When we were young

My charming ex-wife Catherine Debon recently sent me some photos from our performing days, in the 1980s, which she had scanned to digital format.

Here we are with our friend Patti Boucher (l.) in a publicity photo for a show we did in 1984 called "The Horse Knows the Way to Carry the Sleigh."

And here we are about two years later in a still from a show called "Swampcrime," which was about a princess (Catherine) who was upset that the frogs were disappearing from her estate. I played a Jesuitical detective, posing here at center holding the flashlight, with our colleagues (from left) Betty Roi, Patrick Irwin, and Caitlin Morgan.

I'm not sure why I favored a blank expression in publicity photographs.

Catherine is still a performer, and is also on the staff at a hospital in Berkeley, while Betty is a well-known yoga teacher and occasionally still performs as a singer.

All I do now is write, though I do really enjoy giving the public reading part of it, when I'm invited to do so.

Varying headlines show success of GOP campaign of confusion over taxes

Republican talking heads have been yammering for two weeks now that not extending the Bush-era tax cuts is not about "tax cuts" but about a "tax hike," and we see the success of this campaign in these almost simultaneous tweets:

A taste for subversion

A hacker broke into Gawker's commenter database over the weekend, and now I and hundreds of thousands of other people have to change their passwords, not just on their site but on other sites where the passwords might have been used.

Even though I was inconvenienced by this, you know what? I don't really mind. When someone manages to highlight a security vulnerability, that's just a wakeup call. Maybe I shouldn't have been using the same medium-strength password on more than one or two sites (though I use different, longer passwords for more critical applications like banking, email and so on). Live and learn.

I felt the same way about the WikiLeaks release of U.S. diplomatic cables. A, they didn't release any critical secrets, and B, shame on the U.S. for not keeping things more secure. Aren't you glad they didn't release anything that was actually important? Aren't you glad we're having this conversation now, before something like this happened again?

As for the strained outrage among Republicans and others (Gingrich: Assange should be classified an "enemy combatant"; McConnell: Assange is "a high-tech terrorist"), these are not thoughts emanating from real people. Listening to these Republican panjandrums is like listening to Principal Skinner on "The Simpsons."

Bart: Hey, what's this?
Principal Skinner: Oh, that's my old unit from Vietnam. I was their sergeant, they were my loyal troops. (photo shows Skinner saluting and his men scowling at him.) That photo was taken shortly before I was shot in the back, which was very strange because it was during a Bob Hope show. I was trying to get Joey Heatherton to put on some pants, for God's sake.

A little subversion is good from time to time.

If game's secret is 'making users anxious,' maybe it's also key for books

Via BoingBoing, this interview with a man who designs online games has this very interesting tidbit: Games like Farmville are...

...about exploiting the players -- and yes, people report having fun with that kind of game. You know, certain kinds of hardcore game players don't find much interest in Farmville, but a certain large segment of the population does. But then when you look at the design process in that game, it's not about designing a fun game. It's not about designing something that's going to be interesting or a positive experience in any way -- it's actually about designing something that's a negative experience. It's about "How do we make something that looks cute and that projects positivity" -- but it actually makes people worry about it when they're away from the computer and drains attention from their everyday life and brings them back into the game. Which previous genres of game never did. And it's about, "How do we get players to exploit their friends in a mechanical way in order to progress?" And in that or exploiting their friends, they kind of turn them in to us and then we can monetize their relationships. And that's all those games are, basically.

I think people knew this intuitively -- or you did, at least, if you know what Farmville is or even (like me) have never played but have talked with people who have -- but this is the most cogent, direct way I've ever heard anyone explain it.

And if a game is compelling because it provokes anxiety, the same must be true for narratives.

Now... frankly, watching a film or TV show where anxiety is a large ingredient makes me squirm very uncomfortably, sometimes to the point of turning the channel or walking out of the movie. I started walking out of movies in 1979 with Alien and I've been walking out of movies ever since for exactly the same reason: not solely because of the anxiety the film provokes, but because I felt so manipulated. And indeed, there's now a backlash against Farmville because people are seeing through how it manipulates players. It's fun in exactly the same way slot machines are fun: You feed money into it, you get to see a bunch of whirling, flashing images, and there's just enough possibility that you will somehow win that you keep going back for more.

The question for novelists is how to take advantage of this effect without making readers feel as if they're being exploited.

Or at least that's the question for me; I'm sure there are many who feel no compunction about exploiting readers or viewers, just as there is a huge audience that willingly embraces being manipulated. There's no other explanation for, say, horror movies. (Then there are the films of Quentin Tarantino, who goes beyond mere exploitation to sheer contempt for his audience.)

(In related news, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says society is now addicted to technology: "All of a sudden, we've lost a lot of control. We can't turn off our Internet. We can't turn off our smart phones. We can't turn off our computers.")

Wait, what?

Wish I'd been there:

Stephen Chao was the president of Fox Television for 10 weeks in 1992 before he was fired by Rupert Murdoch for hiring a male model to strip during a speech on Standards and Practices given to Murdoch as well as Dick Cheney.

From Fired Former Fox President Stephen Chao Randomly Pops Up On Reddit To Answer Questions on Mediaite.

World's greatest sad

While browsing the New York Times site, I was treated to a popup advertisement for something. In the 30-second ad, a teenage girl sitting in a bright bedroom typed the words "You're the World's Greatest Dad" into her smartphone. There followed several morphing animated scenes of a cartoon girl and her dad winning races, playing in the treehouse he'd built for her, and so on. At the end the ad goes back to "real life," showing the late-middle-aged father sitting alone in a dark book-lined study receiving the message on a laptop and apparently chuckling in pleasure.

But I thought, good God, look at this. Here's this girl texting her father. Clearly they're living apart now, in different houses. And he's sitting alone in this dark study -- it has to be his home, as he's wearing a lavender-colored v-neck sweater -- staring down at his laptop. He isn't working. This email from his daughter is basically the only thing he seems to have to occupy himself with. Is he chuckling at the end of the commercial, or crying?

Oh, and I missed noticing what product was being promoted.

On the right track to confuse everyone

This blogger lists some qualities in books he seeks out:

1. Dozens, if not, hundreds of characters.
   
2. Digressions all over the place that sometimes do and sometimes don't have a connection to the main plot.
   
3. Not being able to understand large swaths of the text.

Hey, I'm on the right track with the book I'm working on. My character list already has at least 75 entries. And there are plenty of digressions. As far as the last criterion, I guess I'll never know whether readers feel that way, unless through some turn of fate the book becomes widely read and I get a lot of feedback. Gee, that would be nice.

Another novel idea: Man with gunshot wound staggers into police station, admits to 30 armed robberies

This would make a great first scene for a crime novel (via the Oakland Tribune):

Oakland man reports shooting, gets arrested in 30 armed robberies

OAKLAND -- Walter Sayles came to Oakland police headquarters Wednesday to talk about being shot at that day. Instead, he was arrested after admitting committing more than 30 armed robberies at businesses in Oakland, Hayward, San Leandro and other cities.

The 21-year-old Oakland resident initially called police about 5 a.m. Wednesday from the 9200 block of Cherry Street in East Oakland to report being shot at. He wasn't hit but was treated at a hospital for an unrelated injury.

Sayles asked to speak with investigators about the shooting, and an officer directed him to police headquarters. The officer advised investigators that Sayles wanted to provide information about the shooting but also told investigators that Sayles matched the suspect description from a recent armed robbery.

Sgt. Randy Wingate and Officer Leo Sanchez began asking Sayles about some recent robberies after talking to him about the shooting. Wingate said Sayles admitted his involvement in more than 30 armed robberies going back several months at gas stations, convenience stories, fast-food restaurants and some street robberies throughout Oakland, Hayward, San Leandro, Palo Alto and other cities.

Pessoa notices everything, sees into everything

From The Book of Disquiet, § 298:

I'm riding on a tram and, as usual, am closely observing all the details of the people around me. For me these details are like things, voices, phrases. Taking the dress of the girl in front of me, I break it down into the fabric from which it's made and the work that went into making it (such that I see a dress and not just fabric), and the delicate embroidery that trims the collar decomposes under my scrutiny into the silk thread with which it was embroidered and the work it took to embroider it. And immediately, as in a textbook of basic economics, factories and jobs unfold before me: the factory where the cloth was made; the factory where the darker-colored silk was spun to trim with curlicues its place around the neck; the factories' various divisions, the machines, the workers, the seamstresses. My inwardly turned eyes penetrate into the offices, where I see the managers trying to stay calm, and I watch everything being recorded in the account books. But that's not all: I see beyond all this to the private lives of those who live their social existence in these factories and offices. The whole world opens up before my eyes merely because in front of me -- on the nape of a dark-skinned neck whose other side has I don't know what face -- I see a regularly irregular dark-green embroidery on a light-green dress.

