Dept. of Quagmires

Christine sends a picture taken at "an alterations shop in (the town of) 29 Palms where I get my own alterations done. There are always Marines in there, getting their stripes sewn on or whatever. The last time I was there a big guy in fatigues was asked if he could pick up his stuff in a week, and he just shook his head and said something to the effect that, You never know these days. This was right as they were getting ready to ship a bunch more guys back to Iraq."

I decided this was inspiring, right after I decided to commit suicide

Fifteen-year-old writes best seller:

Writing "was a passion for me since I was very young," Bujor, now 15, said.

Somebody get Negroponte on the phone

Kind of boggles the mind -- if today's car bomb in Riyadh is any indication, even Saudi Arabia is not far-right enough for the lunatics of Al Qaeda.

Meanwhile, what's more startling in today's Doonesbury -- the image of B.D. without his lower leg, or without headgear? This is the first time since 1968 that he's been shown without some sort of helmet.

At the other end of the spectrum, some people are still upset about the performance of "Hey Ya!" on the Grammy Awards in February. (As far as I know, nobody has even asked what the connection is supposed to be between the pop-hiphop "Hey Ya!" and Native Americans.)

Gay marriages halted in Portland

Though courts stopped gay weddings in San Francisco in March, same-sex nuptuals continued in Multnomah County, Oregon, until today when a judge ruled they should stop until a formal court decision is handed down. More than 3000 weddings were performed since Feburary.

How our downfall started

BoingBoing, which posts more interesting things than any other blog, links to a scan of the cover of a pamphlet entitled "Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles." I found a bio of the pamphlet's author and found he has also written such works as "The Marxist Minstrels," "Rhythm, Riots and Revolution" and "The Beatles: A Study in Drugs, Sex and Revolution." His organization also has a "journal" where he posts these thoughts:

Some things you can change and some you can't. You can raise a pig in your parlor. It won't change the pig—only your parlor. Be for change -- as long as it's change for the better. Ruts are just graves with the ends removed. The most inevitable thing in life is change. But why change the American system which produced the greatest freedom for the greatest number of people in human history, along with the world's highest standard of living, for Socialism? The "Liberals" now prefer to call Socialism the 'Welfare State.' That means that the Power Elite -- those who run the Establishment -- get well and you pay the fare. Under any name, Socialism has been a miserable failure for a thousand years. All Welfare States finally become Dictatorships.

Dept. of quagmires

Sometimes the shadows on the wall tell you more than the real action. This week a Doonesbury character is seriously injured in Iraq. The character of B.D. -- who started in artist Garry Trudeau's Harvard days as the glamorous football team captain who ended up in Vietnam, later became the coach of the college team and recently was reactivated and sent to Iraq -- got blown up on Monday. Today they're trying to save his life, and an Associated Presss story revealed he would survive but lose a leg.

Another strip had a similar storyline. The main character in "Get Fuzzy" discovers that a "cousin" has lost a leg in Iraq.

What a contrast to the Vietnam-era Doonesburys, where the war was treated as a serious joke.

Liberals come out boring

An L.A. Times critic listened to 17 straight hours of Air America and came away with this opinion: "It may have been the most boring day of my life."

I already know I liked the book better

Who owns the film rights to On the Road? Francis Ford Coppola. But after 36 years, he still can't get a film version off the ground. You know, some things are better left alone.

Supersize my morning news

Roundup of the morning's intrigue:

The CEO of McDonald's died of a heart attack this morning while attending a company event in Orlando.

Paris Hilton is having her "memoirs" ghost-written, but reportedly she can not only not write, she can't even read. So her obliging editor got someone to read her book to her over the phone while she stared at the picture that will adorn the book cover. (via Gawker)

I finally found where to download The Grey Album, the rap mix based on the Beatles' White Album. Explanation, if you need one, is at that link. And speaking of music industry mysteries, that William Hung CD (the one by the frighteningly bad Chinese-American singer who turned his humiliation on American Idol into a record deal) is the locker room pep-me-up for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Says the SF Chronicle: "He can't carry a tune, but he has carried the Dodgers into first place."

