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.

Life is a Drop...

Life is a drop of dew balanced on a blade of grass.
- Buddhist saying requoted in the CNN eyewitness accounts from the 26 December earthquake and tsunamis.

There really are no words for it... a 500 mph instant muder-by-water of tens of thousands... one-third children... And it is even stranger to encounter this news from a place of 8 degrees Fahrenheit and an infinite unbroken mantle of snow here in Northern New York.

In my dream last night

I was in a ship with some group I was traveling with for work, i.e. Russian environmentalists, but we were in harbor. I remember enjoying using the word "harbor" in Russian (gaven') which declines rather beautifully on the tongue. It is featured in a lovely song "Arivaderci" by Zemfira (see above link under my obsessions), and after learning it in that song I rarely have a chance to use it. Anyhoo, that's how I know my trip was work-related. I also knew we weren't in Russia. Not because of the fact that it was a warm-water port, but because all the ships had "Ljubljana" scrawled on their sterns as their port of call. It was only this morning recounting the dream to a co-worker I realized that Ljubljana couldn't be any ship's port-of-call, since it is inland. So I think we were in port at Portoroz, or more probably Piran, a place that I think is magical and would like to go back to.

Anyway, the ship was huge. I remember enjoying a shower in a large bathroom while the ship rocked on the waves. I was running down the hall to the gym (in the hold of the ship, somehow) and was feeling really exhilerated about the upcoming trip out to sea.

I think that's a lovely way to enter the new season.

Other Ways to Stalk My Hometown

I keep going back to look at that stubborn snow at the Old Forge covered bridge, wondering if we have snow like that in my hometown. So, I did some stalking. This guy's bird-feedercam looking out at Route 11 (or so it appears) about three miles north of my parents' house seems to confirm it.

I mentioned in my Old Forge blog the other day how beautiful the Tug Hill is. Here is a cam to prove it (a site with a mission also to prove the existence of sun dogs, a phenomenon I have been known to point out to people).

This "Adirondack" cam is, I think, right outside Paul Smith (the culinary institute in the woods)- so it has the snow, being the high ground that the flurries from the Great Lakes are aiming for when they swoop down from Canada. Keep in mind that the Adirondack Park is hyoooge. The south-east corner that most people know (Lake George, etc.) is populous and built-up compared to the poverty-stricken, wind-blown and undeveloped north-west section, nearest my home. The wind has done such a number on the Tug Hill side of the park that there is almost no soil on Tug Hill. You have to pour concrete to put in a fencepost. People in the city take concrete for granted. Where I am from, you take enough-soil-for-a-fencepost-hole for granted.

My Poignant Moment of the Week

So, there's lots of things I've been meaning to blog about: my ongoing observation of the heron at my end of Lake Merritt, the preview I went to for A Series of Unfortunate Events (quickly: lesbian movie standard is met, Monty is the gay character, Klaus is the Jesus character), Dolly Parton, and Geocaching. However, this morning in a meeting a colleague who works in Paris told me to check out the great US apology page (for our recent election), and the World's apology-accepted page.

I know you all have probably known about those two pages for a while, since they have been up for a month now, which is 6 years in internet time. But I just discovered them, and it has me choked me up. The eyes peering out from the computer, sorry. Everyone, sorry. Everyone trying to find a place of acceptance of the reality of things, but where we can still hold our heads up and look eachother in the eye. It's heartening.

Old Forge Betrays its Fan Base

You've changed, man!

Your old webcam shot of the canoe put-in spot at the Moose River was so faaayn, I used to visit it and get all mellow. But now you've left it for the covered bridge shot. I can live, but I just wanted you to know, you used to be cool. Ducks, children playing, sunsets on the water... you don't share that with me now. Just that damned covered bridge.

Old Forge is 70 miles south (yes, south) east from the place where I lived from age 0 to 18. I monitor the webcam to see when it's getting dark, when the snow comes, when the ducks leave. My most vivid memory of Old Forge is at age 17 driving there with Pam, a girl I shared classes with from age 9 on. She was a slutty, smart-ass softball pitcher, and we took her Gremlin to see her horrible boyfriend. Their pet name for his penis was Snuffalupagus. We stopped in some gift shop and I shoplifted some pine-resin incense that I still like-- I burn it when I'm homesick. We stopped on the way home for strawberries some farm family was selling on the roadside. The tug hill was all blue on the horizon behind us. Summers at home are heavenly.

Why Am I in This Suitcase and Where are You Taking Me?

From a letter posted by Michael Moore on his website, making the entire US public into a victim of domestic abuse at the hands of GWB's government:

[Y]ou tell him to go to hell... then you walk out the door, taking the kids and gays and minorities with you...

Are we packed separately, or we all in one handbasket?

A Sedate New Permutation of the Lesbian Avengers?

My Bay Area Sappho list (for LGBT women living in the Bay Area) had an announcement today of the revival of a group I never even knew about the first time-- the Artemis Volunteers. It sounds like the partially-assimilated post-entry-level Lesbian Avengers! In our heyday, the Avengers did some of its best work in San Francisco as part of a coalition, essentially putting our "hands to trouble" as it were, being warm bodies in an action or in support work which ultimately served all of those who are marginalized in society, not just women or lesbians.

Not that I need one more thing to do, but I see this as a positive response to the November elections. Gotta applaud them when you find 'em.

A Near Brush With Obscurity

I don't know why, but today I was suddenly convinced my website was a) hosted by Geocities and b) that it had been deleted. By "my website" I mean my private personal collection of things that I don't subject you, my gentle blog reader, to.

