Doggedly searching for the crux of the biscuit.
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It wasn't my own, but it's the Christmas I dream of having when my kids are grown and return home for the holidays.
(Thanks, KJ.)
As of this morning, the sadistic property management goons running the building in which I work are still pumping Christmas music into the bathrooms.
It's too late for Christmas, but maybe you've got a birthday coming up for that special somebody who has everything. The obvious gift, of course, is antibiotics. But if you're looking for something different, how about dead frogs having a threesome? Current bid is a low, low $37.69.
(Thanks, Ben.)
If the numbers here are correct, the party breakdown of military veterans challenging DC incumbents in 2006 is 36 Democrats to 2 Republicans. Interesting. I don't have a roll call, but info on 23 of the Democratic candidates is here, and the site adds that more information is coming soon. DavidNYC has some thoughts on the numbers at Swing State Project, including this:
It's a lot easier to Swift Boat a lone vet in isolation. While I put nothing past today's GOP, it's much harder to slander your opponents when you're talking about dozens and dozens of men and women across the country. And these guys, I can assure you, will fight back when attacked.
Via Alterman, George Clooney pointing out one terribly weak point in fundamentalist Muslim philosophy:
Yeah, I think they believe in what they're doing and that they're going to get seventy virgins after they die -- but, really, who wants seventy virgins? I want eight pros.
Could anything in this world contain greater comedic potential than online personal ads? Perhaps not.
(via Random John)
Scientific American's Top 25 Science Stories of 2005.
National Geographic's Top 10 News Photos of 2005.
Juan Cole's Top 10 Myths About Iraq in 2005.
And on the sillier side:
Only 70 speakers remain, which isn't surprising, given the amount of effort and discipline it must take to learn it.
A Nebraska man has been arrested in central Iowa for allegedly delivering some unwanted Christmas gifts. Reno Tobler, 54, was arrested Thursday in Clive after police caught him lobbing urine bottles into backyards.
[...]
Tobler is a truck driver whose route regularly takes him to the Clive area. He was charged with littering and harassment for allegedly tossing detergent-sized bottles of his urine over fences. Tobler told police that it was a longtime hobby of his to deliver the bottles. Police searched his vehicle and found several other urine-filled bottles ready for delivery.
All these many years I'd thought it was the stork who brought my bottles of magic urine. Another beautiful story from my childhood shattered upon the cruel, jagged rocks of reality. Growing up sucks.
There was a time, a time not so long ago, that I was pretty cocky about the fact that I barely ever got sick. As they say, pride goeth before the fall. I've been sick more in the past year than the previous 10 or 15 combined and all in all, I don't like it one bit. I'm up and out of bed today — at work, even, though a full day might prove a bridge too far. I suppose I could chalk all this up to a combination of approaching 40 and living with the world's most fearsome disease vector, a child in daycare. However, I'm sticking to my original theory that somebody is working roots on me. Whoever you are, please stop. I respect your power and will change my ways.
At some point during the fever-dreamed night, Robust McManlyPants tagged me with the 7x7 meme. [Aside: I have heard some very strange pronunciations of this word recently. It rhymes with scheme or theme, should proper English matter to you. And it should.] He doubted I would respond. Oh McManlyPants of little faith, have I not always been a generous apostropher unto thee?
Seven things to do before I die:
Seven things I cannot do:
Seven things that attract me to blogging:
Seven things I say most often:
Seven books that I love:
Seven movies that I watch over and over again:
Well now, this is tricky, since I don't really watch movies over and over again. The ones I could watch over and over without getting annoyed (which is not the same as my favorite movies):
Seven people to whom I pass the meme:
A couple days before Christmas, my ex-wife emailed to ask whether I'd be signing any gifts to our eight-year-old son from Santa. I said that I wasn't, since he doesn't believe in Santa Claus any longer. Figured I'd just sign them all from Jesus this year. And think how hard it must be to get down a chimney with your hands stretched out and nailed to a cross.
It really is a miracle.
Gene Shalit: not brilliantological.
Just a guess, but I bet Shanghai Daily is the first news organization to use this headline.