All humanity's social existence lies before my eyes.

And beyond this I sense the loves, the secrets and the souls of all who labored so that the woman in front of me in the tram could wear, around her mortal neck, the sinuous banality of a dark-green silk trim on a less-dark green cloth.

I get dizzy. The seats in the tram, made of tough, close-woven straw, take me to distant places and proliferate in the form of industries, workers, their houses, lives, realities, everything.

I get off the tram dazed and exhausted. I've just lived all of life.

Whenever I find a text like this, I wish I were a high school English teacher again. Imagine the exercises you could do with students, opening their eyes to the images and stories hidden in everyday things. Of course, all poetry has this power. But rarely is it explicated so clearly.

Lucky for me, I'm a novelist, and can take the same text to heart whenever I hit a dry patch.

Previously:
A 2008 New York Times article about Pessoa

Meet a "sovereign citizen"

A Tennessee TV station sent a news crew over to the home of 69-year-old Hollis Fay Summers, who "became a sovereign four years ago after attending a seminar in Alabama." Among other futile efforts, he has filed several billion-dollar lawsuits against officials of the bank which holds his mortgage, because they won't believe that his mortgage has been paid in full with funds from his "secret account."

WTF, you say. Well, in brief -- and the mention of the "seminar" he attended is the giveaway -- there are charlatans going around the country preaching a form of magic. The magic is contained in a mystical and completely bogus interpretation of legal language, and among other things, asserts that every American has a "secret account" of money being held for him by the federal government -- a government in which the profess not to believe, but that logical contradiction is only one among many -- and that you can access these funds if you know the magic. (For an explanation, see "Bill of Exchange" on the Southern Poverty Law Center's page on the so-called sovereigns, or see this page on the ADL's website for a full picture.)

The TV station's page with the story also includes links to a couple of Summers' mumbo-jumbo court filings, including the one where he asserts his sovereign status.

There are not that many of these people -- tens of thousands, at the most -- but they are responsible for gumming up local courts with these bogus filings, each of which must be addressed and declared frivolous. From the ADL's page:

The filing of frivolous lawsuits and liens against public officials, law enforcement officers and private citizens, on the other hand, has remained a favorite harassing strategy. These paper "attacks" intimidate their targets and have the beneficial side effect of clogging up a court system that sovereign citizens believe is illegitimate. Frivolous liens became such a problem in the 1990s that a majority of states were forced to pass new laws to make filing them illegal, their removal easier, or both. Today, eager sovereign citizens can use the Internet to download a variety of boilerplate forms and documents to wield against the government. More adventurous types can matriculate at "schools" such as the Erwin Rommel School of Law; additionally, a number of activists, ranging from David Wynn Miller to The Aware Group, hold seminars around the country to teach people -- for a price -- about the latest tactics and weapons.

(Undeterred, Summers has filed another document in which he attempts to redefine the word frivolous to mean "true and correct," the story says.)

And the thing to know is that these people are not crazy. They're just a bunch of losers who have various grievances and have been tricked into believing that this particular form of magic will somehow lead to the redressing of these grievances.

Some nice details in the story, including the arrival of a dumpster during the interview -- a dumpster being delivered by the bank which is about to evict Summers from his long-foreclosed house. And where will this old grampa go then? Some poor relative, no doubt. But what you should focus on is the people who led him to this pass, who profited from his ignorance and credulousness. Here's the SPLC's page on the leaders of the Sovereign Citizen Movement, many of whom are now serving sentences in federal prison.

Previously:

'Sovereign' files $38 quadrillion lawsuit

The King of Hawaii (the verb)

It's Bad Behavior Friday™! Bring Down JP Morgan edition

According to this blog entry -- on the "Vatic Project" blog which, you should be warned, is usually not only insane but anti-Semitic in the process -- someone has the bright idea that if everyone will just buy one ounce of silver today, it will fuck with JP Morgan bank's plan to make money shorting the precious metal. I have no idea whether this is based in anything like fact, but it's sort of a cool idea, and one example of the maxim that even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

"End is near' warning just as 'timely' as it was a year ago!

The funny thing about prophets who warn of the coming apocalypse is that it's always coming. The end is near, it's constantly near. If it hasn't come by the time predicted, that doesn't make the prophecy wrong. In fact, the prophecy is even righter than ever, because as time passes we truly are nearer and nearer the end!

That sort of logic can be seen in the introduction to this post on from our favorite collapsitarian blog: We Have Some Hard Decisions Ahead. The post talks about how, since the end is near, we may as well all stop participating in the economy, since faithful readers of the blog (the collapsitarian blog, that is) are all busy "prepping" for the Big Collapse. For example, stop paying your car loan and your mortgage; plan to downsize, because soon we will all be forced to downsize.

Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy. But this is what I found really amusing:

This article was originally published at Survival Blog and has been reprinted with permission from the author. The article's original publish date was December of 2009, but it is as timely today as it was a year ago.

Yes -- for all those who didn't follow its advice, that is! Because if they really stopped paying their mortgage and car payments and everything else last year, they sure as hell don't have them now, because they no longer have the house and the car.

And they say fascism depends on people having short memories. I guess so!

One more from the high desert

Speaking of weird crime in the high desert, this is pretty unbeatable:

Victorville Daily Press, 16 November 2010

Buckets of mercury found in Hesperia home

HESPERIA -- A man and a teen were forced to evacuate their home early Tuesday morning after authorities found buckets of mercury, according to San Bernardino County Fire officials.

Working from a tip, officials were called to a home in the 11900 block of Sixth Avenue at about 1:15 a.m. about liquid mercury being kept in the home.

"They found one pound of the liquid metal in buckets," Jay Hausman, spokesman for the fire department, said.

The man was extracting the metal from computer components, but it's unclear why he was collecting the mercury.

Neighbors said the man actually lived in a trailer in the rear of the home.

"It's a main respiratory hazard if exposed to it," Hausman said. "It's easily absorbed into the lungs through inhalation but it can also be spread very easily by walking through it if there's a spill... Even when a thermometer breaks, it's considered a mercury spill. It's a highly hazardous neurotoxicant."

The man -- whose identity was not immediately available -- was cited for possessing the highly toxic substance. He and the teen in the were forced to evacuate, Hausman said. The residents will not be allowed to return to the location where the mercury was found until a private hazardous material contractor is brought to the location to clean the area, authorities said.

The man was identified today as a 39-year-old resident of Hesperia, a desert town near Victorville, which is between San Bernardino and Las Vegas.

A pound of mercury. I can't begin to know how many people that could kill if it were, for example, thrown into an aqueduct (which run exposed all over rural California). But just think about this guy living in a trailer, patiently collecting the shiny metal for reasons of his own. Think about his teenaged son living there with him. That's the desert.

Petty crime

In the research for my current book, I'm on the lookout for crime stories from the desert area I visited in September and October. This story from today's San Bernardino Sun captures the zeitgeist. Here's the whole story. See if you can find the really jaw-dropping detail.

San Bernardino Sun, 17 Nov 2010:
Twentynine Palms burglary suspects caught selling stolen goods online

By Melissa Pinion-Whitt

Posted: 11/17/2010 01:00:31 PM PST

Two people, including a deserter from the U.S. Marine Corps, were arrested Tuesday in Twentynine Palms on suspicion of burglarizing a home and selling the property on the Internet.

Michael Quimby, 25, and Kimberly Angus, 23, were detained at their apartment in the 73700 block of Raymond Drive when undercover deputies found them in possession of the stolen goods.

San Bernardino County sheriff's deputies received a report of a burglary in the 71000 block of Mesa Drive on Saturday. The victim said several items had been stolen the prior week. He saw some of his items listed on the website Craigslist.com and 29palmsyardsales.com.

Deputies went undercover to buy items from the suspects. They met them at their apartment complex and saw two of the stolen items outside the front door of their apartment when they approached, sheriff's officials said.

