I'm recovering from my fear of a frozen death-by-mini-ice-age and/or the decline of literacy due to global warming. Now I'm back to just fearing the president.

The ambassador and the general were briefing me
on the—the vast majority of Iraqis want to live
in a peaceful, free world. And we will find these people
and we will bring them to justice.

George W. Bush Oct. 27, 2003

You want to know where you can read this quote in its original context-- online? The goddamn US State Department website's transcript of the speech "Progress in Iraq." Read it now before the infamous Bush transcript doctors get to it.

I found it in the sig file of my friend Mamaliz and she's a reliable source. But the State Department had the balls to post the quote, as spoken, and that's extra special.

As Though We Needed Something Else to Worry About

It's been brought to my attention that, although inevitably the earth will be consumed by the sun, and in the meantime lots of crazy space debris is lined up to hit us and cause catastrophic climate change, we have something else to worry about: the sun losing its freckles and giving us an ice age.

Mini though it was, the mini-ice-age from 1645 to 1715 did occur (coinciding with a time when there were hardly any sunspots), and the English Channel did apparently freeze over.

Read more about the Little Ice Age (LIA) known also as (or - for the skeptics- merely coinciding with) the Maunder Minimum, the name given to that period with almost no sunspots. Volcanos also might have been awarded part of the blame, for the ice age, not the missing sun spots. I would prefer to worry about something we have no way of predicting, i.e. the disappearance of sunspots. It's just that much more goth.

I would love to know how the Little Ice Age influenced the emergence of popular English literature in the 18th century. And that, my friends, is why I'm studying for the GRE to go get a practical degree in policy analysis, a degree to keep me off the streets where I would be stalking rare books on the correlation between rare deadly environmental phenomena and social trends, menacing small children with my theories relating the decline of culture and global warming.

Bangkok Beauty

I love the Global Development Briefing, if only for its occasionally priceless quotes.

"We recognize that there are some difficult decisions that have to be made in hosting a conference of this type."

— An unidentified U.S. official, speaking to The Washington Post on measures taken by Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra to cleanup and secure Bangkok ahead of its hosting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, which started Oct. 21. The government barred thousands of street vendors from the central city, shipped 10,000 homeless people to army camps and banned more than 500 human rights activists from entering the country. About 600 Cambodian beggars, mostly women and children, were rounded up and airlifted back home on C-130 Hercules military aircraft. About 3,000 stray dogs were caught and shipped to the countryside. And a banner four stories high and a quarter-mile long, displaying an image of the Grand Palace royal compound, was erected to conceal a slum.

(Bolds and italics mine.)

So You Think You're Articulate

Try saying "I was born on a pirate ship."

Now hold your tounge while saying it.

Ponder with me now how many sheets a sheet slitter could slit if a sheet slitter could slit sheets at the world's largest multilingual collection of tongue-twisters.

A Break in the Struggle to Understand California

...to marvel at the authors of the City of Oakland website.

"What do I do about rundown and abandoned property?" asks the official City of Oakland website, to which it answers itself with a more specific subcategory of problems:

Code Violations, Lack of Maintenance,
Weeds and Overgrown Vegetarian

...about which I am shocked there is not more concern. I had no idea vegetarians were getting out of control in Oakland. Isn't Berkeley big enough for these people?

Pitch to Barry

Now that the postseason has rolled on without my local teams, the A's and the Giants both, I thought it was strange that a friend left a "Pitch To Barry" t-shirt on my chair as a gift. I mean, sure, he'll be playing next spring, but until then, what does this shirt mean?

It means give a fair challenge to the overachiever. There is nothing more frustrating for an overachiever to be given a half-assed or mangled and mis-managed challenge.

I know whereof I speak.

And then you ask, why do these mis-managers get appointed/ hired/ elected to frustrate the overachievers who after all only want to do their very best for the team?

Because people love an optimistic bully, and moreover they want THAT guy to lead us, and at BEST they want the fatalistic nerd who believes in the sanctity of fair challenges to be a sidekick or some other humiliating post, like vice-president.

This is coming from the middle of the long (ok, not long, but long for slow readers, i.e. me) Al Gore chapter in Sarah Vowell's Partly Cloudy Patriot, where she muses on the both every day real and mythological/ archetypal nature of the Nerd Versus Jock Struggle.