The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny
Reuters' Pictures of the Year 2005. I'm partial to #3 and #4.
The General spots one Fellowship of Christian Athletes chapter that needs some remedial training on ethical standards. That they lost the game? Even funnier.
Culled from a comment by chris from boca, a bit of perspective on this high holiday, albeit heavily laden with f-bombs. Every word the truth, but all of us here wish all of you and yours the happiest all the same. Also best of luck to the Iraqi Christians, for whom this Christmas pretty much sucks.
Now go get totally hammered and make an uncomfortable scene. Traditions are important.
Did you hear there was an election in Iraq? There was, you know. And you probably didn't know anything about it due to the perfidious liberal conspiracy to hush it up. Well, there was a perfectly good reason those of us with two brain cells to rub together didn't have much to say about it: an election in and of itself is pretty meaningless. It's the results of an election that matter, yes? And as it turns out, the results aren't particularly fortuitous. In procedural terms:
Iraq's elections were marked by widespread intimidation and coercion by paramilitary groups, experts said Tuesday.
"This election appears to have suffered from very many problems. The reports have become overwhelming," Leslie Campbell, regional director of Middle East and North African programs at the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, told a meeting at the Center for American Progress, a think tank headed by John Podesta, President Bill Clinton's former chief of staff.
Campbell said that during the first parliamentary elections under the new Iraqi constitution last Thursday, election monitors had documented "widespread intimidation by security forces affiliated with one group or another. Especially in the south (of Iraq), there have been many reports of coercion to vote for the 5-5-5 Shiite coalition parties," he said. "In the north, there is no doubt that Kurdish security forces exerted intense pressure."
But hey, this is to be expected in a third-world election. We can't even run fraud-free contests here, so nobody should be surprised at such problems in a country trying to stage its first elections in the midst of a simmering civil war. What are entirely more troubling are the results.
The victory of the Shiite religious coalition in the December 15 election hands power for the next four years to a fanatical band of fundamentalist Shiite parties backed by Iran, above all to the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). Quietly backed by His Malevolence, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, sustained by a 20,000-strong paramilitary force called the Badr Brigade, and with both overt and covert support from Iran's intelligence service and its Revolutionary Guard corps, SCIRI will create a theocratic bastion state in its southern Iraqi fiefdom and use its power in Baghdad to rule what's left of the Iraqi state by force. […]
There isn't any point in looking for silver linings in the catastrophic Iraqi vote. The likely next prime minister, Adel Abdel Mahdi, is a smooth-talking SCIRI thug. His boss, Abdel Aziz Hakim of SCIRI, is the former commander of the Badr Brigade and a militant cleric who has issued bloodthirsty calls for a no-holds-barred military solution to the insurgency. The scores of secret torture prisons by the SCIRI-led Iraqi ministry of the interior will proliferate, and SCIRI-led death squads will start going down their lists of targets. The divisive, sectarian constitution that was rammed down Iraq's throat in October by the Shiite religious bloc will be preserved intact under the new, "permanent government" of Iraq led by SCIRI.
I'd stipulate that theoretically the victory hands power to the theocrats. We've yet to see whether this election results in the formation of a government and, further, whether that government has any sort of stability. Neither result is guaranteed. The two previous links are via Joshua Holland, who adds, "Pick your reality, but remember which side has been right at every turn and which has just run out of epic, earth-democratizing landmark moments to hype." Yeah, nice job with that whole war on Islamofascism, guys. This is turning out just swell.
A disc-shaped piece of ice of unknown origin plunged from the sky onto a golf course near Tokyo on Wednesday, narrowly missing players on the fairway but causing no injuries, police said.
Related news: use ice in case of terrorism, disaster or emergency.
Latest New Orleans dispatch after the cut, this one about living in a city under martial law. Andy says this is about events from October, and that the military presence is somewhat less omnipresent, though still pretty prevalent. Remember: this is an American city with American citizens.
Previous dispatches:
There Is No New Orleans
Mystic Bowling with Tornado Warnings
One Tuba Rescued
So Shoot Me
My friend S is sleeping upstairs. She just got out of jail, having been arrested for trespassing on her own property. When I asked her why she did not call us, she said that the cops told her she was not entitled to a phone call because the city is under martial law.
