North Country Briefs

These tidbits were selected for me by my father from the past few months' Watertown Daily Times, and now I'm passing them on to you. None of them are as good as the windchime theft article (a windchime had been removed from a porch; "no suspects [had been] identified"), and no way do any of them come close to the DWI case of the guy driving his lawnmower home carrying a pizza who fell asleep stopped on an overpass on the way home. Still carrying the pizza. He had lost his license for DWI (in a car, one presumes), and also had been arrested once for trying to "direct traffic" while intoxicated. Nor do these match the item that covered a sad weekend when a woman both threatened her husband with a hammer and then later smacked him with a pair of pants, landing her in custody. But they will do.

Woman Cited in Assault In Frying Pan Incident

LAFARGEVILLE - Paula E. Snyder, 46, of 36768 Sprucedale Ave., has been summoned to town of Orleans court following a domestic fight Saturday night when she allegedly hit a man in the face with a frying pan, according to the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department. She is charged with third-degree assult of Christopher Gushlaw, 35, same address, deputies said. Mr. Gushlaw declined treatment for a black eye, deputies said.

Frying pan assaults seem to crop up in the North Country Briefs often enough that my father has a tidy collection of them, spanning years.

Man Charged in Theft Of Beer Bottle in Pants

A Watertown man was charged Friday afternoon with petit larceny after he tried to walk out of a grocery store with a bottle of beer in his pants, city police said. Earl Tooley, 59, of 653 State St., Apt. 1, attempted to steal a 22-ounce bottle of beer from the Great American supermarket, 672 State St., police said. He is to appear in City Court on Oct. 27, police said.

Part of the fun of these briefs is how very much info they pack in about a tiny, tiny incident. Quotes from the pants-slapping victims, the high school the DUI-suspect attended, the number of ounces in the beer you shoved down your pants, EVERYone's exact apartment number. I mean, this is such a small town community, when you lay out a photo montage of North Nosebleed AKA Adams Center, my (and Melvil Dewey's! our celebrity can out-librarian your town's celebrity!) home town, taken from the local grain elevator, the whole thing fits in 6 photos (handily fits). The area is full of tiny hamlets like this. Even with Fort Drum expanding now and then, the whole county only has 100,000 people, maybe. The only public transport connecting us to the world, the Greyhound route from Massena to Syracuse, has been cancelled due to lack of ridership. I used to know that bus schedule by heart, catching the bus at the end of my road to go somewhere (anywhere). Shouting over my shoulder "I've got my key, don't wait up!"


And lastly, from the very place where I went to school (the next field over from the high school):

Golf Cart Found Sunk

ADAMS - A golf cart at Tomacy's Golf Course was found submerged in a water hazard Sunday morning, according to state police. Somebody removed the cart from the area of the pro shop between 11 pm Saturday and 6 am Sunday, police said.

Part of the fun of this one is that - you may notice - it's a crime being handled by the State Police. Not the local police. Why? Because there are no local police. No professional fire fighters. A smattering of EMTs. When my horse kicked me in the head a local EMT happened by some miracle to be driving by and see me fall in the manure pile, so I got primo care and a fast ambulance ride. Otherwise, who knows when I'd have gotten help. We only get about about two dozen cars on the road all day. When my sister and I set up lemonade stands we always had to eat the costs. No customers up this way.

Speaking of my sister, she is also passing through the Nosebleed and today we went cross-country skiing, which put us in the mood to reminisce about how we had to do this for gym class throughout our school years. We skiied around the elementary school track, noses and eyes tearing-up in the wind and cold, and talked about how stinky and awful the shoes would be by the end of the day. The way they'd conduct the first couple classes every year without poles, a great hilarity for the many students with weight problems. The way the school would be pondering whether to close early because of terrible wind and blinding snow, but we'd still be out there on the ski trail, doing timed laps. One year I had a first period gym class (i.e. skiing in the dark AND the snow AND the wind), and honestly the skiing section of the year was a little more fun-- dry shoes, a clean trail (instead of a plaster-smooth sheet of skid marks) - even the chance to break the trail, which I got to do once or twice. But this time I was with my 3-years-elder big sister, and we didn't even discuss it-- she broke the trail.

She is, after all, stuck in a condo in Manhattan the rest of the year. I get California.

More News from North Nosebleed

Our local newspaper publishes the inadvertantly entertaining "North Country Briefs." One recent highlight: a woman was arrested for walking in the road. When she was arrested, she threw the chair she was cuffed to through the wall. One of her charges was then interfering with the administrative governing process, or something. I guess that's the new fangled way of saying "resisting arrest."

The paper also publishes the "news from 100 years ago."

Apparently in 1905 on this date the revolution in the Russian Empire was causing concern to local folks because New York Air Brake (our only local factory) had a componant factory in a village outside Moscow. A "platoon of dragoons" was dispatched to check on the US Americans working there. Nobody from Watertown, NY, was working there at the time.

Meanwhile, in other news, these past few days the obits have had a beautician, a farmer, a mechanic, and a slough of "homemakers." It really isn't fair to have the job you held be the first thing after your name in the obits, at least not up here, where there is so little in the way of employment. I mean, the farmer is a dying breed and it's good to know when one goes the way of the elves, but those other folks probably had other identities they were proud of, maybe prouder than the thing they did to pay the rent.

I also saw a photo spread of noteable local gingerbread houses. Someone did a trailer park in gingerbread.

In local snowman developments, there is now a huge lady snowman with a big yellow bikini up on the top of a hill on the outskirts of Watertown. A little further down the road someone has, as their only holiday decoration, a lit-up plastic palm tree stuck in their front snowbank.

Today I finally got to see a house with Tyvek insulation panels instead of siding. That is our signature dish on the Northern New York architecture menu (usually with s a side of slumped-over burned-out barn). In the sunlight (which I haven't seen yet this trip, but when it happens) these foil-wrapped insulation panels really gleam beautifully across the wind-blasted fields of snow.

Happy Christmas from North Nosebleed

I'm home in North Nosebleed (25 miles south of the Great White North, population 2,500 if you count the larger farming area, 500 if you just count "downtown"), and we just got back from our Christmas morning church service. The minister was phoning it in, so he read a story from Reader's Digest and then read this piece of shite from the internet about how each of the 12 days of Christmas has a Christian symbolism behind it (11 ladies dancing = the 11 faithul apostles... the sad ultimate conclusion of which analogy is jesus in a pear tree, as in nailed dead to a pear tree). So of course stuck in my head for the rest of the service was the Great White North Bob and Doug McKenzie's 12 Days of Christmas, which ends with a beer ...in a pear tree.

Another highlight of my Christmas morning-- seeing that one of the many local snowmen has a very straight and tall pine-branch mohawk.

Now, PRESENTS.

On Wild Gay Love in the Wild West

Well, I just saw the straight-girl slash fan-fictionoid Ang Lee movie Brokeback Mountain. After the caveat that again - again! - a feature length movie that doesn't have two women having a conversation about anything! not even two women in one screen shot! - even still I really loved this love story.

I can't believe Heath Ledger's understated intensity. Wow. The Berkeley theater I saw it in last night was full of weeping gay couples at the end, and the quartet of us were all holding eachother and crying. I mean, in a good way. Not angry sobs. Quiet leaking.

Then we went out and processed. One revelation to think about: Bound is to the noir genre what this is to the cowboy drama. Bound's elevator scene: Brokeback's dirt parkinglot scene. You had the whole movie outlined for you, the sexual tension all balled up and lobbed at you in a wad of silence.

Then you spend the movie waiting for one or both of them to die, something you know by the bleak opening sequence and the fact that you're not seeing it in a queer film festival. In "Brokeback" you don't know what will get the guys in the end, the wilderness or the people of the land. Having grown up rural, I had my money on the people, and sadly that's a bet I'll keep winning again and again...

Now, this morning, I am reading something at work - where we do Russian environmental / indigenous rights protection - about the use of the word "wilderness" - it somehow reminds me of the sadness of the movie, that sense of an undefineable good thing lost to a system that requires definition. In this quote you have the recontextualization of that word by a person whose nation was destroyed in the defining of the wilderness.

