For the last twenty years I have studied how individuals have managed to live out of sight of the surveillance state. Or as John Twelve Hawks calls it... The Vast Machine.

Sigh. No one yet has ever overestimated the appetite of the public for paranoid fantasies.

Pet Noir release party!

A party to celebrate the release of Pet Noir, An Anthology of Strange But True Pet Crimes will be held the evening of Friday, Aug. 19 in San Francisco. (Time and location) Live music and beautiful people.

Above Paris

Google Maps is supposed to work only for the U.S., but if you simply drag the map from right to left, you'll get to Europe. There they have maps with almost no detail, except national borders and some major rivers. But that still makes it possible to locate Paris, and then switch to the satellite view: voilá. Then it's just a matter of zooming. Here, for example, is the Eiffel Tower -- at first you see only its shadow, as the satellite photograph was taken early on what seems to be a sunny winter day.

You want a street map, you'll have to go to Yahoo.fr. Then you can see where Alex Chee went to dinner.

Michael Douglas: butt ugly

We've been getting multiple reports of Michael Douglas sightings and understand that he's in town to make a movie of some kind. You know what that means: Eventually, we will see his ass.

Thus saith Wonkette. Yes, it is sort of a given.

Can I just say something here? The gentleman is 60 years old. His ass, she is tired. Hang it up, bub.

Michael Douglas

Totally unrelated stuff

Rachel Kramer Bussel, erotica editor, freelance writer and interviewer, and cupcake afficionado, has a new site. Naturally she took the opportunity to post a half-naked picture of herself. Hey, if you've got it...

A runner with cancer ran a marathon of 26.2 miles inside the cancer ward at a local hospital while hooked up to an IV. Move over, Lance Armstrong.

A woman in Bombay, which was hit by catastrophic rainfall (37 inches in one day!!) recounts her all-night journey home wading through floodwaters.

This just in: Londoners are beyond annoyed

Courtesy RandomWalks, a London resident responds to the situation:

We're sick of this whole 'courageous London' thing. ... Terrorists cause terror. That's why they're called terrorists. If they didn't cause terror, they'd be called something else -- like 'annoyingists'.

Okay, Get Your War On it's not. But I was struck by the contrast with the attitude of WWII Londoners as satirized by Thomas Merton:

"Where do you come from, to see us English people in our silent, incomprehensible courage? What do the people in your country think of our resistance? Do they know how brave we are? Do they understand our bravery?"

The whole earth shakes with a giant bomb above us, so great that spontaneously, all over the tunnel, voices begin at once the words of the very same song, together: a song full of lying gaiety, cloaked in smut.

"Listen to them," says the man who has been talking to me. "You say you do not know your own nationality. Then if you have no national pride, how can you expect to understand our bravery?"

Dept. of Schadenfreude

Courtesy Salon writer Heather Havrilesky's personal site, a blog full of actual query letters from would-be filmmakers. Here's a snippet from one:

Our gal slaps him across the face with a serendipitous love that swerves him into the passing lane of a road that was taking him nowhere and she tells him to get off at the next exit. She knows comedy (as her father runs a low rent school where he teaches the craft), and she doesn't believe her new love should have to settle for court jester when he could be a crown prince in the movies.

Wow.

Worst. Division. Ever.

Read it and weep:

A division where no team is over .500. The mind boggles.

Say what?

My hearing is starting to recover from Monday evening's Litquake benefit at RNM Restaurant, where the room was jam-packed with writers and the people who love them. I glimpsed Chronicle editor Phil Bronstein, author Kate Braverman, all elegance and gold eye shadow, and a bunch of other people whose name tags I wasn't even able to see. Author Tamim Ansary chatted up Katia Noyes and I -- he was very friendly and nice -- and we also spent a good amount of time talking with Ann Cummins. And I got a chance to introduce Katia to Elise Proulx, who is on the Litquake board.

But boy, the room was packed and it was one of those situations where people were all shouting to be heard. My hearing is never great in noisy rooms, so the event was a little hellish for me until Katia and I got into a corner so that the sound was coming from only one direction at least. Still, my ears were ringing when I left, as if I'd been to a noisy basketball game.

So that's what an author's life is like. Oh, I should say, the food served, all from the RNM restaurant's kitchen, was really good. I'm plugging it because they donated all the food and liquor to the event. So give them a shot.

Stupid wet

It rained 37 inches in one day in Bombay today. Okay God, now you're just being silly.

Around the blogosphere

Min Jung Kim: one of the nicest people anywhere. But she's just tormenting us now.

Busy girls: Violet Blue, looking blissful with headphones (listening to her own podcast?), and Rachel Kramer Bussel, whose name is on the cover of the Village Voice this week.

Tony Pierce (no, I don't just blog cute girls, though sometimes it seems that way) writes about, yes, a bunch of cute girls, and his adventures with them.

Girl of the hour: former "beauty editor" Nadine Haobsh (sic). She blogged and lost a promised magazine job, but has just snagged a hot New York agent. Book, movie deals, TV shots sure to follow.

And StarryShine will never, ever get fat.

INT -- cafe

Me: ... Then she became a Christian.
Her: Uh, oh.
Me: No no, don't worry -- the good kind.

It's called deep-seated insecurity, honey

"It's hard to explain. Your whole life you think you're a heterosexual. Then you get pleasure from a homosexual. It disgusted me."

                       -- accused murderer trying to explain his over-reaction to his discovery that
                           the person he'd been having sex with was transexual

This quotation, taken from the testimony of the Gwen Araujo retrial, reminds one of how young men take pains to display their macho qualities and loudly object to the least intimation that they might not be, in fact, one hundred percent straight. They are terrified, utterly terrified, of being gay or being thought of as gay. So terrified that when something happens that demonstrates to them they are not as purely hetero as they've pretended to be, they go ape. Talk about disgusting.

Also: the same man said he found the transgender teen "attractive." And the above quote comes out differently:

"I think I was going through some kind of identity crisis because I seriously thought I was gay," Merel said. "Your whole life you believe you are a heterosexual and you find out you've been pleasured by a man. It disgusted me... Emotionally I was crushed."

Meanwhile, in the Los Angeles suburb of Monterey Park:

Take a daylight drive through Asian immigrant enclaves like Monterey Park and Irvine, and you'll see women trying to shield themselves with umbrellas -- even for the short dash from a parking lot into a supermarket. While driving, many wear special "UV gloves" -- which look like the long gloves worn with ball gowns -- to protect their forearms, and don wraparound visors that resemble welder's masks.