The current jail is referred to by some as the Amtrak gulag. Since the Orleans Parish Prison was severely flooded during the hurricane, a temporary jail was established in the Amtrak station. I remember seeing the report about its inauguration on the news a couple of weeks after the hurricane, a police officer bragging that they were "open for business." He told the story of their "first customer," a man who drove up to the station thinking he could buy a train ticket. The car he was driving was not his, so he was arrested for driving a stolen car. Until very recently, I have been driving a car that did not belong to me. It did not even belong to someone I knew. At some point, we needed to get out of town. At some point, it became about survival. I know college professors who took boats and trucks, a neurologist who commandeered a public bus, to get themselves and their loved ones to higher and safer ground. I guess we were all lucky that we didn’t get stuck and try to get a train ticket out.
Before S went to sleep, she described the conditions of the jail, and her description confirmed some of what I'd heard. The cells are basically open-topped cages, ringed by razor wire and placed on the concrete where people usually wait for trains. Inmates sleep on the floor with no cot, blanket, or anything else between them and the concrete. The bathroom is left open, facing the guard. S said that the others she spoke to were in for breaking curfew. One woman was an animal rescue worker, also arrested for trespassing. I remembered the words of another friend who was recently arrested, though not imprisoned, for a scuffle with the National Guard. "It is illegal to keep a dog in conditions like that."
Since Katrina wrecked our city, the city has not been ours. There are curfews enforced throughout the city, varying from 8 PM to 2 AM, depending on the neighborhood. Since New Orleans has always been closer to a Latin American than a New York approach to time, it's a situation bound to fail. Many New Orleanians don't even own watches, and now very few have any kind of regular hours to keep them on track. Help a friend in one part of town, then sit down with him for dinner and a beer, and you are likely to end up driving home past curfew, which is what happened to a painter friend of mine the other day. He was pulled over and, lucky for him, warned instead of arrested.
There is such a show of authority throughout the city that one is bound to run up against it sooner or later. There's the DEA, the FBI, law enforcement agents from throughout the country, the National Guard, whose presence is perhaps the most visible with their Humvees and camouflage everywhere one turns, and then there is the mysterious presence of Blackwater Security, the mercenaries who most of us have only heard about as a presence in Iraq, enforcing, but somehow hovering just outside, "the law." While the agencies with three-letter acronyms are easy to spot by the letters on their shirts, Blackwater agents are also pretty obvious. Dressed in solid black, they are visibly and heavily armed. The other day I saw a couple of them enter a house, stay for about forty-five minutes, then come out with another person and a refrigerator which they deposited on the sidewalk. Just what they are doing here is a mystery. Right now, about twenty percent of the population has returned. Crime is practically nonexistent.
During the days after the storm, when people were swimming in their houses and wilting from dehydration in the streets, and when chaos took hold of the city, an authoritative presence was needed desperately. We needed order, some semblance of a central command, and, most of all, food and water. Political bickering continues over whose fault it is that the National Guard showed up far too late, but now that we don't really need them, they are out in droves. They are based in the school where I used to teach – sleeping, eating, living in the school. They are in Jackson Square and on the corner of every major street. Many of them are helpful and congenial. I know a friend who had his flat tire fixed by them. There are rumors that they've cut fallen trees off of houses. But most of the time, they just stand around with their guns, looking bored. And even if there is a good reason for their presence which has not been explained to me yet, it is a most unusual sight to see soldiers in the street of an American city. Having been raised by a fiercely independent family in rural West Virginia, I have an instinctive aversion for such visible, armed authority in a place that is said to be "free."
There are others who are less than enamored with the military presence. My friend J tells of an unpleasant encounter with them. He and his girlfriend ran a self-proclaimed "low-brow" art gallery in the first floor of their Bywater home. When the place was flooded, they gathered the ruined works and piled them on the neutral ground in creative arrangements, titling the whole exhibit "Toxic Art." A posted sign reads: Don't Touch. This Art Could Kill You. Many, including the New Orleans Police Department, have come by to take pictures of it. In one part of the exhibit, J placed about a dozen Styrofoam wig heads he'd found in the wreckage on sticks he had also found. Simple and stark, there is something striking about the bald, mute heads staring out at the passing cars and Guard trucks. He calls it "Field of Silent Screams: An Homage to the Lower Ninth Ward," in honor of the nearby neighborhood which was wrecked by levee breaks during the storm.
