It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- getting around pretty well edition

A Kentucky high school student who wrote a story about a high school overrun by zombies was arrested for making a "terroristic threat" involving a school. Worst of all: his grandparents turned him in after reading the story in his journal.

In order to convince a court he had followed its order to return his illegally-imported pet monkey to Mexico, a man staged a picture showing the monkey with a Mexican newspaper and red and green decorations in the background. The judge was not swayed. ¡Ai carumba, dude! Maybe you should have included a Tecate Light.

Speaking of advertising: In the L.A. subway, you can't even stare out the window without seeing an ad. An electronic system shows commercials on the insides on train windows (right). Click the link for a larger version of the photo as well as a video showing a man startled by an ad. And (courtesy Jackson West) Kerouac's "On the Road" is now being used to sell cars in a European commercial. The ad shows an actor not only performing a dramatic reading of a famous passage from the book but shows the cover of the book itself, in case viewers were having trouble connecting Jack Kerouac with the cars being sold -- BMWs. (I just realized that entry from West's blog is ancient. Oh well, the commercial is still outrageous.)

"Mad Men" actress Christina Hendricks, who plays the formidable office manager Joan, says any suggestions her breasts are not real are "absolutely mean." Somewhat deflating this comment, elsewhere in the interview she says that when "Mad Men" won an Emmy, "I remember feeling high, like after an operation or something."

In New York, a 58-year-old real estate broker said to "have anger-management issues" hit his business partner with an ice bucket during a meeting. The victim was 11 years younger, but had recently had surgery on the parts of his body, the right shoulder and hand, that his assailant chose to whack him with the bucket.

Disproving what coaches always tell you -- "Come on, the ball won't kill you!" -- an 11-year-old Oregon boy was killed by a football to the chest as he blocked a punt during a game at recess.

technorati: Bad Behavior, football, Mad Men

Small-town high school renames yoga after 'concerned citizens' object

After a group of "concerned citizens" objected that offering yoga might amount to a promotion of Hinduism, a small town New York high school has renamed the exercise "Raider relaxation" after the school's mascot. But the best paragraph from the story was this one:

The debate around Massena's yoga program is not unprecedented. In 2002 in Aspen, Colo., a group of Baptists objected to a proposed yoga program in the public school district, citing separation of church and state as well. In the end, all of the Sanskrit terms were dropped -- "meditation" became "time in" and "yogic panting" became "bunny breathing." The only term that remained was yoga.

technorati: yoga

Woman convicted in Clear Lake quadruple murder case

The fucked-up suburb where I lived and went to high school is in the news again today. Last time it was because it got the shit knocked out of it by Hurricane Ike. The infrastructure having sufficiently recovered to stage a murder trial, a jury yesterday convicted a graduate of said Clear Lake High School in the quadruple murder in 2003 of several other youths, some of them her classmates, in a disastrous home-invasion robbery.

The so-called Clear Lake Area, a suburb of Houston, had a real run of infamy around that time, starting with the day in 2001 Andrea Yates killed all her children, following up with the day a year later when Clara Harris ran over her husband in the parking lot of the same Hilton hotel that all the weather reporters stay in when hurricanes hit. I prophetically set several of my short stories in the suburb, stories written a few years before these incidents, in which I proposed that the Clear Lake Area is actually a pit of violence and horror just waiting to erupt. Clearly I was correct.

technorati: Clear Lake City, Clear Lake High School, murder, Christine Paolilla, suburbs, Houston

On Open Salon: far right sees likely Obama win as an opportunity

On Open Salon, I blogged:

Just as the ruling by the California Supreme Court created a fabulous opportunity for conservatives to raise funds and solidify the base through the usual fear-mongering, the prospect of a black man with a funny name being elected president could be the greatest thing for far-right conservatives since Hillary Clinton.

More at the whole post.

Hospital notes

Cris just spent a few days in a hospital getting orthopedic surgery. She came home today and she's doing well. But while she was there this week, I spent a lot of time up there over four days, and I discovered two things.

One, the day nurses were invariably awesome; the night nurses were mostly mediocre. Makes sense: the day shift is more desirable, so the best nurses choose it. The main distinction between the great nurses and the mediocre ones was that the latter are more inflexible and tend to cite rules and policies when you ask them a question, while the good ones actually answer your question and know the science behind whatever you're talking about.

Two: due to the much worse condition of the other patient in the room, I now can say with some experience just what TV programs brain-damaged people like to watch:

Jerry Springer

Nancy Grace

Glenn Beck

Und so weiter. Poor thing, it wasn't her fault some drunk ran into her car. Now she's stuck watching Nancy Grace.

Clusterfuck in the wake of Hurricane Ike

Hurricane Ike happened three weeks ago, making landfall at Galveston on September 13. Today the almost-always-useless local paper went against type and ran an actual news article, reporting about angry residents of a condo complex called The Landing who have been booted out of their buildings because more than two-thirds of the complex is deemed unlivable.