Here's the passage:

We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and winding streams with tangled growth, as "wild." Only to the white man was nature a "wilderness" and only to him was the land "infested" with "wild" animals and "savage" people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery. Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families we loved was it "wild" for us. When the very animals of the forest began fleeing from his approach, then it was that for us the "Wild West" began.



- Chief Luther Standing Bear, Oglala Sioux Nation

Now, you can't equate a population of white "hairy" cowboys with the native nations it displaced, but reading this on the heels of "Brokeback" I have a renewed sense that this system of defining the wilderness (the undefineable, be it a relationship to land or a relationship between lovers) is universally oppressive-- it instills a wilderness of fear in working-poor white people, native peoples, anyone who by chance or position is drawn to reach for wholeness over someone else's false boundaries.

Waiting for the Other Cleat to Drop

We're very sad about the canning of 1st baseman great JT Snow from the Giants. We do not have any clue about where he will go now.

"We" are the the company of the yahoogroups "Wildaboutjtsnow" - not too surprisingly, mostly women. Right now, bitter, angry, Giant-hating women. At least one other fan is considering jumping ship to become a full time Diamondbacks fan. I just can't quite get over their turquoise get-ups. That color belongs on a cabaret show stage, not a ballfield.

I sent JT a letter last week thanking him for getting me into baseball, and for his heroics at 1st base. I included a copy of a clipping I love of him in a comical post-fly-ball pose that looks like he's in wrestling match with an invisible partner and he's losing. He never let pride get in the way of his job.

May I be as diligent and honest in my office chair as JT was on the Giants' playing field.

J. T. Snow:

With the Giants:

Games...1,182

Avg.....273

HR...124

RBI...615

Gold Gloves...4

Slackerstalker Hearts...1

When did we get old?

I had dinner with some other thirty-something friends last night and almost the whole evening's conversation centered around our annoying chronic health problems. I mean, the knees, the guts, the back, the mysterious dizziness, the computer-strained wrists, the trouble sleeping/ trouble waking up... And of course after our nutritious meal we all scattered to our cozy rented corners of the East Bay by 9:30 pm. When did we get old?

And remember that show "Thirty Something"? That was an old people's show!

The one member of our party who was particularly self-conscious about her aches and pains and "oldness" was also, I have to add, the one who earlier in the day went wide-eyed sidling up to a moo-cow and her calf with a handful of dry grass. Cows. It's calming just to watch them. We decided on our hike that day that the horrors we listen to on the news should be interspersed with a minute or two of footage of cows grazing, just to recalibrate back to center between beheadings and rapes and global pandemics.

Is this why people put wooden cut-outs of cows on their lawns? The aesthetics of calm?

From the Office of Federal Obfuscation

I'm sorry I haven't blogged in -what- a month? But life has been pressing what with gall bladder removal, a couple of trips and at least one load of laundry. Just now I ran across an office in the Russian Government which I'd never heard of, but which is apparently powerful, and apparently has something to do with federalism in a big way. Learn more about it at:

The website of the Chair of the Council of Federation of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation

The News from Home:
Sky I Grew Up Under Still As Intimidating as Ever

Sent to me by my parents-- a clipping from the Watertown Daily Times-- my parents' favorite-- the crime notes. This young man, my near-age-mate, apparently didn't escape Northern New York to a place with a friendlier sky like I did.

City Man in Public Square Accused of 'Yelling at Sky'

Corey J. Wiley, 28, of 201 Sterling St., Apt. 8, was arrested Wednesday morning on Public Square, where Watertown police said he was "yelling at the sky."

He scuffled with an officer who attempted to quiet him down, police said, and he was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

He was released following arraignment in City Court and awaits prosecution.

One never tires of the fact that in our small community they publish the entire name with middle initial and exact, complete street address of everyone who gets arrested. It's a great way to keep up with the kids from back home... and far more inspiring than my college's class news column, which is full of news of advanced degrees, exotic research trips, new family members-- it usually brings out that old yell-at-sky urge.

4,000-Year-Old Noodle Found "Sitting Proud" on Sediment

The ancestor of Top Ramen has been found in the ancient land of Chin. It was made from "domesticated grasses" and not wheat. The BBC reports:

It was in amongst the human wreckage that scientists found an upturned earthenware bowl filled with brownish-yellow, fine clay.

When they lifted the inverted container, the noodles were found sitting proud on the cone of sediment left behind.

The Earthquake Rests

I couldn't let the death of Paul "Earthquake" Pena go by unnoticed here.

His movie, Genghis Blues, was the last movie I watched with my partner Kris, on our last night together, about 30 hours before she overdosed on heroin to end her life after a long struggle with breast/ bone cancer and lymphoma. His struggle in the movie to maintain, just maintain, despite the strange circumstances, and the sudden loss of his anti-depression meds, and his despair at his disabilities and lack of language, and how it turned into beautiful music really moved us both. But it particularly moved Kris, an artist herself who had struggled to keep perspective about her growing frailty by writing about her journey and drawing cartoons (she was a somewhat famous cartoonist in her day). She was also a musician- a guitarist- who had once been in a folk/ old time band called the Tampon String Band.

She was not a big one for crying at sentimental movies, but she cried when he sang "Center of Asia". Paul sings solo, in English, accompanying himself on a lonely slide guitar.

Here I sit in the middle of Asia, I can't find the way- to tell them what I need, why I just can't stay...

It's a hard life when you're stupid, a hard life when you're blind... I ain't robbed nobody, but it feels like doin' time...

But, you see, he was a wounded warrior figure, but he was also a garden-variety widower. What the obituaries leave out that -- and how I think about Paul-- is that he wanted to end his life after his wife died. But then he got a shortwave radio, and discovered Tuvan throat singing, learned it by ear, and proceeded into history.

Sometime after Kris died I found in one of my journals a note to myself:

Start.
Stop.
Do something else.

Paul decided to die, to stop. And then he did something else. And the world was a better place for it.

I wonder what you can see now, Earthquake. You were born a year before my Kris, died four years after her. Maybe you two are hanging out over there, on that side, passing the time a little playing guitar together. Whatever you're doing, there's no more sickness and dying for you to worry about. Rest easy.

Injuries Incompatible with the Postseason

On "ER" the way they inform the people who are coming in to see their loved one who they didn't even know was injured but who is in fact very dead is by saying "they had injuries which were incompatible with life." Well, thanks to all my hours logged watching "ER" I wasn't scared to go in for some stomach pain I was having last weekend, and found out I need to have my gall bladder removed. And now, the post-season.

There's something that happens the day after the season ends (i.e. ends for the Giants and A's). I have to look at what parts of my life are incompatible with the postseason / offseason (which are the same, this year, turns out, for Giants and A's fans). And I'm not sure I can handle being on a zero fat diet and dealing with surgery and recovery and bills and all that headache while NOT looking forward to tonight's game or at least replays or at least gossip on the radio about my favorite teams. It's a funny thing, when you have to swivel all that fan-focus back on yourself.

The health problems I've had lately are the sorts of things that (my research tells me) happen to people who aren't popular or attractive. OK, that's not exactly what it says in the Kaiser Health Handbook, but, neither does it say "only caused by genetic abnormality." There is no health profile that says that x-illness tends to happens to relaxed, popular, attractive people. All this leads to even more navel gazing and nervousness.

How many days until spring training?

Russia: Hard to Go, Hard to Stay, Harder to Come Home to a Drunken Cat Sitter

Returning home from Russia yesterday I found that a 2nd cousin had died and that my cat sitter had drunk every drop of alcohol in my apartment, used up all the toilet paper, and left broken glass both in the bathroom and in the bedroom. The fact that I left Russia no longer on speaking terms with my work supervisor (who was, it turned out, a terrible person to travel with in Russia) didn't help matters. Also, my apartment being the cramped thing it is in the crummy neighborhood where it is doesn't help. One very GOOD thing is that the stripey girl cat, my own private predator, was happily stoned on cat nip when I came home, making the make-up game all too easy.