One afternoon, a Guardsman came by and began to knock the heads off, one by one. When J protested, the Guardsman said that his men "found it offensive" and "potentially racist." The wig heads are black, as J found them. He did not take kindly to the remark. J told him that the New Orleans Police Department had seen it and even admired it. He could go get them if he wanted, and he’d be happy to make them some coffee on his generator-powered hotplate so they could all discuss the whole topic. A few hours later, the Guard came back with the cops to arrest him.
There are more sinister stories surfacing now, as well. My friend A was trapped in her house for days after the storm, trying to care for two sick family members as well as a couple of others. When she heard the National Guard finally passing by in a boat, she waded out into the water to try to get some ice for her ailing mother. She immediately had four guns pointed at her. "If you come a step closer, we'll shoot," they said, and cocked their guns. Another friend, who lost his teenage son during the flood, was rescuing people from their houses when the Guard detained him and brought him to the police. Luckily, he knew one of the police officers, who asked that he be let go. According to him, he was then told by a Guardsman that if they saw him again, they'd shoot him on the spot. The cops told him there was nothing they could do about it; he'd better just stay inside.
The topic is a tricky one. Many are defensive about their need to feel protected, and their belief that the visible authorities are doing just that. But lately I have felt more threatened walking down the street after dark than I ever had in the eight years that I walked in this dangerous, pre-Katrina city. Walking alone as a woman in such a testosterone-driven place, one becomes aware of the loneliness of these men. I've been leered and stared at, and worse, I have wondered who I would complain to if I were ever intimidated further.
There are some who refuse to be intimidated. A friend told me of a woman who went to her affluent Lakeview neighborhood, now totally destroyed, to see the remains of her house. A Guard posted at the entrance to her street told her she could not go through. "But it's my house. I have to see it," she protested. He said he was sorry, but she could not drive any further. She stomped the pedal and drove ahead, shouting her defiance out the window: “So shoot me.” I would have loved to see the look on the man's face.
The military approach just doesn't make sense here. This is a city that, in its best times, thrives on a messy, crooked approach to life. It is a city that usually starts to get lively close to midnight. It's a city that revels in its excesses and does not believe in placing boundaries around anything. When we first returned, there was barbed wire across many of the streets, a disturbing image to see in one's home. One afternoon I rode my bike through the streets and circumnavigated the barbed wire to survey the neighborhood, check on friends' houses, and document some of what I saw with my digital camera. Across Piety Street, there were several saw horses wrapped with barbed wire blocking the street. A cardboard sign that read "CHEMICAL SPILL" was taped to them. I stopped to take a picture. Almost immediately a white truck pulled up in front of me, and two large men got out. One of them had a T-shirt with the letters DEA over his heart. The other had a badge of some kind, though I can't remember what it said. I think I was distracted by the large gun he had strapped across his chest and that he kept adjusting, as if to make sure I saw it. "Do you think there is really a chemical spill?" asked the armed man.
"I have no idea," I replied.
"I don’t think there is," he said. As I had no clue how to respond, I rolled my bike a little forward so that I could take the shot. The DEA guy stopped me.
"Don't go anywhere just yet," he said. "Do you have some ID on you?" I did. They looked at it together. The gunman read my address aloud as if to remember it.
"What are you doing around here?" one of them asked.
"I'm riding around, checking on friends' houses."
"You look nervous," said the DEA guy.
"I'm not nervous," I said. "I'm just riding around my own city." Thank goodness I restrained from saying what I thought: What the hell are you doing here?
Another car drove past us, and the armed man stopped it. I stood there for a bit while they asked the driver for ID and began to question him. Finally I asked if I was free to go. They said yes and made sure I knew there was a curfew in effect. I told them I was aware of the fact.