With pictures!

Focus on the Fundies

One nice thing about the Colorado papers is that they keep close tabs on the Christian crypto-jihadists down in Colorado Springs and publish frequent profiles and articles, giving the smiling fundies plenty of rope to hang themselves with. In the July 23 Rocky Mountain News, a profile of Focus on the Family founder James Dobson -- who doesn't even claim to be a minister but feels perfectly comfortable telling everyone how to run their lives under cover of his career as a "family psychologist," and whose first best-seller was entitled "Dare to Discipline" -- "sees the Republican Party as a means to an end," namely instituting a Christian form of sharia in the U.S.

And look at this: Ted Haggard, the leader of one of Colo. Springs' most influential megachurches -- it was the subject of a Jeff Sharlett article in the May Harpers -- is trying to lease land in Israel so conservative Christian tourists can come and cement their alliance with the Israeli far right. This Haggard statement reported by Non-Prophet suggests the reasons behind this alliance-building:

Pastor Ted says that Jews and Christians are forming an alliance to literally fight a war against Islam that will happen in the near future. Pastor Ted says that his greatest fear is that our children, right here in America, will grow up living in an Islamic Nation.

To be fair, the statement from Haggard was reported second-hand and Non-Prophet expresses some scepticism.

Earlier: Sharlett on Haggard.

James Dobson, Focus on the Family, Jeff Sharlett, Ted Haggard, fundamentalists, evangelicals,

Bad idea of the month

A man thinks it would be neat if Barstow were more like Las Vegas, with as many as 206 casinos. Part of his proposal is "A canal system extending to the Pacific Ocean (to) provide fresh water (Johnson said he imagines this happening through desalinization, or by bringing icebergs down the canals)."

This is one time I'm glad the Nevada gamining industry has lots and lots of money and power. You know, I'm perfectly happy to let Nevada, which has nothing else going for it, be the red-light capital of the country. That's really fine with me. They can keep it. Let Barstow -- for all its resemblance to Vegas in the sense that it is also a water-deprived crossroads in the middle of nowhere -- be Barstow.

Onward into the 21st century

Perhaps responding to my veiled note last week that I love it when she's funny, my friend Marilyn posts today about how her birthday was topped off by her "totally ghetto Puerto Rican" boyfriend busting into the theme song from The Partridge Family show. "I guess it's safe to say I was flabbergasted."

(I tried to find a clean link to those lyrics, but all I hit were toxic sites that plastered my screen with lots of popup windows, so I gave up. Caveat surfer.)

Marilyn Jaye Lewis, Patrtridge Family

Hoo ra

A high school journalist "wanted to see how far the Army would go" in recruitment, so he posed as a high school dropout with a marijuana problem. He got the recruiter to go so far as to go to a head shop with him to get a "detox kit" that would help him pass drug tests. The recruiter also said his lack of a high school diploma was no problem, suggesting he simply get a mail-order diploma. When the shit hit the fan, the two recruiters he dealt with were suspended, and the Army stopped all recruiting operations for a day while it did some retraining.

Now that's the kind of initiative that made America great.

Comments are off for the time being

I started to get some comment spam, so I'm turning off comments for a little while to see if it goes away. Sorry!

But if you want lots of goodness, you can't go wrong with today's Obscure Store lineup.

Plame/Wilson backgrounder

In case you feel you need a little up-close-and-personal with the CIA agent and her situation -- "I'm beyond disgusted," a CIA official is quoted as saying -- read this well-written article from Time, released on the CNN site.

Rove, Plame, leak

On the other hand...

For authors who come out of nowhere, a followup is often the hardest part. (Link courtesy Mediabistro)

And yes, everybody wants a book deal. An alleged child molester was writing a memoir, police in San Jose said.

Everybody has an agent these days

Cadillac Man has been homeless in New York City for about a decade. But now the Queens street dweller is banking on an unlikely ticket off the street: a book deal. Cadillac -- who is 56 and won't reveal his birth name -- caught the eye of the book industry after Esquire magazine published parts of his memoirs in May.

"I thought it was stunning," said Sloan Harris, an agent with International Creative Management Inc., which represents literary stars Carl Hiaasen and Toni Morrison. ... Although Harris never heard of a homeless man getting a book deal before, he added Cadillac to his roster of talent last month. The agent said a "major publisher" is courting his client, who spends his days squatting beneath an Astoria viaduct, scrawling his adventures longhand into notebooks.

I don't envy the intern who gets that transcription job.

EXT. - Astoria

In TELEPHOTO SHOT, we see PUBLISHING INTERN BIFF, carrying a briefcase, making his way across piles of trash and between the rusting carcasses of abandoned cars. He approaches a railroad embankment and walks along until he reaches a trestle.

        BIFF

   Mr. Cadillac Man? Hello?

BIFF wanders around until he finds, behind a rusting dumpster, a decrepit, long-dead Cadillac.

        BIFF

   Hello, Mr. Cadillac Man? I've got your proofs!


        CADILLAC MAN (off)

   Fucking Bush! Rumsfield and undisclosed location
   put Rove in a tunnel you can still hear him!
   Goddamn Republican shits!


        BIFF

   Sir, I've got the latest transcriptions.


        CADILLAC MAN (off)

   Oh, it's you, Biff. I thought it was those
   fucking Secret Service agents.

Also: This chick got a book and movie deal based on her blog, and that chick seems poised to do the same.

I love the smell of hypocrisy in the morning

The internets is running slow this morning, so I don't even know if this'll post, but if it does, read this entertaining analysis by Echidne on Sen. Rick Santorum and his various hypcrisies.

Worst-case scenario

A friend who manages a large chain bookstore reported on the Harry Potter launch: "At 10:20 p.m., just as we were about to pick the winner of the jelly bean game, which is the third activity, there was a loud pop and the power went out. Picture 400 revved-up kids and parents in total darkness. The emergency lights came on and we kept everyone calm while I tried getting PG&E on my cell phone to ask them what was going on. But eventually we had to evacuate everyone. Four hundred people went down the street to [the other big chain bookstore in the same neighborhood] and we locked the doors. Because we can't even sell the books without power -- no cash registers."

"Wow," I said, "I guess your numbers for Q3 will be a little off."

"Yeah, it wasn't until everyone was out of the store and I was walking back to my office to lock everything up that it hit me. I haven't heard anything from corporate yet, though. But talk about bad timing. That's basically your worst-case scenario."

Rove redux

Mr. Fabrizio said that even if Mr. Rove left the White House, he would continue to consult with Mr. Bush "unless they put him in a tunnel."