Never mind that the conference I was at was a total success, and the two major campaigns I've been working on have had great breakthroughs in the last week, my supervisor was just miserable. I was clearly working on her last nerve, being as happy as I was. Buying a bunch of Russian duck calls at a hunting store (just wait until my family gets these for Christmas-- I hope they know what to do with all the Russian ducks) and then trying them all out in the restaurant where we were having lunch on our last day probably snapped her last thread of control. So, she made sure to put me in my place before we all got in the van to go to the airport.

I can't help it that being in Russia makes me happy. I don't know why she- being dedicated as she is (to the point of being at a dead-run on the way to Burn Out City) to the country- was so miserable there! My two theories are that she was actually happy and she just shows her happiness by being miserable, or that she is actually a much more miserable person and this was her being happy.

So back to my amazing cat sitter, who must have taken all the liquor to the bathroom and drank while sitting on the toilet for ten days (how does one woman use up 4 rolls and a box of tissues in ten days!?). I asked her about one of the (full) bottles she drank and threw away-- a balzam that was a rare gift from a friend-- my last violin teacher, back in Novgorod, Russia-- and she simply said that if I hadn't wanted her to drink it I should have told her not to. I really do wonder if this woman has any idea that she even has a drinking problem, I mean, that she- who only eats organic and works as in the healing profession- drinks like a sailor, a Russian sailor, a Russian sailor with a particularly bad drinking problem. In ten days she drank a nearly full (not small) bottle of gin, whisky, two bottles of absinthe, a full bottle of Russian balzam, an unopened bottle of wine and bottle of champagne-- and some more alcohol she had bought herself when my stash was running low. I almost want to ask her-- what was wrong with the sherry? She only drank it half down. It was perfectly good sherry. And the sweet vermouth she hardly touched at all. If anyone is wondering, her name is Stacy Lininger, CMT, and she is a good cat sitter if you don't mind the massive number of empty liquor bottles and the broken glass in places where you walk barefoot.

Luckily I'm NOT a drinker (most of the bottles Stacy Lininger, CMT, emptied were gifts that I kept for special occasions), and I have a good pair of slippers to protect me from the glass, so this doesn't impair my ability to relax. I'm taking a sick day to regroup and think about my poor cousin Bill. He was a long-time sufferer of MS - but it's funny how the chronically ill surprise you when they die. You just think they can go on forever, since they've already survived so much. He was a few hours older than my father, and so they were childhood playmates and very fond of eachother. Bill made a lot of mistakes in his life, but as my father said, he didn't make these problems anyone else's. Well, unless you count his wife and son, but he really did try to do ok by them, as sick as he became. Rest in peace, Bill. Or, now that you have your legs and arms back, may you party very hearty and then rest in peace. Sleep very well.

Back to my time in Russia. This was an amazing trip where the organization where I work gathered leaders from 30 different important Far East/ Siberian environmental organizations (plus Greenpeace and WWF since they have programs out there) in the very deep woods near the Sea of Japan to discuss the coming year of projects and campaigns. It was the seventh such conference, and it met for about six days, a longer time than the conference had ever extended. Since the women's cabin (the damskaya obitel we called it - the convent) was up a muddy hilly trail we all had to try to stay sober, but the men really whooped it up. Some started the day with beer and ended the day hardly able to sing the sad songs and cry about the things Russians like to drunkenly cry about. But other than the partying, the working groups really gained common ground, and the new people seemed to really connect with the older members of the coalition, and the slimy WWF guy left early. A success all around.

And then there were the tigers. The area where we were-- Lazovsky reserve in the Primorye region- is one of the preserves where about 450 Siberian tigers still roam. The head organizer of the camp where we were staying was a miraculous survivor of a tiger attack - two short years ago- where he nearly lost his leg and then all but died lying in the snow for two days while they tried to organize a rescue using a private helicopter (the emergency ones could only be used at decree of the administration heads who were off drinking with some Japanese businessmen). He had a lovely singing voice. And he seemed to stay sober enough to use it. And to keep an eye out for tigers.

Now, keep in mind the fact that we ladies had to cross a couple of streams (hopping on rocks and thin planks) and climb a steep hill at night to get to our cabin. Through an unlit stretch of woods. Then we had as our protector the young shepherd Jack (Russian: "Djeck") who was on a fairly short and fairly stout chain, i.e. a nice appetizer before hitting the damskaya obitel for lunch.

Also keep in mind that the young men running the place were unable to design the cabin to make sure heat circulated to the upstairs room. The men apparently don't need heat. So the ladies upstairs in the obitel were freezing the first few nights until they got loud enough to get the men to stoke the fire in the bottom floor early enough and hot enough to * heat the bricks that made up one part of one wall in their room *. That was all they had for heat. So, that done, the ladies (including me) on the bottom floor had to leave ALL the doors and ALL the windows as WIDE open as possible ALL night in order to breathe let alone fitfully sleep. So, warm sweaty ladies in a blanket, all ready for the evening tiger buffet. One had to just not think about it. Some of us simply didn't go to the outhouse after dark. I relied on my good luck, and managed to see more stars in one sky than modern humans almost ever see. I liked to imagine the tigers were too distracted by the brightness of the stars, making up tiger constellations, to pay attention to the little fleshy lady-niblets running around.

Then there was the banya. The banya. Ah the banya. It was three days old and the sap was still seeping out of the fresh pine boards. The men built it specifically for us. Such gentlemen. I've never bathed in a three-day-old banya-- the pine scent mixing with the birch switches (used to slough off old skin) will be with me for a while. Then there is the matter of handsome Sergei the tiger-mauling-survivor taking one of our handsomest Slavic beauties into the banya one afternoon for a little R&R. It honestly made the banya seem more magic-- like a healing house and a bathing house and a pleasure house all at once. A place of solace in a terribly broad swath of taiga.

One late afternoon we went to the beach. It was our last evening out in the taiga by the Sea of Japan. We saw the fog rolling in just like it does here in California. Just like a Californian I jumped into the surf. The beach was soft with small pebbles and the undertow was like a big paw pulling me down-- I had to call out to get pulled out by my arms. Not long after I'd recovered, someone cried out and we all grabbed our digital cameras and came running. Tiger tracks. The tracks couldn't have been more than a matter of hours old. A set of just-as-fresh wild goat tracks were next to the tiger's. After that I kept one eye on the ferocious undertow in the deep bay to my one side and the other eye on the steep forested hill on my other side... at that point some ladies just went and waited in the cars. One particularly drunken activist man-- from Chukotka, that Russian side of the Bering land bridge-- went and taunted the surf by trying to stand in the waves. I just found a rocky perch and amused myself wondering how we could get him out if he finally went under. He went down on his knees with almost every wave but he never got tired of the game. So it is with our activists, and why they might just succeed in protecting that good water and those wild tigers...

Flatulence: The Enemy Within


This actually came up on a South African search engine when I was researching export credit agencies.

I think I detect a new international NGO starting up: Flatulence Without Borders.

No matter where you go in this world, you will always find a local word for a flatulence outburst. In Japanese, it's called he. The Russian's perdun, the Chinese's fong, the German's furz, the French's pet, the Hindu's pud and the Afrikaans's poep give clear proof that flatulence knows no borders.

From the Department of Pasta Research

We know you always wondered why dry spaghetti never breaks in half.

No more broken-spaghetti-fests in the kitchen for you.

Ah yes, why I'm still in San Francisco

We may have fog all summer, but we don't have ice storms in August.

The weather report today for my home "town" includes this lovely aside:

Any storms this afternoon may contain downpours, gusty winds, frequent lightning, and hail. Rain fall rates of an inch or so per hour will also be possible in some of the storms.

The weather for Adams Center, New York, at Weather Underground

Still on light duty from tendonitis

Headlines You Will Never See on Your NYT RSS Feed

My RSS newsfeed from the BBC included one that made me long to know this strange world of people who still like Shakespeare in their headlines:


'Authentic' Shakespeare on stage


Which has a link to another headline that I love for its being a distillation of the great extreme of non-news-worthiness (through US journalistic eyes):


Poetry newcomer up for award

"She who must be obeyed" has died

Please to read.

She controlled the rains and rivers and liked to disco.

Gonadactylicious!

My summer intern's other job is trying to train these lovelies to recognize shapes and colors.

Dolphins Use Sponges

And not just as fashion acoutrements.

