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.)

Desert sojourn: day 13

I went to the nearby "government center," i.e. the courthouse and jail, to observe a morning in court.

About two dozen people were there to be arraigned, almost all of them on traffic offenses and other misdemeanors, but I didn't know that when I was waiting in the hallway with them all. Almost all of them were either in their twenties or their sixties -- I guess those are the times when you do the worst driving.

When we were let in, a female deputy served as the bailiff and made announcements: No gum chewing. If you want to ask for time to pay your fine, ask while you're before the judge. Interestingly: "Your case is important to you. It's not important to me. It's not my job to listen. It's your job to listen. Don't ask me later what was said." And: "The time to ask for traffic school is when your case is being heard. Some people don't understand that." The judge came in, a man in his late thirties or early forties, while the public defender was making her announcements; no one paid attention to the judge's entrance.

Finally the judge announced a name. No one responded. He said the name again and looked around the courtroom. Nothing. "Bench warrant -- fifty thousand," he said, passing some papers to a clerk. In front of me, a young black man who was sitting with a small group, presumably a family, shook his head in dismay. The judge announced another name. That person also was missing. "Bench warrant -- ten thousand." The young man shook his head again. After that, most of the people on the calendar were present.

There were a few prisoners in orange jumpsuits sitting in a section in the front of the room, by a door that led to holding cells, I suppose. One was a scrawny white woman who sat listlessly, scratching her arm; another was a scrawny Latino; another was a black man with nappy hair. A white prisoner was brought in for a few moments, and then he did something out of line that I didn't see, and the deputy (also female) who was guarding the prisoners hauled him back out the door and scolded him in the hallway for a while; then I didn't see him again.

Fifteen or so misdemeanors were handled; the most interesting ones were a woman in an uncomfortable-looking tweed suit who got busted for speeding and not having a license and who said her husband was overseas in the military, and a beefy young white man who was cited for neglecting the care of an animal. He got a pretty stiff fine, if I recall.

The parade of misdemeanors ended, and a few public defender-represented cases were called. The assistant D.A. was not present at first, and one of the PDs joked that the judge should dismiss the case. The black man was dealt with -- his case was continued. The judge and the DA and another lawyer disappeared to chambers for a conference, and meanwhile the deputies started chatting casually with each other. The bailiff asked the one who was in charge of the prisoners: "You going to start doing yoga with us?" They chatted about vacation spots, and then started talking about the worst fights they'd ever had on duty. The second deputy, whose name turned out to be Courtney, began, "Out in Landers, on Lynn Lane -- you'd know the family I'm talking about..." (pregnant pause) she'd once fought for fifteen minutes with an arrestee and that at one point, when she had him on the ground with one handcuff on, said to him: "I'm gonna call in on my radio. If you move, I'll bash your brains in with my radio!"

And then the major event, the scrawny Latino, who was up for a number of robbery charges including a home-invasion robbery, pled guilty to a bunch of charges and was given a total of eight years and four months in prison. Then a deputy came in and said she had another prisoner out there and gave a name. It took several minutes for them to figure out that this person was supposed to be released to the custody of someone from Panorama Ranch, the drug rehab place a couple blocks from me in JT. "Is there anyone here from Panorama Ranch?" the judge asked, and everyone looked around, and especially at me, since I was one of the few people left in the room by that time. I didn't say anything.

After that, things sort of devolved. They were waiting for something.... The DA disappeared and everyone waited, and had a snack from a bag of candy bars kept by the clerk. Then the judge went out. Finally the court reporter said "Are we done?" and the bailiff said no, they were waiting for the DA to come back so they could handle this last case, and she indicated the only other person still sitting in the audience section aside from me. Then the bailiff looked at me and said "What are you here for?" Just observing, I answered. She didn't seem to think that was out of the ordinary. Nevertheless, a little while later, chilled to the bone by the courtroom's air conditioning and with no sign that anything else was going to happen anytime soon, I left, after being there for over two hours.

Tonight's the full moon, an event I've been anticipating. Since I can't see the moon rise above the horizon from my house, I'll try to drive north a little, away from the mountains just behind me to the south which mark the borders of the national park. However, I did see the almost-full moon set this morning at 5:50 as I was getting ready to go out on my morning walk.

Desert sojourn: day 12: Eagles! or buzzards or something

I started my morning walk around 6:00 a.m. and I have a new, simple strategy: walk towards the sunrise until the sun actually rises, and then turn around and walk away from the sun. This worked great this morning, except that I kept going for another twenty minutes or so after sunrise. This caused no problems, except that I went 5.25 miles instead of around 4 miles, and toward the end of the walk I could really feel the sun on my back. Usually I'm indoors before it starts to heat up.

Around 10:15 in the morning, I glanced out the window and saw this:

Click the picture for All Sizes on Flickr.

Then I recalled that Christine had told me a few days ago about just this phenomenon -- huge birds (buzzards?) settle in large trees for the night during their annual migration right around this time of year; they circle and swoop down in the evening, then take off in the morning. And sure enough, this morning there they were.

I caught them just as they were forming up to head wherever they were going. They had a three-foot wingspan -- they were much larger than the hawks I saw yesterday -- were golden-brown, and were sort of circling each other as they slowing gained altitude and headed off to the west. Here's a short video I took with the same digital camera; it doesn't show much detail, but you can see them swooping around each other. Wow, that was exciting.

Update: Christine informs me they are turkey vultures.

Desert sojourn: day 11

Really intense work for my day job today -- just all day long. It didn't matter much in the sense that it was a hot day and it was no good going outdoors anyway. I completed my walk at dawn as usual, about four miles.

At the end of the day I went outside at sunset and ate my supper at a garden table next to the house. Here's the house from the side rear, with the getting-fuller moon rising, and the Harrison House across the street to the left.

However, I did uncover some great material for my book. I was just telling Cris yesterday that I want part of my plot to involve one of the "typical FBI terror stings" in which some hapless loudmouth is the target of a sting in which the FBI arrests him for planting a non-functioning bomb that they themselves gave him. And voila, it happened. The criminal complaint shows quite clearly how the FBI's confidential informant encouraged this poor shmuck and strung him along until they had him dead to rights. It isn't scary, it's just sad. Compare this to the complaint in the 2007 Fort Dix "pizza terrorists" case -- even less threatening than that. At least in New Jersey they seemed serious about doing something before the FBI got involved.

Desert sojourn: day 10

Joshua Tree in Landers, Cal.

7:40 a.m. -- Up at 5:25 a.m., out walking by 5:50 when it was just getting light. I walked east, toward the sunrise, and then turned around as soon as its rays struck me, so that I was walking away from the blazing light. The sun rises about 6:30 and I walked until 7:25 -- over five miles this morning. This morning the unusual thing that happened was that I scared up a couple of hawks. I would approach the telephone pole one was sitting on, and it would fly off to about two or three poles down. Then I'd approach the other and it would do the same; the male of the pair would utter the distinctive hawk's scree. This leapfrogging happened for quite a while until they both turned back, I guess so as to stay within their accustomed range.

I also saw an animal from a distance, crossing a road. It looked the size of a coyote, but it was dark in color, so it must have been a dog. There is a German shepherd I ran into a few days ago, with its owner, so it was probably that dog. Most of the dogs here are kept behind fences, and raise a ruckus when I go by.

As with every morning, it's completely clear, and it's supposed to get hot today. I have more laundry to do, but otherwise I'm not sure what I'll do with my Sunday.

1:20 p.m. -- I decided to go to a Twentynine Palms institution this morning, The Jelly Donut. It's just a donut shop in an old filling station. But someone suggested I go there in the morning and hang around and listen in on conversations. I did so this morning on the way to church, and everyone was aflitter over the massive police presence downtown. According to the reports passing through the donut shop, someone robbed the Rio Ranch Market overnight. Judging by the reports, it was just a burglary, but there were at least ten cop cars on the scene, from the county, the Highway Patrol, and the Military Police (the Marine base is five miles away, and the Rio Ranch Market is on the main road that leads to it). Some obvious street person came in and said he'd been "interrogated" three times and searched for stolen goods, "but I didn't take nothing."