Tell me about it. Cris and I went to the game on Sunday, and despite an inclement drizzle that should have discouraged the visitors, the hated Dodgers won for the third game in a row. Bonds, who went 4 for 4 with 5 RBIs, muttered that he couldn't carry the team on his own. Hey, I know the feeling, big guy.

Sun everywhere

I spent sunny yeserday wandering around the city on foot and by transit, as the pictures on the photoblog show. It was supposed to rain, but instead it was gorgeously sunny and cool. I wish Marilyn, who visited last week, could have seen this weather.

And speaking of erotica-writing friends, Susie Hara has a new piece on Cleansheets, the first one she's published without a pseudonym. Or maybe they just goofed. Anyway, read it, I like her writing.

At one point I rode the streetcars all the way from Castro to the Embarcadero, and then around to Broadway. Every tourist to SF should do this ride -- right down the main drag of the city, from neighborhood to neighborhood, all of them interesting.

Update later: We went out to Mt. Tam for a little hike. Specifically this meant about 2.5 hours of driving for an hour or so of hiking, but I wanted to see the wildflowers. We saw a few of those Calipso orchids -- tiny little purple things. I would have missed it, but one of them had a crowd around it taking pictures. "They're very rare," one of the people assured us.

"Oh yeah, like, um, that other one over there?" I asked, pointing a few feet away. Then a few feet farther we saw one more. But that was it.

Woodward book: Bush planned Iraq invasion in early 2002

Bob Woodward's new book "Plan of Attack" says Bush secretly planned an invasion of Iraq soon after going into Afghanistan, and kept it so secret he ordered Rumsfield not to tell the CIA director. Meanwhile, Tenet was assuring Bush that Iraq had chemical weapons.

Let's think that through. That means Bush planned the invasion assuming U.S. troops would get attacked with chemical weapons. But they evidently had no idea elements of post-Saddam forces and Muslim armies would wage a guerilla war.

Meanwhile, yesterday a retired Marine general criticized Rumsfield for being naive about what it would take to pacify Iraq.

Frisco piggyback!

This vintage jacket bearing the logo of a defunct railroad could be a big seller. Somebody take that picture to a manufacturer and get a volume discount.

Rpublican gaffe of the month

Responding to reporter's questions, Def. Sec. Donald Rumsfield allowed as how the current chaos in Iraq is "not exactly" what the administration might have envisioned when it invaded the country. But that's as far as he would go. He also put his foot in his mouth when he said:

...the reason it is contained is because we have the extra troops there. That is self-evident. Come on, people are fungible. You can have them here or there.

The Kerry campaign immediately jumped on this, saying Rumsfield's statement "is further indication of this Administration's continuing disregard for the men and women who put their lives on the line," blah blah blah.

Maybe the SUV was just a bad idea in the first place

A friend, Philip Klasky, has been an environmental activist for many years, leading, among other things, opposition to a huge landfill in the Mojave Desert as well as a nuclear waste dump in Ward Valley. Now he's trying to rein in off-road vehicles that tear up desert habitat and produce noise pollution. I had to laugh, though, at the mention of the "Gammel Township Neighborhood Association." I think that's probably Philip, my friend Christine, maybe Jerry, and a couple other people. But more power to 'em. Those fucking off-roaders are bad news.

Mister fatso millionaire

Perhaps desperate for some positive publicity, Simpsonscreator Matt Groening is set to appear for the first time as a character in the show itself. (I wonder if this has anything to do with the strike by series voice actors for more money.)

What I'm really concerned with is the picture of Groening that accompanies the BBC story. You know how rich that guy is? (I don't know either, but this 1997 article says his income was $18 million annually "and that was a few years ago.") And he looks like the weird hippie at your sister's wedding.

Splash catcher

Here's a picture, sans mask, of that joker in a Schwartzenegger costume who keeps catching home runs hit into the Bay by Barry Bonds (mostly).

Tired of the same old thing?

This satirical piece from the Onion perfectly captures the attitude of acedia -- what we now call plain old burnout. Pretty funny.