Deputies found most of the property stolen in the burglary inside the residence. Sheriff's officials said Angus sold a stolen blue bassinet to a woman at a Jack in the Box in Twentynine Palms. Detectives are looking for the person who bought it so the item can be returned to its owner.

Deputies booked Quimby into jail on suspicion of burglary and for his military warrant. They plan to submit a report to the District Attorney's Office for consideration of charges against Angus.

Yes, these desperate tweakers stole a bassinet from someone, and managed to get rid of it by putting it on Craigslist and then meeting the buyer at the Jack in the Box. You can see why I want to set my story there.

Oh Mama, could this really be the end?

An essay on the blog Download Squad with the alarming title Facebook -- with or without Google -- will destroy the world as we know it explains the two companies' diverging strategies. It's interesting (though I can't get very worked up about yet another apocalyptic scenario, in which something from the movie Terminator is used to get across how frightening it is), but what I was struck by was this line (emphasis theirs):

In other words, Facebook knows who we want to be, while Google knows who we actually are.

How Dylanesque!

The article closes with this warning, which I find pretty believable. Referring to Facebook's announcement yesterday that it was going to offer the equivalent of Facebook email, the article cautions:

You will be given the choice of opting out, of course. But think about it: can you see yourself leaving Facebook today? Now fast forward a few months, a year. Imagine what it will be like once all of your communication goes through Facebook; quitting won't be an option.

Now, the thing is, I use Google mail, I collaborate with others using Google documents, I have Google voice pointing to my cell phone, I use the calendar, and so on. It seems as if I'm pretty wrapped up in Google. And yet I think if Google disappeared tomorrow, all I'd lose is my saved email and this month's household budget. My life would go on, for the simple reason that Google's mail system communicates with the rest of the world, while Facebook's is designed not to. A "walled garden" is the term commonly used for such an exclusive online universe. I can think of another word.

I'm glad I'm not a Facebook denizen; I never registered. It's like having gone through the 00s without having gotten a tattoo: once you participate a little, you're marked for life.

Quelle barbare!

This article in The Australian is about how the French love the "For Dummies" books (in French known as "Pour les nuls"), despite initial fears that subjects such as French poetry and history would not withstand the format. The funniest thing? Their publisher is a man named Vincent Barbare, which means "barbarian"!

Aide read 'Brave New World'' aloud to Bush during stem cell debate

The L.A. times book blog has an entry today with a list of the books George Bush mentions in his memoir. Among the items in the list is this dumbfounding entry:

"Brave New World" (1932) by Aldous Huxley. Read aloud to Bush in the Oval Office by an aide as he was thinking about stem cell research.

Imagine what that must have been like! Some young fellow sitting on a couch in the Oval Office reading the "orgy porgy" scene while Bush stares into space. I wonder if it gave Bush a hard-on. It did to me, but I read it when I was 14.

I wonder what Bush was reading when he was 14. I suspect the answer is nothing, which would explain a lot.

It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- Chain of bad decisions edition

It's been a long time since I had a great story for Bad Behavior Friday™. Maybe I'm just jaded. But this story (via Gawker) is just too perfect:

A Nevada woman -- "an alcoholic who relapsed" -- went on a drunken binge and, realizing she was too drunk to drive, sat her twelve-year-old kid on her lap behind the wheel and told him to drive them home. Plus, her seven-year-old child was also in the car.

Let's count the chain of bad decisions in that incident:
1. She fell off the wagon...
2. Big time (blood alcohol level: .299)
3. She had her kids with her at the time
4. She was in the car
5. And finally, she asked her kid to drive.

I'm not sure you can really blame her for having the 7-year-old in the car as well -- though the judge certainly did -- she is being charged, among other things, with felony child abuse. That seems rather harsh. What was she supposed to do, leave the 7-year-old by the side of the road?

In fact, the more you read the story, the more sorry you feel for her. Frankly it seems like the judge just wants to be a hard-ass.

The four most objectionable winners of 2010

Of all the bad behavior that went on in the last couple of years, how did it affect the perpetrators?

Rep. Joe Miller (R. - S.C. 2), who shouted "You lie!" during Obama's health care address to Congress in September 2009, was re-elected 53.5% to 43.7%.

Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R. - Tx. 19), who shouted "Baby killer!" at Rep. Bart Stupak during the final House debate on the health care bill, was re-elected 77.7% to 19.1%. Stupak, by the way, decided to retire after the kerfuffle, and his House seat, which he had held for eight terms and won re-election to by a 65-32 margin in 2008, was lost yesterday to a Republican.

Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R. - Mn. 6), who is famous for saying stupid shit, was re-elected 52.5% to 39.8%.

Rep. Ron Paul (R. - Tx. 14), who has made a career out of ostensibly opposing almost every aspect of the federal government he is a part of -- for example, even though he represents a wide swath of Texas Gulf Coast, he opposes the federal flood insurance program -- was re-elected 76% to 24%.

Man.

Meg Whitman, thanks for the $140 million! signed, the California economy

Former Silicon Valley CEO and inveterate bully Meg Whitman is now badly trailing in polls in the California governor's race, despite the $140 million cash of her personal money she donated to her campaign.

Where's all that money go, anyway? I think mostly:

• Advertising media -- radio and TV stations, newspapers, websites, direct mail, printing companies.
• Transportation and hospitality -- Hotels, restaurants, bus companies, private jet companies, fuel.
• Consultants

Most of which will be staying in California. Hey, I bought stock in two different radio broadcasters more than six months ago, and it's up about 15%. Thanks for the dough, Meg! Now that's change I can believe in!

Breaking news from the paranoid front

A website called The Survival Retreat -- you know, that well-stocked fuhrerbunker that will allow you to get through the supposedly coming apocalypse -- alerts us that now is the time to stock up on ammunition.

It just occurred to me that perhaps all the zombie movies and zombie TV shows are really about our anxiety about this eventuality, where there's total societal collapse, everyone attempts to flee, and the well-stocked right-wing Christian survivalist is vindicated. (See my entry from yesterday. (Speaking of which, the title of a post from another collapsitarian blog says it all: The US Government Is Preparing For Unlikely Events Like War, Catastrophic Collapse of Society, and Even Asteroids -- Are You?.)

Related: the Seattle Times reports that it's a buyer's market for islands. Which might help protect you from zombies, who (which?) presumably can't swim, but not from the desperate marauders imagined by the apocalyptic collapsitarians whom I mentioned yesterday.

By the way, can you guess which famous 1960s musician wrote a song about this topic? None other than Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul and Mary, whose 1971 song "John Henry Bosworth" imagined the same riots, flight from the cities and suburbs, and survival on a remote piece of property -- but minus the guns and with a much more truly Christian vision than the apocalyptic right-wing Christianity the survivalists apply to their fantasies.

For another optimistic alternative, see this April 2009 NYT magazine article about what was called the Transition movement, which I linked to before. It says something about the appeal of the more horrific fantasies that they're 99 percent of what you hear and read about.

Rand Paul supporters rough up Move On demonstrator

Why would anyone be surprised that far-right wing demonstrators, whose stock in trade is rage and violent images, actually resort to violence?



Via mediaite.

Updated: The man who did the actual head-stomping has been identified as a local campaign coordinator for the Rand Paul campaign. He has verbally apologized, and has been banned from the campaign.

Collapsitarian screed: You're SOL

Last month I mentioned a book I was reading, a so-called novel which described a claque of well-prepared paranoids and how they survive the total collapse of society, including riots, cannibalism, and the end of all political and economic systems, which (according to the novel) will be a swift and inevitable consequence of our current political-economic course.

If you really want a sample of the way these people think, without slogging through that ridiculous (though self-righteously humorless) "novel," take a look at this blog post. It's on the website of the author of that book, and though the post itself was not written by the book's author, it partakes of exactly the same mentality -- only even grimmer. Here's just one sentence, following a passage in which the author says that if you do make it out of the riot-torn cities, it won't do you much good to try to hunt for food because your gunshots will attract other refugees.

Deciding not to risk your life to kill what's left of God's little animals, you might innocently/ignorantly believe that you can sustain yourself and your family by foraging for wild, edible plants, but so does every other unprepared refugee who has fled to the country, and they are all scouring the countryside, grazing on everything that is green or was green or might be green someday.

The whole thing's like that, wild-eyed and detailed to a pornographic degree -- because that's what it is, pornography. It's porn for paranoid right-wing foamers.