I was struck by the article because I lived in The Landing in 1970, when it was an apartment complex. (It was the first place my family lived in Texas, at a time when my father wasn't sure he was going to be transferred permanently to the Shell refinery there. We lived there about 10 months.) It is located [satellite map] right on the shore of Clear Lake, and even back then the parking lots would flood during a bad storm because it was so close to sea level. At some point in the 1980s, on one of my trips back for Christmas, I drove by and noticed that the ground around the complex had been built up somewhat, raising it a few feet. Not enough in the case of a major hurricane, and in any case there must have been extensive wind damage, as the eye of the hurricane passed just a few miles to the east.

As I've written many times, I've no love for that area, which I consider a mistake and the worst example of suburban sprawl. It isn't a town and never was; it's just a collection of subdivisions plunked down between two towns, Webster and Seabrook, that were barely more than rural hamlets before LBJ got NASA to locate its headquarters there. As I wrote previously, the area has "no center, no landmarks, no history, no culture, and no taste." I have no reason to go back there anymore, as my mother moved out of the state following my father's death.

It's too bad for the people who were tricked into buying as condos these small apartments which were kind of nice in 1970 but were located in a flood-prone area. But if you choose to live in that area, it's hard to feel sorry for you, because it was a disaster before the hurricane, and the hurricane just made it more obvious.

technorati: Ike, Hurricane Ike, Seabrook, The Landing, FEMA, El Lago

Unfortunate name of the month

If you change your name to Jesus Jihad, no good is likely to come of you.

Focus on the Fundies: FOTF to shed more employees

Focus on the Family, the influential fundamentalist media empire headed by Dr. James Dobson, will lay off 46 employees after sales of videos, books and other products failed to meet expectations, an article in the Colorado Springs Gazette reported.

The Colorado Springs company -- which has radio, television, publishing, marketing, distribution and internet divisions -- has been highly influential over the last 25 years in creating the politicized Christian Right. In addition to initiatives like the antigay Love Won Out, which claims that gay people can be converted to heterosexuality, and Pure Intimacy, which addresses porn addiction and other sexual problems among evangelicals, the group has an influential political policy and lobbying arm.

But with disillusionment with the Republican Party spreading among evangelicals, FOTF's influence has also lessened, with donations and newsletter subscriptions way down, according to a January 2008 Time article.

technorati: Focus on the Family, Dobson, evangelicals, Fundies, Christian Right

Sign of the apocalypse: Dentist chair TV's programming is Disney, ads

This definitely falls into the Kill Me First category: a new device you wear like eyeglasses allows you to watch television in the dentist's chair while being worked on. Sounds good, you say? The only programming is:
ð Disney programs
ð Dental health messages
ð Advertising.

It's paid, of course, by the latter.

Personally I'd rather listen to the drill.

technorati: advertising, television, technology

It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- Dog Day Afternoon edition

In Fountain, Colo., an 18-year-old man tried to hire two men to kill his mother so he could cash in her bank accounts in order to finance his girlfriend's breast augmentation. The plot went forward but the incompetents hired by the youth failed even to seriously injure the woman, who alerted neighbors by setting off the car alarm using her car key thingy. This was sufficient to stun the sole attacker -- the other idiot was standing outside -- long enough for the woman to flee next door.

Today's fake: A man who stole a Dodgers baseball uniform to impersonate a player was arrested Wednesday when he walked onto the field at Dodger Stadium. A security guard "recognized him from an earlier incident," which suggests a pathetic untold story. The man is 47.

Speaking of pathetic, this headline says it all: Bass fishing catching on as high school sport. I'll bet that really attracts the chicks.

Two San Francisco vagrants are regular attendees at the many conventions and conferences in the city, scamming conference swag, free meals, and, of course, "donations." They say they've been a team for 17 years, entertaining out-of-towners with comic pleas for alms.

A police detective in the New York suburb of New Rochelle, whose wife is a famous local TV anchor, admitted he used his badge to force a teenaged girl to have sex with him -- and that it wasn't the first time. Amazingly, the thug was allowed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor and got no jail time.

The Seattle Times has a feature on Ben Huh, the master of I Can Has Cheezburger, but he didn't invent the site. He merely bought it from a Hawaii couple, Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami, "who started it as a hobby and were overwhelmed by the response." I hope they got a ton of money. The Korean-born Huh also owns Fail Blog, the article says.

Nebraska has a law that permits parents to permanently abandon a child at a hospital with no legal consequences. This week a widowed, out-of-work man dropped off his entire family, nine children between the ages of 1 and 17.

Staton said his wife died last year, shortly after delivering their youngest child. He said he quit his job because of his family responsibilities but couldn't pay rent or utilities or take care of his children. "I was with her for 17 years, and then she was gone," he said of his late wife. "What was I going to do? We raised them together. I didn't think I could do it alone. I fell apart. I couldn't take care of them."

This paragraph is also significent:

A 2007 interview with Staton's oldest daughter in Omaha North High School's student newspaper said she shouldered some of the parenting duties. Despite helping to feed her siblings, check their homework and put them to bed, the teen graduated a year early.

And got the hell out, I hope, though it doesn't say that.

Focus on the Fundies: Xtian bookstore chain refuses magazine with female pastors

A bookstore chain owned by the far-right Southern Baptist Convention has carried a magazine called GospelToday for many years, but recently refused to distribute an issue depicting female pastors on its cover, because of the denomination's rule that only men can be pastors in its churches.