Like I say, it sounded like a mere burglary, so I'm not sure why it was treated as a major police mobilization. In big cities today a burglary might not even get you a visit from the police ever.

Update, three days later: The following story ran the following Wednesday on the website of the local radio station, which is really the only daily news source here:

ALARM AT TWENTYNINE PALMS STORE LEADS TO BURGLARY ARREST

A security alarm at the Twentynine Farms Market, formally the Rio Ranch, led to the arrest of a Twentynine Palms man for burglary. Sheriffs’ spokeswoman Vera Martinez said early Sunday Morning about just past 4, Sheriffs’ deputies responded to an alarm the grocery store in downtown Twentynine Palms. Arriving deputies found a rear door open, and evidence someone had fallen through the attic. Deputies searched the area for several hours, collecting evidence. The investigation led deputies to an address in the 6400 block of Yucca Avenue in Twentynine Palms, where John Pratt, 29, was arrested. John Pratt was booked into the Morongo Basin Jail for investigation of burglary and held on $25,000 bail. A review of court records show Pratt has two past convictions for burglary, a DUI conviction and misdemeanor disorderly conduct convictions.

Church done, laundry partly done. I found a laundromat much closer than the one in 29 Palms, and it's even air-conditioned. All in all a much more pleasant experience than the one in 29. Now, in the heat of the day, I'm going to work on more notes and maybe do some brainstorming. I'm sure a nap will come somewhere in there too.

4:45 p.m. -- No nap, but I did spend about two and a half solid hours copying the text of more news articles about San Bernardino County political corruption into an MS Word file. I now have 125 pages of single-spaced 11-point Times New Roman pages of articles, mostly about the Postmus scandal, but also some other things.

Now that the sun's approaching the horizon, it's time for a little drive. I'm going to take a trip to the outback, and hope I don't get stuck.

7:50 p.m. -- I'm back from my jaunt into the bush. I drove down the highway just a bit, then headed north across the desert. The road was paved for five miles, and then it turned to sand/dirt/rock (which is the default surface for roads here except for highways and streets in town -- some of the streets) and started climbing up to a mesa. I was more worried about getting stuck in drifted sand than I was about the road itself, but after another five miles of bone-shaking washboard road, I decided it might just shake my car apart, and I turned around. But the desert out there was just lovely -- lots of creosote bushes, and some joshua trees, which will only grow starting at about 2500 feet elevation.

One thing I observed is that when you see houses, they're just as likely to be beautiful design-y modern houses as they are decrepit desert shacks. One of my interviewees pointed out that land here is so cheap that poor people can afford to buy an existing house (or cabin -- which is what the shacks are called out here) and rich people can afford to build a house, but you'll see both on the same road.

I drove back to the highway and did some more exploring, winding up in a place called Landers, which is even higher elevation, about 3100 feet, with loads of joshua trees and even some cottonwoods. (See picture at top of this post.) Its only claim to fame is the 7.4 earthquake that struck in 1992. Otherwise its claims to obscurity are much more numerous. In fact, its obscurity, its off-the-beaten-path quality, its back-of-beyond character, is why people here often mention it when they talk about dark deeds -- body dumping and so on. It's also pretty much on the way to the ORV haven where that deadly crash happened last month.

Wow, the weekend went fast. At least I have no commute come tomorrow morning. All I have to do is put my work monitor and keyboard back in front of me and turn on the work laptop.

Desert sojourn: day 9

I sent this morning to a party at a friend's house in Wonder Valley. Perry is part of the ex-San Francisco crowd, which numbers six or seven. He's an artist whose house is itself a work of art. It's almost impossible to take pictures inside, because the decorations and colors are such that a photograph tends to lose perspective. But the picture linked to above gives at least some idea of the colorfulness.

During the party I met another artist who lives nearby in Wonder Valley. We went over to see the studio she and her husband built. A large quonset hut on a concrete slab, it stayed remarkably cool in 93-degree weather with just those whirly roof fans going. It was packed with workbenches and storage shelves along with works of art finished or in progress. I took some pictures inside without asking, more for my own research (who knows, there may need to be an artist's studio in this book), so I won't post them.

After that, I came home; it was already after one in the afternoon. I worked a little and took a nap, and then put in a good two solid hours of transcribing last night's conversation with the disk jockey, which I described in yesterday's post. I didn't leave the house again until nearly 7 pm, when I drove back to Twentynine Palms to an art opening. As usual, I was more interested in the milieu than the art itself. One or more artists had transformed what seemed to be a series of work sheds into galleries and installation spaces. In front of these was a dusty courtyard where a rock band was playing. Kids were running to and fro in the crowd, which was mostly composed of people in their 30s and 40s.

I saw a few of the folks from today's brunch, but I didn't see the friends I was supposed to meet, so I came home, listening again to the Giants broadcast on the radio. The reception is better in Twentynine Palms, which is to the east and a little bit farther away from San Francisco, than it is here in Joshua Tree about 500 feet higher in elevation. Don't know why.

Now it's 9:30 and I'm bushed. I've been getting up around 5:30 or 5:40 every morning to walk, and today was no exception.

Tomorrow's supposed to be real hot -- 102 instead of 95.

I liked this article in the local paper about some filmmakers using the apocalyptic landscape of a shooting range-dumping ground as the backdrop for their movie. This is actually one of my themes, or theories about life here: that people come here and use the vast expanses of the desert as the backdrop for their own fantasies. They wanted a grungy landscape -- they found one.

Desert sojourn: day 8

A road runner came to visit

Realizing how the rear of the house remains cool all morning long, I've been working at the kitchen table with the back door open. This morning a road runner came by and nearly poked his head in the house. I said "Szzzt!" which I am used to doing with the cats at home to keep them from coming into the bedroom, but the road runner never met a cat and didn't know what I meant; he didn't budge until I picked up the camera. Then he hopped up on the bench where I sit and have coffee after my morning walk, and I got this picture before he hopped off and trotted away.

In the early evening, I drove to downtown Joshua Tree to the studios of the local radio station. It's part pop music station and part small-town local station, with local news stories. My ideal of desert radio is "The Hot One for the High Desert" as heard on The Firesign Theatre's "Everything You Know is Wrong." This station isn't as fusty and weird, unfortunately, but it does have a few distinctly strangely voiced announcers. Tonight I got a chance to sit for over an hour and interview one of the DJs in between announcements. I asked him about a general picture here, and I've tried to be careful not to make it seem like I'm just looking for dirt, but people keep serving it up. According to the guy I interviewed, drugs and crime are fairly rampant. But I also have a contact in the local sheriff's department and want to get his side of it too, as well as the side of as many other people as I can.

It was a little before 8 pm then, and I didn't feel like going home, so I drove 35 or 40 miles to The Palms in Wonder Valley and had a beer. The bartender, an attractive brunette, had one arm in a sling and did everything with the other arm. She kept telling people that she had broken her elbow a day or two before, though I didn't hear how it happened. This place is way out there. After I finished my beer, I went out to the parking lot and looked up at the stars. Even though there was a bright enough moon to cast a distinct shadow, the stars were shining brightly, because there are no other lights out there.

The other good thing about The Palms, aside from its extreme funkyness, is that there are no Marines. Not that I have anything against them, but I don't want to be in a bar when they're drinking. I'd rather stay far out of the way, and if I have to drive 30 miles, fine.

He's putty in their hands

I ran across this plaintive cry in a forum post on a site called Tea Party Patriots:

Here I sit once again at the computer, same routine. Look for a job, check emails, seek out local like minded patriot groups, research current events and repeat. I am getting restless!!! I want to do so much but I don't know how to channel my energy properly. At 40 years of age I still maintain the anger and rebellious nature of my youth. I am a family man, blue collar with a school teacher wife and a daughter starting college, but the anger that I feel for the way my country is being run into the ground and the lack of faith I have in government just build up inside me and I know I could easily go down the wrong path. I know that this is what they want and will only further strengthen their wicked agenda, so for now I will content myself with writing it all down, spreading the truth to my fellow Americans and preparing for what lies ahead. I get some hope from joining this group and others, networking with people who want to fight for what is right and not what "they" say is better for us. My family and friends think I am nuts because I am throwing myself into this 100%. I was Known as the dude who didn't give a f#!k about what goes on but thankfully I snapped out of it and I am ready to roll. my email is (redacted)@aol.com.

