Ding dong, Falwell dead. But wait, what's that smell?

Just when you thought it was safe to carry a red handbag again: A senior Polish official has ordered psychologists to investigate whether the popular BBC TV show Teletubbies promotes a homosexual lifestyle.

If a "homosexual lifestyle" means dressing up in a big furry suit and talking in ear-splitting baby voices, why yes, yes it does.

Note the nice link to the 1999 BBC story about Falwell's fatwa on the children's show.

Weekend

Worked on my book for two days of this three-day weekend -- that was good.

This morning I stopped into a neighborhood cafe and was doing a little blogging when some young guy opens the door of the place and starts screaming names at the boss. Since one of them was "faggot" I got up to see what his problem was. We went out on the sidewalk and had a three-way conversation at some volume. Something to do with the people living upstairs and whether the cafe owner was hitting on the guy's girlfriend... Sheesh. Nothing's simple.

Gore is teh lolcats

I am also very impressed with that chair.

Cris graduated from law school

Cris graduated today from law school, and takes the bar exam in late July. I am so proud of her.

BREAKING: Falwell dead

Jerry Falwell has died after collapsing in his office at the far-right Christian college he founded, Liberty University. Falwell, 73, was vastly overweight.

'What happens in Ms. Buford's class stays in Ms. Buford's class'

A Chicago, Ill. student and her grandparents are suing the school district for half a million dollars [second story in column] after a substitute teacher -- who made the students shut the door to the room and warned them, "What happens in Ms. Buford's class stays in Ms. Buford's class" -- showed an 8th grade class the film "Brokeback Mountain."

According to the story, the 12-year-old girl's grandfather said "I had already given them (a warning) on the literature they were giving out to children to read; this was the last straw." The literature, not named, had "curse words."

Imagine this poor man's life. He, and perhaps his wife, are raising this 12-year-old girl; wherever her parents are, the story doesn't say. And like many parents they feel assailed by the vulgarity of modern American culture; that they are grandparents means they are even more out of it than most parents. The more this girl grows up, the more threatened they are, on her behalf, by everything that American materialist culture is telling 12-year-olds.

Then one day -- perhaps a year earlier, when she was 11 -- the girl brings home a Judy Blume book she's reading for class, and Grandpa discovers it contains the work "fuck." His mind exploding at the idea that his precious granddaughter, whom he is trying to protect from the world so that what happened to her mother won't happen to her, has to deal with the word "fuck" even in books, much less the movies he won't let her watch, threatens the school with a lawsuit, and the school backs down. But a year later a substitute teacher sneaks in a showing of "Brokeback Mountain." Ho - mo -sek -shuls in the classroom!! Who could stomach it???!?

Now look at the world from the 12-year-old girl's perspective. Every chance she gets, she watches MTV at friends' houses. She leaves the house early every day so she can stop by a friend's house and change out of the stupid clothes Grandpa makes her wear into something she wouldn't be embarrassed by. Meanwhile every male she encounters outside the home makes sexual remarks to her; in every advertisement, women dress like prostitutes. She has enough trouble trying to make her way through this minefield every day, so when they show a romantic movie in English class, at least that gives her a chance to nap for a couple of hours. She probably sleeps through the homo scenes. But later, in an argument with Grandpa over whether she can stay out after her 6:00 pm curfew, she hurls at him: "I know about sex! They showed 'Brokeback Mountain' at school last week. You don't know anything, old man!" Grandpa's head explodes again.

Meanwhile, Ms. Buford is missing. Where do you think she is about now -- Cancun, or maybe she got a job waitressing on a cruise ship. Anywhere but Chicago.

Encouraged/Discouraged

When I was a teenager I would haunt bookstores and the library looking for something good. I read all the time and during the summer would read as many as two novels a day, because there was little else to do in that blistering hot, boring as hell suburb. As much of the day as possible, I would hide from the heat indoors reading whatever I could get my hands on, until my mother drove me from the house. Then I would get on my bicycle and ride it for ten or fifteen miles along the highway -- choosing by necessity to ride on the shoulder, which on the Texas Gulf Coast was a spongy mix of gravel, sand and crushed oyster shells -- to some dubious destination, usually the mall.

