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.

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.