Anyway, this confusion was resolved when (after I dried my tears) I Googled "yahoo + geocities + sucks" and found a page of links to Anti-Geocities and Anti-Yahoo sites --- hosted on * Angelfire *. Whereupon I remembered that I use Angelfire, too.

That tells you how often I update my site. Well, anyhoo, it lives. I am glad. Yay.

So, Slovenia Looks Good. Or Canada...

...until the Slovenians give me a work visa.

Read more about the noble Canadian effort to rescue liberals from our grim fate.

I was just in Alaska for ten days-- I can handle any weather the Canadians throw at me.

The Blended One

Eskimo fish ice cream!

Akutaq is "the blended one" in Eskimo Yu'pik language. They put up a sign at the Alaskan Federation of Natives conference-- across the street from the convention center-- some senate candidate's stump-- AKUTAQ 11:30-- the swarm could have stopped traffic (if there was traffic). People walked away with armloads of boxes of cups of the pink frothy yumminess. It is, actually, yummy, if made with whipped cream and not seal lard.

September 15, 2001, Barbara's Vote of Conscience

One of the reasons I still can love this country, that I am represented by Barbara Lee, the solitary vote in Congress against the Iraq war. I found a Mother Jones interview with her about her solitary vote... dated September 20th, 2001. How much has changed since.

I was in DC lobbying with a group of Russian Far East ecological activists and we got a tour of the Congress by a young assistant from Rep. Lee's office. He seemed totally paranoid that we would say something in a tone of Bush-bashing within earshot of a guard. He rather struck fear into our hearts. He used the words "right wing coup" without erring from his deadpan Californian blase'-ness.

He was very excited about the underground mini-metro between the house and the senate. He wasn't a cynical man. And he believes we have undergone a coup.

News from the Lakeside Baptist Church, My Neighbors

Well, the church with which I essentially share a wall has undergone some changes. My apartment building, which previously gave homes to nuns, is full of queers, immigrants, crazy old women and young men fresh out of jail. The church has become noisy with remodeling lately, and it started to look- from the odd groups coming and going helping with the hauling and painting and pounding- that something akin to what happened in the nuns' residence had happened. Well the Berkeley "Regeneration" church that has taken over now that the many "ethnic ministries" housed there have found their own churches.

The Regeneration church is the reason why I thought a rock band was rehearsing in the church on Sunday nights. The guys working in the alley right now told me- with a little embarassment- "yeah, we get pretty loud- does it bother you?" Those are the kinds of neighbors I can deal with. The old saws from the Methodist Hymnal being rehearsed off-key at 9 am-- that was making me hate Christianity all over again. A shame after all those years of detante.

I wonder if their minister will be moving out of his coffee shop office. His book is "The Relevant Church." I can respect that in a title.

P.S. Barry the Heron is avoiding me. I saw his large sweeping wings flapping in silhouette- flying away- as I walked by his post the other night. Figures.

The Heron and the George W. Bush Effigy

Walking home from work yesterday, I stopped to look at the Great Blue Heron that has been fishing at my end of Lake Merritt since the onset of fall. We usually eyeball eachother for a few minutes, taking stock. I'm not a fish, he's not a metaphor. But we get a certain something out of this relationship.

Coming to the conclusion that this was a relationship, I decided to name him, and was in the process of saying names loud (to test their musicality) "Bob the Heron, Bill the Heron," and was probably about to come up with a really clever name when this lit-up musical effigy of George W. Bush rolled into my path on Lakeshore.

I guess the Pants On Fire Mobile is en route between Eugene and Reno. I highly recommend trying to catch a glimpse, if you are in Reno this weekend.

By the way, I have decided to name my bird friend Barry the Heron. May he always fish 1000.

Big Cats Make Me So Happy I Can Forget About Baseball

I am trying to forget about baseball for the time being, since the season ended on such bad footing for the local teams I love, and so I'm spending time perusing this website for hot photos of big pussies, big speckled and striped Russian and Chinese pussies (tigers and leopards).

I think I love the big cats because I have a tabby-stripey girlcat who loves to hunt, especially small objects indoors, though sometimes she likes to hunt big game--pouncing on me, claws extended, when I'm in bed. I don't think she does it to wake me up-- it's just a hit-and-run game. Anyway, I like to know her whereabouts when I'm in bed.

So, I was retelling a great story I heard while I was in Vladivostok this past month about a tiger who ripped off a guy's leg at the knee. I was in bed with my girlfriend. I paused in the story and suddenly noticed... unmoving... two stripey ears perked up over the edge of the bed.

I chased her off, but I don't think I'll be telling the one about the maneating tiger again, not even if she asks really sweetly. My own private predator... the bears are smart, but it's true, the man-eaters are smarter.

My First View of the Pacific From the Left

It is pretty big. I flew longer than I've ever flown in one stretch- 13 hours. Then I flew another two hours here, to Vladivostok. The bay makes the air moist and fresh, when the diesel isn't suffocating you. The air is warm, even though the sky doesn't get light until after 7:30 am. They say the swimming is great.

I have seen Korean graffiti here, and in English "I hate this faking world." I've seen ads for Gold Bond brand tea and Maxim brand coffee.

In the lift you are forbidden to use "fiery things" or to try to "libirate yourself" in case you get stuck. Aside from those restrictions, it's a pretty nice budget hotel.

That is all.