I don't know why the tunnel would stop him. Cheney still managed to run the country from his "undisclosed location."

Ahh!

After one day of real heat, when it reached 90 degrees in the city, and we implemented our weather emergency plan -- sit around the house all day naked, sipping ice water -- this morning when I got up it was cool (61°) and foggy, with a gentle, cool breeze off the ocean 5 miles away.

I love this city.

To do this weekend

Tonight on KQED, the local PBS station which has tahnkfully gotten back to playing classic movies on Saturday nights, The Fortune Cookie, a hilarious Billy Wilder black-and-white New York urban comedy with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon. Has one of the greatest Matthau takes ever. Wonderful.

Blacklisted screenwriter Walter Bernstein and other blacklisted Hollywood figures will appear at the Castro Theater [map it] Sunday after a screening of The Front (co-written by Bernstein) on a panel "Jewish Left? Writer?" as part of the Jewish Film Festival. "The Front" at 4:00, panel at 5:45.

Later on Sunday, Pamela Z will appear with other new musicians:

Heavy Snowflakes
Sunday, July 24, 2005
9 pm to 1 am
Mickey T's Drum Machine Museum
142 Taylor St. (btw. Turk and Eddie) San Francisco
Admission: Free

Performances and Media Works by:
Pamela Z (San Francisco)
Seppo Renvall, Jari Haanpera, and Maria Duncker (Finland)
Katya Gardea Blown (Mexico)
Christopher Fleeger (San Franciso)
Alaric Burns (San Francisco)
Aaron Wolf Baum (San Francisco)

Walter Bernstein, blacklist, Red Scare, Castro Theatre, Pamela Z, Jewish Film Festival

Knife-weilding woman on trial

In a case that hasn't gotten any attention outside the Houston area, a Houston woman is on trial for cutting off her husband's penis after he beat her, gave her a sexually transmitted disease, and raped her. The dog carried it off.

Update (Saturday): A jury found her guilty.

Film critics censored in Japan

Marxy posts evidence that Japanese journalists were censored by distributors of the recent Star Wars film. Distributors asked writers to remove certain references and critical comments or face blacklisting.

Focus on the fundies: Upper Midwest edition

Courtesy MNSpeak, visits to two different vast megachurches in suburban Minneapolis.

In November, Pulse visited bustling Wooddale Church:

Pastor Tim believes that despite His omniscience and divine power, God does not meet all our needs. People still need people. Using the overhead, he explains his theory using stick figures of Adam and Eve, bold arrows and a list of "needs" shouted out by the audience.

... followed early this month by the Twin Cities' City Pages visiting Grace Church:

Dees speaks of the American flag as the screens burst with images of the nation's banner, including coffin drapes. He unveils a sculpture of a kneeling soldier. When he says, "This memorial was made of the bronze altars, the bronze images, melted down from Saddam Hussein's palace," the congregation -- unprompted by the video monitors -- erupts into a long round of applause. "Is that not a fitting way to honor God, honor our service members?"

Meanwhile, they've been running a series all week long over on Salon about so-called "ex-gay ministries," institutions which try to "cure" homosexuality through various mixtures of prayer, "counseling" and compulsory masculinity. Some are sincere but misguided efforts to help people who are crushed by guilt, some are weird cult-like organizations, others are out-and-out scams. I haven't paid much attention to the series because I just don't need to know the details to know how full of shit these programs are, but it's there if you want it.

Not all that glitters is gold

Courtesy Obscure Store, this mugshot on Smoking Gun of a paint huffer. Guaranteed laugh riot.

I was also taken by this photo of the British police and their fearsome bomb-sniffing dogs.

Plus ca change, etc.

Apparently the Daily Show killed last night. In a musical number set to a film sequence from Bye Bye Birdie, characters enacted the fateful Matthew Cooper - Karl Rove leak:

Matt (as geeky kid): Hello Mr. President, this is Matthew Cooper, can I speak to Karl Rove?
Rove (as woman in bubble bath): Did you hear about Joe?
Matt: He's a horrible guy!
Rove: He was sent by his wife
Matt: I hear she's a spy!
Rove: But it isn't a crime
Matt: Did you call her his wife?
Rove: Now go write it in Time!

Then Jon Stewart had on the perfect guests to comment on the whole thing: Woodward and Bernstein.

That's all on the increasingly invaluable Mediabistro site, specifically their Fishbowl NY page, which does for New York media what Wonkette does for DC. You know, if I had to choose only one site to pay-subscribe to, I'd drop Salon and keep Mediabistro. (See earlier entry.)

Mediabistro, Salon, Rove, Jon Stewart, Daily Show

Women envy

Kenyan women who were raped or abused left their husbands (or were thrown out) and formed their own women-only village. They began supporting themselves selling unique necklaces, and built a school. Now the village is the target of regular attacks from local men who are envious of the women's success.

Support Litquake!

I read last year and had a great time shmoozing with people, and now that I have an agent* I feel like a real author again, so I'll be attending the July 25 Litquake benefit dinner here in the city. It's a hundred bucks, but where else are you going to get a chance to shmooze with Amy Tan, Po Bronson, Daniel Handler and other local (yet nationally famous) luminaries? It's a tax deduction! So get on the phone and reserve your ticket, too.

* Yes, it's true! Just over two years after finishing my novel Make Nice, I have an agent. Next week she's going to start sending the book to publishers. Exciting!

Coincidentally, there's a piece on Mediabistro today, "How I Got My Agent." Part of a series, apparently.

Previously: A step toward getting the agent

War of the Worlds: it's all about family values

Nice Annalee Newitz piece on War of the Worlds in which she wonders:

As everybody embraces, Tom's estranged son finally calls him "Dad." Ah yes, the balance of things has been restored: for, after all, as the voice-over explains, "Man has bought his birthright of the Earth." There is no mention of woman. Doesn't it seem weird that a movie which has updated the entire 19th-century scenario of War of the Worlds—moving it from 1898 London to 2005 Brooklyn -— doesn't update the repeated use of the word "man" to describe all of humanity? I mean, while you're transforming your main character from an effete writer to a burly dock worker, why not say that "humanity has bought its birthright of the Earth"?

She also draws attention to the lame, abrupt ending and weird use of the voice-over. The voice-over is rarely a good idea. It's a literary device imported from books (where we accept an omniscient narrator) only awkwardly to films and television, which tell stories primarily through images, not words.