It wasn't that the magazine was saying the five female ministers were, or should be, pastors at Southern Baptist churches, or that the SBC should change its rules. The denomination simply didn't want customers at its bookstores to be exposed to the fact that other denominations -- just as conservative, no doubt, in most matters -- allowed women to become pastors. Such is the paranoid attitude that typifies fundamentalists and totalitarians everywhere as they try frantically to keep control of people.

technorati: href="http://www.technorati.com/tags/fundamentalists" rel="tag">fundamentalists, Baptists, books, bookstores, Christians

Asshole RNC delegate's karma: robbed of over $100,000 by 'beautiful woman'

A Colorado delegate to last month's Republican National Convention who loves uttering jingoistic, aggressive statements was taken to the cleaners by an opportunistic prostitute to the tune of over $100,000. A sampling of his wit and wisdom:

Schwartz was candid about how he envisioned change under a McCain presidency. "Less taxes and more war," he said, smiling. He said the U.S. should "bomb the hell" out of Iran because the country threatens Israel.

Asked by the interviewer how America would pay for a military confrontation with Iran, he said the U.S. should take the country's resources. "We should plant a flag. Take the oil, take the money," he said. "We deserve reimbursement."

The "beautiful woman who introduced herself to me" quickly put Schwartz's words into practice, relieving him of a $30,000 watch, a $20,000 ring, and other valuables, plus cash. (What is a Republican convention delegate doing with tens of thousands of dollars in cash? I'll leave that to your imagination.)

Here's more of Mr. Schwartz:

He said an attack on Iran was needed to protect Israel, and he offered how it could be accomplished through "strategical airstrikes. Hopefully, just bomb the hell out of them from the sky. No troops," he said.

Schwartz was asked if he had a message to the protesters who filled the streets of downtown St. Paul. "Get a job," he replied.

Or, just maybe, find some stupid Republican and take advantage of him.

It could have been better. It could have been a male prostitute.

technorati: Republicans, prostitutes

Hurricane yike

The hurricane that clobbered the Texas coast this past weekend struck a bulls-eye on the Houston suburb where I went to high school, a purgatorial realm I have written about in stories. Judging from news reports, the destruction was not what I might have hoped. (Sorry if you live there now, but consider this weekend's events as just another big hint that you ought to leave.)

Remnants of the storm dumped copious rain in the Midwest yesterday. I just got email from my friend Marilyn in Ohio saying she just got power back after being dark for 24 hours.

The petits fours of the bourgeoisie

I'm posting on Open Salon a lot, and today's post was one of my typically oblique free-associations that nobody likes but me.

Yuppies know their comforts often come at the expense of others. Those fantastic strawberries at your dinner party, organic though they may be, were raised and picked through an immigrant's back-breaking labor. My comfortable brand-name sneakers protect my middle-aged joints, at the expense of the blighted lives of the Chinese factory workers who made them. Und so weiter. This is what it means to be an affluent first-worlder in a top-heavy global economy. One's pleasures are another's pain; in fact, the pain of not just one other, but a thousand.

Today's fake: 'professional seducers'

Courtesy Melissa Gira: a story from the Times of London about an agency that employees young Japanese women to seduce husbands whose wives want a divorce. The story goes into quite some detail about how it all works, complete with case studies. What's strange to me is that the women -- the wives, that is -- are so desperate that they are basically paying a prostitute not just to to fuck their husbands but to make the men fall in love with them so as to convince them they'd be better off without their wives. Once the men agree to let their wives go, the young ladies disappear, naturally.

Takashi works for a company called ACYours. It was founded in 1997 by Mr Mishima, a rather sinister-looking character with a sparse beard, earrings and a tattooed arm. He explains solemnly that the business is all about helping people.

If this all sounds like a film noir setup, remember the opening scenes of "Chinatown," for example: Jack Nicholson's character specializes in capturing spouses on film in flagrante delicto. Such practices used not to be unheard of in the U.S., before the era of no-fault divorce and other advances in women's rights.

technorati: Japan

It's so over

Utterly brilliant is my friend's take on the Palin nomination:

It's uncanny, isn't it, how the guyz only seem to adopt a form after it has been drained of every last whiff of inspiration, meaning, or purpose and has limped off to die? Thus, one cannot be surprised to find that it is within the sublimely ironic Sarah Palin Republican candidacy that the once-vital corpse of Second-Wave Feminism seems to have reached its final resting place, caught like a consolation prize in the triumphal, rigid, and perfectly unmusical embrace of the official Party of the Straight White Men, where it will moulder for decades as an anachronism so empty it is devoid of even a clue.

Dandy is so awesome.

technorati: Palin, feminism

On Salon: All Palin, all the time

On Open Salon, I couldn't help myself: I posted an entry about Sarah Palin. In part:

Whatever the likelihood that McCain might die in office, it's 100% probable that if he does die in office, the president will then be Sarah Palin... This darling of religious conservatives who is forcing her own 17-year-old daughter to bear an unplanned-for child and to marry her deer-in-the-headlights boyfriend would be appointing Supreme Court justices until 2012, and maybe for four years after that.

technorati: Palin, McCain

On Salon: God to Republicans: Drop dead

Salon.com started a new blogging-cum-social networking realm called Open Salon, and I started a blog there. My first post is kind of obvious.