This apocalyptic event, known to right-wing paranoids as The End Of The World As We Know It or TEOTWAWKI*, is almost as widely predicted among the gun-crazy right wing as the Rapture itself, and perhaps even more widely yearned for -- because amid all the suffering that comes with it, the well-prepared right-wing paranoid will be vindicated. Plus, he'll get to do what he's always wanted to do, and that's kill everyone in sight that's not in his little survival group. It goes without saying that the end point of this fantasy is that the only other people around will be like-minded right-wing fascists just like him. No wonder he's looking forward to it.

* I think having an acronym that's impossible to pronounce pretty much defeats the purpose of having an acronym, especially when the phrase "The end of the world as we know it" is so easy and fun to say and even has its own rock song, which you are probably already humming along with. They also refer to this event as "When the Schumer hits the fan," apparently a cryptic anti-Semitic reference and one that allows them to piously avoid saying "shit." Because when you're planning a survival strategy that requires you to kill or leave to rot every other human being who isn't as well-armed and well-prepared as you, you'd better not cuss. The post-Schumer world, awash in blood, would be a terrible place if people took the Lord's name in vain.

Why Graham Greene traveled to Africa, Mexico, Vietnam

Reading Graham Greene's autobiography A Sort of Life -- a cheap edition I got used for a few dollars -- I got to the part where he talks about a "war on boredom" that he began to fight, during a depression of what he later understood to be his manic depression condition. As part of this war on boredom, he engaged for a season in playing Russian roulette.

The first time, he was rewarded with "an extraordinary sense of jubilation" and of his renewed life's infinite possibilities. But when he repeated the experience later -- he describes having done so several times during the fall the year when he was nineteen -- he found the exhilarating effect of the experience lessened each time. Finally, when playing Russian roulette no longer had the power to give him even an adrenaline rush -- which he frankly describes as a "drug" he had come to enjoy -- he gave up doing it.

But the interesting part is at the end of the chapter when he says that this practice of using what he calls recklessness to fight his "war on boredom" is what underlies his subsequent journeys abroad:

A kind of Russian roulette remained too a factor in my later life, so that without previous experience of Africa I went on an absurd and reckless trek through Liberia¹; it was the fear of boredom which took me to [the Mexican state of] Tabasco during the religious persecution², to a léproserie in the Congo³, to the Kikuyu reserve during the Mau-Mau insurrection⁴, to the emergency in Malaya⁵ and to the French war in Vietnam⁶. There, in those last three regions of clandestine war, the fear of ambush served me just as effectively as the revolver... in the lifelong war against boredom.

The references are, of course, to Greene's later books:
(1) Journey Without Maps -- actually this journey, which he undertook with a female cousin, was done on behalf of the British secret service, to assess whether Axis powers had a foothold in Liberia.
(2) The non-fiction The Lawless Roads and the novel The Power and the Glory
(3) A Burnt-Out Case
4 and 5 -- No book that I know of, but that's probably just my ignorance.
(6) The Quiet American

Esquire, attempting to do for men what Cosmo does for women

A few weeks ago I started subscribing to the Esquire magazine website RSS feed in Google Reader, and I've been kind of dumbfounded by what I've seen there. Some very representative titles of articles:

• How to Eat Like a Man Anywhere You Go
• Why is Clint Eastwood Still The Man?
• What You Can Learn from Mad Men's Season 4 Style, a feature that includes tips such as "Your clothes begin to tell a story about your character, without overpowering it. ... Start seeing your shopping habit as opportunities to invest in your character's wardrobe" and "We ladies love a good vest because it defines your torso under the jacket. It looks rakish and cool when you pull off your jacket. Please do not scrimp on quality, though, and make sure your vest fits you perfectly."

What the fuck!? Why don't they just call the magazine Tips for Clueless Guys with Terminally Insecure Gender Identity?

That "Mad Men Style" feature alone is a masterpiece of insinuation, scorn, and impossibly high standards, written by a woman who apparently thinks men spend more time thinking about their clothes than they do about pussy. In other words, apparently Esquire is a magazine for closeted gay men.

Clint Eastwood, really?? They think 35-year-old men regard an 80-year-old as a role model?

Today's fake: British MP says her blog for constituents is "70% fiction"

Here's something I was fascinated with. A British MP has a blog she uses to publicize her activities and her positions on issues -- just as most politicians now do. But after being cleared of allegations she misled Parliament on some expense account-related matters, she blithely announced that her blog is "70 percent fiction" anyway and it shouldn't have been used as a basis for the charges, which had to do with whether she spends most of her time in London or in her district.

Conservative MP Nadine Dorries, who represents a district known as Mid Bedfordshire, said:

"My blog is 70% fiction and 30% fact. It is written as a tool to enable my constituents to know me better and to reassure them of my commitment to Mid Bedfordshire.

I rely heavily on poetic licence and frequently replace one place name/event/fact with another.

In the light of the bullying onslaught of the Daily Telegraph (which reported the claims about her expenses) I used my blog to its best effect in reassuring my constituents of my commitment to Mid Beds. My commitment is absolute and is always my first consideration regardless of where I sleep at night. However, I have always been aware that should my personal domestic arrangements become the knowledge of my political opponents, they would be able to exaggerate that to good effect. Hence the reason for my blog and my need to reassure my constituents.

Isn't it for situations exactly like this that the word truthiness was invented?

What I love about this story is that she is completely blithe and unashamed that she told lie after lie to her own constituents. In her mind, her blog fulfilled its purpose perfectly -- it told her constituents what she wanted them to believe about her positions and activities. What actually happened is totally beside the point, to her -- the important thing is that she got her message across.

Of course, it's nothing most people don't do -- obfuscate the truth to construct a larger truth, a constructed, smoothed-out version of reality. It's what we do in letters and phone calls to our parents, because (to use a now clichéd phrase) they can't handle the truth. We do it to anyone whom we feel entitled to patronize, in other words. But for a politician to be so unapologetic when caught red-handed really does expand the boundaries of shamelessness.

Frankly it's unsurprising that it's a conservative British politician, with their sense of entitlement and scorn for what the (British) CEO of BP called "the little people," who was caught at this.

Today's fake: Amazon astroturfs pro-Kindle comments

The blog Mobylives discovered some telltale similarities in comments to a post mentioning the Kindle, leading to the inescapable conclusion that the pro-Kindle comments were generated automatically by a program looking for blog posts about the e-reader.

The Mobylives blogger wonders why the behemoth would bother when the commenter names were obviously made-up monikers like Kendall Puddephatt and Sergio Rodenbough. Probably has something to do with search engines, which don't pay attention to commenter names but do pay attention to content.

I wonder if now I'll get a bunch of pro-Kindle fake comments. If I do, I'll be sure to approve them, so readers of this blog can see.

Desert sojourn, last day

After the hike on Saturday and a dinner with Christine and other friends that night, the cold I'd had for several days started to get worse, and by the following afternoon I had a fever. So the last 24 hours have been more or less wasted. Although I'm feeling a little better now and have started packing and cleaning for my departure tomorrow morning, my last days here have been subsumed in the sensations of being ill. Today when I drove to Twentynine Palms to gas up the car and to eat lunch, I looked around at the landscape, which I have gotten used to and which I won't be seeing after today, and attempted to see it with new eyes. I'll miss the views from the house.

My trip here has been a success, in that I made good contacts and I found what could be the key to the second part of the novel. It's been a failure to the extent that I haven't followed up on some leads, more or less out of shyness or laziness. There's much more I could have done. But I'm glad I came.

Speaking of parkland

Christine was just telling me about this today, while we were hiking. I didn't know it was happening already. ¡Pobrecitos!

Biologists scour Mojave in desert tortoise roundup

More than 100 biologists and contract workers fanned out across a nearly pristine stretch of the eastern Mojave Desert on Friday to start rounding up tortoises blocking construction of the first major solar energy plant to be built on public land in Southern California. On a sunny morning in the height of tortoise courting season, the biologists methodically peered under every bush and into every hole on both sides of a two-mile lane traversing the project site. Following close behind, workers bladed century-old creosote bushes and erected fencing in areas that will soon be declared a "tortoise-free zones."

The effort in San Bernardino County's panoramic Ivanpah Valley, just north of Interstate 15 and about 40 miles southwest of Las Vegas, disrupted complex tortoise social networks and blood lines linked for centuries by dusty trails, shelters and hibernation burrows.