He did publish his full email but I have redacted it. The actual guy is not the point, the point is how typical he must be, how he embodies the blank slate that animates right-wing conservatism today. "I'm full of energy... restless... won't give in to their wicked agenda... my friends and family think I'm nuts... I am ready to roll."

Could it be said any more succinctly? He's just begging "Manipulate me, exploit my inchoate anxiety, and point me at a target!" It occurred to me that there must be people in Islamic societies in the exact same mental state, and how easy it must be for people with, yes, a "wicked agenda," to turn them into suicide bombers and so on. And what makes me really alarmed is that the differences between our democratic society and their autocratic or theocratic society seem to be rapidly shrinking. Once those differences sufficiently disappear, what's to stop us from having suicide bombers here, and worse? Just look at that guy who crashed his plane into the IRS earlier this year -- that's exactly what I'm talking about.

Desert sojourn: day 7

Bouldery slope above the Morongo Basin

There's another sunrise-lit picture from another early-morning walk. I took the stroll this morning with my landlady, who lives in the house next door, which is to say 200 feet down the street. She corrected me as to the ownership of the Harrison House -- she owns it, not a foundation. She came down to make a film about its construction and wound up with the house itself after the builder and original owner, composer Lou Harrison, died soon after its completion. She also owns her house, plus the house I'm staying in, plus the next one as well. Still a performer, she's presenting a solo performance of classical Indian dance in a couple weeks. With live music.

I spent some time today gathering articles online about a local political scandal. Here is just one story (from July 2009) about the juicy, juicy scandal that went on for over two years, and is still being played out, as this story from yesterday's paper shows. Christine hipped me to this character, whom she said is emblematic of the closeted gay Republican good-old-boy network that rules corrupt San Bernardino County. The gay anti-gay state senator who was outed earlier this year after being picked up for DWI after leaving a gay bar is another example.

What does this relatively local scandal have to do with the desert section of my novel, which has partly to do with an alleged terror plot? I'm not sure yet, but it's all material.

In the evening I got a little fouled up. I was supposed to go to one Chamber of Commerce event and meet people, and I went to a different one instead. The wrong one, the one I went to, was held at the Joshua Tree Retreat Center, a very large spread -- I had no idea how large -- right off the highway on the other side of JT proper. Last weekend the place hosted a four-day yoga fiesta and there were a lot of skinny women walking around downtown JT in those stupid curled-up straw cowboy hats.

After I retreated from the wrong Chamber of Commerce gathering, I drove the 15 miles to Twentynine Palms and got a pizza for no particular reason than I'd been craving pizza a little. At this point the sun was very low in the sky, and at this particular time of the year, the westbound highway goes straight into the setting sun. This was no doubt the reason for the heinous accident I saw, a pickup truck on its side and three other cars stopped -- there were already a variety of cops there -- one of which had clearly t-boned the pickup which had been blinded and pulled out onto the highway at the wrong time.

(Update, 18 September: Actually, I was wrong. The location of the sun had nothing to do with the accident, which was caused by a tire blowing out at 90 m.p.h., according to this news report.)

On the way back it was long enough after dark that I was actually able to pull in the Giants radio broadcast all the way from San Francisco -- intermittently. Strangely, it's easier to pull in 50,000-watt San Francisco station KNBR than any station carrying the broadcast of the Dodgers, whom the Giants are playing tonight.

Desert sojourn: day 6

The Morongo Basin, seen from just inside the northern edge of Joshua Tree National Park

It was quite cool this morning, about 60 degrees. I walked about three and a half miles. I got a very early start and walked for a longer time, but covered less ground somehow.

I knocked off work about 4:00 pm when Christine came over to take a little hike with me. We walked up to the top of the street, on the other side of which an easily passable fence marks the northern edge of Joshua Tree National Park. We walked up a slope, past the science-fiction Doolittle House which I've mentioned already (you can see it on the right side of this picture) and up a wash. A wash is a dry stream bed, an arroyo. During a flash flood it's no place to be; otherwise, it makes a convenient path through the desert, as long as you're content to go uphill where the wash goes and climb over occasional boulders. In the late afternoon, we found a cool shady spot in the canyon to sit and talk.

Christine is one of my oldest friends; I've mentioned her many times. We used to perform together. Now she's a painter.

I ate dinner outside as the sun set. As soon as it had disappeared behind the horizon, the air was noticeably cooler. Now at 9:30 pm, it's quite cool again. I love sleeping in cool weather -- that's what's so great about San Francisco. Speaking of which, I had the greatest dream last night.

There's crazy and then there's certifiably insane

One of the more truly insane blogs I follow is The Vatic Project, which regularly posts anti-Semitic economics-related rants and other forms of paranoid fantasies about the state of the world. Just another dot on the spectrum of collapsitarian nuttery, this particular dot pretty far out on the spectrum. Today he -- whoever it is -- posted something and included an introduction, as he often does. A preface of sorts. And this preface is priceless.

They do not want this one up. Taking control of my cursor again so I can't put it up. So do not know when you will get this. I was trying for today, but it may not be til later when I can do this without the messing around. Be patient, ITS GOING UP NO MATTER HOW HARD THEY TRY, I AM FULLY AND UNEQUVICALLY STUBBORN. THIS MEANS YOU NOW HAVE TO READ IT, BECAUSE THEY ONLY DO THIS ON INFO THEY DO NOT WANT OUT THERE.... SO GET THIS OUT THERE ALL OVER THE PLACE. THANKS. Its about waiting til I get a different shift. hehehe.

It appears that its the OFFICE OF INTERNATIONAL TREASURY THEY DO NOT WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT. SO PAY SPECIAL ATTENTION TO THAT AND DIG EVEN FURTHER SINCE THEY SEEM TO HATE THAT ONE WHICH IS WHERE I GET THE WORSE MESSING OF THE CURSOR.

Wow, "they" must really not want it up on the internet -- whoever "they" are -- because no sooner did I click on the link than I get a "Page Not Found" message. It Really Makes You Think, Doesn't It??!?

For those really interested, here is a screenshot of the feed from Google Reader from which I pulled his text. I was able to get only a couple of the lines of the actual article, but it's the preface I love.

'Uniquely Southern' panic rooms also serve as storm shelters

Coincidental to my research on nutbag collapsitarians and survivalists (don't miss The Biggest Threat to Your Survival? An American Economic Collapse) is a piece in the Wall Street Journal today about storm shelters-cum-panic rooms which are said to be "the new must-have" in amenities.

These aren't the dank bunkers your father hid in, as we discuss in today's WSJ story. And they aren't cheap. Many of the new shelters are above-ground $4,000-$15,000 prefabricated pads that can be bolted to the garage's concrete pad, or even installed inside the home. They boast names like "StormRoom" and "Iron Eagle II" and often lead double lives of offices, tool sheds and even wine cellars in less turbulent times. DuPont makes one reinforced with bullet-resistant Kevlar. Builder Rhonda House, owner of Uniquely Southern Homes in Ward, Ark. says she regularly includes safe rooms in her new custom homes, calling it a "must-have item."

Did you catch that? Not only is the owner of a house-building company named Rhonda House -- un nom du destin, as my French teacher would say -- but her company is called Uniquely Southern Homes. I think a bullet-proof storm shelter really is a uniquely Southern idea, don't you? Doesn't say if they also come with gun racks.

I also liked this bit:

Above-ground designs are particularly popular among families with elderly members who might not be able to navigate stairs or make it across the yard into a bunker quickly.

Wow, what could possibly go wrong?

"Hello Momma? ... No, Momma, those aren't tornado sirens, that's probably just an ambulance. ... Because I'm looking at the weather on the internet and there's nothing on the radar. ... Well of course the internet knows. ... Momma, please don't lock yourself in the storm shelter again. Hello? Momma? Hello?"

Yes: If your elderly mother locks herself in the tornado-proof, bullet-proof storm shelter and can't remember how to get out, how do you get her out?