Though it is pretty limited to females and just a few (I'm guessing gay) male dolphins, apparently.

Neato.

Waiting for Superpowers

Well, my physical therapist hit the wrong button on his machine (the "H-Wave") or it was in fact, as he said, shorted out that day (though not on the day his supervisor was using it, a week later), and I got the full voltage. Into nodes on my back. Very bad. I told him later after I calmed down from screaming that maybe he'd cured my depression. He didn't get the joke.

Anyway, I think I'm entitled to get a superpower from the experience. X-ray vision at least. But it's been almost two weeks and NOTHING. No super nothing. I've been revisiting that question posed on This American Life-- inivisibility or the power to fly?-- and I just keep thinking Wonder Woman had it the best. An invisible plane.

Due to this tendonitis I've been trying to stay off the computer, but I had to blog today because I found a note intended to inform a blog I think I wrote a few years ago, about supervillains. Make of it what you will. The question apparently was: is George W. Bush a supervillain, or just a bad president?


Here are my notes:

Is G.W. a supervillain--

1. mask
no

2. armor
Dick Army

3. cape
no

4. refers to self in 3rd p.
probably

5. has own country
yes

6. style
not really

7. despair
yes, helpless-seeming

8. fallability
yes

9. ignorance
yes

10. degree
yes [he did finish college eventually, yes?]

11. adaptable
no

12.
creative
no

13. delusions
yes

-----

That's a -- let's see-- 8 out of 13! Good for you George, you're almost a supervillain! In particular I think you need to get some style and a cape.

The Conclusion to the Arrested Grandma Story

Well, sad to say, I have tendonitis and can't give the full 411 (or maybe it's 911) on this story about my grandma's famous arrest. In a few short paragraphs then---

She, a single woman with a Swedish name, showed up in the Chicago hoosegow about eight weeks after Pearl Harbor, with no officer present to state her charge, and a general suspicion hanging over all foreign-named people (they hadn't sorted out ally from foe yet-- everyone seemed to be an enemy after the bombing).

The jail matron looked at her name and -- not knowing her crime-- "ya shouldn'ta oughta dunnit!"

She was a seminary student on a date with another seminary student who chose not to stand for a racist war bonds ad playing before Dumbo. They were seminarians going to the movies to see Dumbo! Ya shouldn'ta oughta dunnit.

Well, the Chicago Tribune screwed up the story-- two Chicago University students refuse to stand for national anthem was the quick and dirty version-- and it ended up all over the news wires (back in the day when there were wires), playing over the radio in the barn where my great-grands on my grandpa's side were milking cows, and on the front page of the Boston Herald, which my great-grands on grandma's side read every day. Since Grandma was from Boston she was quite the local feature.

So, that night grandma and grandpa were arrested, the faculty of the seminary was at a party, and someone passed the hat around and put together their bail money. Later they were given a talking to about putting the seminary's relationship with Chicago U. in jeopardy because of the papers calling them Chicago U. students. The photograph of them holding their hands over their hearts and saying the pledge of allegiance (their penance in court) was given big play on the front pages of the big papers the next day.

Grandma wrote editorials correcting the errors in the stories and asked the papers to publish them without edits, but only the Boston Herald printed it in full.

The end of the story is that the bejesus had been scared out of the young couple, especailly grandma, and without even a formal courtship and proposal and engagement they just sped along to the wedding. Grandma's tentative position as a foreigner in a country at war scared them that much. Their Japanese friend studying with them at seminary attended their 1942 wedding.

He's still a minister, living now in Japan.

Later that sprign grandma and grandpa graduated by the skin of their teeth (the management of the hate mail, hate phone calls, press reactions, their families, etc. etc. took a lot of their time and energy for a few months). They finished their dissertations on manual typewriters in the Chicago hotel room they got for their honeymoon.

the end

Whence I Came: My Grandma the Jailbird

Being home in North Nosebleed for a few days always resurrects the ghosts. This time I was collecting my grandmother's ghost stories and recording them for posterity. She is 87 or something godawful close to 90 and her mind is still razor sharp, so there's lots of cool gossip about ghosts to harvest. One of her best is the story of a date gone awry. I'm lining up people to read at a "bad date" themed performance, and I'm realizing my horrible dates have nothing compared to my grandparents' bad date that ended up on the front of the Chicago Tribune and across the country in the radio news headlines, a date that generated hate mail. A quintessential bad date.

My first date was at the age of 12, and I showed up in my finest clothes only to be asked to help with the neighbor's haying. My date and I were out in the afternoon heat hauling in the hay bales. My second boyfriend, me still at the age of 12, didn't really have dating on his mind and so I remember repelling his advances more than any one of our few, bad dates. My third boyfriend was the first in a long series of long distance romances that didn't require as much effort, which worked for me, since I'd figured out before even the first bad date that I was actually a lesbian. Dating women or women-identity-based-creatures didn't start for me until I was 19, far past my prime in the world of North Nosebleed. Now I'm an old maid at 31, enjoying a cup of decaf earl grey, some good wool to knit, and NPR far more than I probably should. Meanwhile, in 1930's Brooklyn, my grandma was being made an old maid at the age of 15.

My great-grandpa Adolph (so named in the same year as the other Adolf-- they were age-mates) had great plans for his two daughters. He wanted to see their names in lights. He was born to poor farmers in Sweden, an illegitimate child to a class-conscious mother, who ran away to the US with the first guy who'd marry her, to try and start the climb to the social top rung. He wanted no man to touch his daughters and put them in the bad position his mother escaped. So he made them pile their hair up in long braids pinned to their heads like some 19th century cameo. The style then was short hair, and cutting her hair was the first thing my grandma did when she escaped Adolph and went to Chicago Theological Seminary (his alma mater, and the furthest away he'd let his daughter go). He also taught them how to box. His youngest, my great-aunt-Mona, beat up-- rather badly-- a teacher for holding her after class... when she was in the fifth grade. My grandma takes a very dim view of boxing, but I like that Adolph taught them to defend themselves-- it feeds my fantasy that I come from some bastard line of Xena Warrior Princesses.

So, when grandpa passed her a note in her Religious Drama class asking her out to coffee, grandma was ready for action. She says she was a Swede who couldn't turn down a free cup of coffee, but I bet she was just aching to make her father jealous. Off they went to two semesters of coffee and strawberry shakes, during which time grandpa made sure his date was aware that he was from a penniless line of Michigan farmers. We had no less than three bankruptcies on that side of the family during the Great Depression. Just the ticket to piss off her papa, she threw herself into the romance and even spent the winter holidays at his family's farmhouse. To give grandpa some credit, he was a handsome devil, the son of another handsome devil. Great-grandpa Frank has a headshot from his youth that looks like a movie star-- dark and brooding and wind-tousled. Grandpa had even more gravity about his dark good looks.

Little did these lovebirds knew what was in store for them the night they went to see Dumbo. It was February 1942. Dumbo had hit the theatres just days before bombs hit Pearl Harbor, three months before. After the news reel, the theatre played a war bonds ad. The ad was a cartoon in which the war bond you could purchase flew into a racist charicature of a Japanese fighter pilot, whose blood then dripped down the screen and became the field of red in the stars and stripes of the US flag. The national anthem rose up in the background of the war bonds spiel, and some people in the theatre stood up and removed their hats. My grandparents, who had a dear friend at seminary who was Japanese, did not stand at this gory display. An off-duty police officer sitting behind them tapped my grandpa on the shoulder, and told them they should stand. They refused and told him why. He arrested them, and sent them to the paddy wagon without escorting them-- leaving them waiting at the jail to be charged while he finished watching Dumbo.

They were later charged with disorderly conduct.

Tomorrow... the story of my grandma's hard time in jail.

World Bank Supports Community Art Project

Albeit indirectly.