The Lord, as His minion Pat Robertson likes to claim, directs natural disasters towards sinners, and thus the destruction wreaked by Hurricane Katrina was punishment for American wickedness... As Hurricane Gustav approaches landfall, you have to wonder, then, why God has it in for the Republicans so bad that He sent a major hurricane to disrupt their convention.

Read the rest of the post.

Klamath Falls to SF

I've been out of town for a week, driving up to see my mother in suburban Portland. There, in addition to family duties, I worked for a day out of my company's downtown Portland office, and went to lunch with co-workers. That gave me the opportunity to discover the lunch trucks of downtown Portland. Anyplace there's a parking lot, two or three or eight trucks, trailers and carts are set up to serve a variety of foods, everything from Thai to Mexican. It had been several years since I'd been to downtown Portland during a workday, so this was a pleasant surprise to me.

While we were standing on the sidewalk waiting for our orders and talking in loud voices about new features of the next software release, a couple of hippie punks walked by, the boy intentionally brushing my shoulder and arm as he went past as if to tell me we were taking up too much room on the sidewalk. Being a cluster of four men, we probably were taking up too much room, frankly. I looked up in surprise at the glancing blow but it wasn't enough for me to make an issue of. If it had been enough to jar me off-balance, maybe. Anyway, I was amused by the fact that I am now a fat middle-aged businessman in a polo shirt being twitted by the same kind of hippie punk I was thirty years ago.

The next day, having posted on Twitter about being in an office building in downtown Portland, I was contacted by my friends Chris and Debora, who live in the southern California high desert but happened to be sub-letting in Portland for the month. Cris and I got together with them, had lunch, and went to the Portland Japanese Garden. What a nice break from family stuff!

In between breaks from family stuff, we spent time with my mother and her husband Tom. He is a typical old-man grouchy Republican who loves to bait me with lines like "Ya know, illegal aliens run California." Since the Democratic Convention was on all week long, he had to sit and watch it. The best moment was when Obama was speaking and Tom intoned, "'Change, change!' Change from what? He never says what change" and Obama promptly said, "Now let me tell you exactly what change I am talking about."

Now we're in Klamath Falls, where a cool wind is blowing. We missed a heat wave in the San Francisco Bay Area and we'll be back there tonight. Thanks, Katia, for the cat sitting!

technorati: Klamath Falls

How to go from Olympic hero to douchebag in a week

How do you go from Olympic stud to total douchebag in a week? Wear all your gold medals so that it looks like you have on a really bad belly dancer's costume, and top it off with a face that was never meant to be viewed dry.

I mean, everybody knows the guy looked good wet and naked, right? Why mess with success? Why not run a picture of him exulting in a just-clenched victory? Everybody knows he won the fucking medals.

I guess it's that, having won 8 medals, you never actually get to wear them except on your big SI cover shot. So if you have to have him wear the fucking things, then why not over a shirt of some kind? He's not going swimming in them, so why take his picture in swimming trunks?

Didn't anybody at the shoot say, "Uh, wait a minute. He looks like a freaking douchebag like this. Wardrobe? Can we get a shirt on him?"

technorati: Michael Phelps, Olympics, douchebags

Yes, it's lucrative

This post on Valleywag lists the going rate for H1-B visa workers hired by Microsoft, and includes the amazing statistics that a developer is paid around $115,000 while a technical writer gets $129,000.

Jesus! I don't make that much. But it is a pretty lucrative field, which provides certain evil consolation for the fact that it takes up all the time and energy that one might better spend being poor and writing novels.

Previously:

On sf.metblogs.com: Zyzzyva editor H. Junker was a technical writer before becoming a litmag editor

On Too Beautiful: What does a tech writer do?

technorati: technical writing

Focus on the Fundies: Non-denial denial of the year

When a pastor of an African megachurch was arrested today at the Oakland airport, accused of fondling a 13-year-old girl seated next to him on a flight from Denver, a Bay Area minister who has known the man for many years issued this stupendous, and stupifying, non-denial denial:

I'm deeply grieved, but I have no reason whatsoever to believe that there was any purposeful action on his part that would be in any way inappropriate.

WTF!

Today's fake: Artist hoaxes Florida city mag

Courtesy MediaBistro: an artist pulled a major hoax on Orlando magazine, resulting in a feature story filled with bullshit. Among other claims, artist Mark Pulliam claimed to have played for the New York Yankees and to have done a commissioned painting of Yankee Stadium for team owner George Steinbrenner's office. Evidently the magazine, which published this fantastic tale in its August issue, never did any fact-checking for the piece.

Not known yet is whether Pulliam pulled the hoax intentionally or whether he just fed a gullible interviewer a load of crap, never dreaming his wild claims wouldn't be checked. But at least the guy really is an artist: view his work here. The interviewer, Jay Boyar, is primarily a movie writer who "teaches film analysis at the University of Central Florida."