Desert sojourn: day 5

First rays of sunlight, looking north over the desert

On my walk this morning, I started late, took an alternate route, and wound up walking along the highway for a short distance as traffic blew by at 65 mph, probably commuters heading for jobs on the Marine Corps base at Twentynine Palms.

Like yesterday, after my walk and my morning coffee, I spent the entire day inside, from 9:00 a.m. to just after 4:30. It's not the heat I'm hiding from as much as the sun, and aside from the back porch in the early mornings, there's not much shade around this house. After 3:00 pm it's possible to sit in a chair in front of the house in a little bit of shade, if I really need to, and I did sit out there a lot reading on Saturday and Sunday.

After logging off my job for the day, I went over there myself on a second attempt to do laundry. While the stuff was in the machines I waited at the Jack in the Box and the McDonalds, each of which held several Marines who had just gotten off work, or whatever you call it -- off duty, I guess. Man, they are young. I almost said "Marine boys." But of course any of them could take me apart like Toshiro Mifune takes apart that sub-standard shoe in "The Bad Sleep Well." All the Marines were eating copious amounts of McDonalds food. When you're 18, what you eat is what you eat. A middle-aged man who was sitting there actually said something like "That's a lot of food." The Marine answered, "Yes sir, I had no lunch, I'm hungry."

Also seen in town were a couple of degenerate-looking characters, one of them heavily tattooed and scrawny as a starving dog, the other meatier and only slightly less mean-looking. I saw them wander across the street in one direction, and then half an hour later they were in the McDonalds at the same time I was.

I came home and skimmed half of this crazy book I picked up for half price at Borders a few months ago. It's a so-called novel written by a survivalist gun nut about how to survive the breakdown of society after the U.S. economy implodes following a sudden bout of hyperinflation. Ninety percent of the book is devoted to detailed explanations of how to stock up for the great collapse, how to run your survival retreat like a military camp, and so on.

It is not a novel in any sense of the word; rather, a narrative of how a group of people would survive for several years after the collapse of society if they had properly prepared. (To his credit, in an interview the author himself admitted, "I don't pretend it's a literary masterpiece.")

What I find entertaining, aside from the unintentionally funny stuff of which there is a great deal, is the window into the mindset of the survivalist type and the unexamined assumptions he makes. Maybe the biggest assumption is that a total social breakdown inevitably and swiftly would follow the collapse of the economy. He takes it for granted that riots and looting swiftly render every city and town uninhabitable, as if everyone becomes like one of the zombies with the Rage virus in "28 Days Later" as soon as the power grid fails. This happens universally, he says. Well, if it doesn't, then there's no reason for his little stronghold, obviously. Anyway, he never tires of endless discussions of how to create a homemade cannon, and how to make your own camouflage suit, and endless near-pornographic discussions of guns and ammunition.

This is research, of course.

Desert sojourn: day 4

In the morning I left for my walk earlier than ever, when it was really rather dark, and I was just able to make out the road when I got to the unpaved part. But I had the advantage of walking two-thirds of my walk before the sun rose. Then I made coffee and sat out on the back porch, which is on the shady west side of the house in the morning, and read the Psalms.

The only way I could get away to get down here was to arrange to work remotely, that is, to do my day job from here. Fortunately, the internet connection has been as advertised, because my whole job is pretty much using online systems -- email, the bug tracking system, the document management/authoring/publishing system, chat. But because there is no phone at all in this house, I found myself using my cell phone for an hour-long meeting. Then I realized that if I had a meeting once or twice a day I would use up all my mobile phone's minutes in a jiffy. So I called Verizon and upgraded my plan. I can set it back down in a month when I leave.

In the evening I tried and failed to find a laundromat. You'd think that in a military town which Twentynine Palms is, there would be a ton of them, but I found only one, and it closed at 7:00 pm -- which is the time when I arrived there. So back home I went with my load of dirty laundry.

I did give up reading "Divisadero" when I got to the part, which takes up the last 25% of the book, about the romantic French writer. All the other characters, the ones whose story takes up the first 75% of the book, never come back. Suddenly you're stuck in an uncertain time period with a character you don't care much about. Plus, the timelines are vague and confusing: The bucolic first part seems to take place in the 1920s or 30s, but when the characters have aged ten or fifteen years, they're suddenly living in the modern present, and you know it's the 1990s because the book makes reference to the Gulf War. Similarly, one character is researching a writer who, it seems, lived no more recently than the 1890s or so, because people are going around in horse-drawn carts; but a character who is a child during that period is no older than 45 when he meets the girl, again in the 1990s. It's as if whole decades vanish conveniently. I suppose the reader is supposed to think this is akin to magic realism or something, but it just seems sloppy and romantic.

So that's it for "Divisadero" (which has nothing to do, really, with the San Francisco street of that name other than a fleeting reference; you get the sense that the author just liked the way it sounded).

Desert sojourn: day 3

Coyote melons (Cucurbita palmata) on vine, Joshua Tree National Park border fence

This morning I started my morning walk even earlier than the day before, and it was a good thing, because I could tell right away the day was warmer. On Baseline Road, along the border fence of the national park, I found this coyote melon vine. It's unusual to see ripe (yellow) melons intact, because once they're ripe, they're usually eaten by critters. But not only was this vine undisturbed, but one of the melons had rolled away a couple of feet, and even it was undamaged. I took it home.

Today was a good day for my book project because I was able to meet somebody who works for the local radio station, as well as a local clergywoman, and I'm going to try to sit down and talk with them this week about living here, the people they meet, and whatever stories they can tell.

Because it was so hot today, I spent the rest of the day indoors, only going out at sunset to sit at the table outside, and then after dark to lay on the table and take in the stars. Since there is no moon this week, it's a good time for stargazing, even though it's not nearly as dark where I am as it is at my friends' houses in Wonder Valley.

Interlude: reading: 'Divisadero' by Michael Ondaatje

I'm reading the novel "Divisadero" by Michael Ondaatje, and enjoying it pretty much while being annoyed by a few of his choices. It's about two sisters and a farm hand, a few years older, whom they grow up with in an impossibly bucolic setting in Marin County. The first part of the book is this pastorale, and the rest is about their mostly separate lives as adults.

The thing I want to talk about is this: one of the sisters becomes a literary historian who is researching the life of a French poet named Lucien Segura, whose life and surroundings the author describes in evocative detail, so much so that I searched on the internet to see who this Segura was -- and he turned out to be an entirely made-up person. I thought that was a strange choice, why make up a writer for your character to research when there are so many real writers whose life and work you can bring to life? But fine, just one choice I disagree with.

But then not thirty pages later the book describes the adult life of the other sister, who has gone to work as a researcher for the San Francisco Public Defender's office, for a lawyer named Aldo Vea. And this is a real person! -- Alfredo Véa, who also wrote a very interesting novel entitled Gods Go Begging. And from the description in "Divisadero," it's crystal-clear that Ondaatje is describing the very same Alfredo Véa.

So he makes up one person but uses another very identifiable real one! I just can't get over it.

But I don't want to over-emphasize what I don't like about the book. The language is carefully crafted and the story is drawing me along. It's clear the author -- with no connection to California I know of -- intensely researched the history and geography of northern and central California, among other things. In this one book he gives Joan Didion (born and raised in the Sacramento delta) a run for her money. This aspect of the book alone is impressive.

Desert sojourn: day 2

Motorcycle rider in Yucca Valley, Calif., midday, 11 Sep 2010

Before I came down here, I resolved to get my daily exercise in early in the morning, while it was cool, and to that end I mapped out a 4.5-mile rectangular loop in the neighborhood. This morning I got up and was out just at sunrise. I covered the distance much faster than I cover the same distance on my treadmill at home, which I guess shouldn't be surprising. There isn't much special to see in the neighborhood, aside from the fact that Joshua Tree National Park begins immediately at the end of the street about half a mile to the south, and part of my route goes along the boundary fence. I also noticed a house in the neighborhood that looks like it was made from a retired streetcar. I'll have to get another good look at it.

After my walk, I sat down and made a few notes and had some cold cereal. I'm still getting organized here, and I keep misplacing things, which is not easy considering the house was completely empty when I got here yesterday -- aside from the furnishings, which are comfortable but not cluttered at all -- and then I have to walk around the house and sometime out to the car looking for whatever it is I can't find.