I guess I am supposed to accept this, somehow. But everything in me resists it. I can't get used to the sound of helicopters, to being asked for ID in my own city, to being told when I am allowed to walk in the streets. My friend Jimmy thinks they are practicing on us. Practicing to control and occupy a city in our own land. “Remember the helicopters a few months back?” he asks me. Back in the spring, New Orleans was chosen as a location for practicing war games. Helicopters swooped impossibly low, landing on abandoned buildings. A few isolated warehouses were blown up. There was never much explanation as to why we were chosen, but it was a very disconcerting time. Jimmy thinks the games were connected to what he calls the “occupation” now. While no one has officially declared martial law, many aspects of it are being enforced. The fact that the enforcement is random and unannounced makes it even more frightening. Jimmy thinks they want to see how it goes over.
Whatever the reasons, I am not getting used to it. The increase of authority is not making me feel any safer. Maybe that's because, as often happens with power, it is going to people's heads. Lately the image of a retired elementary school teacher being beaten by the New Orleans Police Department has been broadcast across the country. What is almost as alarming as the violence itself is the reaction to it. Many here are debating whether or not the man was actually intoxicated, as the police claim he was. But whether or not he was drunk – and the man swears that he wasn't – has nothing to do with justifying the clearly excessive use of force the officers used. Granted, the police force has been stretched far beyond human capacity these weeks. But police spokesmen are not saying this, are not offering any excuse, in fact, for the violence against an unarmed citizen. They continue to defend their actions in the media, and verge on gloating that the witnesses for their defense are none other than the FBI. There is nothing comforting in this. Such police brutality does not, sadly, seem to be an isolated incident. I have heard from two different friends of people they know being beaten and harassed by policemen. Both people in question, like the retired schoolteacher, and like the two friends intimidated by the Guard during the flood, are black. Whether this is a factor or not, there is no comfort now in knowing there are likely more armed authorities than inhabitants.
The other day I listened again to the lyrics of Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row" and felt that it was distressingly close to home. Perhaps it should be the soundtrack to the current post-Katrina New Orleans. "And the riot squad, they're restless, they need somewhere to go…" A few nights ago, I played it for Jimmy when he was over for a visit, and he was struck by it, too. Later he told me that after he walked home, careful not to break curfew, he decided to listen to it again. He'd noticed the Guard at the end of his street as he walked home. And he got an idea. He pulled out his boom box and decided to blast "Desolation Row" from his balcony toward their post. And then something magical happened, he said. They left within minutes. Perhaps we've finally found the solution to taking the city back.
"At midnight, all the agents and the superhuman crew, come out and round up everyone that knows more than they do…"
I don't know about you, but if I caught a fish with two mouths, I sure as hell wouldn't be putting it in my own mouth. Just looking at it gives me the jibblies.
...women are turned on by monkey porn. Speaking of which, I have to get me some of these stamps.
On a (sort of) similar note, this is an interesting and surprising datapoint in the nature/nurture debate: when given human toys, male and female vervet monkeys each gravitate toward the same "gendered" toys that human children do.
While John Gibson's and Bill O'Reilly's "War on Christmas" truly exists only in their own cavernous noggins, let me go ahead and own up: I really, really, really hate this time of year. Oh, I like winter. I love the cold weather and fires, the lights and tinsel are pretty, even the kitschy turbo-displays are amusing, and I'm always happy to get a few days off of work, but Christmas? Humbug. Why? Mostly it's the water-torture effect of hearing the same 15 songs everywhere I go FOR A SOLID MONTH EVERY GODDAMNED YEAR OF MY LIFE. They started piping them in to the bathroom at work just after Thanksgiving, for crying out loud. I can't even sit down and take a crap without my chestnuts roasting on an open fire.
I know this is a touch neurotic but, you know, it's my own neurosis and I'm sticking to it. Screw you, Bing Crosby. Anyhow, I actually like my family and my in-laws, so the holidays aren't remotely oppressive to me on that level. My humbuggery is mostly based around having "Rocking Around the Christmas Tree" or some other bit of treacly crap getting stuck in my head for hours at a time (dammit, I just did it again - aaaughhh, get it out! Get it out!). I honestly don't begrudge anybody celebrating Christmas however they see fit, though this insistence that private merchants use specific greetings is just downright bizarre. Apparently, Merry Christmas is the new fuck you.
