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.'