Nader trouble in Oregon

Ralph Nader failed to draw 1000 supporters to a Portland appearance, and if he can't draw in Portland, it's hard to see him getting on the ballot in Oregon at all. That crucial swing state barely went for Gore in 2000, with Nader polling ten times the margin between the two major-party candidates. In other states (famously, Florida), Nader stole tens of thousands of votes from the Democrat, who lost the state by 537 votes and thus the Presidency. (And that's if you accept the official count.)

Go ahead, ask him anything

Romenesko today collects a consensus of press views on yesterday's Bush news conference: that the Pres. was particularly unhelpful. Maybe the best link is to this Time magazine piece:

The event felt more like an intervention, with a psychoanalytic press corps trying to goad the president into admitting that he had made a mistake, if not in the run up to 9/11, then in his administration’s cheerful prediction that coalition forces would be met with cheers or that there’d be weapons of mass destruction turned into ploughshares when the U.S. pulled into Baghdad. They tried to make the press conference a presidential 12-step program. But Bush wasn’t going to go down that road. Sure, he said he’s thought about what he might have done differently. But when my colleague John Dickerson asked the president if he could think of any mistake he’d made since September 11, a tongue-tied Bush couldn’t think of one. “Maybe I’m not as quick as I should be,” he said.

Yeah, I managed to listen to about 40 minutes of it on the radio, sitting at a corner in Berkeley marking up a chapter by one of the members of my writing group.

Report: Starbucks coffee has twice the caffeine

So says the Wall St. Journal. The article goes on to say (emphasis mine):

The more robust taste certainly lures many consumers. But in light of mounting research on how the body reacts to higher caffeine, the stronger brew suggests another reason coffeehouses have resurrected a beverage that once had considerably less buzz in the U.S. However accidentally, their business may be thriving in part because customers are habituated to a drug, albeit one legal and relatively harmless.

For caffeine, scientists usually use the term "physically dependent" rather than "addicted," a term they reserve for severe cases, as in a hooked heroin user or someone who smokes a few packs of cigarettes a day. But in recent years researchers have quantified specific doses of caffeine and linked them with withdrawal symptoms including headache, drowsiness and difficulty concentrating.

These ill effects are important. Recent research has shown people often choose to maintain their caffeine intake more to avoid the irritable results when they don't get it, than for the positive effects when they do. Caffeine withdrawal usually begins within 12 to 24 hours after the last coffee was drunk, which may neatly explain why people often reach for their mug first thing in the morning.

"You wake up in a state of withdrawal," says Laura Juliano, an assistant professor of psychology at American University who has studied caffeine.

I doubt this is what they had in mind

Pick up the nearest book.
Open it to page 23.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Everybody's doing it today. So okay: here's what I got:

Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother, and went to the land of Israel.

(from the gospel of Luke, as quoted in Eucharistic Readings, a Episcopal Church publication.)

Apples fall far from tree

To Vice President Cheney's lesbian daughter, Newt Gingrich's lesbian half-sister, the gay son* of frightening right-wing foamer Phyllis Schlafly, and Chastity Bono, add to the list of arch-conservatives' gay relatives the gay adopted son of anti-abortion fanatic Randall Terry.** Here's an article discussing the phenomenon of high-profile conservative activists with gay children or siblings.

* BTW, my search turned up the appalling fact that John Schafly is still working for his mother's arch-conservative organization, Eagle Forum -- or was, at least, in 2002.

** Randall Terry himself today published a pre-emptive defense of... himself... in the conservatives' own Washington Times.

I'll bet insurance doesn't cover it, either

Several homeowners along a busy road in suburban Minneapolis sold to a developer who wanted to demolish their houses and put in a strip mall. He told them they could take any fixtures, so they took apart their homes, ripping out everything from lighting fixtures to central air conditioning to landscaping. Then the developer pulled out of the deal, leaving the flabbergasted residents with uninhabitable heaps. Said one dispossed housewife: "We are simple people."