(The Google map shows the route going along the freeway, but I rode on the shoulder of adjacent State Hwy 3. You know what I want Google maps to do? Allow me to specify a different route -- for instance, in this case, "via Hwy. 3" instead of the freeway.) Update, July 16: Google heard me, and users like me, and now you can drag the default route to match the desired route. Here's the route I actually rode.

Then I could go through a small bookstore and have a fairly good idea of everything that was in the fiction section. I hadn't read it all, of course, but I had a notion as to whether or not I would want to.

Nowadays I got into a bookstore, even a small one, and usually I feel dismay that the selection is so large and that I will never even find all the good books, much less have time to read them all. But I buy the ones that I think I will definitely want to read some day. That's why I have dozens of books unread. Once in a while I can't remember why I thought I would be interested in reading something, and get rid of it. But I still have a lot of unread books.

Related: an article from yesterday's NYT business section on the publishing industry and how best-sellers are unpredictable.

Sex in Bangalore

My Google Alert for Bangalore today coincidentally turned up two different links having to do with sex. First, this Deccan Herald interview with the filmmakers of a documentary -- produced, oddly, by Japan's national TV network -- on Indian youth and changing sexual mores. And second, a press release about an Indian escort service purportedly run by someone named Jim.

While I was there I never saw anything remotely pornographic -- not like you see in Japan, speaking of Japan, where pornographic magazines and comix are available in vending machines -- but I didn't spend any time at the few newsstands I encountered. I was too busy looking at buildings.

But also happening at the same time is this new regulation that women will not be allowed to work at night. Though the enactment of the regulation is probably a technical legal error and will be quickly revoked -- because if it isn't, the whole call center industry will die instantly -- it has provoked serious discussion about the changing role of women in India in rapidly changing places like Bangalore.

technorati: Bangalore, Sex, Escorts

Escape from small-town America

Violet Blue writes today about having been named to an independent film jury with, among others, a filmmaker named A.J. Schnack. I had been dimly aware of this filmmaker before now, because of his name -- an association that will be made clear momentarily -- but this pairing with Violet made me finally Google him and make sure it was who I thought it was. Yes, he is indeed one of the sons of my grade school principal, Aldo Schnack. My grade school was a conservative Lutheran elementary school, and the idea that the son of the principal -- who was a cross between Principal Skinner of "The Simpsons" and "Mr. Weatherbee" of the Archie comics -- turned out to be a successful, non-religious independent filmmaker is both strange and amusing. Usually I think I'm the only one who made it out of that dead little burg with an intact sense of humor but I suppose there must be two or three others.

Could I say 'BoingBoingitude'?

I cracked up a couple of weeks ago as I read this NYTBR review by Lance Morrow of a new book by Bill McKibben, the patron saint of middle class environmentalism, in which Morrow coined a priceless new word to apply to the greener-than-thou notions of people like McKibben:

McKibben lives and teaches in Vermont, and his vision, for better and for worse, is suffused with a certain Vermontlichkeit.

LOL!!!1!! -- that is just the best thing ever. And I found another example of it on BoingBoing today, in a tale of a hip librarian who installed "Ubuntu Linux" instead of Windows on some donated computers. Her quoted post ends:

The Calef Library has two Windows PCs already so if people need specific software that doesn't run on Ubuntu, they can use those. I'd like to get them a Mac as well and then they can be the only library (to my knowledge) that is triple platform in the entire state of Vermont.

Oh, you go, anti-corporate warrior.

Come to think of it, BoingBoing itself, especially its avatar Cory Doctorow -- science fiction writer and former Electronic Freedom Foundation issue-staker -- who is known to become exercised over issues like corporate intrusion into private lives and, well, just dumb corporate behavior. (A couple years ago there was a satirical, and completely fictional, piece on the web depicting Doctorow phoning a clueless company and browbeating the poor customer service rep about one of his hobby horse issues -- completely hilarious, but I can't find it anymore.) I think we need another neologism -- BoingBoingitude? -- for the sort of default anti-corporate stick-it-to-the-man but-in-a-way-that-everyone-would-consider-cool positions taken in many BoingBoing postings.