During the middle of the day I did some shopping in nearby Yucca Valley, which more than anyplace else in the area is a suburban-type town with lots of shopping centers and chain stores. (I'm glad it's there, so I can go to the chain stores, and I'm glad they aren't here in Joshua Tree so I don't have to look at them.) It turned into a long trip because it took a long time for Walgreens to fill a prescription I needed. After I finally got home, sometime around 1:30, I put my groceries away and took a nap, which has always been my main plan for hot afternoons here. And then I read for a few hours, and when sunset came, took this picture of the place across the street, a straw bale house built by composer Lou Harrison in his last years and now maintained for residencies and occasional chamber concerts.

The same person who owns the house I'm renting also administers the Harrison House program.

* BLM = Bureau of Land Management. Basically if the federal government owns it, and it's not on a military base or in a national park, it's administered by the BLM. An example of the kinds of anything-goes behavior that happens on BLM land are the off-road races such as the one last month where several people were killed because they stood too close to a course where trucks were hurtling by.

Desert sojourn: day 1

Just after sunrise in Wonder Valley, northeast of Twentynine Palms, Calif.

In the morning, I woke up at first light, and failing to go back to sleep I got up and walked around for a little bit. It was surprisingly cool, about 55 or 60 degrees, with a gentle but steady breeze from the east. I took this picture just outside the house where I spent the first night, the house of my friend Chris in Wonder Valley.

I went over to the house of Chris's girlfriend Ellie and had a long breakfast -- my second free meal, thanks guys! -- during which I heard a lot of gossip and anecdotes about the denizens of the area -- "the Basin," they call it, in reference to the Morongo Basin, which covers the whole area from Morongo Valley to Twentynine Palms and beyond. I heard about local political conflicts. I heard about the drunken woman who after breaking up with her boyfriend and coming home drunk attempted to enter his house through the chimney and whose body was discovered only four days later by the cleaner. I heard about the man who, on the day of his daughter's wedding, shot and killed the wild dog which had the day before killed one of his goats and had come back the next day, the day of the wedding, to kill the other. I heard several stories in which critters played roles, including a coyote who ate a chicken "as if no one in the world was watching him." I heard about the guy who runs the local radio station.

In short, there are a million stories down here, and that's what I'm here for. I want to write about the area in such a way that people who have lived here a long time (or all their lives) can read this section of my novel and think that it isn't inaccurate. And to do this I want stories, and to talk to people.

Which I am terrible at. But luckily for me, my friends know a heck of a lot of people down here, and they're willing to introduce me. I did go to an event tonight that was interesting, though not extremely useful for my book: a historical presentation about the Mojave Road, one of the original wagon trails across the desert and one of the best preserved. I'm not sure I need quite that much history, but it was good to get information about one of the farther reaches of the region (one that is actually entirely outside the Basin). I actually do want to drive out in that direction while I'm down here, if I have time.

In the middle of the day, I moved into the house I'm renting for just over a month. It's actually in Joshua Tree, about 20 miles west and 1000 feet higher in elevation than Wonder Valley, on the other side of Twentynine Palms. The border of Joshua Tree National Park actually comes right down to the end of the street I'm staying on, and the lady who owns the house -- a local artist who also administers the Lou Harrison House -- said you can walk right up into the park. I plan on getting in my exercise in the morning, when it's nice and cool.

Temperature at 9:40 pm: 73 F.

Down to the desert

Drove from San Francisco to the Mojave desert today, to a friend's house outside the town of Twentynine Palms, in an unincorporated area called Wonder Valley. I'll spend the night here tonight, then tomorrow move into the house I've rented about 15 miles from here in (or somewhat east of) the village of Joshua Tree.

I was lucky arriving tonight, because Christine already was making dinner for two guests and she and her partner Deborah just added me on. I arrived just in time for dinner. They had homemade pie, too!

It's about 75 degrees here at 10:20 at night, and I want to go out and look at the stars for a few minutes, but then I have to go to bed, because I drove nine hours (route via Bakersfield and Ludlow) and I'm bushed.

You can see by my outfit that I'm a cowboy too

My friend VonCookie, who is in her first or eighth year teaching at UC Berkeley, depending on how you count it, writes of how she dresses professionally now that she's a PhD. Reading that reminded me of this bit of dialogue from my days as a high school teacher, a time when I wore a shirt and tie, slacks and dress shoes to class every day:

Student: Mr. Pritchard, why do you wear those black leather shoes every day?

Me (archly): If I didn't, you guys wouldn't respect me.

Student: Aw, yes we would!

Aw. Actually the main reason I dressed like that was because even though I was 28 years old I looked much younger, and I had to have something that distinguished me from the kids I was teaching. At that age I was still wondering "Am I an adult?" and I realized that if I wavered on that point, my classroom would be a catastrophe. So when I answered that student, even though I was sort of kidding, I also wasn't kidding.

That said, VonCookie is ten times the teacher I was, so her students would probably pay attention no matter what she wore.

Nutbag of the month: special 9/11 edition

Of course, a discussion of right-wing Christian nutbags would not be complete without mentioning Terry Jones, the "pastor" of an organization in Florida called the Dove World Outreach Center. (Despite its name, which makes it sound like the visitor center of a soap factory, it is a "tiny church," according to the New York Times.) Jones is the fellow who wants to burn copies of the Koran on Sep. 11.

Today's story in the NYT on the man and his plan draws attention to the fact that one of his justifications for the act of burning a Koran is a "never-reported story" of an attack on Christians by "radical Muslims" during the Balkan war in the 1990s. "Never-reported story" is the NYT's way of saying "completely made-up bullshit;" this is clear when the writer goes so far as to say:

To a reporter who worked in Bosnia during that war, the story Mr. Jones told on Wednesday sounds very like the kind of fictional tales of wartime atrocities against Christians that were cited by Bosnian Serbs and Croats at the time to justify the well-documented massacres of Muslims that did take place — like the murder of thousands of Muslim men and boys buried in mass graves around Srebrenica in 1995.

The story goes on to say that Jones is not just one more Florida cracker (like Chuck Baldwin); he and his wife led a church in Cologne, Germany until two years ago. And it gets weirder after that.

Nutbag of the week: Pastor Chuck Baldwin

Last week I first brought up one Pastor Chuck Baldwin, a man who believes (along with his Baptist version of right-wing Christianity) in something he calls the Clinton-Bush Crime Syndicate, along with other delusions, 19th century political positions, and various paranoias. He seemed entertaining, so I thought I'd follow his blog.

And so today he posted a justification for his just-announced move from Florida to Montana. In his post, he compares himself to the Pilgrims who fled Old World oppression for the New World:

I believe Montana (and surrounding states) is in store for a FREEDOM RUSH. People all over America instinctively realize that things cannot keep going the way they are. The tyrannical tentacles of Washington, D.C., are making life a proverbial hell on earth for people all over the country, and, unfortunately, many (if not most) states are unwilling to resist the Crown's (excuse me, DC's) evil machinations. So, in the hearts of freedom-loving people there burns the question, "What do we do?" My family and I have answered that question. Our move is in response to the direct and definite revelation of God, in much the same way that our Pilgrim and Pioneer ancestors followed God’s guiding light.

Right... Even if you ignore the delusion that God is speaking directly to him about his family, you still have this grandiose notion that he is repeating the flight of the Pilgrims in his "RUSH" to Montana. And later he goes on to compare himself to the Founding Fathers. He seems to realize this sounds grandiose, so he adds:

{My critics] realize the potential of what we are doing is so great, so powerful, and so extensive, that it could literally change the course of American history. Yes, I truly believe that. Do I believe that I am that important or powerful? Not at all. I am only one man (a rather simple man, at that). But I know there is a great God in Heaven Who inspired great men of history to incorporate great principles of freedom into the minds and hearts of a great people, and by so doing changed the course of history at that time. And I am convinced that this same God and those same principles are just as revolutionary -- just as powerful -- today as they were then. Therefore, the principalities and powers that be are scared silly that others will be inspired to do as we are doing. So, they are attempting to assassinate my motives and character.