The new Bohemians

Typical Chronicle sentimentality today in a feature about the Fillmore St. building that once housed the Six Gallery -- the site of birth of all Beatnikism. The news hook is that the rug merchant who has owned the building for the last 25 years has sold it; the writer spends a good amount of time on the ruggist and his immigrant tale and attempts to draw parallels between the merchant and the Beat forerunners. What the article doesn't say is that the neighborhood, known as Cow Hollow, is known as one of the rich neighborhoods of the city now. Wealthy heterosexuals live down there, with Union St. the cruising spot of choice for rich, young, drunken youths living out "Ally McBeal" fantasies. I doubt Allen Ginsburg et al. would recognize it -- but they probably wouldn't recognize most of SF now, 50 years later.

Memo to Hunter S. Thompson

One of the grandest Las Vegas "resort casinos," the Bellagio, suffered "a massive electrical generating trauma" yesterday, and the power is still out. Weirdly, the news report depends on anecdotal information from hotel spokesmen to trace the source of the power outage. Why not just call the power company, for goodness sake?

This joyful Eastertide

For a church secretary, big Christian holidays can be a little stressful. Fortunately, the music director at the church I work at got all his service material to me a couple weeks in advance, and I was able to spread out all the bulletin duplicating and folding over several days, so last week was actually fairly easy. At my own church, I didn't even attend any Holy Week stuff until Friday, though they had something going every evening. Finally the Easter Vigil on Saturday went off without a hitch, though not very well attended.

At the third church I regularly enter -- where I do morning prayer every weekday morning -- they have a tumultuous Easter Vigil service which ends with snacks and champagne. This morning the place was still a mess, with champagne bottles all over the altar. (Yes, you read that right. They do things a little differently.)

Sunday evening I had the pleasure of meeting Marilyn, a writer friend, in San Francisco, where she was visiting relatives. We had dinner, and then she went off to more relatives.

"Oh my God!" doesn't count

A poll of 500 Washington state residents found that more than half pray daily. Sounds like a pretty small sample to me. Here's another poll, but web polls are for shit -- of course the people who go to a site called faith.com pray a lot. (Here's a similar survey on a Buddhist site -- must be using the same software. Still farther out, 21% of visitors to a fundamentalist site say they pray "every moment."

Save the girls

Here's something fun to do tonight, courtesy of tribe.net:

Wicked Messenger -- Tonight!
Wicked Messenger 4.11 (Being for the Benefit of Heather MacAllister)
Easter Sunday, April 11, 7pm at The Dark Room (formerly Mission Records) 2263 Mission between 18th and 19th
$5, 18 and over
Catering by Ya Mo Thai Kitchen at 18th and Mission

The 21st century variant kabaret returns with a benefit for Big Burlesque's Heather MacAllister! Heather was recently diagnosed with ovarian cancer, so please come show your support.

Featuring:
The Lollies with Kitten on the Keys (girl burlesque)
Roky Roulette (boy burlesque)
Larry, Hall & Jack (queer music)
Dattner (comedy)
butcH Greenblatt (queerer music)
Karuna Tanahashi (slam poetry)
...and an open mic. (anarchy)
Hosted by Sherilyn Connelly. (don't ask)

Did I mention the free Thai food? You really don't want to miss this one. www.sfgoth.com/~sherilyn/wickedmessenger/index.html

This just in: Democrats, liberals welcome at Eucharistic feast

John Kerry will be allowed to receive communion on Easter (and presumably indefinitely) after the Boston archdiocese rejected pleas from right-wingers to deny the Democratic Dauphin the sacrament for his "softness" on abortion. Fuck, the difference between this country and those Muslim ones we're bombing is merely a matter of degree, you know?

Dept. of Schadenfreude

A few days after posting $5 million bond for ripping off billions from investors, former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling was arrested at 4 a.m. Friday morning in New York for "accusing passersby and restaurant patrons of being FBI agents and had pulled at their clothes in search of hidden microphones." The AP story has a slightly different take:

The police source said Skilling ran up to patrons at two bars and pulled open their clothes. "He was shouting at them, 'You're an FBI agent and you're following me,'" the source said.

By the way, how's John Ashcroft's royal pain? Ah, he's okay. Bring on the 9/11 commission.

'Our time will come'

An artist-prankster, disguised as a museum worker, installed an un-approved work of art into a British museum of natural history, where it hung on the wall for most of a day before it was identified and removed.