Federal wildlife biologists said it was needed to make way for construction of BrightSource Energy's 3,280-acre, 370-megawatt Ivanpah Solar Electric Generation System. Without the roundup, an estimated 17 federally threatened tortoises -- and an unknown number of half-dollar-sized hatchlings -- in the 913-acre initial phase of the project would have been squashed by heavy equipment. A total 36 adult tortoises are believed to inhabit the project site. "We can never say we got them all out of there — these are cryptic creatures," said Roy Murray of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service desert tortoise recovery office.

Under a plan approved by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, as many tortoises as possible will be captured, weighed, measured, photographed, blood tested, fitted with radio transmitters and housed in quarantine pens with artificial burrows. The tortoises will remain in the pens until they can be transported and released in natural settings elsewhere in the region determined to be free of disease and predators -- a process expected to take several months.

Tortoise translocation is still an experimental strategy with a dismal track record. In previous efforts, transported tortoises have shown a tendency to wander, sometimes for miles, often back toward the habitat in which they were found. The stress of handling and adapting to unfamiliar terrain renders the reptiles vulnerable to potentially lethal threats: predation by dogs, ravens and coyotes; respiratory disease, dehydration and being hit by vehicles.

But project biologist and tortoise expert Mercy Vaughn was optimistic. "Our goal is zero kill," Vaughn said.

Good luck with that. Good luck, critters.

Desert sojourn, day 30

Queen Valley, Joshua Tree National Park

Christine and I went hiking in the Queen Valley area of Joshua Tree National Park (here's the official map [PDF] if you're interested) and had a great critter experience: we saw two tarantulas. Here's video of the first one:

The second one was motionless at the edge of a hole right at the spot where the first one had appeared -- they live in holes in the ground. Christine pointed out that it was mating season and that "males usually don't survive mating... Maybe she bit his head off."

After our hike, we drove a little ways to a parking area for something called Wall Street Mill, a historical attraction we didn't actually visit. Instead, we took a different, unmarked path that led to these ruins:

She said that this used to a store of some sort and that it was open as recently as the early 1970s -- or so she had heard; there was nothing to tell us what we were looking at. We had already been talking about the officially approved activities in the park -- camping, hiking, rock climbing -- differ from the things you can do in the park but which the park staff doesn't want the public to see or know about, such as precolumbian petroglyphs and other relics. She told a story about going to an officially undocumented archeo-astronomical site -- a place where the indigenous people of the area had arranged rocks to mark astronomical events (of which Stonehenge is the best known example) -- one solstice before dawn, and being detained by park rangers who literally jumped out from behind bushes to ask what they were doing there. It was very different when the park ranger assumed his or her police function, she said, suddenly they're no longer this friendly person in a Smokey Bear hat, suddenly they're a cop. And the rangers were very uncomfortable with anyone knowing about the archaeoastronomy site.

Of course, I understand why the park wants to protect culturally significant sites and objects -- they don't want them to get trashed (like, for example, these vandalized petroglyphs). Other sites, such as the Wall Street Mill mentioned above, or events such as the shootout between two crusty pioneers, fit into the Old West narrative the park wants to present.

But the ruins of the store -- if that's what it was -- have no explanatory plaque, no signs pointing to the site, no mention of it on the map. (Here it is on Google satellite.) The 1960s aren't part of the official history.

By now we were standing beside a large piñon pine tree about a hundred yards from the ruins, close by some sheltering cliffs. "There will never be," I said, "a commemorative plaque about the 7000 great acid trips that people took while lying under this tree." And Christine laughed, because that's the kind of thing we used to do.

Desert sojourn, day 29

Local news accounts are full of the story of the hiker from Los Angeles who was lost in the national park for sex days before being found. The story seems to be everywhere, so it's no wonder it's on people's minds. When I was walking yesterday afternoon -- two hours before sunset, up a dirt road not far from the house I'm renting -- a passing pickup truck slowed and stopped and the driver made sure I was okay. "I wanted to make sure you wasn't like that lost hiker guy," he said. Nope, not lost, and not nearly as well equipped, though I do have a hat and usually a pen.

Somebody should find out what kind of pen it was, and put him in its ads.

In other local news, a bar in 29 Palms burned down on Saturday in the wee hours, and it went up so quick that they're investigating to see if it's arson. The place was a sports bar favored by Marines. Most people told me to stay out of it, which is fine -- I really like the Joshua Tree Saloon much nearer, where I went to watch the first half of a playoff baseball game last night. There the guy on the seat next to me had dialed up ten songs on the jukebox, and with each one he told me why he liked it, and often had a related anecdote. Of Buddy Holly's "That'll Be the Day," he said that Holly had written the song after seeing John Ford's The Searchers, a film where John Wayne utters that line several times -- or so my new friend said.

He went on to say: "I met John Wayne twice. The first time was at Knotts Berry Farm, they dedicated the John Wayne Theater, and he was there and made a speech. He walked by the crowd and I shook his hand, and then later we went out to the parking lot where we knew his car was -- we recognized his car -- and waited for him. When he came out with the guy who drove him, he stopped and talked with us for about fifteen minutes. Oh, he was very nice, extremely friendly. The second time was when I was working at the Disneyland Hotel. He came down the hall and got in the elevator. Then when the elevator went downstairs, I went with the maid into his room and looked at his stuff. There were some cards there with his name on them -- I wish I'd taken one but I didn't -- that he gave out to people, since he couldn't sign his name because he had arthritis. And he had two toupees. Two."

Later in the day: It was warm enough today to read outside in the shade at the end of the afternoon. I happened to look up and see a long line of birds flying from west to east. At first I thought they were ravens, but then I thought, do ravens flock? After thirty birds or so had passed, it seemed like the parade of whatever it was was over. But I looked up later and saw more -- many more. Now it was clear they were turkey vultures, the species I saw a couple weeks ago. A ragged line, lower and closer this time, flew over in the same direction, just north of east. Dozens of birds, not in a straight line, but maybe between 50 and 100 feet apart. A group of twenty or thirty would fly by, and there would be a short break, and then another forty would fly by. I tried taking pictures of them, but failed.

As the sun set, they flew lower, apparently seeking out a place to roost for the night. There are no tall trees right around here and I didn't see them circling to land. When the sun had finally set, that was the end of the overflight. Majestic!

Guy finds FBI tracking device on his car -- confirmed when FBI shows up to ask for it back

From Valleywag, emphasis mine:

On Monday, a guy in California posted pictures of an FBI tracking device his friend found on his car to the social news site Reddit. Tuesday afternoon the FBI showed up at his friend's house and demanded it back.

Reddit user Khaledthegypsy posted this picture to Reddit, asking "Does this mean the FBI is after us? ... Afifi's deceased father was a prominent member of the local Muslim community and was on a federal watchlist.

The FBI left Afifi with "You don't need to call your lawyer. Don't worry, you're boring," according to Wired.

Read the Wired story, which adds:

His discovery comes in the wake of a recent ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals saying it's legal for law enforcement to secretly place a tracking device on a suspect's car without getting a warrant, even if the car is parked in a private driveway.

Speaking of surveillance: This blogger says illegal surveillance by various agencies is increasing.

Desert sojourn, day 28

On my long drive yesterday -- about seven solid hours of driving, all the way from Joshua Tree to Laughlin, NV and back (click for map) -- I listened for a while to right-wing radio foamers. I usually can't stand listening to them for more than about 30 seconds, but I was kind of a captive audience -- I couldn't get anything else on the radio. Plus, it's material for my book, which in part involves characters who have adopted a paranoid view of the state of things. Man, it's all just fear, fear, fear. One guy repeated what he said he'd heard from some right-wingers in the U.K., some tall tale about Pakistani drug gangs and their enslavement of 13 and 14 year old English girls -- white English girls, of course. The American commentator repeated this blather not only without critique but as if it were an oracle of what was about to happen in the U.S. And it all comes from building mosques, he said.

Just an example. I won't waste my time even saying how stupid it is, or how classically xenophobic and racist. What struck me was not the paranoid fantasy, but the enthusiasm -- spoken in a voice trembling with fear and loathing -- with which it was repeated and the explicit prediction that this is where the U.S. is headed.

And I had to remind myself -- Obama isn't even up for re-election for another two years! What will it be like after another two years? How far can they ratchet up the hysteria? Then I realized: that's exactly why terrorists blow shit up, to stoke exactly this kind of hysteria. Thus the right-wing foamers' talk becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Or at least that seems to be the only place it leads to.