Peepers, Stars, and Cow Crap

The land of my birth. I am leaving tomorrow morning to go back to the SF Bay Area to complete whatever next challenges I've chosen for myself. But returning to this place I call North Nosebleed for a few days reminds me that there is achievement in just leaving here. And, if I can find it, still more genius in finding a way to come back, if only in reweaving my life to include this. My father and I went for a walk to remedy the food coma from Mother's Day's all you can eat carbo-riffic buffet, and in the 20 minutes we were out, only one car passed. The stars were so multitudinous we didn't even carry flashlights, and found the neighbor's garage floodlight blinding. The dark swampy fields of May were washed in a thick eau d' cow shit-- the annual beshitting of the fields where the dairy industry would get its hay in July. The new generation of baby frogs we call "peepers" were in full swing. Each song would last about 15 seconds. I have-- for the plane ride home-- numerous MP3's that I recorded from different points around the swamp on our land. Two were leading the peepage, and uncounted quieter thousands of voices kept a gentle pulsing chime going under the solos and duets. When the lead singers paused, it seemed like the stars themselves were providing the undercurrent of shimmering sound.

This makes me happy.

I have a couple of guys working with me on a project whose names are Bob and Doug. It doesn't help that they are both a little slow on the uptake and one is Canadian.

Walking down memory lane via Google, I discovered this factoid about the SCTV puerile purveyors of the federally mandated "Canadian content" that was Bob and Ted's Great White North (from a site devoted to beer):


Canada's fastest supercomputer, used to simulate the collisions of galaxies and the movement of supermassive black holes, is named "McKenzie," after the nefarious brothers. It cost $900,000 to build, which, at the current exchange rate, equals roughly 40,900 Molson beers, sold wholesale.

You can read "important Bob and Doug episodes" here.

A Chance of Inspiration with a Steady Downpour of Frustration by Nightfall

Rest in peace, Marla Ruzicka. My coworker M. remembered you fondly-- he organized your first trip to Cuba, when you were 17. Your friends at Global Exchange are gathering today to share memories about you. I don't think I ever met you, but I very well might have-- and that is something I can be proud of: we ran in circles not that far afield from eachother. Although, reading about you, I must say your field looks like it was always a helluva lot more dangerous than mine. But I was a early-teen visitor of nonprofit offices and collector of pamphlets and subscriber to The Nation and The Economist and Greenpeace and Amnesty International-- but I couldn't get started as fast as hard as you did, since I was living in North Nosebleed, and you were in Northern California. You will be remembered among the bright young stars that fell on my watch:

Terry Freitas who died helping the U'wa defend themselves against big oil while volunteering for Project Underground, where I was also then a volunteer; and

Rachel Corrie, another SF Bay Area leftie -- she died when she tried to stop an Israeli bulldozer; and

...the not-yet-gone:

Lori Berenson - who was a roommates with a dear friend of mine when she was in college. I imagine her decorating her jail cell in Peru and thinking about her dorm room at MIT... how far she has gone to stick to her beliefs.

Tonight: more inspiration from the Goldman Awards! Where (as per usual) my organization "knows" some of the awardees.

My Unitarian Jihad Name Is

The Gatling Gun of Courteous Debate.

Anyone surprised?

Lovin' Those Gmail Ads

I have a rendezvous with a web design person -- who I've never met in person-- about a project, and he wrote me the following magic eight words:

You can’t miss me. I have green hair.

And here are the headlines of the links-- based on those eight words-- that Gmail helpfully provided in the margin:

• Remi Cuticle Virgin Hair


• No more Chlorine Buildup


• METROPOLITAN DIGEST
  
  Kansas City Star - 15 hours ago
  A baby was left at Truman Medical Center on Tuesday afternoon, and ...


• Police seek info after body found
  
  Townsville Bulletin - Apr 12, 2005
  The body of the woman, in her early 40s was found at 1.30pm at Rowes ...

Everything is Turgid

I am sorry, but I find this sentence hard to forgive, even in a book with brilliant moments and an interesting premise, and especially as the opening line of a chapter.

She used her thumbs to pull the lace panties from her waist, allowing her engorged genitalia the teasing satisfaction of the humid summer updrafts, which brought with them the smells of burdock, birch, burning rubber, and beef broth, and would now pass on her particular animal scent to northward noses, like a message transmitted through a line of schoolchildren in a childish game, so that the final one to smell might lift his head and say, Borsht?

I'm sure other people found Jonathan Safran Foer's "Everything is Illuminated" to be a work of unprecedented genius, but I'm here to tell you, it can only be appreciated if you can ignore that his Sasha speaks some horribly fake Ringlish (or Ruslish, however you like), and his non-Sasha narrator spews out some real stomach churners, like that one above.

As I bounce gleefully into the new Eoin Colfer, The Artemis Fowl Files, with my favorite juvie-lit heroine Captain Holly Short!

Perks of Working at an NGO: Penguin Baseball, or, the Joy of a Fowl Ball

The chair of our board sent this to me yesterday. My best is 319.8 feet. Hers is 293.5.

For $1800 a month, they can't complain too loudly about the penguin honks coming out of my office.

You click once on the yeti for the "pitch" and again for the swing.

I Heart the Alien Tort Claims Act

I read about this in the paper some time ago, but didn't realize the case had been settled until picking up a friend's lefty newsletter at Easter dinner yesterday.

US Corporate Pirates can be brought to some kind of justice, even under a Bush administration.

This Is What You Get

I remember when I thought I was a punk. Well, for my part of rural dairy-farming Jefferson County, I was. I was 14. We didn't even have sidewalks, let alone skater punk culture. I would powder my face white, put on eyeliner, and wear a long black cashmere thrifted coat that blew in the wind and didn't close at all. For Christmas I pinned bells into the hem. They never suspected it was me jingling. Well, I was reading some punk magazine. Actually, it might have been Creem. I don't know if that is punk. But I had a subscription to that and a few other things that I thought were punk. My favorite band was U2, which never was very punk. Not even pre-Boy.

So somebody had an ad in the back of this magazine where if you sent him a dollar he'd send you a doughnut seed. Why didn't I think of this myself, I now wonder. I sent my dollar with the requested SASE, and after a few weeks I got my own handwriting on an envelope in the mailbox. Excited, I opened it, and a crumbled Cheerio powdered out into my hand. Then there was a note making fun of my handwriting, from my anonymous doughnut farmer. I remember being so lonely and attention-starved that I thought this was funny and wished I could correspond with him. Maybe he could be my boyfriend.

So, this is life, right? You know what you're getting into, sort of, and it looks exciting, so you ask the universe-- surprise me! Then in your SASE-- the handwriting reminding you that you yourself are entirely responsible for this-- you find a pale shadow of what you had imagined for yourself. And there are no doughnut trees. There will never be doughnut trees.

And it's entirely up to you if you laugh, or delude yourself into thinking that this is the universe being kind, or delude yourself into thinking this is the universe being cruel. But ultimately it's a trick you play on yourself, right? You get yourself into trouble reading the backs of magazines, so you let your subscriptions run out, and then you still find yourself ordering the equivalent of doughnut seeds on Craigslist 15 years later. You're not punk, you never were punk, and you are not much smarter than you were when you were 14, falling in love with gay boys and weeping over the gravestones of people who died in 1872 named Sophronia and Ezekiel.

But somehow I find that comforting. Today, anyway. I'm glad I still ask people to mail me doughnut seeds.

We all turn out right in the end, right? Like this phenomenally demutated plant, we can untangle the ways the world trains us not to lean directly into the sun, and grow ourselves right. I can be my own doughnut tree.

I Hurt Myself Laughing

The Feline Silly Sleeping Pose Olympics

The injuries from laughing at the Face Down Food Kersplat nearly brought about an untimely demise.

Who Knew Such Hippy Misfits Worked at the Department of State?

Yes, he juggled oranges on stage, and put it in his DOS online bio. Now my coworker, distinctly NOT a hippy, is about to call him. They put his phone number on the website, that's their fault.

I Heart Zora

I don't know what is more renewing than a Zora Neale Hurston Story. I got reminded of this watching the TV production of Their Eyes Were Watching God last night. The morals to her stories just feed the soul, they do.

You can see the picture that I saw on a poster in a grade school classroom that fascinated me so much I starting researching her and reading her books on this Florida Hall of Fame site. I love that shit-eating grin. Alas, the Hurston Museum site -- linked there -- doesn't function very well.