The article doesn't seem to have been cached by Google, unfortunately, but at least you can read the magazine editor's column that issue, in which he says:

Associate editor Jay Boyar's profile of Winter Garden artist Mark Pulliam ("The Natural," page 74) is a great read. Although Madonna is a fan of Pulliam's paintings, he is a virtual unknown in this area. And would you believe he also once pitched for the New York Yankees? Hey, I couldn’t make that up if I tried.

But someone did.

technorati: hoaxes, fake, Orlando

Kathy Acker feature, and lots of stuff from the 80s

While searching for something else, I ran across this 1985 feature on Kathy Acker in which the author, who was yet to become widely known, talks about her early career. Very entertaining.

The archive of the article's author, one Mick Sinclair, has all kinds of good stuff in it about famous figures of the 1970s and 80s, from Acker to Laurie Anderson to The Residents to Suzanne Vega.

Previously:
Kathy Acker, Clarion of Entropy

technorati: Kathy Acker

John Edwards: 'I am a straight American'

Over the years, along with the rest of the country, I've marveled over the tendency of celebrities to fuck around. When their miserable attempts at having a secret sex life were revealed, I wrote about Bill Clinton, Ted Haggard, and others. Now John Edwards joins them.

This Marueen Dowd column, though rather drawn out, pretty much sums it up:

For some reason, super-strivers have a need to sell what is secretly weakest about themselves, as if they yearn for unmasking. Edwards's decency and concern for the weak in society -- except for his own wife. Bill Clinton's intellect and love of community -- except for his stupidity and destructiveness about Monica. Bush the Younger's jocular, I'm-in-charge self-confidence -- except for turning over his presidency, as no president ever has, to his Veep. Eliot Spitzer's crusade for truth, justice and the American way -- except at home.

This urge, as DowD identifies it, has long been satisfied by famous, powerful men by seeing prostitutes, especially dominatrices. But as Spitzer and the FBI demonstrated, you can't even fuck a prostitute in private these days without getting accidentally caught up in some racketeering investigation.

Clearly the only solution is that pursued by Rudolph Giuliani: Fuck someone else and act like you don't care who knows it.

technorati: John Edwards, adultery

Mystery vs. thriller vs. farce

The detective story is about solving the problem, getting to the center of the labyrinth and restoring some sort of order. The crime story is about chain reaction, about events and the ripples that move outward from them. The detective story demands greater story coherence; crime stories are more about style and energy. Chandler, who wrote mysteries, made story mistakes, and we forgive him what we wouldn't countenance for a second in Agatha Christie because his style was just so utterly, joyfully, mind-blowingly wonderful. ... Story works best when it just happens on the page. At the same we, as readers, crave shock and event. From the writer's point of view, the big and surprising twist creates a huge amount of energy -- and always, always problems later. Novels, even novellas written to order for Playboy, are written over time and tend not to be seamless. Perhaps this is for the best -- it's another way in which they can reflect the mess of life.

From the Jacket Copy book blog on the LA Times site.

(Not sure what he's referring to when he mentions "novellas written for Playboy." Do they publish serial novellas?)

This is like something Cris and I were discussing earlier this year. I wrote in my notes for my current novel:

Thrillers and farces, she said, work by ratcheting up tension, and by setting up a precarious situation and then setting everyone loose. Everyone has a goal, usually conflicting, and as they all try to fulfill their goals, things get more and more chaotic whether it's a thriller or a farce. People feel compelled to thrust themselves into a situation, thus destabilizing both the new situation and making it impossible for them to return to their previous state. She used the word "pressure" to describe this effect: the characters' character traits create "internal pressure" that compels them to do these things. Add the other characters and the setting and you have the ingredients of a farce, or a thriller if the characters' goals are sinister enough.
Situation comedy, she went on, works a different way: by setting up what she called traps for the characters. She referred to a film we saw part of on TV, "The 40 Year Old Virgin," in which the characters suffer a series of situational setbacks -- for example, when Steve Carrel and Catherine Keener first try to have sex, her teenage daughter bursts in on them. ... She also said something that was very pithy, if slightly unrelated: In a mystery, the story is resolved when the crime is solved. In a thriller, the mystery may be solved without a resolution to the story.

technorati: narrative, writing technique, novel writing

Liberty: stupid sometimes

A court in California ruled yesterday that parents may home-school their children without any qualifications at all. While 30 other states disagree, in California you can raise your children to be just as ignorant and benighted as you are, and no one can argue.

Liberty is stupid sometimes, but I guess this is the kind of thing you have to accept in a free society. I'd like the other free parts to stay free, however -- like being able to walk down the street or cross a bridge without being surveilled, or being able to consume what I want without fearing that my preferences are being uploaded to some huge database.

technorati: homeschooling, democracy

Retro Saturday morning

I just got home from breakfast and a walk with Anna in Noe Valley. In the early 1980s I loved nothing more than to wake up, go to breakfast together in Noe Valley and then take a window-shopping walk. Though I often go there on my own, this morning was the first time I'd done it with someone in years. What makes it great is the combination of pretty good food and the great windows. We encountered a huge family of Italian tourists, too many to count -- at least ten of them. And later a group speaking in French. It was cloudy and just a little bit misty. Great morning.