Let me say one more time -- I never can stand to listen to this stuff. So it's really true that I've never heard it before, not full-force for a couple of hours. And the millions of people who thrill to this stuff listen for hours, all day every day. Kind of an astonishing moment in the history of the U.S. experiment with democracy, really. A real test of the question "How much free speech can we stand?" (Coincidentally, the Fred Phelps cult went before the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday so the court could address just that question.)

Not reading

My new favorite blog is Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?, by Bhanu Kapil, who teaches at Naropa:

I am writing this blog post very early in the morning because my son's tooth fell out; once again, pre-elk. So the "tooth fairy" had to wait for its moment (2 a.m.) before slipping the five bucks under his pillow. Is five bucks too much? I'm so sleepy. I grew up in the same house as my parents. There was never any money, no matter how many teeth fell out. I asked my dad about it, once I'd figured out the tooth fairy was meant to be him. He said: "Nobody came to pick her up from Heathrow, so she went back to Delhi."

Actually, he said Ludhiana, but the thought of the neo-industrial North with its bright white winter-time fogs and dead bodies in the canal makes me queasy. I thought about that a long time, the idea of a person failing to fully arrive: and it is one of the few things that probably made me into a person: the idea of a person, for example, exiting the airport, then immediately, after a few gulps of light blue, freezing cold air, going back in. A cup of Nescafe from a machine, with extra milk. A country as seen through the glass. Then home, with only a description of rain to show for it, for her troubles, which were extensive, though recently have sloped off. Why not? Why shouldn't things come to an abrupt end? Just look at Mr. Elk rubbing his basket of strict attention on the dirt of the riverbank, until it sheds. Until he's no longer a random attractant. Elk porn: all the cars with Nebraska plates on the verge. Thirty-seven year old men in khaki shorts clutching their cameras close to their necks, just in case.

In other news, I haven't officially given up on Handke's "Crossing the Sierra de Gredos," but I haven't exactly been hankering to get back to it. Instead I am reading a short story -- published by itself in a chapbook, by New Directions -- by Javier Marías, "Bad Nature; or, with Elvis in Mexico." It's a lot more fun, for sure. I like reading things that are fun, who doesn't?

Desert sojourn, day 27

Intersection of Calif. Hwy 62 and U.S. 95

I worked steadily on technical writing all day and through lunch, and then, conscious that everyone back in the Bay Area had gone to Angel Island for a company picnic, I took off. I drove out east of here on State Hwy. 62, which winds through the desert until it reaches the middle of nowhere and dead-ends into U.S. 95, a junction where there is exactly nothing, aside from some directional signs. But I love that drive -- it goes through absolutely unmarked desert -- no rail line, no structures, and for much of the way, not even a line of telephone poles paralleling the road. You get the full bottom-of-the-sea sweep of the desert landscape, punctuated by brown stony mountains. There's no traffic. It's the perfect drive that says "I'm in the middle of the desert and liking it."

Then I kept going to Laughlin, where I lost $25, and turned around and drove back. Thing is, it's 185 miles one way. Luckily, I was able to catch a baseball playoff game on a station out of Salt Lake City. And when that was done, there was the Giants' station from the Bay Area, broadcasting phone-in talk sports. It's all good. I'm darned tired now though.

Desert sojourn, day 26

Looking northeast across the desert after sunset

I can't get over how the weather has changed. Four days ago it was 95 in mid-day; two days ago 85; today 70 at most. A cool breeze springs up in late afternoon. When I took a walk at sunset, I wore a jacket, just as I had for my sunrise walk this morning. I took a quick little snapshot camera video of some quail crossing the road, but it was already too dark for the video to really come out.

After dark I went to "downtown" Joshua Tree (nothing more than a concentration of stores and storefronts, many of them not actually hosting going concerns, near a crossroads) to the Crossroads Cafe. It's the closest you can come to a fairly hip joint, complete with organic salads, white hipsters in dreadlocks, and wicker baskets full of small works of art and craft. And it's the place to get a really decent sandwich. I sat and eavesdropped and made notes on my book. One quote that's going to make it in: "How do you take advantage of a current that's moving against you?" I didn't hear the reply to this probably rhetorical question, but it's just as well, the question itself speaks volumes.

Sins of silence

Daniel Ellsberg interviewed in the L.A. Times, reflecting on his role in history:

Although he was attacked by political opponents for betraying his country, Ellsberg's regret is rather that he didn't leak documents earlier -- in 1964 when the conflict was still escalating.

"I'm one of a few dozen people who could have prevented the Vietnam War," he says, drumming his finger on his wooden table with every syllable. A Democratic Congress would have turned on Johnson, he thinks, if they had seen how bogus his war justifications were. "But I was very inhibited -- I felt like I was breaking my promise."

It's human nature that troubles him the most.

"Humans are herd animals," he says. "They depend very much on being part of the group, and to remain part of the group, they'll do anything. And a much larger number will go along with anything. And the broadest form of that is keeping your mouth shut."

Desert sojourn, day 25

The weather really turned today. Though the sun was, as always, hot and oppressive in mid-day, there was a constant breeze. By 5:30 p.m. when I went outside to read, I actually had to go inside after half an hour because I was too cold. I've turned off all the fans and vents; now, at 7:40 p.m., I think it's about 60 degrees out, or even cooler. Practically a 30 degree difference from this time last week.

I had sort of a critter interaction this morning, if you want to count domestic pets. While I was out on my morning walk, just after sunrise, a pickup truck came bumping along the dirt road. The driver stopped and asked if I'd seen a black and white husky that he'd lost. I said no, but twenty minutes later when I was back in my neighborhood, there was the dog. I called him, and he came over and obediently sat down while I looked at his tag. Unluckily, his only tag was from a rabies vaccination at a vet in Wasilla, Alaska. Well, he was a husky, that made sense. While I was on the phone with them and they were looking up the vaccination records, the man in the pickup came along again, and the dog jumped in the back. The man explained the dog had gotten out when someone left the house earlier in the morning.

If that's not much of a native critter sighting, one very common critter I haven't mentioned yet is the quail. They're all over the place, especially in the early mornings and late afternoons, tootling along on the ground, sometimes in the classic line formation, sometimes in a sort of squad. If they're startled they take off with a very noisy flutter, much noisier than pigeons. But generally they just putter around. They're very cute.

The other very common critter is the cottontail rabbit. They're all over, too, big ones and little ones. Very shy, but you you can't help but notice when they bolt from cover and sprint across the sand until they're out of sight.

Desert sojourn, day 24

Boulders just inside Joshua Tree National Park, near my rented house

This morning marked the fourth day in a row that it was stormy in the morning. Although it wasn't very close to my house, it did look like heavy rain in Twentynine Palms. By the time I went over there for church at 10 a.m., though, it was all cleared up.

But it did mean I skipped my walk in the morning. So after working on my book this afternoon, making up characters and researching yet another area I know nothing about -- theft of native American artifacts -- I took a small walk about an hour before sunset. As I've said before, at the top of the street, half a mile from the house I'm renting, is the boundary of the national park. And you can slip through a barbed wire fence and just go walking. That's what I did for about an hour. I only got a few hundred yards into the park at the most -- there's no trail and while it's easy to go overland, you do have to thread your way between cactus, creosote bushes and boulders while also looking out for squirrel holes (ankle spraining danger) and snakes (bite danger). Quartz litters the ground. It's gorgeous, which is why it's a national park.

Nice weekend. Glad I got some work done on my book!

Desert sojourn, day 23

No walk this morning, as it was even stormier than Thursday morning. Much more rain fell, especially between here and the town of Twentynine Palms, where I was hit by a hard rain on the highway. When I got to town, the power was out. At Denny's, they let me order coffee and pie, and then, since they quickly ran out of coffee that had been made before the power was out, they began turning people away. In fact, they couldn't even charge me. I tipped the waitress anyway.

I drove with Christine today back into the Mojave Desert Preserve, where I had gone last Saturday. It was a cooler day, and when we got out to walk around at Cima and Kelso (I didn't take any pictures today) it was much more pleasant than last week. We encountered no rain on our trip. Christine resumed telling me gossip about local weirdos. I don't think she'll ever run out of stories about them.

After we got back I spent the rest of the day transcribing yesterday's interview and researching some more today about a heinous murder that happened 100 miles from here but which might just as well have happened a few miles away. Young people, drugs and alcohol, abandoned military bunker, guns -- what could possibly go wrong?