I was and remain amazed that I never crossed paths with her until randomly being captivated by a classroom poster, years after leaving Vassar with an English degree. I found that she had many of my same passions, and was also what some might call a witch. I think you can read "Their Eyes" as a lesson in how every woman needs to be accountable to herself for her own happiness. The deliberate, informed nature of all of the heroine's choices -- to take risks for her own joy -- is what makes it a witchy for me.

Let me direct your attention to a past blog entry related to Zora-- from the week I was celebrating Undead Americans.

A Freed Hostage Nearly Dies Under US Fire

I was going to write today about the delight of having a friend recently "come out" as some kind of non-heterosexual, and the interesting conversations we've been having. I was also going to write about brewing some tea that I bought in 1989 in Moscow, and maybe even tell the story of how the USSR came on to my radar when I was a wee teen. But THIS disgrace has emptied my mind of other, more pleasant subjects.

Was the driver afraid we were trying to re-kidnap her? Did he panic? Did we really warn them? Boggles the mind.

In Honor of Presidents' Day, I'm Going to Interview my Cat About the Word Lesbian

A women's studies professor friend has asked me to think about the usefulness - or lack thereof - of the word Lesbian.

I can't think of a way to make this more interesting than by putting some socratic questions to my cat, Dasha. She is a stripey tabby girlcat with more than enough brains to figure this one out.

S.S.: So, Dasha, why does sexual orientation need labeling?

D: (Sitting on the computer monitor, facing me) This spot is nice and warm, and might put me to sleep. I hope you don't mind. Now, as Allah says, we have names so that we might better know eachother. If people feel like they need a label so you'll know something important about them (like gender, sexual orientation, or style of stripes), then more power to them. A true tabby has circular stripes on her flanks, which you'll note that I have. If I want people to know this about myself, I call myself a tabby. If I don't, then I call myself "gray" or "tiger."

S.S.: The US anti-oppression movement of the turn of the milennium encompasses a broad range of young people's issues, which go far beyond sexual orientation. If labels are for knowing eachother, and people find other ways to self-identify besides sexual orientation more important (like single/ not-single, poor/ not-poor, punk/ geek/ nerd, unconventional/ within-the-system, Marxist/ Anarchist/ Communist), why do the activists of the 60's feel betrayed by the way "lesbian" has fallen into disuse? Isn't it just a matter of empowering people where they feel disempowered, and not about defending one term from obscurity?

D: (Turning to listen better to the sound of someone dumping their trash in the alley outside my apartment) If I had a catnip mouse for every time someone asked me that. We sort ourselves every day, but often do it without examining the history of the terms we use to do the self-sorting. Or, sometimes, even examining our own personal histories -- and if the ways we self-sort are really accurate. I, for one, consider myself intelligent, but I could allow that my lack of an opposable thumb
and therefore ability to type or hold a pencil and therefore score highly on any standardized tests makes me NOT "intelligent" but maybe rather an "intellectual." I like "intellectual" better, now that I think of it, since it takes power away from those people who measure things like IQ, and height, incessantly.

Anyway. Intellectuals stare squinty-eyed out at the universe and decide their place in it. So do activists. Naturally, young women who love women turning to another word for self-identification is threatening to people for whom the old label "lesbian" still has positive charge. But the people for whom it still has charge-- not all 60's activists, mind you, but international activists who find its clarity of meaning, translatability, and sexy Greek roots appealing-- need to do a better job at dissecting the power of the word and sharing their findings with the young women who eschew it. Without that understanding, women are going to continue to use niche terms like "polybiflexible" or "queer grrrl" - which might serve to best identify them to themselves, but does it really help the people who they want to know them to (in fact) KNOW them? What about that sexy Greek exchange student?

They need to learn the skills of self-reflection to know who they are (first) and also the meanings of the terms they use in a larger context than, say, their campus or girl-clique. "Lesbian" has that broad accessiblity, offers a big umbrella under which sexually-different women have always found some quarter (if only to use the word to thwart interested gentlemen). Buddha says gender is an illusion and sexual desire is an attachment that obscures truth, anyway. Did I answer the questions? I'm a little distracted by the alley pigeons. No, wait, that's just a reflection.

S.S.: Sure, sure, close enough. Young women need tools of analysis more than dictation of what terms are best and most powerful. But "lesbian" does something that those "niche terms" don't do-- it thingafies gender and sexuality in one fell swoop, without allowing for that gray zone that we now can explore with a wealth of new terminology, new theories, new spheres of education dealing with sexuality and gender-- spheres that-- by the way-- are getting farther and farther apart the more we advance into their subdermal meanings. Isn't it too specific? Too rigid to empower young women who are just coming out? Who don't want to call themselves something that-- also by the way-- sounds like a kind of disease, or a person from a middle-eastern country?


D: After this answer I really have to sleep. This computer monitor is just HEAVENLY. You are NEVER getting a flat screen, not on my watch. So, with "Women's Studies" turning into "Gender Studies" and "Lesbian Studies" turning into "Alternative Sexualities" the historically-stigmatized words that invoke society's second-class people--women/ women-loving-women-- are becoming re-marginalized, and might again become used as diagnostic-- not social empowerment-- terms. Aren't young lesbians-- however they call themselves, if they are persecuted under law in some countries it won't be for queer-grrlism, but lesbianism-- losing out on a "safe space" where they could DO that analysis and-- hopefully-- from there learn what other factors marginalize people, especially single women, poor women, sex-workers, etc.? Doesn't "lesbian" still have the force to clear out that safe space for dialogue? Its historical weight doesn't go away with fashion, or with the fear of its stigma (whether that of the right or the left)-- making it invisible makes the history less visible. If anything, keeping "Lesbian Studies" but having the whole first month of study be discussing the historical and present -- national US and international-- usage of the word "lesbian" is in order. MORE focus on the word, not the deletion of the word. In the less-public (than a university catalogue) class room you can choose to abandon the word, but young women who refuse to take a class because it's not "Queer Grrrl Studies" don't have the patience to learn history anyway.

S.S.: Isn't that a little flip? A little ageist?

D: I'm going on six years old what do you want me to say? Run along my little pretties, call yourselves whatever you want? Everyone will just figure out that you're lesbians eventually? Unless of course you change gender and all become straight men?

S.S.: Now you are getting transphobic. You take your nap, I'll get back to you later.

To be continued...

To Brighten Your Friday: The Charming Somerville Gates

As much as I would like to highlight the Poopatorium Gates photo from the Somerville Gates, just for the fact that I think it features a hand-crafted litter box made of - I think - ash or cherry wood, my coworker and I have to say that the Tub Gates photo is our favorite.

For people stumbling upon this from outside the information highway or from inside a cave, The Gates (by Ikea, as Jon Stewart put it) is what those clever Somerville people are alluding to.

What Fun, this Gannongate

Amoral queer sex-workin' capitalist Dem-attacker quits the White House Press Corps amid a brouhaha; John Aravosis' Ameriblog comments--

And they can't even handle a bronze breast on a statue.

Here is the Feb. 10 CNN article, which plays up "Gannon's" resignation from the conservative Talon, and sadly skips the porn website angle. Never mind that, The Washington Post goes where CNN fears to tread. Yeah, Post, you just had to drop in a Deep Throat allusion, didn't you.

The Fishes Really Are Lke The Traffics

I'm finding myself in the "Shark Tale" Pixaresque scene of street traffic as schools of fish swimming by... Today I spent the afternoon at the Monterey Bay Aquarium (being a guide to a local visiting-from-Russia former-prisoner-of-conscience environmental celebrity, Grigoriy Pasko) and got into my head all these images of fish swimming in neatly-kept schools crisscrossing and whatnot, which bled all into the long drive thither and back, and then walking on the street tonight in San Francisco... After an evening of whale-related informational discussion and drinking beer with some shark and whale and manatees specialists, Market Street traffic starting looking verrry fishy to me... those sunfish are almost the size of a VW, you know.

You'll be happy to know the Great White girlshark in their outer bay aquarium is still kicking it there at the top of the indoor water-column. Hasn't eaten anyone (important) yet.

When Even the Economists Say We're Becoming a Police State
... maybe it's really time to worry.


"Commodity economies are typically not a pretty sight."