Even in his protestations that he is "a rather simple man" (and beware of people who feel they have to say that), he used the word "great" three times in one sentence. And he believes his urge, along with a similar urge he predicts many like-minded people will feel, "could change the course of American history."

Just pick the reasoning apart a little bit. He has a certainty that God wants him to seek greater freedom by moving from Florida to Montana -- does he understand that Montana is still in the United States? Does he really believe the law is different there? But fine -- let's indulge him for a moment. We're still confronted with his notion that moving from a tyrannous region of the country (Florida is "hell on earth" for conservatives? Really?) to a supposedly more free one (Montana is to Florida as the American colonies were to England?) "could change the course of American history."

How, pray tell? Let's suppose this predicted "FREEDOM RUSH" (his caps) happens, and half a million people move to Montana and Idaho, where white supremacists, paranoids, and general whack jobs have plenty of lebensraum. Now you have an extra three hundred thousand unemployed people in the Mountain Time Zone. Of course these folks are way too free, too liberated, to ask for unemployment and Social Security. Because that would be wrong. I suppose they'll all be selling Amway and guns? Or whatever. And... they'll be living in another of the fifty states. And... enjoying the climate change. And... the delusion that they've changed their lives and possibly changed American history. And... nothing.

Oh, and he's asking for donations! I guess that's okay.

Annoying Columbian novel

I finished reading the novel "The Informers" by Juan Gabriel Vásquez. The language is beautiful, and I haven't read a novel by a Columbian since reading something by Gabriel Garcia Márquez a long time ago, so it was very interesting to read something set in modern-day Columbia and be assured that it is not merely a third world country that was, in the 1980s, very nearly a failed state, but has something of a culture and a history. (The view I have of places like Mexico, Guatemala and Columbia, places where crime lords or secret police have held sway over large swaths of the country if not the entire country, is pretty much the picture Bolaño paints of Santa Teresa in "2666," or in reality in large parts of Mexico these days, so it always surprises me to find out that in these places live people who are literate, educated and cultured, that they're not all at each other's throats.)

But as I say, I was annoyed by this book, because of the author's tendency to obscure the most important information about relationships between characters and the basic events of the plot. I don't think it's just my own denseness, because it was like this all the way through: about the most important narrative and character elements, the author is deliberately vague. So that I enjoyed the reading but not the story so much, and in the end I'm still not quite sure what the relationship was between a few of the major characters, and most of all the central question of the book, which is why the narrator's father betrayed his best friend (and it took 90% of the book to make clear that betrayal had actually happened). I understand the authorial strategy of being sly with information -- Cris compared it to the way a poet shows things through symbolism or other techniques -- especially as a way to mirror the time and effort the narrator takes to find out the same information. But in this book the narrator finds out information fifty pages before the reader does, and then -- and this is the annoying part -- constantly refers to it as if the information had also been shared with the reader, so that as a reader I was constantly asking myself, wait, did I miss something? And like I say, I never learned the main question of the book, which is the motivation for its main action, the act of informing to which the title refers. I don't think it was ever revealed -- but because the author obscures information all along, I'm not sure. so, yeah, annoying.

There's always someone more conservative/crazier/foamier

Reading conservative blogs and news for research purposes, I came across this doozy, which says that "some libertarians" believe foamers like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are secret "neocons... conning the Tea Party."

Here's all the salt you have to throw at that bird:

1. The assertion that Beck and Palin might be secret "neocons" is laid to someone called Pastor Chuck Baldwin. Who is he? See below.
2. In the universe of the Ron Paul cult, a "neocon" or neoconservative is just another big-government interventionist who wants to interfere in their lives. Thus, to suggest conservative demagogues like Beck and Palin might be secret "neocons" is tantamount to calling them false prophets and potential traitors (indeed, "Judas goats") to the Libertarian movement (which Paulites feel is the only proper approach to conservatism) and the US as a whole.
3. The poster goes on to defend and praise Beck and Palin.
4. Most comically of all, the poster's main allegiance seems to be to the "Tea Party," ignoring (or simply ignorant of) the fact that the "Tea Party" organization is nothing more than a collection of front groups funded by Texas billionaires (as reported last week in the New Yorker).

This guy Chuck Baldwin is a real piece of work. From his Wikipedia page: "Baldwin supports lessening U.S. involvement in the United Nations, reducing U.S. income taxes and repeal of the Patriot Act. He would withdraw troops from Iraq, seek to end illegal immigration, and enforce stricter immigration laws. Emphasizing "America's Christian heritage", he supports the gold standard, the right to keep and bear arms, homeschooling, and pro-life legislation such as the Sanctity of Life Act." And that's his Wikipedia entry -- his own blog is even more hilarious:

Speaking of Hillary Rodham, I predict that she will replace Vice President Joe Biden BEFORE the 2012 elections. I've said that in private for many weeks, and now say it in this column -- remember, you heard it here. The Clinton-Bush Crime Syndicate (CBCS) needs Hillary in the White House badly, and Obama has readily accepted a subservient role in the criminal affairs of CBCS (for very profitable reasons, no doubt).

In other words, a nutbag pretty much on the scale of the guy who took over the Discovery Channel building yesterday (permalink).

The strangest thing is that as far as I can tell the entire pro-Tea Party blogosphere is simply ignoring the New Yorker's piece. They require their Tea Party to be a grassroots movement, therefore it is, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Meanwhile the Ron Paulites, who predate the creation of the Tea Party, are all sour grapes, complaining they were the real conservatives all along and only they have the right answers.

It would be great if this division and infighting, this struggle for conservatism's mantle, translated into general confusion among the right wing when it came to the election in November. But it won't help the Democrats, because nothing will make any of these people vote Democratic, and there aren't enough third-party candidates to dilute the right wing. November will be ugly, people.

Happy birthday, dear dead girlfriend

It would have been the 41st birthday of Stephanie who, having died at 30, never manifested anything close to a middle-aged self. It's impossible to think of her middle-aged; she'll always be the gentle, sweet girl with the killer body and (as another admirer dubbed them) "museum-quality tits" (not obvious in this picture). Remembering her today made me think of the line in "Masculin-Feminin" where the young people go to a movie and, as heard in the narration:

We often went to the movies. The screen lit up and we trembled... But more often than not, Madeleine and I were disappointed. The pictures were dated, they flickered. And Marilyn Monroe had aged terribly. It made us sad. This wasn't the film we'd dreamed of. This wasn't the total film that each of us had carried within himself... the film we wanted to make, or, more secretly, no doubt, that we wanted to live.

Marilyn Monroe had aged? Yes, we got to see Marilyn in early middle age, and frankly I thought she looked fantastic. Take a look at her in "The Misfits." For his part, Jean-Pierre Leaud, star of "Masculin-Feminin," has aged much worse -- just do a Google Image search for him. Shocking. But few of us ever get old gracefully, at least as far as our bodies and appearance go, me included. Stephanie, with her violent death in a car crash at 30, was spared that, and lives always in memories as the young, gorgeous, sexually permissive San Francisco chick. How lucky I am to have had her in my life, and in my memories now.

Child soldier-turned-Marine-turned-fitness coach's story sounds fishy

This Reuters profile is about a man called Tchicaya Missamou, who says is is a former child soldier in Africa who became a US Marine. He is now a fitness instructor in southern California and is on a book tour (which is how he comes to be the subject of a profile. I wonder how many personalities, ideas and language memes first enter the public notice through book tours) for his memoir "In the Shadow of Freedom."

According to the story:

Growing up in Congo-Brazzaville as one of 16 siblings born to his father's seven wives, Missamou's childhood was shaped by the violence that sprung up in the 1990s following the oil-rich central African nation's first democratic elections. Missamou describes how, at around 14, he and his teenage friends were handed guns and a few grenades and put in charge of a checkpoint with orders to block members of rival ethnic groups from entering the area.

"I saw awful things during this time," he wrote in the book... Violence broke out again in 1997, and this time Missamou became a war profiteer. He assembled a convoy of armed men and struck lucrative deals with Brazzaville whites, most of whom had fled, to rescue abandoned suitcases of cash and valuables. "The Congo was falling apart, but I was rich," he wrote.