Desert sojourn, day 22

Sky (yesterday evening)

I've started taking pictures of the sky -- just the sky, with no landscape in it. I don't know if this is because I've had some startling revelation about the nature of geographic space in the desert and the irrelevance of the land, or if I'm just bored with the sights of the neighborhood.

But! today I talked to a guy in his mid-20s. He grew up here. And his parents, who have lived here for decades, live in two old L.A. streetcars that somehow got hauled up here. Well, at least the streetcars form the basis of their house. That's one thing in the neighborhood I haven't taken a picture of yet. In the desert, you don't go around taking pictures of people's houses the way you would in San Francisco, and the reason is that you don't know who lives there. It could be an ex-con, a meth-crazed Marine vet, a guy on Megan's List, a biker on the lam from his enemies, or any number of people who live out here precisely because the extra space allows them some privacy. So you don't want to stand in the road (or, if you're really suicidal, on their property) snapping pictures of their place unless you want to be looking down the barrel of a gun.

Nevertheless, the nice family who live in the streetcar-house won't shoot me, so I'll take a picture of their house some day. But I'll phone first.

Anyway, talking to the young guy was an eye opener. Every time I start asking people about their lives here they wind up telling me crazy stories about meth-crazed villains, even though I don't really ask for them. Today's beaut was about... well, see for yourself:

Ex-Marines sentenced to prison for killing in Twentynine Palms

Associated Press, 22 Aug 2004

TWENTYNINE PALMS, Calif. - Two former Marines were each given three-year prison sentences for the machete death of a man they lured to an off-road area in the Mojave Desert.

Alan Patterson and Justin VanMeter, both 24, were sentenced Friday in Superior Court on charges of involuntary manslaughter. Both have been in custody for two years and probably will be released within a year, prosecutors said.

They were convicted July 6 of the August 2002 killing of Daniel Smith. Prosecutors alleged that they lured the 19-year-old to the Sugar Bowl area of Twentynine Palms and took turns hacking him with a machete because they thought he was informing sheriff's deputies about their alleged drug dealing.

The other funny thing was when I told the guy where I was staying so he could come over. "Oh, the old Garrison house," he said. Thinking he was getting mixed up, I said no, the Harrison House is across the street.* "No, I know which house you mean," he said. "It used to belong to an old tweaker named Garrison. I used to babysit there." And when he walked in the door he laughed and said, "Man, this place looks much better than it used to!"

* See my entry for Sep. 20.

Today's fake: woman faked her son's cancer to glom donations

An unemployed Detroit-area woman faked a cancer diagnosis for her 12-year-old son so she could solicit donations, including $7500 from a church fundraiser. As part of the scam, she shaved his head and eyebrows and drugged him so he would appear lethargic. She told him he had leukemia. She's facing fraud and child abuse charges.

Desert sojourn, day 21 - day of storms

I've been getting out later and later for my morning walks, and as a result I do too much of the walk in full sunlight. So this morning I was all set to get out early. Had my alarm set for 5:30 and everything. But the sky had other plans. I was awakened a little after 5:00 by strong breezes coming in the the windows, which I keep open at night. By the time it started to get light, the wind was really blowing and there were lightning flashes. Clearly it was no time to take a walk. We had another colorful sunrise and by the time it got fully light I could see dark clouds here and there and precipitation coming from them. I took the picture above, showing the house I'm staying in under a rainbow, just after sunrise. And I took this video (1 min. 4 sec.) about the same time.

But it wasn't until around 8:30 that a little rain finally fell on me. It lasted for ten minutes or so, not getting anything around here very wet. Though I was glad I had gone outside and closed the windows of the car, which I also keep cracked open.

Now at mid-day it's just kind of cloudy, with clearing in the east. The storm cleared out the haze in the air, and the clouds are making it a little cooler.

Update a little later: While all that weather was going on, searchers found a guy who'd been missing in the national park for almost a week.

Desert sojourn, day 20

Sunrise along Foothill Road, Panorama Heights, Joshua Tree, Cal.

More clouds this morning, another dramatic sunrise. In the southwest I could see some precipitation falling out of clouds as near as 15 miles away, but I don't know if anything reached the ground. The Wunderground.com page for Joshua Tree says the humidity is an usually high 41%, so there may we be some showers somewhere.

Less than an hour after I came back from my walk, I was sitting at the kitchen table next to an open door when I heard a sharp whack sound and felt a vibration. It felt as if something had struck the roof of the house. For a second I thought the house might have been hit by a stray bullet -- no one is supposed to shoot their guns within half a mile of any dwellings, but you never know out here. I crouched down in the doorway, trying to see if anyone were assaulting the house, or anything else such as one of the bullet-riddled abandoned cars nearby, but I didn't see or hear anything. Eventually I went back to work.

One of the standard questions I've been asking people I meet here is, Of anyone you happen to pass on the road or in town, how many people do you think are packing? I wanted to see if that question would evoke a response like, "Are you kidding? Everybody!" But no one answered that way. They all thought about it for a while and then made a guess. Of course that is a different question from whether people have guns at home; I presume a lot of people do. The first day I was here I heard a story about a Wonder Valley resident who shot a feral dog which had killed one of his goats and had come back for the other.

Now it is true that things are more wild-west in Wonder Valley (see map), which is a good 15 or 20 miles east of here. But I wouldn't put it past some of the social misfits in the neighborhood -- and there are old junky places in my neighborhood along with the nice houses, places with junk cars and trailers and piles of junk and a broken, improvised fence and a general air of Crazy Desert Crank Addict And/Or Survivalist Nutbag. When they built their place twenty or thirty years ago, this was little more civilized than Wonder Valley is now. So yeah, people have guns.

Desert sojourn, day 19

Because the moon is now several days past full -- living out here, you become aware of the times of sunset and sunrise and the phases of the moon, because they are so evident -- yesterday evening I did some stargazing, lying on my back on the table outside, the same table I eat dinner at around sunset. I noticed a few wispy clouds and some haze on the horizon, but it's been getting hazy the last few days, and the conditions didn't detract too much from my enjoyment of the night sky. As a city dweller, especially someone who lives in San Francisco where the fog comes in so regularly and obscures the sky at night, practically any views of the stars at all is a huge improvement over what I'm used to.

Then this morning there were even more clouds, so there was an ornamented sunrise:

In fact, I didn't see the sun itself at all until about 9:15 a.m., so my morning walk (which took place at sunrise) was shaded after sunrise for the first time.

In other news, there was a story in the Riverside paper today about the acquisition of a couple of sections of nearby land for the national park. The interesting parts of the story are about the flora and fauna on the land and the part about the waterfall that appears when it rains. Wow, I'd like to see that.

Yiyun Li among 23 MacArthur grant recipients

The just-announced 2010 list of recipients of the MacArthur "genius" grant includes novelist and short story writer Yiyun Li, whom I interviewed in 2009 about her novel The Vagrants.

Her new book, her second collection of stories, is Gold Boy, Emerald Girl.

Desert sojourn, day 18

Hawks nest along Cottonwood Road, Panorama Heights, Joshua Tree

There's the hawks nest I spotted yesterday. At least I assume it belongs to the pair of hawks I saw hunting from the tops of those same electric poles on two different days. They weren't around this morning; I suppose they hunt different ranges on different days. They aren't dumb. The only critters I saw this morning were two gleaming black ravens. They looked so well-fed that it seemed hard for one of them to lift off the ground, but maybe he was just being lazy.

It's hot again today, but I have no cause for complaint, since it's actually much hotter in Los Angeles, if the weather map is to be believed:

Update: The L.A. Times has just reported record-breaking temperatures of 113 degrees in downtown Los Angeles.

Still, I'm thinking of going to the movies this afternoon, a mid-20th century way of escaping the heat. There is one movie theater, predictably in a shopping center in the suburbanized town of Yucca Valley. And there's a drive-in too, which all my hip friends say is the only way to go. That's in Twentynine Palms. Actually, knowing there's a 6-screen megaplex in a shopping center in Yucca Valley and a drive-in in Twentynine Palms tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the difference between the two towns.

Desert sojourn day 17

Up early today, 4.5 miles. In my now-standard rectangular route in the neighborhood, I encountered for the first time a female runner. She was going clockwise while I was going counter clockwise, so we passed each other twice. She was heavily equipped with the arm-strapped combination music player-runners timer and looked very professional.