One thinks of the original release of Blade Runner, which used voice-over by Harrison Ford (at least he appeared in the movie) to cover some of the awkward cuts made by the producers and the happy ending they tacked on ("Tyrell had told me Rachael was special: no termination date"). The "director's cut" re-release dispensed with the voice-over, and the film appeared as designed. I wonder if WOTW could survive having the narration removed.

Annalee Newitz, War of the Worlds, Blade Runner

One more note on the Freed Screed

The website of author Lynn Freed, whose essay in the July Harper's magazine caused a small stir as well as a funny but somewhat strained parody, says the essay was actually scheduled for September* -- when her memoir (from which the "essay" was no doubt drawn) is scheduled to be released. But it made much more sense to release it in July, at the beginning of summer lit workshop season.

* Thanks to someone on the Emerging Writers Network blog for pointing that out.

Earlier: Discussion on Freed Screed continues, and a Rick Moody essay on almost the same subject.

Lynn Freed, Rick Moody, literary workshops, memoirs

News from friends

No, my world does not consist entirely of web surfing and making rude comments about the foibles of others.

Marilyn posts an entry that makes me wish she would be funnier more often.

Violet confronts her frustrations about the erotica writing field -- I know just how you feel, doll.

Rachel K-B has a new interview with a mainstream editor, part of her series of publishing industry interviews posted at Mediabistro. If you're a writer and want to get published, a membership in Mediabistro is really worthwhile. There's a lot of great content on that site.

Kmi Addonizio's novel Little Beauties is now available.

Animals in the news

In Washington, residents of the small town of Enumclaw were taken aback when it was revealed that a local farm was a "destination" spot for people who engage in bestiality. The farm's popularity became evident when a man died after having sex with a horse and deputies investigating the death discovered hundreds of hours of videotape of men having sex with horses. Even a Seattle columnist was speechless.

And in Minneapolis, a pig that became famous in 2001 for biting a burgular died of heart failure.

Minions! I want more minions!

Headline of the day:

Gates Puzzled by Lack of Programmers

Seems Bill Gates is mystified why someone would want to become, say, a gym teacher rather than a software programmer. "I mean, are they making breakthroughs like speech recognition or artificial intelligence? I'm dying to see these new games they're inventing," he said.

Speaking as a former high school teacher, I'd say gym teachers, and others -- faced with youths speaking an incomprehensible patois and pretending to know what they don't -- make progress in speech recognition and artificial intellegence every day. Computer programming, on the other hand -- that shit is hard!

Anyway, Bill's in luck. HP just laid off 14,500 people.

Bill Gates,HP, lack of programmers, vocational training

Focus on the fundies: With Supreme Court vacancy, Christian Right looks to cash in chips

By [1980], white evangelicals, who four years earlier had supported the election of [Jimmy Carter,] a Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher, a man quite open about the central role of faith in his life, instead voted overwhelmingly for his defeat, switching their loyalties to Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party.

Now, with an opening on the Supreme Court that offers President Bush the opportunity to alter the course of American jurisprudence, the alliance between Republicans and religious conservatives has reached a defining moment.

The Chicago Tribune article goes on to say that religious right leaders are growing impatient with Bush and "If we don't get a decent nominee, we've got to ask ourselves what we have been doing."

Meanwhile, a Colorado congressman -- curiously, his district includes Littleton, the location of Columbine High School -- suggested:

"...if [a terror attack] happens in the United States, and we determine that it is the result of extremist, fundamentalist Muslims, you know, you could take out their holy sites," Tancredo answered.

"You’re talking about bombing Mecca," Campbell said.

"Yeah," Tancredo responded.

fundamentalists, Christian right,conservative, religious right, Supreme Court

What age are we talking about? Perhaps the 1950s

A Seattle-area high school confiscated and shredded copies of the creative writing class's literary magazine when they discovered one poem discussed a first sexual experience. The poem's 17-year old female author "said her verse was about the pressure teenagers face to have sex and the disillusionment that can follow." Despite this seemingly responsible approach, the district ruled the poem was... wait for it... "not age-appropriate."

Uh, if they're old enough to have sex, they're old enough to talk about having sex.

Pointless story of the week

Woman Keeps Finding Herself Back in Barstow

And keeping with the vehiclular theme of that piece, here's a Seattle Times story about people who are so stupid they will buy a car on the internet sight unseen.

Scientologists forge new front in proselityzing

This isn't on the web; I'm typing it from today's San Francisco Examiner, P.J. Corkery's column, page 5:

Now we're in North Beach, where the Siren Sisters of San Francisco -- Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White, Police Chief Heather Fong, District Attorney Kamala Harris and Emergency Services Chief Annemarie Conroy, always generous about helping good causes -- were sitting down to a lunch Friday to help the kids at North Beach's Yick Wo Elementary School. At a silent auction held by the school's friends last May, the Siren Sisters agreed to sit down for what was planned as a typical rollicking San Francisco Friday political lunch. A man who described himself as "a North Beach lawyer" bought the lunch for $700.

But when the ladies arrived, they found five other guests, including the lawyer, one George Shieman, already in place... and with something other than politics and a fun Friday lunch on their minds. Turns out the lunch with the four top women officials was won by Scientologists. And the five Scientologists, led by Shieman, were intent on missionary work. The ladies endured with good grace nearly two hours of nonstop pitching, replete with books and DVDs about L. Ron Hubbard.

Said one lady, "This was a real misuse of a charitable event, coming in with a secret agenda." Meanwhile, at another table, Willie Brown and Joe O'Donoghue watched with amused eyes. Now the friends of the Yo Wick School are trying to figure out what to do with another get-together sold at the auction: a tour of City Hall by Gavin Newsom. Yep, the winner, paying $1000 cash, of that event was also George Shieman.

Scientology, proselityzing, San Francisco

Pix

I posted a few photos taken today on a walk we took around the neighborhood, as well as a couple of miscellaneous photos.

Remember, it adds life

An Indian photographer is in trouble with Coca-Cola for composing a photograph showing a pump and a bunch of empty water jugs in front of a Coke ad.

"As a photographer, it is my take on the severe water shortage in the state and across India. It is a fact and an irony that there is a shortage of drinking water while Coca-Cola is available everywhere."

Mr Haksar said he should be allowed freedom of expression.

More on writing and the teaching of it

Discussion continues about the Freed Screed, but over at The Atlantic, Rick Moody has written what can only be described as a competing essay on "his earliest years as a writer, and the kind of teaching that helped or hindered him". Thanks to Katia, who commented that Moody's piece was "much more insightful about writing workshops" than Freed's in Harpers.