Basic Life Skills, Circa 1978

I was just a few posts back there revealing how I have maintained a thin layer of tapes insulating my apartment from all the blustery changes in the music-listening-industry outside.

I made a tape from the Gillian Welch and Freakwater CDs of my oh-so-more-modern friend La (I should say, more technologically advanced, since her cyborgian accoutrements have included personal organizer devices that you wear on your hip, and which have steady red blinking lights like the eye of HAL, and that call you at home when she sits down on them-- but for the main she is known in the world as an Old Time banjoist, not a cyborg).

Well, I keep that tape in my car, and it sort of lives there, as back-up to my 12-CD changer full of bellydance music, girl-power rock, and the upbeat-for-Russians music of Linda and Zemfira. My personal failsafe: In Case of Need to Cry, Hit CASSETTE. Well, this morning I needed to cry. Not Freakwater cry, just Gillian Welch "Orphan Girl" cry. I had been listening to the radio, and the Beatles "Across the Universe" had come on, and I had just gotten out of therapy where I was talking about my dad who yesterday got on the other side of a 2nd-in-the-last-six-months brush with death. On rainy Saturdays my sister and I used to play all his Beatles on vinyl. He even took us to see Yellow Submarine in a real theater when I was really too small to understand. So after that song brought me to the tears that I'd been bottling up, I needed to hear some really good cry music.

I pressed play, and it was on the Freakwater end of things. Suddenly, reloading an obscure 1978 setting in my brain, I thought "I need to flip it." You know. Like vinyl. I took out the tape and flipped it. It was still playing Freakwater. I stopped it. Tried changing sides again. Freakwater. I turned it off. I was staring at the dashboard, about to just have a silent frustration cry instead of a good sad-singing-person cry when I remembered you have to fast forward through the half you don't want to hear.

That's right, I

(1) forgot how a cassette works,
(2) actually thought it worked like a record, and, more amazingly,
(3) still don't have EITHER of these two albums, or anything by Gillian Welch or Freakwater, on CD.

Rock Mommies: "Eat Your Damn Spaggheti"

Pregnancy has definitely gone in a different direction with my generation. I have one good friend who is a woman in a pregnancy and in a lesbian relationship, and the other day we were talking about the sperm donor shopping experience. You pay more for people with degrees. I think of all the dickwads I knew at my high-priced college, and shudder. The niceness guage just doesn't add up to bucks. Can you imagine being a discount sperm donor? That has become one of my favorites on my "list of potential band names," by the way. The Discount Sperm Donors.

Now I find out that there are ladies in my Oakland who have formed a band called Placenta. USA Today mentions them in this article (where you can also read about the mommy-rock-band Housewives on Prozac who sings "Eat Your Damn Spaggheti").

My good friend Preggers tells me that her good friend who is as pregnant as she is (and also a dyke) is sick of the feminisation of the pregnancy process. She calls her situation "hosting," and her pregnancy clothes "hosting gear." A case of morning sickness is being "on the rocks." I'm glad baby-bearing among my peers is so edgy.

For some other serious post-rocker MommyCore you have to also look out for the new Beth Lisick book, which is going to be her best ever. I got to hear some of her soon-to-be-published stories the other day at a reading in SF. She doesn't comb her baby Gus' hair because she just couldn't cope with the screaming and she heard "it eventually falls out."

And Another Thing About Crossworders

They... we... are a bunch of cheaters! I went on the NYT site last night to try my hand at that timed puzzle nonsense again, and felt pretty good about finishing the Tuesday puzzle in just over an hour. I thought I would see how I measured up against the other subscribers, and there was one liar who said s/he finished it in two minutes. There is no way. That cheater downloaded the puzzle, filled it out, and then typed as fast as possible to get it entered under two minutes. If you did it HONESTLY, two minutes isn't enough time to read all the clues and type in the answers, even if you were that smart.

Now, I am not going to say I don't use my NYT crossword dictionary, or my regular dictionary, or Google, or this cheater's website (I was scandalized at its existence, I must say-- that was a long time ago, at least two weeks), but I am a weak person. I am ONLY thirty-one, and I am NOT -- as some have suggested-- some kind of international 411 with all the names, dates, and quotes from international heads of state memorized. I need these crutches. But who am I to look up to? Who will be my model of crossword integrity, with people like "colliesiii" cheating their way to the top of the NYT timed crossword competition? I tell you, it's a dark day for humanity when all the smart people turn out to just be CHEATERS.

I Aver the Idee
That Doing Crosswords Doesn't Make One a Snob

And so also says this Columbia News Service article:

Another peculiarity of the crossword puzzle phenomenon, according to a Random House spokesperson, is the profile of a typical crossword puzzler. People who buy the puzzles span both educational and economic background. A passion for playing with language and the thrill of filling in the white boxes seems to be the only common denominator.

So I stayed up late enough Sunday night to think that doing the Monday NYT puzzle in a competitive, timed on-line format was a better idea than figuring out how to download the puzzle with Firefox to work on it later. So I have a problem with the boxes. So what. I will catch up on my sleep when I'm old and senile.

GOOD FOR WHAT AILS YOU:
A Dog and Dolphin Hero Tale

From a New Zealand newspaper, The Timaru Herald.

January 18, 2005

Timaru, New Zealand- Dean Gibson can tell the ultimate fisherman's story -- the one about his drowning dog and the dolphin.

The almost unbelievable, but true, canine adventure took place at the Opihi River mouth a week ago when Dean and his mate Craig Woodnorth went to the river for a spot of salmon fishing one evening.

With the pair was Dean's seven-month-old german wirehaired pointer Heidi.
The men were fishing on the south bank of the mouth when a wave came in over the spit and washed Heidi into the river.

The river was still running high from heavy rain. Dean stripped off intending to jump in and get her, but Heidi was swept out through the mouth too quickly for him to do so.

He saw her flipped over in several waves before her head finally came up and she started swimming out to sea in the strong current.

'I rang (helicopter pilot) Sandy Jamieson,' Dean said, explaining how he was hoping Mr Jamieson might be able to lower a bucket under the chopper and scoop Heidi up. He wasn't home so that plan never eventuated.

As he rang his wife Janine with the bad news, he was watching Heidi through his binoculars. She was just a dot swimming lower and lower in the water.

Dean saw a fin and relayed the bad news to Janine that there was a shark beside Heidi. Another look and he realised the fin belonged to a dolphin.

What happened next stunned the two fishermen. The dolphin appeared to swim in front of Heidi making her turn towards the shore. It then swam nearby, rising out of the water a couple of times. Dean can't help but wonder if it was checking to make sure Heidi was still swimming in the right direction.

Even with the help from the dolphin it still took her close to half an hour to get back into the beach, finally coming ashore about one kilometre south of the river mouth.

A wave dumped her back on the beach.

'She shook herself, spun around, and was pretty pleased to see us,' Dean said.

'It was a big swim for a wee dog.'

Yet the adventure didn't slow her down. Minutes later she was chasing seagulls.

Even a week after the incident Dean finds it amazing.

'It blew me away. It makes you wonder if the dolphin knew she was in a bit of a predicament.'

At this time of year Dean fishes at the mouth a couple of times a week.
While he often sees dolphins there he has never heard of a dolphin rescue in the area before.

Whangarei diver, author and dolphin enthusiast Wade Doak wasn't at all surprised to hear Heidi's story. While he couldn't recall yesterday any other cases of dogs being rescued by dolphins, he could offer a whole filing drawer of stories involving dogs and dolphins.

In an incident in Marseilles, France, a dolphin used to bang its tail on the water near a fish canning factory when it wanted the two dogs that lived there to play with her. The dogs would leap into the water and the dolphin would then tease them by swimming around and under them. On one occasion the dogs did catch the dolphin, but didn't hurt her.

He also has notes on a dolphin called Aihe which used to live at Takaka. It always wanted dogs to swim out to sea, although the pets' owners usually stopped the adventures.

Dr Liz Slooten, a marine mammal scientist at Otago University, has been studying dolphins for 20 years but had never heard of a dolphin helping another animal until yesterday. But it didn't surprise her.

'We do it to other animals,' she said, suggesting that the dolphin would have been well aware Heidi was in trouble. As she was not a threat to the dolphin it was willing to help her.