As Missamou's success grew, so did his notoriety. With the help of his father, a police captain, he fled Africa while still a teenager. He ended up in California and found work at a martial arts studio. There, Missamou met a U.S. marine recruit who encouraged him to enlist. Soon, Missamou was deployed overseas, going to Afghanistan and Iraq to fight for his adopted homeland. Through an executive order that fast-tracked citizenship applications of U.S. soldiers, Missamou became a U.S. citizen in 2003....

But Missamou, who wears his crisp, white U.S. Marines uniform on his book tour, said he also wants to give back to his adopted country. In 2007, he opened The Warrior Fitness Camp in Valencia, California, where he trains students in military techniques as well as the skills he learned as a child in the African bush.

Really? Is this all from the guy's book and from an interview with him? Did the reporter do any checking at all? Is it even possible to do fact-checking on the memoir of someone with a resume like that? Or are we just supposed to take the guy at his word? Of course we are.

It's the "white Marines uniform" that made my bullshit detector go off. Who goes around the country on a book tour in a dress uniform? Not even Colin Powell. I mean, really -- could this guy's story possibly be true?

Irony compounds in Santa Rosa

A man who sells electric motorcycles was killed in a collision... with a Prius.

Japanese men just go on being lame-ass

Someone please tell me they're kidding: Japanese men ferry virtual girlfriends to beach town.

No, I don't think they're being ironic.

Today's farce: man almost burns down apartment building in attack on bedbug

No matter what actually happened, no matter whether the poor shmuck was really just trying some heavy-handed extermination or whether it was the result of a "heated argument" (!!), the events of Monday night in a Nashua, N.H. apartment building turned out bad for everybody.

Police have charged a 27-year-old Nashua man with arson, alleging he intentionally lit a mattress on fire that displaced several occupants of a Hanover Street apartment building.

Michael Fink, of 49 Temple St., Apt. 32, was arraigned Wednesday in Nashua District Court on the arson charge. During the proceeding, Fink told the judge that it was a "misunderstanding." He also said he was attempting to light a bug on fire, not the mattress.

Lt. Jeffrey Bukunt of the Nashua Police Department said Fink used a butane lighter to ignite a mattress on Monday in his girlfriend's lower-level apartment at 24-A Hanover St. ...

Bukunt said police stand by the charges, adding Fink was engaged in a "heated argument" with the woman during the incident. Once Fink allegedly lit the mattress on fire, he then tried to push the mattress through a window, but it became lodged and ignited the side of the building, according to Bukunt. Police said the fire quickly spread throughout the apartment and continued to damage other apartments within the multi-unit dwelling. ...

-- news story

The desperado fled the scene and was arrested at ... wait for it ... the local public library.

It doesn't say whether the apartment is now free from bedbugs.

'Sovereign citizen' type files $38 quadrillion lawsuit

A Las Vegas man, claiming damages in a dispute over a piece of desert land, has filed a $38 quadrillion lawsuit against the landowner's lawyers, the Las Vegas Daily Herald reports. Among the amusing facts:

Anderson said the property has been valued $36 billion and asked for 12.5 percent of that value, $4.5 billion. He also asked for additional compensatory damages of four times that amount and punitive damages of 200 times the amount, which added up to $918 billion. In his initial complaint, Anderson said silence on the matter by the defendants would constitute a binding contract.

Silence on the matter constitutes a binding contract! Now that's the way to get things done. I guess a lot of people who wrote the President on various matters are owed some money and favors, if that's where we set the bar.

The key to this story is in the second sentence:

John Theodore Anderson, also known as John-Theodore:Anderson in his filings ...

See the weird punctuation? That's the sign of an adherent of the "sovereign citizen" movement, which I mentioned in my last entry. Basically they believe in alternate theories of American law, theories which lead to fantastic assertions like "silence on the matter constitutes a binding contract."

It's all very amusing -- unless you become the target of one of these wack jobs, I guess, and wind up with all kinds of liens and frivolous lawsuits filed against you.

King of Hawaii (the verb)

In researching my latest novel, I hit upon a gold mine of material just published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit whose main mission is to monitor and report on hate groups. Among the articles they published in the September issue of their publication Intelligence Report is a list of leaders of the "sovereign citizen" movement, which is a loose group of people with a magical belief in an alternate legal system. The most amusing profile contains this information:

A former tool-and-die maker, the man who writes his name as ":David-Wynn: Miller" — or, as he amusingly says it verbally, "David hyphen Wynn full colon Miller" — came up with his "truth language" scheme as a result of a frustrating court experience in 1988, when he was going through a divorce. In short, all truth language sentences used in court filings must begin with the preposition "for," contain at least 13 words, and use more nouns than verbs to be effective (he has claimed that only nouns have legal authority). David Wynn Miller considers himself a "Plenipotentiary Judge" in the Unity States of the World, and has named himself as the King of Hawaii, a feat he claims he accomplished when he converted Hawaii into a verb.

That is awesome! And this guy is not even a performance artist. God, I love this country.

It's August, isn't it

It's silly season, so we have choice articles like this on Salon.com: "Why I got the male Brazilian wax" job -- or, as the story says, the "brozillian." (That's different from a "brozillion," which simply means Brooklyn.)

It gets really good about halfway through, where we learn that people have all sorts of projections about the gender and power relationships between men and those who wax them. At first, "women were not comfortable with their husbands and boyfriends getting waxed by other men." So they hired women. But then the guys think it's too much like a massage parlor and start asking for extras. This leads to a hilarious incident at the Ted D. Bare Salon in San Jose, Calif:

Once, she was forced to taze a guy who wouldn't stop misbehaving. "He got really aggressive and kept insisting that I perform certain favors on him," she said. "So I tazed him in the thigh. He fell right off the table."

And it only gets better from there.

Previously: Ripped from the headlines

Another book idea

This news story from the L.A. Times suggests all sorts of fictional adaptations. I love the 1930s Los Angeles setting -- the mise en scene of "Chinatown," "Ask the Dust," "Day of the Locust."

Remains of babies dead for possibly 70 years found in L.A. basement

August 18, 2010 | 6:17 am

The bodies of two babies wrapped in Los Angeles Times newspapers from the 1930s were found in an apartment building basement near downtown L.A.

Workers found the bodies Tuesday evening when cleaning out the basement. According to the Los Angeles Police Department, the remains were found with personal letters and tickets to the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

The LAPD and the Los Angeles coroner's office are investigating. A coroner's official told The Times that the newspaper-wrapped bodies of the children had a mummified appearance.

[Updated at 6:50 a.m.: The grim discovery was made in one of L.A.'s oldest districts, a densely populated area of apartments west of downtown Los Angeles near MacArthur Park. Officials said they have launched an investigation, but it's unclear whether anyone who lived in the apartment during the 1930s is still in the area.

Law enforcement sources told The Times that the case is being classified for now as a "death investigation" and not a homicide. Officials will attempt to determine how the babies died -- likely with the help of forensic anthropologists. They will also look for any reports of missing babies during this period and attempt to find anyone who lived in the apartment at the time.]

LAPD Lt. Cory Palka told KTLA News the remains were found inside a steamer trunk in an apartment in the 800 block of Lake Street in the Westlake District.

The coroner's office is examining the remains to see if it can determine a cause of death. Authorities believe the babies have been deceased for seven decades but will perform tests.

Update, 2 Sep 2010: Police have identified the owner of the mysterious trunk.

Natural conflict

Rossellini even said that you shouldn't write scripts -- only swine write scripts -- that the conflict in a film should simply emerge from the facts. A character from a given place at a given time is confronted by another character from a very different place: and voilá, there exists a natural conflict between them and you start from that. There's no need to invent anything.

-- Francois Truffaut, interviewed in 1984,
just reprinted in the New Yorker

Does not compute

Elsewhere in the unintentional irony front: The New York Times "challenged" readers to go without their cellphones and whatnot for a few days during vacations. The Times then published the results with an introduction that included these sentences (emphasis mine):

The New York Times asked readers to temporarily give up their technological tethers, then make videos about the experience... You can watch a selection of videos prepared by readers here.