And here's a long, thoughtful reaction to the Freed piece.

Lynn Freed,Rick Moody, creative writing, creative writing gulag, Freed Screed

Bad judgement of the month

A T-ball coach allegedly paid one of his players $25 to injure a mentally-disabled teammate so he wouldn't have to put the kid in a game. A policeman said of the coach: "The coach was very competitive. He wanted to win."

Come on, people. T-ball??

And in television, it turns out that the executive producer of a reality show -- excuse me, a documentary -- about online dating is named Terence Wrong. That's right: a dating show producer is named "Mr. Wrong."

More diplomatic niceties

On the heels of Jacques Chirac's rude comments about English food, the governor of Tokyo prefecture has said "French is disqualified as an international language because French is a language which cannot count numbers." Apparently he meant the fact that French does not have a separate word for 80, using instead quatre-vingts or "four twenties."

Up in arms, 21 French teachers and researchers in Japan are suing Shintaro Ishihara, saying his comments endanger their livelihoods. They're suing for 500,000 yen which, by the way, is trois mille six cents quatre-vingts trois Euros.

Freed Screed revisited

The only online forum I can find tackling the Freed Screed is the one at the Chronicle of Higher Education's website, where someone posts a response, which I quote in part:

Freed's essay is troubling in several ways. For one thing, she insults her students, who, if they were to read her article, might feel violated -- justifiably so, since she makes her living supposedly teaching them with respect and not the condescension or resentment over some of their being unable to "get" what she tries to convey. For another thing, its having appeared in a mainstream magazine that contains a lot of good work and progressive vision is unfortunate, in that it sullies the articles that appear with it. making the magazine slightly less trustworthy. But then, her embarrassing revelation of her unhappiness, in a lovely writing environment, lucky to be assigned the piece and to have a creative writing teaching job -- well, if only she could voice more gratitude and simple humanity.

Blogger Frances Dinkelspiel has another view:

The worst part about the Harper's article is the title.* It makes it seem like Freed hates teaching because she hates the students. In fact, Freed dislikes the classroom because of the time it takes away from her own writing. She gets so absorbed in teaching she has little room for creativity. The article is a sad confession of her own limitations.

* "Doing Time: My Years in the Creative-Writing Gulag"

And I can't remember if I posted this before, but Galley Cat has a run-down of other reactions, including the most over the top, as well as the parody in the form of a blog, which Galley Cat editor Nathalie Chicha calls "the best blog I've read in weeks."

Lynn Freed, creative writing, creative writing gulag, Freed Screed

Area man is self-hating gay

Courtesy Wonkette comes this news that the spokesman for homophobic Sen. Rick Santorum is, himself, gay. And African-American.

Now we know who Ken Mehlman was speaking to when he apologized to black people for the Republican Party's infamous "Southern Strategy": self-hating black people who work for Republicans.

Slamming Mehlman's apology, by the way, was Rush Limbaugh, who uttered an analysis all too appropriate for Santorum fans: "Republicans are going to go bend over and grab the ankles." Or perhaps he actually had in mind Mehlman himself, who is the subject of rumors about his sexuality.

But back to Santorum, who was recently spanked by Sen. Ted Kennedy for suggesting that the Catholic Church's clergy abuse scandal in the Boston region was somehow linked to the area being a stronghold for liberal voters. (Yeah, the connection was hard for me to see, too.) Yesterday Santorum refused to apologize for his words.

Ken Mehlman, Rick Santorum, Rush Limbaugh, Robert Traynham

Never love a writer

A woman was floored when she opened the Sunday Times to discover her ex had written about their relationship and breakup,* revealing some of their most intimate details. (Not her name, though.) Of course, she may well turn around and write a revenge piece. But it seems to break some social taboo to write in an unflattering way about someone and not even warn them that the piece -- presented as nonfiction -- is coming out.
* Link courtesy Maud Newton.

Words are powerful and, with the advent of the Internet, more and more permanent (some email exchanges I had in the mid-90s are archived on websites, for example): I said something in passing about another writer's work more than ten years ago in a newsgroup -- something negative, I guess, but (I thought) trivial -- so trivial I didn't even remember making the comment. That person proceeded to cut me dead for years, to my complete mystification. Then years later, that person was asked by another writer what she thought of me, and her anger actually made it into this other person's book.

Not every sex radical likes loudmouthed rhetoricians like Mark. He's given to attacking others if he disagrees with their methods; when I mentioned him to ________, she shook her head and told me of his on-line diatribes against her. His indie sensibilities... combine with an elitist attitude that allows him to dismiss much of what's floating around out there in the marketplace. "There are some people who seem to be promoting themselves more than the issues they're talking about," he commented. He didn't seem to consider that he himself might seem a bit of an egotist, since he did start a magazine to publish his own opinions. **

Only after I read that -- more than four years after this woman had begun spurning me and perhaps six years after the alleged "online diatribe" -- did I form even the most remote memory of saying anything about this woman. In fact, I don't disapprove of her "methods" and I feel like I would remember composing "diatribes" (plural!) about someone. But who knows -- I'm an asshole sometimes; I'll own up to being an egotist and even "elitist." Maybe I did say something negative; in those days, the mid-90s, you did feel like you could do anything on the internet with total anonymity and impunity. Or maybe it wasn't me, maybe somebody else posted something anonymously and she assumed it was me. I don't know, because I've never asked her about it. And ironically I can't find any evidence of any "diatribes" archived online. All I have is her continued scorn, and that book.

But back to the jilted woman and the NYT article in which she was pilloried. One can only imagine her shock. It's not like she was slagged in a newsgroup, or a book review, or even the Dick Cavett Show. She was ripped in the Sunday Styles section of the New York freakin' Times. Lackadaisical members of the bourgeoisie on four continents got to read about the most personal details of her former relationship over their Sunday coffee and croissants. An illustration accompanying the story depicted her -- let's use her words -- "as a grotesquely oversized, adultly breasted infant girl, arms and legs spread wide while a little boy frantically filed away at iron bars to make a prison break from a heart-shaped metal cage." Now that's some world-class bridge burning.

"I somehow knew my boyfriend would write about us," she says wanly. Well, you know what they say about falling in love with a writer. I've been reluctant to use real people in my work, with a couple of exceptions. In one story, in fact, I used what I thought were very clear emotional themes taken straight from a current relationship and put them into the title story in How I Adore You. But when I gave the story to the person I was having an affair with, she was mystified as to the connection between the story and us.