'Humans are not unique in helping other species.'

A Very Unexciting Blog Entry About Music
...and a little aside about a big protest

I have been tagged by La to fill out this music survey on this, my blog. I hope you enjoy it.

1. What is the total amount of music files on your computer?

I do not know, but it isn't much. I was late leaving the cozy nest of the cassette tapes (with my collection now lining the edges of my apartment), and still therefore insist on having a stereo set-up in my car that has radio, CD and tape deck. I have had to replace it or componants of it damaged or stolen about four or five times, but I can't do without my tape collection. I recently bought some damn new-fangled "personal jukebox" MP3 player from iRiver for too much money and it annoys me almost as much as I enjoy it. I have nearly thrown it in my beloved Lake Merritt numerous times, accidently pushing "record" or "off" (sometimes first one and then the other, and then the 30 second shut-down and 30 second restart...) while trying to switch between radio and MP3 modes. Stupid stupid stupid interface.

2. The CD you last bought is:

I just re-bought Fiona Apple "When the Pawn" - one of my favorite driving-around albums, stolen in my most recent car burglary.

Can I just say that the new Battlestar Gallactica is reminding me of Twin Peaks? A sci-fi Twin Peaks. With a more traditional doom-laden soundtrack. And a few hottie girls with guns. The blonde hottie fighter pilot is like the log lady, with a cigar.

3. What is the song you last listened to before reading this message?

Something in the car... what was it... I was listening to Bedouin music from an album called "Apocalypse Across the Sky," and then switched to a different CD in the changer... Tori Amos? Kate Bush? Ah, yes. Paula Cole. I was just listening to "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone" by Paula Cole.

4. Write down 5 songs you often listen to or that mean a lot to you:

I've had "Down to the River" sung by Alison Krauss stuck in my head a lot lately.

I hit some button on my iRiver thing that put the damn thing on "repeat track" (probably hitting "record," and then "off" and then "play" again -- the record button is the way to change a lot of settings, depending on how long you hold it down, including the "shuffle" and "repeat" settings), and I did it with O Brother Where Art Thou's "You Are My Sunshine" playing. So THAT got stuck in my head for a while. Alison K's song is the one on after that one, and my head naturally goes to the next song, so they've both been stuck in my head a lot lately.

So that's two. I absolutely love this CD some bellydancing teacher mixed from vinyl that's full of Turkish Roma (Gypsy) dance songs. I'm not sure where it is, but when I find it, I will burn it and listen to it all the time on my iRiver. It's all 7/8 or 9/8. There is a song on it with an unknown artist and unknown album called "Lady Yelling." I love most everything on that CD so I'll just leave that as number three. There's another dance CD that I listen to ALL the time: "Gypsy Caravan" from the Putomayo series. I did a solo at the Rakkasah bellydance festival last year to the first track: Divi Divi, So Kerdjan. I may do that solo again at a couple venues next month, I liked it so much. I don't do songs twice. That is four.

OK, for number five... I love Patty Griffin- especially her first two albums. But I can't really pick a song. I've been listening a lot to the one album of Sweet 75, the little-known project of Yva Los Vegas and Nirvana's Krist Novoselic. But another candidate for number five is the song by Wild Colonials that I've been repeating (the hard way, since when I want to I can't figure out how to INTENTIONALLY set the iRiver on repeat) their song "Charm," which is fabulous. Soaring rock violin, and that lead singer Angela McCluskey's huge alto rock voice... But for number five let's do "Elenke" by Charming Hostess-- the old ChoHo, not the new ChoHo, with that hot violinist Carla Kihlstedt. I miss the old ChoHo. They only did that one fabulous album, "Eat."

Now, in retrospect, I have a regret. I wish I'd made number five the sad "Winter Song" by the Crash Test Dummies. That song reminds me of many good times gone by, and sad times that I don't miss. Listening to that song I'm again standing at a window looking at a deep, frozen woods, in the house of a dear friend who is no longer a friend, watching the pale winter sun steal away. There's a lot of silence, and space, and room to forgive in the long distances of the place where I'm from. That song seems to hold that thought.

5. Who are you going to pass this stick to? (3 persons) and why?

I don't do "chains" for anything. I long ago let go of the fear of karmic retaliation for not sending friends chain-questionnaires or political e-petitions or what-have-you. When I get them, I usually respond, but the one or two friends who send them to me are the only ones I would send such things to, and I don't think you're supposed to just send them back whence they came.

That said, these past few days and the next little while I'm very absorbed in building this website that documents the happenings around a big ongoing oil company protest by indigenous people on the Russian island of Sakhalin. They are very hearty souls, blocking trucks with picket lines and bonfires in 30 below CELSIUS (with windchill) conditions.

Sensitive New Age Cuttlefish

Heterotransvestism among the kin of Cthulu.

The God of Pants

I belong to a women witches' discussion list, and after some recent discussion I am in a quandry about magical ethics and "jailin' pants," or, as one put it "the low-riding gangstah leaning pants you either want to pull up or pull off" - the style that came from having your belt confiscated in jail. I'm not sure if anyone else is in this quandry, I get the list in digest format and kind of scan it, so I might be mixing up two threads. Well, I think it's a valid quandry anyway.

The basis for the quandry is this: one is not supposed to wish anything on anybody without that person's consent. As in, I will ask a friend with a broken arm if she wants me to do my mojo to ask for her quick healing. Usually the broken armed people say yes, but some people aren't comfortable with any kind of mojo being thrown at them, so the ethical thing to do is ask first, mojo later.

But one can't help it, can one, if one prays (as someone put it) to the God of Pants to make a passerby's droopy drawers stay up? Is this inflicting mojo on an unconsenting subject immoral? Or is it for the greater good?

And, just who is this God of Pants that we all know about but don't talk about?

All I know is that I am pleased with my new courdoroy stiped greenish-orangeish bell bottoms, and I hope the God of Pants is pleased too, and will grant me many years of stay-uppage-ness.

The Fuzzy Cute Pictures Continue

Still trying to wash out the post-tsunami image I unwittingly clicked on the other day, I am treating myself to a little internet stalking of the sugar glider.

I just found out, to my joy, that I know someone who has a 9-year-old sugar glider. She is scared of heights. The glider, I mean, not my friend. I wonder if catnip works on sugar gliders? I bet she'd fly then. I would if I were a stoned sugar glider, that's for sure.

Images from Hell and Tequila

I have been thinking about a quote I read somewhere recently about how everything today is about commodifying sex and horror. I love a little bit of the thrill of the hunt for the gritty, so I do my share of clicking around the images of war and death. My voyeurism around news coverage of the tsunami wreckage has until now yielded rather chaste images of high aerial shots or home videos of the white line of the advancing wave on the horizon. 160,000 dead in a few minutes just doesn't make sense to me yet, so I keep clicking, but I just keep getting those extreme close-ups of faces of survivors or the geography-lesson images. I therefore wasn't hesitant to click on a coworker's attached images of "local photoes of tsunami's impact." He is a Chinese environmentalist working in China- China didn't have that direct an impact. I assumed it would be more nice aerial shots of beaches created where once there were none. The first and last image I opened was of a sunny scene of a dumpster filled with stiff, misshapen, brown bodies. Faces weren't visible. Legs were.

I immediately felt sick, and then did what my good friend La sometimes does-- inundates herself with images of cuteness. I went to Google image search and typed in "cute." THIS turned up among polar bear cubs and frogs and kittens. I am now officially traumatized.

I will now spend some time clicking around the more wholesome www.sashy.com/etc/cute in the hopes of purging these images.

This cat in a lime helmet helps.

1. This is Too Depressing

From an anti-corruption mailing list:

Report received from contact in Aceh [Dec. 29]:

Until today not a single grain of rice, not a drop of water from outside have reached Acheh, all stopped in Medan by the military who insist that the aid must be given to them to be distributed by them.

This link to an article by journalist Phelim Kyne about corruption in the hardest-hit Indonesian province is a Yahoo link, so it will expire; for more info on the graft of aid money in Aceh, try the coverage bythe news portal Laksamana.net.

2. This Cheers Me Up

Geocaching.