So they asked readers to unplug... and then plug back in again to report. I guess if anyone went permanently off the grid and made their report by longhand, we'd never know.

Universe begins collapsing on itself: Facebook at fault

We're reaching the point where irony is so widely employed and ubiquitous that language itself is losing its meaning:

The idea is that you are pretending to speak in the common language of Facebook, and are in fact speaking in that common language, but are aware of how unoriginal you are being; so when you write "omg" you are ironically commenting on the use of "omg," but when other people write "omg" they are seriously saying "oh my God."

-- Kaitie Roiphe in the New York Times, 13 August 2010
in article entitled "The Language of Facebook"

That is, if you want to call "omg" (and put as many quotation marks around that as you want before you get tired and start drinking, even though it's only 9:30 in the morning) language. And it is, of course.

Yesterday I had a chat (not a face to face [or F2F] conversation, but a Google chat) with a friend yesterday in which she was telling me about her college students indulging in "code-switching," which in her case is "heritage speakers" in her Spanish classes -- i.e. students whose first language is Spanish -- speaking in a mixture of English and Spanish without even realizing they're doing do. At least they don't write like that, though I don't see why they should stop themselves in certain forums -- including Facebook, no doubt. I immediately thought of Thomas Merton's use of Macaronic language (which is the intentional practice of using multiple languages in a text to shade, obfuscate, or enhance meaning) in his poetry. Merton's work is the only Macaronic poetry I'm familiar with, and I couldn't find a good example online in a short time, but here is an example "from the early 15th century" (!):

A celuy que pluys eyme en monde,
of alle tho that I have found,
    Carissima,
saluz od treye amour,
with grace and joye and alle honour,
    Dulcissima.
Sachez bien, pleysant et beele,
that I am right in good heele,
    Laus Christo!
et mon amour doné vous ay.
and also thine owene night and day
    in cisto.

Mythologize your friends -- or just make them up

It's really a very simple strategy. You have a small group of friends and you declare them all to be geniuses and you laud all their work and ascribe to them sweet and stormy qualities worthy of the Greek gods. What you're selling is not just your writing but your personal legends.

That's Edmund White, writing in the Aug. 19, 2010 New York Review of Books, reviewing photographs of the Beat writers by Allen Ginsburg, talking about how Jack Kerouac turned his real-life friends into not just fictional characters but mythical ones.

And when I read that, I immediately thought: Yes, that's just what Bolaño did in The Savage Detectives, which for that reason among others has been compared to On the Road and the rest of Kerouac's work. And in a previous generation Henry Miller did something similar (though most of the weird characters and hangers-on in The Rosy Crucifixion didn't turn out to be famous writers or artists -- not including Anaïs Nin and her crowd who showed up later).

You may think to yourself, right, my friends are just as nutty and proto-famous as that collection of characters in New York in the 1920s/New York in the 1940s/Mexico City in the 1970s. The poet-barista you have a crush on -- surely she's the equal of June Miller. That pretty flash fiction author who reads at every open mike is just like Gregory Corso. The hairy, almost inarticulate author of chapbook verse who hangs out in the park every Sunday is another Ulises Lima.

Or not. Maybe you're singularly unimpressed with the talent around you. Maybe you just realized they do a lot more talking about their art than working on it. Maybe they're boring. Very well. Make up characters -- that's creative writing.

Another book idea falling from the sky

Another passage from the news that qualifies as the premise for a novel. (In this case, understandably so, since the reporter is also a novelist.)

In the following months, snow wreaked havoc on (Moscow) whenever it fell. In three separate instances, drivers drivers of snow-clearing vehicles were shot at when they collided with other vehicles; one of the drivers, shot by an off-duty police officer, died. Even without snow, the movement of cars through the circular maze of Moscow was incredibly frustrating. During rush hour on an overcast, slippery day in late February, the luxury Mercedes of a vice-president of Lukoil, the country's largest oil company, collided at high speed with a small Citroën. The occupants of the Mercedes escaped with superficial injuries; the Citroën crumpled like a paper bag, and the driver and her daughter-in-law -- both doctors -- were killed. The accident exploded into scandal. ...

-- From "Stuck" by Keith Gessen, in the Aug. 2, 2010 New Yorker

All you have to do is add the suggestion that one of the doctors -- the young, pretty one -- was carrying secret information, perhaps something about a Soviet-era nerve gas stockpile up for sale to the highest bidder, and you have all the ingredients for a thriller; it writes itself. And I haven't even included all the other color with which Gessen opens the article, such as the scene where an ambulance driver just pulls over and starts aimlessly throwing snowballs because he's been stick in a traffic jam so long that the patient he's been transporting has died. Of course, that would have to figure into the thriller plot too, because in a thriller (A) Everything not action is atmospheric, and (B) Even atmospheric details are somehow connected to the conspiracy at the heart of the thriller's plot. Like I say, it writes itself.

Previously:

The desert 'love lost lawyer'
The lonely Brinks stockroom man
The sacrificial lambs of Presbyterian College
"The Extra Man"

The interview and the interviewer

On Salon.com, Laura Fraser looks at the sometimes troublesome relationship between novelists and interviewers. This caused me to recall the James Thurber story "The Interview," in which a newspaperman (as journalists were called in the mid-20th century) visits a famous writer, who leads him by the nose up a number of conversational blind alleys before getting almost too drunk to talk. Thurber treats all the characters with characteristic compassion and understanding, and even better, has the reporter do the same with the novelist, despite how the novelist treats him. (The story, published in the Feb. 25, 1950 New Yorker, is reprinted in the collection "Thurber Country.")

The whole topic reminded me of some of the early interviews I tried to conduct as a student journalist at the Daily Texan in Austin during the mid 1970s. The first was when I was assigned to go backstage at a concert venue, the legendary Armadillo World Headquarters, to interview a touring rock guitarist. Unfortunately I was utterly unfamiliar with the work of this very famous blues-influenced player and I knew I would have absolutely nothing to ask. To my utter relief, I was turned away at the backstage door: I wasn't on the list. I wrote up the experience in a kind of New Journalism way, putting myself in the article and writing mainly about my anxiety about the whole situation. I wish I still had that clipping.

The second was a couple of years later when, still a student, I interviewed David Bromberg, another rock musician; he isn't remembered much today but he was in the same crowd as Ry Cooder, Jerry Jeff Walker, and Townes Van Zandt. Unlike the first attempt, I was very familiar with the work of David Bromberg and I was looking forward to talking with him. But when I got backstage, I utterly froze. Absolutely tongue-tied, I could not think of a single goddamn thing to ask. It was a complete fiasco, but he was actually very polite about it, and I wrote it all up as nicely as I could. But to tell you the truth, the first piece was better.

Since then, I've interviewed several people, including the novelist Yiyun Li -- I interviewed her by Google Chat, which is a great way to interview people, because you don't have to transcribe the result -- and io9.com founding editor Annalee Newitz. I interviewed filmmaker George Romero. I even learned how to interview people whose work I didn't really know or understand, by becoming an ISO 9000 auditor at the software company I worked at in the 1990s. Basically this meant that I, who knew almost nothing about software, went around interviewing people who did. This was a good job for someone who, like me, is very good at pretending that the 1% they do know is sufficient for about 50% of the work. And I've been happily out of my depth ever since.

Marilyn Jaye Lewis's 'Freak Parade'

My friend Marilyn was kind enough to send me her new erotic novel, Freak Parade, about a washed-up pop singer in New York who has to go out and get a job, start taking responsibility for herself, and stop making so many bad decisions. Along the way, she has sex with a lot of people and finally meets the love of her life.

As usual, I really enjoyed Marilyn's direct, passionate and compassionate writing. Her erotic scenes, characterized by a wonderful clarity and sense of pacing, are as messed-up and hot as ever. I wanted even more! And because I like stories that capture a time and place, I loved the glimpses into New York bohemian culture around the end of the 1990s, when apparently even the bohemians, thanks to the trickle down of all that money, found ways to live fairly high off the hog.

That's Freak Parade by Marilyn Jaye Lewis, one of my favorite writers.

technorati: Marilyn Jaye Lewis