The rat was stuffed and clad in scaled-down wraparound sunglasses, and had a rucksack on its back and a microphone in one paw. A miniature spraycan sat at its feet, while above it was sprayed in graffiti-style lettering "our time will come".

Control freak

Aging monster Jerry Lewis is interviewed in the Guardian (U.K.). He dictates the article's lead, "is little changed" (though the picture shows him still bloated), and berates the interviewer. "You're sloppier than hell aren't you, Simon?" He squeal-laughs like the Kid. I find my pen. The laughter stops. "You're not gonna write are you Simon? You got tape. You don't need notes."

'Unholy mess'

Elderly Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin proves he can still shit-distrub with the best of them by publishing several columns this week on the imbecility of fundamentalism.

"Homosexuals are dangerous," [The Rev. Lou] Sheldon assured me one day. He was a short man with eyes gleaming when he mentioned how bad homosexuals truly are.

"How?"

"They proselytize. They come to the door, and if your son answers and nobody is there to stop it, they grab the son and run off with him. They steal him. They take him away and turn him into a homosexual."

"You should be confined," I told him.

"I speak the truth for the Lord," he said.

"You're a fruitcake," I told him.

"No, I speak the truth. They steal your son."

That's from Breslin's Tuesday column, reflecting on distasteful right-wingers and how they're little different from the guys shooting at Marines in Iraq. The next day, he defended the quotes in the column after interview subject Lou Sheldon denied them, taking the opportunity to print a number of other Sheldon whoopers. And today the editorial staff of Newsday gets in on the act.

The world of San Francisco

In San Francisco, housing prices are insane, so we have people and organizations devoted to "housing activism." That means trying to get affordable housing for working class people, and in many cases it also means desperate opposition to the city's political power structure. Some of these nay-sayers have started their own online daily, BeyondChron. They call it that because they think the local paper, the Chronicle, is too friendly to big business and developers. Worth catching for columnists Michelle Tea, whose combination of glamor and street cred could only be found in San Francisco, and Henry Norr, tech columnist fired by the Chronicle last year for participating in antiwar demonstrations.

In other literary news, increasingly famous poet Kim Addonizio -- whose website I am honored to be able to list among those of my "friends" -- is reading this Saturday at the Make Out Room to benefit Other magazine.

We're doomed again

Just a reminder: The jig is up. You know it's not a good report when "a new Ice Age" and "the collapse of the Gulf Stream" are cited as possible positive things.

Or you could have too many chickens.

Raise your hands!

The Olympic bid committee for New York City has rolled out a logo, and New Yorkers are having fun with it. Gawker published a hilarious rant: "The two color blocks look like the freaking WTC... Hooray! It's death! Gay death!"

The apparition of these faces in a crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough

Worshippers in an English church have seen a vision of the Holy Mother -- Marge Simpson, that is.

Coming soon

Men who ejaculate frequently -- at least every two days -- are at less risk of prostate cancer, a study finds. (I like the sentence, "He praised the study's large size.") And there's good news: masturbation's just as good as any other way of provoking an orgasm. So if you'll excuse me...

I am not afraid, 'cause you see this too

Nobody's doing LSD, says a Slate article from last week. Well, it's from April 1. I suppose it's real, though. Sekretnaut?

Memo to Marilyn: Glen Campbell rocks

Cris continues to order products for the cats, especially for Six, the devil cat. He is relatively under-equipped compared to our other cats. One of the things she got was called a Stink Finder, essentially just a portable ultraviolet light which will help you find, according to the box, "blood, urine, feces, saliva, semen, vomit and all other bodily fluids."

It didn't say tears.

Then today, on Engadget, there was this: the VerifEYE, a wall-mounted blue-light scanner you're supposed to run your hands under. I won't explain why. You read it.

Recycling is bad, when it comes to news

Baseball season opened this weekend -- the Giants open this evening in Houston -- which allows me to indulge one of my regretful reveries. If only I'd decided to be a sportswriter instead of a movie reviewer back in college, I might be coving the Giants today.

But life as a sportswriter isn't all fun. Consider this (speaking of Houston): A Houston Chronicle sportswriter was suspended yesterday when it was discovered that a column he turned in last week was virtually identical to one he'd written on the same sports figure -- a college basketball coach -- 14 years ago when he worked for a different (now defunct) Houston paper.