So in this spirit, I'd like to note that boozy ol' Chris Hitchens has taken a short break from pointing out my deep personal love for Saddam Hussein to pen one barn-burningly grinchy column at Slate comparing December in America to every day in North Korea. 9/11 may have pushed Hitch over the edge of contrarian warmongering lunacy, but he's still one hell of a writer when he's annoyed. Behold.
[C]ompulsory worship and compulsory adoration can indeed become a touch wearying to the spirit. Our Christian enthusiasts are evidently too stupid, as well as too insecure, to appreciate this. A revealing mark of their insecurity is their rage when public places are not annually given over to religious symbolism, and now, their fresh rage when palaces of private consumption do not follow suit. The Fox News campaign against Wal-Mart and other outlets—whose observance of the official feast-day is otherwise fanatical and punctilious to a degree, but a degree that falls short of unswerving orthodoxy—is one of the most sinister as well as one of the most laughable campaigns on record. If these dolts knew anything about the real Protestant tradition, they would know that it was exactly this paganism and corruption that led Oliver Cromwell—my own favorite Protestant fundamentalist—to ban the celebration of Christmas altogether.
No believer in the First Amendment could go that far. But there are millions of well-appointed buildings all across the United States, most of them tax-exempt and some of them receiving state subventions, where anyone can go at any time and celebrate miraculous births and pregnant virgins all day and all night if they so desire. These places are known as "churches," and they can also force passersby to look at the displays and billboards they erect and to give ear to the bells that they ring. In addition, they can count on numberless radio and TV stations to beam their stuff all through the ether. If this is not sufficient, then god damn them. God damn them everyone.
Love it.
...but I can clearly see you're nuts. (NSFW, though no-one would mistake your intent as prurient.)
Thanks for the tip, Ben.
Pursuant to this comment, my curiosity has now been piqued. The Beastie Boys song "B-Boys Makin' With the Freak Freak" contains a brief sample of a black comedian (Flip Wilson? Rudy Ray Moore?) exclaiming, "If I knew it was gonna be THAT kind of party, I'd have stuck my dick in the mashed potatoes!"
Despite my best googling attempts, I can't find any background on the sample, beyond other people asking the same question. Somebody please help me sleep at night and source this, along with the setup. Somebody? Anybody?
So the results of the Iraqi election are mostly in and whaddayaknow? It's Islamic fundamentalism for everybody!
Iraq is disintegrating. The first results from the parliamentary election last week show the country is dividing between Shia, Sunni and Kurdish regions. Religious fundamentalists now have the upper hand. The secular and nationalist candidate backed by the US and Britain was humiliatingly defeated.
The Shia religious coalition has won a total victory in Baghdad and the south of Iraq. The Sunni Arab parties who openly or covertly support armed resistance to the US are likely to win large majorities in Sunni provinces. The Kurds have already achieved quasi-independence and their voting reflected that. The election marks the final shipwreck of American and British hopes of establishing a pro-Western secular democracy in a united Iraq.
Islamic fundamentalist movements are ever more powerful in both the Sunni and Shia communities. Ghassan Attiyah, an Iraqi commentator, said: "In two and a half years Bush has succeeded in creating two new Talibans in Iraq."
Well played, Dubya! The march toward the inevitable civil war proceeds apace! And the biggest winner of all is, of course, Iran. Now, to all the right-wing keyboard commandos who just days ago were loudly and predictably castigating all of us commie, Islamofascist symps for not cheering the election loudly enough (as they have done at every step of this entire foot-shooting exercise), this would be exactly why, you halfwits. And I'd like to cede the floor briefly to Jim Henley:
1. My attitude is not the problem. YOUR POLICIES are the problem. The people who actually have the power to conduct policy are the problem.