This is the struggle of my life, and it certainly is not behind me. I think this is one of the reasons the recall election has depressed me so soundly. The biggest, most optimistic, and most Nazi-esque candidate for governor won, in part because of a vote from the person I'm dating, who believed this cartoon-character bully couldn't be worse than what we have already, who is a pessimistic dweeb. This person I'm dating is, like me, a still-recovering-from-high-school nerd. I'm really interested in her use of her vote in that horrible election.

Is there something in us nerds that sometimes longs to, for once, be on the winning team? To just walk away from the "right" and the "wrong" of the #2 pencil blue and white test form, and just go with the "flo"? Even when the "flo" is running us over a waterfall into a morass of poverty, denied rights to minority/ marginalized parts of the community, and infrastructure failure?

I am not speaking ill of our new Gubernator, who hasn't even taken office yet, I'm just trying to get inside the head of a very intelligent person who maybe is prone- as I believe I also am- to seduction by the prospective dark fun of dirty dealing, mangled command, the overachievers being thwarted and bullies running amok.

This is the side of us nerds that watches the Sopranos, the side that dresses up as pirates for Halloween, the side that wants to learn how to properly shoot a gun. It's a fantasy that we will somehow win if we side with the bullies who inevitably seem to prevail.

But will the mis-managers take notice of our loyalty when the time comes? Will we finally be spared our regular humiliations as brainiacs who just want a fair challenge, or will we once again get a painful lesson in democracy, which is that life is not fair and democracy is MUCH more unfair? Won't we, the overachieving nerds, even the nerds who helped elect an anti-nerd to office, despite our better knowledge, keep expecting people to play fair, stepping up the plate and praying for a nice, clean pitch?

After Some Contemplation..."Kicking Our Own Bicycles," An Anology for the Recall Fiasco

Sometimes everything breaks down, and we call it a fiasco. This recall election was a total breakdown of the democratic process, and it was so massive a breakdown that we could even call it an attack on democracy. It was like the electorate was taking out its frustrations on the electoral process.

I had a boyfriend once who was a nerd, and had always been one. Riding his bike home from school he would often be cornered and beaten up, and/ or his bike would be wrecked or stolen. One time, I think after three bikes had been stolen, he was cornered, and he just got off his bike and started beating the crap out of the damn bike. The bullies fled.

This is the electorate, feeling like politicos have stolen our government (whatever that means... it's just a general feeling of not having power or representation in government), and now an election rolls around that gives the electorate a little opening to express itself rather freely. It gets off its bicycle democracy, turns on it in the middle of a circling swarm of perceived politicos, and hauls off and elects a joke for a governor. It's more than self-deprecation, more than self-loathing-- it's a self-preservation urge gone twisted and desperate, lashing out at a PROCESS, a means to an end, as guiltless as a bicycle. It's so lacking in faith that you have any power in a situation that you just turn on an innocent object and tear it apart, alternately cynical and mindless and scared.

Speaking of tearing things apart, my tabby girlcat is raptly watching with me "The Lion Queen" on the National Geographic Channel. The lioness "Scarface" is our favorite character.

A not-very-bright dyke femme bully (diva?) has a one-woman costume drama in my face, the Giants and the A's play their way into a load of first class tickets to their own private World Series viewing from their COUCHES, my boss Captain Bligh gives me a couple of extra jobs and a six-month termination notice, and now a Nazi-reared brainfart of a man is holding the highest office in California, no doubt preparing to execute a series of gruesome 180's on a lot of great, if only recently passed laws, like the very seriously good domestic partner bill AB 205, so I will now ponder...

The Virtues of Parsley

I have recently changed from loving basil the best to loving parsley. It goes on everything I make that involves cheese or tomatoes. Which is a lot of what I make. Parsley has thiamine.

Googling, you will find parsley has a home in the titles of a number of blogs.

It also has a great and glorious place in antiquity (from Botanical.com):

The Greeks held Parsley in high esteem, crowning the victors with chaplets of Parsley at the Isthmian games, and making with it wreaths for adorning the tombs of their dead. The herb was never brought to table of old, being held sacred to oblivion and to the dead. It was reputed to have sprung from the blood of a Greek hero, Archemorus, the forerunner of death, and Homer relates that chariot horses were fed by warriors with the leaves.

I love antiquity, too. Now, having blogged, I will go translate some pages of the Aeneid and think about the ablative absolute. Calm, cold, comforting ablative absolutes. Far from the terrible, terrible reality I now live in.