Now it's back to work on my book.

technorati: Noe Valley, San Francisco

It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- Gold medal edition

I know who's not going to be Obama's choice for VP. By lying about having an affair, John Edwards proved his presidential stature. Only bad thing about this? He fucked around while his wife was battling cancer, and that means we can no longer fault Newt Gingrich for doing the same thing.

Megachurch pastor Joel Osteen's wife -- a classic big-haired Southern blonde -- is being sued for an alleged air rage incident that started over a wet spot on the armrest of her first-class seat. They were kicked off a Continental Airlines flight in December, 2005 when Mrs. Osteen berated a flight attendant, who is now suing her. Victoria Osteen, who is the author of a new book, Love Your Life, was fined $3000 by the FAA in the incident.

The Osteens' congregation -- she is also listed as a pastor of the organization -- is called the nation's largest church, so huge it meets in a former basketball arena, capacity 16,000. Turning the arena into a space suitable for a televangelist cost $75 million. And the Osteens -- neither of whom seem to have had any training to be ministers -- weren't traveling on a mission to the poor on that fateful day in 2005. They were on their way to Vail, Colorado "for a family ski vacation."

The trial is being covered by The Houston Press's Hairball blog, which earlier this week alerted me to the difficulty Stephen Elliott's Progressive Reading Series is having getting getting Houston to accept a donation to buy more recycling bins.

Not content with playing second fiddle to China as the Olympics open, Russia started a war with neighboring Georgia yesterday. So much for the peacemaking effect of nations meeting on the sports field and all the other b.s. that's singing over the airwaves today.

technorati: John Edwards, Joel Osteen

It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- Illicit pie-eating edition

I adore this priceless anecdote:

When I was a little girl, my best friend was Mrs. Brown, a 65-year-old widow who lived on the corner across the street. Several times a week, I joined Mrs. Brown for lunch. She always ate the same thing: a hamburger patty, a scoop of cottage cheese, two slices of tomato with pepper, and a cup of hot tea with lemon.

One day, Mrs. Brown veered from course and also ate a slice of pecan pie. No sooner had she taken her last bite than her telephone rang. It was Mrs. MacQueen, another widow who lived on the opposite corner: "I saw you eat that piece of pie," she said.

Mrs. Brown and I were both horrified, even though I knew Mrs. Brown also watched Mrs. MacQueen's every move from her own dining room window. They gossiped incessantly about one another. Heaven forbid one should have had a night visitor.

Or that either had been a blogger.

That's by columnist Kathleen Parker, printed in the St. Paul Pioneer Press about the larger issue of gossip and why it isn't news. Not only does this anecdote reinforce the whole Lake Woebegone ethos that everyone expects expects from Minnesota, but it curiously echoes the zeitgeist reflected in the latest cringeworthy NYT Magazine article on internet culture, just posted on the NYT site.

Ideas are plentiful

Galleycat suggests a way to enliven these slow summer days: comb your spam email subject lines for story ideas. In fact, it's a contest being held by Weird Tales magazine.

In just a few minutes I uncovered these intriguing ideas:

Vaginas or not
No tipping please
Sex with robots. Video.
We make what is real

And my favorite: Paris Hilton wins Pulitzer Prize

technorati: spam, Galleycat

Friday night wrestling, with penetration

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

Why should the devil have all the good music?

Brilliant writer Janice Erlbaum posted an amusing tale about combatting an annoying subway preacher by singing as loudly as he was ranting. Her selections included "Let's Do It," "You Do Something To Me," "When They Begin the Beguine," and "It's All Right With Me." It didn't stop the guy's ranting but did raise her spirits.

The title of this post refers to a song by a Jesus rocker, Larry Norman.

technorati: Bad Behavior, subway+preachers,Janice Erlbaum

NASA needs whiz kids

Courtesy Good Morning Silicon Valley, enjoy this NASA press release soliciting urine samples from "All Houston-SLS Associates, employees at 2200 Space Park, and any visitors to the building" at the Johnson Space Center in suburban Houston, Tex. -- just up the road from the subdivision I lived in during my high school years. The "urine collection study," for the purpose of testing some tubing meant to be used in space toilets, started yesterday and will collect several gallons of piss a day through next week.

technorati: NASA, pissing

It's Bad Behavior Tuesday™! -- Into Thin Air edition

A megachurch pastor broke his wrist when he lost control of a motorcycle onstage during a church service, and drove off the stage and into the first row of (vacant) seats. The stunt -- intended to demonstrate "how a rider becomes one with the bike" -- resembles a scene in the Barbra Streisand-Kris Kristofferson version of "A Star is Born," when Kristofferson, playing an out-of-control rock star, does the same thing.

Megachurch pastors... drunken rock stars... Not that much difference these days.

technorati: Kokomo

Definitely not me

Added to the list of the Mark Pritchards I'm not is this father of triplets, one of which was carried by his wife's sister. Since I was born in St. Louis, I suppose it's remotely possible that this Pritchard family is somehow related to me, but not that I know of.

Funny, though, I've always loved the name Darla -- it's just so down-home. I've tried to use it in several different stories, none published. The triplets' mother is not the only Darla Pritchard, though, it seems.