2. Anyone who wants to prate about their sincerity and their positive outlook as if it somehow outweighed the foreseeable results of their own goddam hubris, while the Administration they've trusted and its supporters to whom they've cleaved assert literally unlimited power over what we used to be able to call citizens, those people need to go fuck themselves.
In 2002 I was practically begging people, as sweetly as possible, to comprehend the likely outcome of this folly. I'm not going to spend 2006 trying to impress people who wouldn't listen then with how chipper I can be, or sniffling my pious wishes that their harebrained schemes had worked out a little better. Nor am I going to sit back while the President doubles down on a bad bet and treat the onlookers egging him on as if they were worth taking seriously. (Two words: "New Prague.")
My deal for all of these people hasn't changed: Learn something and I'll take you seriously. You don't need to apologize. You don't need to genuflect. God knows you don't need to strike a particular attitude. (I would recommend losing one.) All you gotta do is catch on and start writing that way.
Indeed, though I'm not holding my breath waiting for anything in that last paragraph. If you haven't caught on yet, you aren't blessed with the brains God gave a hackysack and I'd settle for you just sitting down and drinking a great big steaming cup of STFU. Not that I'm expecting that either.
So when I see the heads of otherwise mostly rational people bobbing up and down in Bush's lap, repeating yet another iteration of the "we can't afford to lose" mantra (as best they can with their mouths full), I just want to throw up my hands and go back to blogging nothing but exploding whales and penile self-amputations. Because the "we can't afford to lose" schtick isn't just meaningless, it's completely fricking backwards. We. Have. Already. Lost. What we can't afford is to keep throwing more dollars and lives down on the three card monte table.
Ah, what the hell. Go ahead. Keep cheering until the lack of oxygen makes everything look all glittery and pretty. And slap one of these on the back of your car.
...this is going to be the coolest temple ever. Also, I'm pretty sure this woman invented the Slinky.
Less than an hour left on this auction.
You are about to bid on a real feline! This cat was found during an unexpected venture into a crawlspace underneath a house that was built in 1946. The cat has obviously been dead for many years but has been well preserved in a cool, dark, dry environment. The fuzzy stuff in the pictures is insulation that the cat was tangled in, not fur or part of the cat. There is no fur to be found on the cat, other than the short whiskers you can see on the face. The skin is dry and hard and holds the cat together. The front left leg is broken but still hanging in place. The tail and other limbs are in tact and strong. The cat doesn't smell or have any visible live worms or bugs in it. I've left it in the condition which it was found in, but I'm sure it would clean up nicely.
The bid's at just $51 as of right now. Pictures at the link, of course.
My god, they've found a way to batter and deep-fry bacon! Every day, life on Earth gets a little more wonderful.
Why would you read a right-wing, pro-war, nutjob "news" site like NewsMax? Because it's the only place you'll learn how to viciously fuck up entire gangs of bikers, skinheads, and martial arts experts using nothing but paperclips.
Good to see Herbert Kornfeld is still keeping it real.
He's feeling the magic of Christmas.
A family found an owl in their Christmas tree, and the bird apparently had a little hooter in him. A small screech owl was found in a live Christmas tree that a family bought. They kept the tree for five days before they decided to decorate it. When they did, they found the owl. Animal control officers came to get the owl, and when they did, they made a shocking discovery!
"I kept smelling him and smelling him, saying 'What is that odor'. It was lying there as happy as can be," says one animal control officer who was at the scene. "Curiously enough, the owl's feathers smelled very, very potently like marijuana," says Animal Control Officer Dering. "They examined the owl, looked at its eyes, big owl eyes, and the owl was, in the vernacular, stoned."
Blood tests confirmed the owl was flying high, on marijuana. They checked him out, fed him and named him Cheech. He'll be released in a few days.
He does look pretty squinty-eyed in the picture.
(via Monkeyboy)
To all the self-described "small-l libertarians" who voted for Bush: try paying attention, okay? Your taxes are the least of your worries.
If the concept of fantasy football makes you groan and roll your eyes, you'll want to skip this one.
After a dismal 2-5 start, The Mustard Truck! went 5-1 over the second half of the season for a 5th place finish in our 14-team league. I won in the first round of the playoffs and go up against the regular-season champ this weekend. But that has nothing to do with the question. I must declare one player to hold for next season and am calling on the collective wisdom of the intarwebs to help me decide.