I also saw the two hawks I saw a few days ago, and this time I noticed their nest. I didn't have a camera with me, so I'll take a picture tomorrow.

I skipped church and worked all day long on my book, and I got a lot done. While I was working, a coyote trotted right by the window in broad daylight -- it was maybe 10 in the morning -- but I didn't move fast enough to take a picture of him. Handsome animals.

At the end of the day I sat outside reading and drinking a beer. As the sun set I took this picture of the view across the street. It didn't come out that great using the cellphone camera. I guess I was too lazy to go back in the house and get the better digital camera. I took that picture at sunset; the hills are the foothills of the Queen Mountains and they make up the southern border of the national park.

It was quite a hot day. When the sun set I hosed off the west side of the house, where the concrete back porch was radiating a tremendous amount of heat. And it's supposed to be hot tomorrow. I can always go someplace air-conditioned; I can even take my laptop and work from wherever.

Desert sojourn: day 16: Up above and down below

From a letter to the editor of the local paper on the controversy about whether the nearby town of Yucca Valley should permit the construction of a Super Wal-Mart (Yucca Valley is the only suburbanized town here, full of shopping centers, national chains, and stoplights; they already have a Wal-Mart the size of a hanger for jetliners, the controversy is over whether they should be allowed to build a "Wal-Mart Supercenter" the size of a football stadium):

For individuals who have no financial worries, please think of those of us who live on limited incomes. We are the ones who travel down below once a month to shop at a Wal-Mart Supercenter.

They travel "down below" -- in other words, west on the highway down a long, steep grade to Palm Springs. Up here we are in the Mojave Desert, elevation 1500 to 5000 feet; down below they are in the Colorado Desert, elevation from below sea level to about 900 feet. There's a real awareness here about the difference between life up here and down below. Not only is it cooler, less humid, and prettier up here, it's much less suburbanized -- except for Yucca Valley.

Yucca Valley is a story in itself, and I should be devoting more time to researching it. There's a reason the place is full of shopping centers: the town is run by developers and their chums. And reportedly they all go to the same big-box evangelical church. All very cozy.

I didn't write yesterday because I was tied up with work all day, and then I drove over to Christine's in Wonder Valley to watch a DVD with her and Deborah and a neighbor. Antonioni's Le Amiche (English title "The Girlfriends") from 1955. Wow, it was so beautiful, and the direction was so fluid and complex. Back then he was as good as Kurosawa in shooting complicated interior shots with people standing all over the frame, depth of focus, and lots of movement. It was so good.

The full moon has been gorgeous the last few nights. And as I lay in bed last night I heard coyotes howl. That was nice. But then in the middle of the night I awoke to a ruckus, a great deal of barking -- lots of people here have dogs -- and the desperate howl of a wounded animal. It didn't sound like a rabbit (plenty of them around here); I was thinking a pack of dogs might have got at a smaller dog.

Well, I thought there wasn't a pack of dogs around here. But this morning when I went on my walk, I took precautions. The only danger, however, was a chihuahua.

Update, 9:00 pm: I took a long drive, winding up on the old Route 66 where it cuts through the desert north of here. I took this picture somewhere around the ghost town of Chambless, looking back toward the Sheephole Mountains in the distance, behind which are Twentynine Palms and Joshua Tree. This picture fails to capture the dramatic sweep of the desert land, which is very beautiful out there.

Today's fakes: internet vigilantes who entrap and humiliate

This is one of those stories I learned about very late. It started when I saw a piece of news on c|net, but that's the end of the story. To start closer to the beginning, it seems there's a vigilante group called Perverted Justice. Started by a geek who wanted to act out his feelings of rage against an alcoholic father (according to this 2007 Rolling Stone article on the group), they began online flirtations with men, claiming to be underage girls, then publicized the hapless men's pictures and chat transcripts. This was so successful (successful from their point of view) that they began partnering with MSNBC on the show "To Catch a Predator," turning their online stings into a reality TV show. The show resulted in the conviction of over 200 men for attempted sex acts with underage girls, even though there never were any underage girls, just adults posing as girls for the sheer purpose of entrapping would-be molesters.

If these tactics sound dubious to you, the D.A. in a Dallas suburb would agree -- he refused to press charges against two dozen men who were netted by these antics after one of the men who was ensnared (but who didn't even show up at the house of the supposed jailbait), a prosecutor in a neighboring locality, shot himself.

Okay. So along the way, one of the people who became angry at the tactics of Perverted Justice was one Bruce Raisley. He embarked on a campaign to publicize and embarrass the organization, leading the founder of Perverted Justice to retaliate by posing as a woman -- not even underage this time, but using the same flirtation tactics which had proved so successful -- and getting Raisley to leave his wife and show up at an airport with flowers ready to meet his internet love. The P.J. founder sent a confederate to take pictures of the hapless Raisley, and then posted them on its website with the taunt: "Tonight, Bruce Raisley stood around at an airport, flowers in hand, waiting for a woman that turned out to be a man... He has no one. He has no more secrets... Perverted-Justice.com will only tolerate so much in the way of threats and attacks upon us."

Well, that would piss me off, all right. And Raisley was so angry that he downloaded some software and launched botnet attacks on several websites, such as Rolling Stone and other publications which had reported P.J.'s trick on him. And today, to bring this to a close, Raisley was convicted of computer crimes and faces ten years in prisons and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. Here is a more detailed story.

The Perverted Justice group (archive of stories about them here continues its antics. As far as I can tell, they've never been accused of a crime or suffered any negative consequences as a result of their activities.

Desert sojourn, day 14

Warning sign on the border of the Marine base

Today for the first time I did not take a walk in the morning. I slept in a little, then worked a little on my book, then had coffee while I started work. Then I knocked off at 4:00 pm and went in Christine's 4-wheel drive out the same road I had tried to go on last weekend -- her vehicle is more suited to the desert roads than my Volvo sedan. We drove across the mesa on the other side of the valley, all the way to the border of the Marine Corps base. (See the map from a few entries ago.) Then we turned west and drove along the border of the base, past a small mountain called Goat Mountain, and out to Giant Rock.

Giant Rock is worth a story on its own, and many have written it. Here's one version, emphasizing the New Age strain that is abroad in this area. (Not far away is a structure called the Integratron. We'll go to the New York Times for an illustration of that; interior here.) It's been the scene in the past of rave events in the 1990s, and more recently as a rallying point for off-road partiers. When we arrived, there was only one pickup truck, with a couple of guys drinking beer, one of them taking a rifle out of the back of the truck. They didn't look hostile but there's not much to do at Giant Rock if you don't have beer and guns, so we turned around and went back to civilization, passing through Landers and arriving back in Joshua Tree.

When in doubt, just throw anything

A woman fending off a bear attack grabbed the closest thing to hand -- a 12-inch zucchini from her garden -- and threw it at the snarling ursine, hitting it on the noggin. It fled.

"Really though, at this point, who's to say what's real anymore?"

Last year the actor Joachin Phoenix famously appeared on David Letterman's show, and in other public events, looking completely fucked up and saying he was quitting acting. Well guess what -- it was all a hoax or, as they're calling it, performance art, in service of a mockumentary called I'm Still Here.

In this post on Mediaite, about how Phoenix went back on Letterman's show and got a "scolding" from the host, a despairing blogger asks (emphasis mine):

Letterman took Phoenix to task for tricking him (he made the actor admit that he [Letterman] hadn’t been in on the joke or scripted) as well as using most of the footage in the film without paying The Late Show a licensing fee. He even (jokingly?) told Phoenix that he owed him $1 million. When Phoenix, playing along, asked if they could discuss it in private, Letterman took a hard swipe saying they could go to one of I'm Still Here's screenings.

Really though, at this point, who's to say what's real anymore? Maybe Letterman wasn't mad and this was all a hoax.

Such are the dangers of piling air quotes upon sarcasm upon satire upon irony. We're now approaching Andy Kaufmann territory, where a performer constantly spoofs and tricks his friends and family along with his fans so many times that even those closest to him don't know what to believe. You know, if I were going to venture into those rarified levels of hoax, I think I'd set up a secret website for my closest friends and family, where I'd promise to post the real truth, at pain of amputation of my privates. (Of course, if you're actually dying, like Kaufmann was, I guess at some point you might actually go so far as to risk that penalty.)