So I have a hard time doing it even when I try. And I'm glad of that, because there are very few people in the world I would want to crush in print, no matter how many, or how few, read it.
** from Weird Like Us by Ann Powers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000.

Ambiguous headline of the week

Novel warhead may bust deepest bunkers

No, it's not about the Harry Potter launch, though the 700-page tome may well be considered a weapon if wielded incorrectly.

Reporter 'should be shot' for suggesting Rove broke law: Congressman

A U.S. congressman from New York suggested Tim Russert and other journalists should be "shot, not Karl Rove" for criticizing the portly presidential aide. (Link courtesy Mediabistro's Newsfeed email.)

What was classic about the statements by GOP Congressman Peter King was this rationalization:

Listen, maybe Karl Rove was not perfect. We live in an imperfect world. And I give him credit for having the guts.

Isn't that what they always say whenever one of their own gets caught? Oliver North, G. Gordon Liddy, James Watt, and all the other convicted felons -- they all get a free pass from the party of high moral values and patriotism. And another thing -- isn't it typical for them to equate criticism with "being shot"?

King is becoming well known for his willingness to shoot from the lip. Check out this correspondence when a constituent wrote him to protest Rove's comments a few weeks ago about how liberals merely wanted to "offer therapy and understanding" for Sep. 11 attackers.

Rove, Peter King, reporters should be shot

Those nutty Australians

Here's the Australianism of the month: rort. From context, I gather it means "infraction" or "incident in which a rule is broken," and can be used as a noun and a verb.

But Piggins wasn't backing down from his crusade against the rorting of the salary cap that he believes is going on in the game. He was quoted yesterday describing the salary cap as "a joke", that it "just doesn't work" and that the league had to do "a better job of policing it. It should be fairly obvious, some of the stuff that is going on," Piggins said.

Forward into the 21st Century

Noted on BoingBoing, a link to this humorous post about a "renegade party". Fortunately for the rest of us, someone was brave enough to post a comment asking what a "renegade party" is, and the original blogger was kind enough to answer. Apparently it is a sort of rave held without permits on someone else's property, and furthermore seems to be some kind of roots movement:

I know folks have these impressions of ravers as cracked out teens, but that's not what this was at all. Most of us are educated professionals who were sober and being goofy as hell. Many of us grew up on renegade rave culture and love good music and dancing under the stars. Unfortunately, the worst parts of rave culture ruined the fun for the rest of us. All we want is a fun dance party with our friends.

I love how middle-class people with straight jobs take pains to say they are "educated professionals," as distinct from, I dunno, drug-addicted street punks or white-trash oxycontin addicts, I guess. "Oh, I'm not really one of those 'ravers' you hear about, officer/Mom/Dad/boss -- I'm an educated professional with a full-time job, medical benefits, an ESOP program, stock options, airline points and a mortgage. And sober 'as hell.' And soon I will have children, whom I will not believe when they tell me this exact same thing."

rave, renegade party

Job of the month

Get paid for watching porn. That's right -- a San Francisco company is looking for people to watch porn DVDs and write capsule summaries for their online catalog. Like this:

Roadside Affliction (DVD, 78 min.) -- Join Capt. Sparky, Lt. Wiggly, and their privates for an explosive encounter you won't soon forget! We begin with the gang riding in their inadequately-armored Humvee down a road in Tikrit. The tension is so thick you'd have to throw a bomb to release it -- and someone does! Soon the squad is exchanging smoldering looks and even hotter profanity as they gather around Pvt. Legless and Pvt. Armless, surrounding them with hot, wet first aid. Then Lt. Wiggly and Sgt. Gruff get it on, in a knock-down, no-holds-barred fight over who's to blame. As the other members of the squad fire off round after round of hot molten lead, Lt. Wiggly can be heard screaming "More! More! Fuck it all!" The film's last hot scene, with three soldiers in a death embrace exchanging body fluids, is one to write home about.

Okay. But it's a real job. Really.

If this is summer, it must be time for brainless fun

Unwilling to watch the Tom Cruise train wreck any longer, the ent'ment press is turning to his finance, Katie Holmes, whom Salon calls a fem-bot and the Telegraph (U.K.) says is being chaperoned by a Scientology minder who says she is Katie's "best friend."

Jessica Rodriguez, 29, a senior member of L Ron Hubbard's Church of Scientology, denied that she was "working" with Holmes. "Oh no, we're just best friends. . . Well, Katie has a lot of friends." And how long have you been friends? "Oh, a while," Rodriguez said. "I don't know."

Right. You can also tour the new site Tom Cruise Is Nuts or read Salon's four-part series on Scientology.

By the way, I don't know if anybody ever reads comments on somebody else's blog, but did you notice the two comments after I mentioned I wouldn't be seeing "War of the Worlds"? Really odd that they came within ten minutes of one another, when I generally have almost no comments on this blog. And "sporatic emp" -- what the fuck is that?? And the other guy, who commented:

It's too bad you've made up your mind to not see it. You've probably missed a great many good films this way.

Something just a little too smooth and haughty, too reminiscent of Cruise's own "You haven't studied the history of psychiatry like I have" comments, about that "You've probably."

Focus on the Fundies

Fundamentalist minister Rod Parsley, who is closely tied to right-wing Ohio politician Kenneth Blackwell, is an open bigot:

The God of Christianity and the god [sic] of Islam are two separate beings. ... Muhammad received revelations from demons and not from the true God. ... Islam is an anti-Christ religion that intends, through violence, to conquer the world.

"Rod Parsley and I are friends," Blackwell said. "We have found common ground on a host of social and cultural issues from the protection of innocent life to the defense of traditional marriage."

In the Beliefnet story, back to Parsley now:

Saying success doesn't come without sacrifice, Parsley notes that many people refer to his church as Pentecostal, prompting a treatise on the etymology of the word Pentecost.

"Why do you think they call it Pente-cost?" he roars. "Because it's gonna cost you something!"

Arrgh. Head... hurts...

Also on the fundie beat, the Guardian has a story on the growing market for fundamentalist fiction.

What do you call 14 Canadians with a secret?

Fourteen customers of a British Columbia supermarket snagged copiesof the new Harry Potter book when it was accidentally put on the shelves last week. A judge (acting on whose motion, the story doesn't say) ordered them to keep quiet about what they've read until the book's official release at midnight Saturday. And they have to return the copies to the Canadian distributor. The distributor will send them back copies complete with the author's autograph on release day, along with a "gift pack."

Dept. of Better living thru chemistry

A "popular" drug to treat Parkinson's Disease, Mirapex, has been linked to sudden increases in compulsive behaviors such as gambling and sex. When you stop taking the drug, you stop your dissolute behavior.