Okay, you're not supposed to palgarize, even yourself. But a month without pay seems pretty harsh. Take this guy John Wooden, the basketball coach. He's 93 YEARS OLD. So the sportswriter wrote about him 14 years ago when he was 79. You think the old fart really changed a lot between ages 79 and 93? Imagine trying to come up with a new angle on that guy, year after year.

Bummer of a commute

U.S. "and Iraqi troops" (wtf? I thought we'd disbanded the Iraqi army. Where'd the "troops" come from?) surrounded Fallujah today, giving rise to sights like tanks sitting in the middle of the freeway. Just what you don't want to see on your trip to work, a tank pointing its cannon right at you.

Know the enemy

John was married and the father of three teenage sons, but throughout his 20-year marriage, he had been involved in anonymous homosexual encounters. Early on, he was so desperate for help he moved his entire family to New York City, stating he wanted to earn a Ph.D. at a theological school there. But his real motivation was to receive help from a psychoanalyst in Manhattan well known for his successful treatment of homosexuality. Through this doctor's care, John came alive to his sexual need for his wife.

Once in a while, it's good for you to read what the other side has to say, to remind yourself how full of shit they are.

Then there's this: French film critics say Gibson's 'Passion' is "sadistic", "manipulative" and "boring", and "undoubtedly the most dangerous and most violent interpretation ever made of the Passion of Christ."

And: this piece about how right-wing Christians support Zionism because they think Israeli-Palestinian strife will hasten the Second Cmoing.

Carnage continues in NASA/Clear Lake area

Here's yet another heinous murder perpetrated by a resident of the horrid suburb I lived in during my high school years. I was keeping a list of these killings, but there have been so many that I'm tired of maintaining the list.

Martyr complex

Last year I copied a story off the L.A. Times site on "The Fellowship," the shady Christian-right group that works behind the scenes with right-wing Republicans and others to influence national and international policy. That article is one of the main reasons people actually come to my website, because I'm the only person who makes it available. Now I'm posting a new article on a different right-wing Christian group, The Voice of the Martyrs. They raise money by publicizing the persecution of Christians in third-world countries. Excellent comments on the article at The Revealer, the site of Jeff Sharlett, who wrote the article in Harpers that got everybody interested in "The Fellowship."

We are not amused

On the day the Commerce Dept. announced there were 300,000 new jobs in March, Sun Microsystems announced 3300 layoffs.

Brits ho-hum gigabyte

Heard a funny little conversation on the BBC World Service while driving this evening. It went something like this:

Male announcer: In technology news, the American company Google is in the news again, Camilla.

Female announcer: Yes, Google, which is, of course, a "search engine" company, has announced it will begin offering free email.

Him: Now, many companies already offer a free email service, so what is distinctive about Google's offering?

Her: The company plans to give users nearly unlimited storage space -- so that you could, for example, keep all the email messages you have ever sent.

Him: My goodness, is there much demand for that?

Her: Yes, seems rather pointless. Probably it will appear to only a small segment of computer users.

Just one

I've always hated being the victim of pranks, so I'll tell you straight up: This is a funny satire of Salon.com.

The four dead 'civilian contractors'

The four "civilian contractors" who were killed yesterday in Iraq -- shot, burned to a crisp, dragged through the streets and then hung off a bridge -- were employees of a private security firm called Blackwater USA, according to Reuters. Today Mother Jones reprinted a 2003 article about Blackwater. The more you read about them, the creepier it all becomes. Not that that makes their fate any less horrific.

And by... viewers like you

Really strange and interesting episode of "The West Wing" last night -- it started off thanking fictitious "underwriters," as if we were watching PBS and not NBC. And then the entire episode was essentially a parody of PBS's Frontline documentary series, with the same voice-over announcer, same graphics, and same tone. A friend who works on the Frontline website (she edits the Reporters' Stories section) saw the show and thought it was hilarious. Unfortunately, the gal at Television Without Pity, a site which is usually extremely sharp-eyed, missed the whole joke.