Clever is as clever does

I've been pretty quiet on this site this summer. There isn't much interesting going on -- I've just finished a big project at work that started at the beginning of the year, but it's just another tech writing project at an enterprise software company. It pays well but there is little to say; I wrote up a description a few months ago. I haven't worked much on my novel, I haven't been to any readings or performances, and the only travel I have in the future is to see my sick mother. My day is pretty much work, exercise, do chores around the house, and get to sleep. So, sorry for the lack of clever observations. There isn't much gas in the tank these days.

Pessoa in the NYT

A few weeks ago I started reading a remarkable book, "The Book of Disquiet" by a Portugese writer, Fernando Pessoa. It's a collection of very short pieces -- almost like journal entries -- written from a fictionalized point of view. The perspective is almost zen-like (in fact, I bought a copy of the book for a friend who practices Zen meditation) in the narrator's quality of observation and his perception of nothingness at the core of existence. But it's not correct to speak of the book's "narrator," since the author's intent was not to write a novel or even a fictionalized diary, but to filter his own perceptions through layers of personas.

Today in the New York Times there's an article about Pessoa, whom I had never heard of before a month ago. In fact, I can't remember how I heard of this book. But it's really, really great. I was happy to see that its star shot in the NYT today resulted in a big spike in sales on Amazon.com, where it's number 4016 at this moment.

technorati: Fernando Pessoa

Well, I think it's funny

I just looked on Google News -- there were 1302 news articles returned by the words "Obama" and "cover." Satire is dead, pessimists say. Perhaps the people who are freaked out about this satirical illustration -- which is entitled "The Politics of Fear," get it?? -- believe that.

It's classic coastal elitism. Not the cover itself, but the belief that people will see this cover and say "See?! This proves my point exactly! Obama really is an Islammer!" Thinking that you are smart enough to understand a joke while the hoi polloi won't, and that this could be horribly damaging -- that's the elitist belief. And the New Yorker -- the epitome of what the ignorant flyover folk are supposed to fear -- has done a good thing in giving a full-frontal dismissal of it.

Courtesy Huffington Post: The artist, Barry Blitt, defends his work. And so does the New Yorker editor.

You want a real "Satire is Dead" headline? It was on Salon today:

My wife left me when the dolphins at Sea World gave me an erection.

My God! An insult to dolphins!

technorati: New Yorker, Obama cover

Americans not the only ones freaked out by images of children

Jesse Helms may be dead, but his spirit lives on in Australia, of all places. There politicians are freaking out over a nude image of a child -- her mother is the artist -- on the cover of Art Monthly Australia. Foamers are threatening to cut support grants from the publication. Ironically, the issue contains an article exploring a previous controversy over images of children that were yanked, then restored, to a Sydney gallery after being declared "'G' or 'very mild.'"

It's no surprise that Australia is the only English-speaking country aside from the U.S. where right-wing evangelical Christianity has a foothold. Among the influential foamers down under is the Anglican bishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen, and other organizations like Family First and Catch the Fire Ministries, which attempt to duplicate the influence of U.S. groups like Focus on the Family.

technorati: art, censorship,Australia,fundamentalists, nudity

Kind of a drag on things

Whee, it's almost our national day!




That graphic is from the msnbc.com home page for today, showing the general state of the business world. When I was an adolescent -- which is to say, long into my thirties -- I would have rudely jeered such news, because I thought it was only about financiers and tycoons. And indeed, until the late 70s at the earliest, there was no business reporting the way there is now. These stories about Starbucks and GM and the airlines -- no one would have cared about such things (not that there was Starbucks then).

Now I see that while it's still true that business news affects mostly tycoons and financiers, it also affects the poor saps who lose their jobs. I'm not likely to lose my job for the foreseeable future, but I've also been wrong about that before. Who among us can really be sure what's going to happen next month, much less next year or in ten years?

Remember the summer of 2001, and what the biggest news story was? The disappearance of Chandra Levy (here's Wikipedia for those who don't remember). It seemed so important! Some poor sap of a Congressman from Modesto was suspected of being (but turns out not to have been) involved in the woman's disappearance. Then something rather more dramatic happened involving some airliners, and the story of the Congressman and the missing woman vanished.

Of course, the Violet Blue-BoingBoing kerfuffle makes the Levy case look like serious news. A real woman was murdered. This week's scandale des Internets is a little less weighty, but somehow I feel we're tempting fate again and are due for another rude shock. What'll it be this time?

BoingBoing - Violet Blue - memory hole kerfuffle

I've resisted commenting on the kerfuffle in which all mentions of San Francisco blogger Violet Blue were suddenly erased last month from A-list blog BoingBoing. But today's Valleywag post by Melissa Gira Grant pretty much blows it wide open, reducing what initially seemed like a sinister case of Big Brother-type memory-holing into a jealous snit by an alleged former paramour.