Immediately makes you wonder about famous Parkinson's patients Pope John Paul II, Billy Graham, Michael J. Fox, and, curiously, several dictators, including Mao Zedong, Adolf Hitler, and Francisco Franco. I don't guess any of the latter were on Mirapex, though. Maybe if they had been, they could just have had obsessive sex and not killed so many people.

Hello, White House? Ron Ziegler calling!

White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan got freedom-fried by the press corps today when he refused to comment on confirmed reports that Karl Rove leaked information on CIA agent Valerie Plame to the press. Here's the AP story. Catch the video of the press conference on Crooks and Liars (link courtesy Wonkette), and be sure to watch Countdown with Kieth Olbermann tonight on MSNBC, if you have cable.

Rove, Plame, McClellan, Olbermann

Good morning, good morning, good morning - guh!

5:15 a.m. -- gunshots. Definitely not firecrackers. Not close enough to be on my block, though, so I decide not to check it out. 5:45 a.m. -- garbage collectors come by, con escandalo typico. The garbage cans are all plastic now, but that doesn't stop them from making big hollow thumping noises when they're set down or moved. 6:15 a.m. -- can't go back to sleep, so I get up. The cats are happy about it.

Did anybody not in SF see one of the Giants games that were nationally broadcast this weekend? Fox did the Saturday afternoon game, ESPN did the game at 5 on Sunday. If so, you got to see San Francisco summer weather at its finest and weirdest, particularly the fog-plagued game on Sunday. The Giants lost both, but they were close, getting the tying run on base in the 9th in each game, and they were interesting, good games. Fun to watch.

The Giants just aren't making it this year, though. I take those two losses as a predictor for the second half of the season: close to winning, but not enough.

In a speech this weekend in Aspen, Sen. Hillary Clinton compared Bush to ALfred E. Neuman, saying the President's philosophy was "What, Me Worry?"

When winning is really losing

Here's the headline of the week:

U.S. Appears to Win Global Warming Debate

Isn't that great? What do we win? How about, just for starters, Hurricane Dennis, spawned in an Atlantic Ocean where "ocean temperatures in the subtropical Atlantic are still very warm, significantly warmer than normal."

global warming, Hurricane Dennis

Former Freed student checks in

Over at the thread on the Chronicle of Higher Education's website, a former student of Freed Screed author Lynn Freed writes she was "hands down, the worst teacher of any kind I have ever had."

She obviously cared not a bit about her job or her students. She arrived by plane once a week, obviously read our stories while in transit and scribbled minimal, formulaic comments on them. In class, we were often treated to her reading aloud from Alice Munro for half an hour at a time. Failing this, she would assign bizarre and inappropriate in-class writing exercises.

The situation got so bad that we tried to organize a strike against her, but there were several meek students who prevented this.

I've had a lot of great writing teachers and a few mediocre ones, but Lynn Freed was the only one who was actually bad. Professors are under no obligation to be kind, caring or supportive--though they ought to be--but Lynn Freed was rude, dismissive and insulting. She quite obviously had no intention of doing the job she was paid for, which is unarguably bad practice.

Just one former student, and to be fair, I have a friend who had Freed for a summer workshop and thought she was great.

Lynn Freed, Freed Screed, creative writing gulag

Okay, this is getting out of hand

It was one thing when they were sitting in lawn chairs on the border with a six pack and a pair of binoculars. They sat down there for a month, and then when it started to get hot, they packed up and went home. But now the "Minutemen" of Texas have figured out a way to harass people from the air-conditioned comfort of their SUVs: they will patrol Houston streets and videotape day laborers and the people who pick them up to give them work. Sounds like a recipe for trouble.

Let's hear it for the SFFD

Recipe for disaster: middle of the night, 20 mile-an-hour winds off the ocean, hundred-year-old three-story wooden buildings, and a fire. The result? Only a few minor injuries, a lot of saved pets, and dozens homeless -- but nobody killed. Our fire fighters are amazing. Map of the location.

Post from a neighbor's blog, with photo, and another blog from farther away. (No, my house nowhere near.)

"Fat Man Walking"

A 39-year-old, 400-lb. guy in San Diego got disgusted with his weight and decided to walk across the U.S. He seems to have little training, no corporate support, just the support of his family (who maintain a website for him) and an Oceanside, Calif. outdoors store, and a lot of will power. In three months, he's made it from San Diego to somewhere east of Kingman, Ariz. His online journal is riveting. It's not the world's greatest writing, but it's real. Can't help but admire the guy's resolve, if not his judgement.

Tear yourself away from CNN

The Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley did a look back at Flannery O'Connor today. The author quotes O'Connor's words in which she compared her self to fellow Catholic novelist Graham Greene:

If Greene created an old lady, she would be sour through and through and if you dropped her, she would break, but if you dropped my old lady, she'd bounce back at you, screaming 'Jesus loves me!' I think the basis of the way I see is comic regardless of what I do with it; Greene's is something else.

The L.A. Times did a profile of Reza Aslan, author of No god But God (sic), an examination of Islam and the possibilities of reform. (The link to the Aslan profile courtesy Moorish Girl.)

The NY Times does a story on how more than one book winds up using the same stock photo -- or other similar design -- on its cover. Everyone involved professes embarrassment. I see it as a niche business opportunity, a sort of publishing due diligence: before a book cover design is finalized, validate its originality by submitting it to a firm whose whole business is to watch out for such things.

Speaking of publishing, a woman who posed as, variously, a publisher and a literary agent, is under federal indictment for bilking hopeful writers. The suspect went so far as to claim one of her false identities had been killed in the World Trade Center in 2001. But she's not the only one; the story says there's a website called Writer Beware that lists 400 "questionable" literary agents and 200 such publishers.

Flannery O'Connor, Jonathan Yardley, Reza Aslan, Moorish Girl

Can we just back up a little and look at what the problem is in the first place?

A former pro-wrestler turned fitness instructor says he teaches yoga for guys who wouldn't be caught dead doing yoga. Hey, I must be doing that kind of yoga right now.

President makes a wish

There are so many reasons to love this photo of Dubya apparently preparing to blow out his birthday candles (or perhaps he's just astonished that the waiters in Denmark go around wearing medals).

• The colors are just so amazing
• Bush looks utterly idiotic
• The waiter has been awarded two medals

Photo posted by Tony Pierce's busblog.