Warm San Francisco night

It was hot in the city yesterday and today -- 85 degrees!! Even 88?!? WTF!?

Yesterday was pure bliss. I met with Shannon to talk about comix, then went to the ballgame with Anna. I held back from drinking beer because I knew it would make me feel tired and blah, and there was still plenty to do in the evening. After the game we went to my new favorite restaurant, Bar Bambino where, as Anna posted, the portions are just perfect.

Today also warm. I went by Cleis Press to talk to them about a new project. They have an opening for a web marketing person, so if you're all about the intarwebs and want to get into publishing, it could be a fun job.

Came home from work; it was still hot. When it's warm in the evening, the main thing to do at home is try to cool off the bedroom -- which is closed off during the day to keep the cats out. For the last hour I've been sitting on a chair in front of the open bedroom door to guard it from the cats while we air it out.

Tomorrow it'll be cooler along the coast. Tonight, it could be iffy.

Man dies of thirst in desert 'survival' experience

As a clumsy, incompetent athlete in my childhood, I was alarmed the first time I ever read about the program Outward Bound. It must have been about 1967; the article may have been in the Reader's Digest or the Saturday Evening Post, both of which were delivered regularly to our house in small-town Illinois. According to the piece, pubescent enrollees in Outward Bound were awakened every morning at 6:00, set on a three-mile run before breakfast, and to top it all off, had to throw themselves off a cliff into the Atlantic Ocean. Those who failed to accomplish any part of this daily regimen not only went without food, but their whole cabin or patrol or whatever also went without food. Thus combining the scourges of my childhood -- sports, macho posturing, bullying and guilt -- Outward Bound sounded to me like hell on earth. I tore up the magazine and hid the pieces deep in the trash, lest my parents get any ideas about shipping me off to become a real boy.

Such crypto-fascist exercises have always frightened me. Today on SF Gate there is a story about a man who died of thirst in a desert "survival" program after hiking all day in blistering heat. Program staffers, who wanted him to push "past those false limits your mind has set for your body," saw he was disoriented, hallucinating, and cramping up -- all symptoms of dehydration -- but failed to give him the water they were carrying.

The course is intended to push people "past those false limits your mind has set for your body."

"Somewhere along the many miles of sagebrush flats, red rock canyons, and mesa tops of Southern Utah — somewhere between the thirst, the hunger and the sweat — you'll discover the real destination: yourself," BOSS says on its Web site. ...

"He said he could not go on," staff member Shawn O'Neal wrote two days later in a statement ordered by the Garfield County Sheriff's Office. "I felt that he could make it this short distance [a pool of water in a cave 200 feet away] and told him he could do it as I have seen many students sore, dehydrated and saying 'can't' do something only to find that they have strength beyond their conceived limits."

O'Neal didn't inform Buschow about his emergency water.

"I wanted him to accomplish getting to the water and the cave for rest," he wrote. "He asked me to go get the water for him. I said I was not going to leave him. ... Shortly thereafter I had a bad feeling and turned to Dave and found no sign of breathing."

So it used to be just macho peer pressure; evidently the 21st century version of this sort of self-hazing has acquired a faux-mystical tinge. "Your mind has set false limits for your body... The real destination is yourself." It's like the worst combination of positive business-speak, sports psychobabble and ninth-rate mysticism. For the purveyors of this stupidity, I wish the worst punishment possible: women laughing at them.

Still here

It's a rainy morning in the city -- kind of nice. It used never to rain after, say, April 15, but the climate is changing, they say. Last year we had rain in June.

Whoever starting reading this blog because of my exciting posts from Bangalore, or something, must be vastly disappointed. In those days (as recently as four or five months ago) when I was worried about things like sustaining reader interest, I would have been beating myself over my failure to keep the thread going -- any thread. But the fact is that jet lag, plus a new project at work, has almost completely consumed my energy for the last week.

On the plus side, I did have a birthday last weekend, quiet but very nice.

So this is just to say I'm still around, haven't caught a microbe as far as I know, and am simply working way too hard to do or think about funny and delightful things in the news. I admire, and am slightly scared of, people like Badger who keep blogging no matter what.