The point most bloggers seem to be making -- that if this had happened anywhere else, it would have been reported with the usual mixture of glee and outrage on BoingBoing -- is hard to dispute. Pretty much every other aspect, such as Grant's parsing of BoingBoing's too-little-too-late excuse that it is entitled to be as "personal" and petty as it wants to be, is splitting the finest of hairs. There's a lot of harsh rhetoric blowing around the internets about this, including an anti-BoingBoing backlash [for example], and Grant's post will only inflame matters. What amuses me is how much it matters to everyone, making it clear that a high school hallway ethos pervades the internet and those who have become "famous" because of it. If anyone comes out ahead, it's Violet Blue, whose own comments and postings on the affair have shown admirable restraint. One thing I admire about Violet is that she always seems to remember that a few pixels one way or the other don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

technorati: Violet Blue, BoingBoing, internet censorship

Focus on the Fundies: Haggard back home, just in time for Gay Pride

Ted Haggard has left the "rehabilitation program" that was supposed to turn him into a heterosexual and has returned to Colorado Springs with a shameless appeal to former supporters:

It looks as though it will take two years for us to have adequate earning power again, so we are looking for people who will help us monthly for two years.... Between now and the end of the year, we have to find the people who want to help us transition into our future. So I am starting today to let friends like you know that we are raising money ...

The story goes on to say that Haggard is living in the same Colorado Springs mansion he lived in when running a magachurch there. And there are still five big cars in the driveway.

In an email to a "friend," Haggard admitted using drugs with male prostitute Mike Jones, whose revelations to Colorado TV stations outed him just before the 2006 election

technorati: Ted Haggard

Sayonara, CRTs

Today they asked everyone to put out their dead -- their old CRT-style monitors which have been replaced by flat-screen monitors. The aisles were quickly littered with them.

On the way to work

Commuters at 4th and Folsom this morning. The sky, contaminated with smoke from wildfires, is extremely hazy.

Overheard in SSF

Coming out of the men's room at the office, I passed the little alcove where a door leads to the fire stair. Standing in this alcove was one of the women who works here, standing with her face turned away from passers-by, saying urgently into a cell phone:

"It could happen anywhere!"

What small potential tragedy was she relaying, I wondered. But I went on and overheard nothing more. There are many little alcoves in our office where we seek privacy to deal with the outside world. No longer taking personal calls on our desk phones, because our cubicles offer only a little visual privacy but no audial privacy, we take our cell phones away to these little corners and vacant conference rooms, there to have furtive conversations with spouses, kindergarten teachers, doctors' offices, or the company we're secretly interviewing at.

I once shared a large office with three other people in the days before everyone had a cell phone. One of my co-workers received regular calls from her child's preschool. Once she picked up the phone for one such call, listened for a moment, and then asked: "Was it projectile?"

technorati: overheard

Weekend the last

The cool air returned on Saturday night. Sunday was the usual San Francisco summery cool sunny breezy. Now, Monday morning started very foggy, but I already see a patch of blue sky directly overhead.

Hotter than a match head

It's the third day of a heat wave, the day when people start to crack. By this afternoon I expect to be lying on my back on the floor of the house, along with the cats, with a cold washcloth on my forehead.

Yesterday Cris wanted to go to a furniture clearance sale because the advertisement showed some dining room chairs like the ones she's been stalking for years. We drove out to the Bayview district, to a neighborhood of warehouses, and turned onto the street shown in the advertisement. It was choked with u-hauls and pickup trucks. Evidently people in the cheap furniture trade had shown up ready, as Cris said, to acquire mass quantities. We almost immediately got sandwiched in between two large pickup trucks trying to squeeze their way along the choked street. As it was 95 degrees outside, we would have had to park two blocks away, and Cris is using a cane, we simply fled without even getting out of the car. I don't even want to think about what it was like inside the warehouse.

In the evening I went over to Berkeley, which was slightly cooler than the city, and when I came home the house was just as hot as it was during the daytime, judging by the thermometer on the thermostat. It cools off fine when there's a breeze, but there wasn't any breeze. We slept all night with nothing but a sheet, that's how warm it was.

Now at 8:30 it's already 78 inside the house, and it'll be another hot day; I'm not so sure about the forecast fog coming in. In the sky is a strange sight: a clear blue sky with little smog and white fluffy clouds, as if this were Illinois.

technorati: San Francisco, heat wave

Our anniversary

Today's the 22nd anniversary of me and Cris first meeting, the day we celebrate as our anniversary. There she is graduating from law school last year.

We met as high school teachers in summer school, in the cafeteria at Mission High in SF, waiting for students to come and register. They never did come and register that day, as the school administration had (typically) screwed up: they told the students to come on one day, the teachers on another. That gave me and Cris all morning to flirt, then we had lunch together, and the rest is history. Happy anniversary, darling.

Writing report

I spent the day working on my Bangalore novel. By my count this is something like the fourth draft. As most writers know, writing is like playing the accordian: sometimes you're expanding what you have, sometimes you're contracting, or cutting. The idea is to write as much as you need to in order to fully express your theme and let your characters develop, then cut it down to essentials, and then give it more space in case something else new and beautiful pops up, then cut again. Do this until it's as good as you can possibly make it. I failed to make it as good as I possibly could, and gave it to my agent last year and she gave it right back, telling me to try again. This is trying again. It's difficult, though, because another thing that happens in the course of a long project like this is that you gain and lose enthusiasm as time goes on, and that too is a pendulum that swings back and forth. And now is a time when enthusiasm for the story and the characters is somewhat lacking. But you keep on, because writing is not just pure inspiration but also craft. And you learn that lesson over and over again.

technorati: writing, novel writing