Bush birthday, birthday cakes, Denmark, Tony Pierce

Bombing photos

I found an excellent collection of photos from London, in case you're not near a TV. The Guardian has a blog entry narrating breaking events.

UPDATED: Salon has quotes from, and pointers to, eyewitness London bloggers.

Eating locally

Some foodie friends, including the estimable Jessica Prentice, have launched a challenge to eat locally during August. That means not buying, preparing or eating food that is grown or raised outside a hundred mile radius. They're calling themselves locavores -- that's from "local," I think, not "loca."

This is one of those things you can admire but not, actually, do. I find Jessica a wonderfully warm and enchanting person, but some of her monthly essays on food and agriculture are a little overwhelming. They're the nonfiction equivalent of magical realism, in which everything has ... what's the opposite of a "shadow side"? A side that glows just a bit too much, like you were coming on to an acid trip and you have an inkling that if this keeps up it could be overwhelming. And yet everything she writes is common-sense and not woo woo at all. Maybe I'm just too old, again.

locavores, eating, food industry, Jessica Prentice, foodies

This boring party

Weirdly, it is the birthday of Dubya, the Dalai Lama, and Nancy Reagan.

Bush also told the Times not to look for him in a pleated tartan skirt.

Queen Elizabeth in 2003 held a dinner in Bush's honor, and Bush recalled that an old friend of his father's, Scottish investment banker Billy Gammell, turned up for the event in a kilt.

"The queen gave a beautiful dinner for us at Buckingham Palace, and Gammell showed up in his kilt. And I said, 'Look buddy, you can wear your kilt, but I'm not going to wear one, if that's all right,' " Bush said.

UPDATE: On a birthday ride around the summit site today, Bush crashed his bicycle into a security man guarding him and other world leaders.

Credit card companies -- a pox on both their houses

In this morning's Chronicle, David Lazarus reports on yet another instance of a credit card company losing millions of customer records.

Coincidentally, I was surveyed last night, in a random telephone poll, about this issue. If you've ever had the patience to sit through one of these polls -- and I always do, because I once was a telephone poller for a few months and I have compassion for the people who have to do the mindless job -- you know that by the end of the poll you can guess who the client is and what they really want to know. And in this case, it was VISA, and they want to know how upset people are about "recent instances" of credit card record theft -- in particular the incident in 2004 that was only revealed last month, the one where a company called Card Systems Solutions was hacked and had the records of 40 million accounts stolen.

They polled on how aware I was of the incident, and whether it would make me less likely to use my credit card in the future. I had to say no, since how are you going to not use credit cards?

But they did not ask me about what I'm really upset about when it comes to credit cards. Let me count the ways:

The way credit cards companies market to young people and get them $30,000 in debt before they're 24 years old

The way companies offer a low interest rate for a period of time if you transfer your balance, then if you're even one day late on the payments, jack up the interest rate to the max, much higher than what you were paying before you transferred the balance. In one case I found myself paying 29.9% interest on an account I thought I was paying 0% on, just because I was two days late with a payment!

I wish I could tell them to go fuck themselves. But just like everybody else, I'm a slave to convenience.

VISA, MasterCard, credit cards, David Lazarus

Sects and politics

A giant teapot and umbrella are religious symbols for the heretical Islamic sect known as "Sky Kingdom." However, the giant teapot may not be long for this world.

Where's Liv Tyler when you need her?

Hilarious SFGate columnist Mark Morford recently won an award for best online columnist, and today's entry shows why:

Let me get this straight. You're saying they shot a freakin' rocket 83 million miles into space, straight into a relatively tiny comet that was ripping through the galaxy at 23,000 freakin' miles per hour, and they freakin' hit it? Is that right?

We're searching for the origin of the universe in bitchin' meteoric space dust via some truly mind-boggling technologies and meanwhile, we still can't make a goddamn full-sized sports sedan that gets more than 25 mile per gallon? I am hearing you correctly? We can nail a rock 83 million miles away but we still can't find a cure for male pattern baldness? We still shove Bibles into Holiday Inn bedside tables and call it enlightenment? We still can't find Osama? We just recently figured out how to put little wheels on goddamn luggage? Is this what you're saying?

Pee - yoo!

In perhaps the most potentially disgusting toxic accident since hog waste ponds began overflowing in North Carolina, a tanker truck full of molten sulfur overturned on a Texas highway. Fortunately, none spilled.

Career opportunity

Liberal arts majors, get your resumes ready. According to a news story, state and local governments spend millions every year on remedial writing courses for their employees.

But you must enjoy teaching writing. No bottoms.

I'll take diplomatic dustups for 400

Oh! It's the daily double! Chirac to Putin:

"You can't trust people who cook as badly as [the English]. After Finland, it's the country with the worst food."

Warming to his theme, the French leader added, to laughter from Putin and Schroeder: "The only thing they [the English] have ever done for European agriculture is mad cow."

And in West Virginia, it seemed like Dubya had just donned bunting.

George Bush, Jacques Chirac, Vladimir Putin, U.K.

It was a perfect day. I'm glad I spent it with you

Got a CD full of pix from Catherine from the day a few weeks ago when Christine, Jenny and I visited her new Oakland bungalow. We took pictures in the garden, had tea from Cath's grandmother's tea set, and all was bliss. I posted the pix to my buzznet photoblog.

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Freed at last

Now revealed: The Secret Diary of a Prisoner in the Creative Writing Gulag.

Earlier: An analysis of the Freed Screed.

Lynn Freed, creative writing, writing gulag

It's Bad Behavior Friday™!

Henry Kissinger has apologized for calling Indira Gandhi a bitch.

In Houston (where else?) a man was stabbed by his son after the father kicked the family dog.

In New York, a Howard Beach (where else?) man arrested for beating a black man with a baseball bat was previously arrested, post-9/11, for beating a turbaned man with a baseball bat. Also in Gotham, a high school teacher was busted for calling in sick when he was actually preparing to participate in a pro wrestling match:

But he led a secret life as pro wrestler Matt Striker - a greased-up macho man known for ring moves he called "the overdrive" and the "lung-blower," investigators said. Several of Kaye's students suspected as much.
"I swear I saw him on WWE Smackdown last week wrestling Kurt Angle," a student wrote on the Web site www.ratemyteacher.com last March. "I know it was him."

A Bridgeport, Conn. woman has been arrested for mailing threats, some laced with rat poison, to Supreme Court justices.

A Maine man was arrested after he was discovered in a latrine pit, peeping at users' privates. See, this is why pornography is a good thing. Subscribe to one of those websites in your spam mailbox, pal, and stop bothering people.