The decision comes down to Rudi Johnson, Domanick Davis, Cadillac Williams, and Anquan Boldin (with the mighty Samkon Gado being the crazy pick that I'll eventually regret not keeping). What say you, almost strangers?
As always, Pharyngula is your one-stop shop for hot squid-on-squid action.
Fine, fine, we believe that you're batshit insane. Now you can stop trying so hard.
okthxcyal8r,
apostropher
The narwhale's bizarre unicorn-style tusk appears to have more uses than we knew.
Nweeia and his colleagues learned that the narwhal's oversize tooth possesses a rare combination of extraordinary strength and extreme flexibility. It turns out that an 8-foot (2.4-meter) tusk, seemingly rigid, can bend 1 foot (30 centimeters) in any direction.
The team also found compelling evidence that the tusk may be a hydrodynamic sensory organ that contains an extensive nerve system and gathers valuable information for survival in Arctic waters. Researchers say the tusk's nerve system could detect temperature, pressure, motion, and chemical-solution gradients, such as differences in salinity and water particles that would indicate the presence of certain fish prey. The tusk also may possess tactile abilities, perhaps allowing narwhals to identify and communicate with one another through tapping.
"There isn't any other tooth like this, not even remotely close," said Nweeia, the research team's principal investigator and a Harvard School of Dental Medicine clinical instructor.
In other whale news, killer whales have been discovered to be the Arctic's most toxic animals.
The marine mammals carry distressingly high levels of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), pesticides, and brominated flame-retardants.
"This new killer whale research reconfirms that the Arctic is now a toxic sink," said Brettania Walker, toxics officer with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) International Arctic Programme. "Chemicals in everyday products are contaminating Arctic wildlife."
Considering how remote this region is from the areas where these chemicals are used (and the fact that PCBs were mostly phased out in the 1980s), this is a very bad sign.
Having now met me in person, Ogged vouches for my normality:
The apostropher was another surprise, just because he seemed so damn normal. I guess I was expecting him to show up in a t-shirt with a gruesome scene pictured on the front, and the entire internet in his back pocket, but, in fact, he seems like the kind of guy you'd let babysit your kids. Seriously.
He can't say I didn't warn him.
"Signs that a child might be playing this game include: inexplicable bruises and marks on the throat, redness of the eyes, locked bedroom doors, frequent severe headaches, disorientation after spending time alone and finding shoelaces, belts, ropes and leashes tied in strange knots."
Bill O'Reilly is completely full of shit.
Update: And bonkers!
O'REILLY: Now, this is a conservative city, Richmond. I mean, this is not Madison, Wisconsin, where you expect those people to be communing with Satan up there in the Madison, Wisconsin, media.
Communing with Satan? What the hell is wrong with this guy? Somebody check his meds.
The latest NOLA dispatch from my friend Andy is after the cut. She says it feels dated to her, but I think it's important to record the non-official history of what's happening down there. One of the projects she was working on when Katrina ravaged the city was a literary and arts magazine called Meena.
The word "meena" means port, or port-of-entry, in Arabic, and that is exactly what we would like Meena to be: a port between our cities, our countries, our languages, our cultures. "We" are a group of writers and artists based in the port cities of New Orleans and Alexandria but from all over the United States and Egypt (and beyond) who want to share our work with each other and with you.
Much of our first issue deals with conflict or, more specifically, war. It is a difficult topic to avoid, and we thought it might be best addressed from the start. We agree with Dr. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, founder and director of PROTA (Project of Translation from the Arabic), who says if we read one another, we will be less likely to kill one another. It is our sincere hope that Meena is a port to enter one another's worlds, one that can help us understand and, perhaps even more importantly, hear each other. There may be an ocean between us, but there need not be a wall.
Understandably, the logistics of the project have become much more difficult since the summer. Still, the first issue is out and subscription information is here.
Previous dispatches:
There Is No New Orleans
Mystic Bowling with Tornado Warnings
One Tuba Rescued
Refrigerators line the streets, decorated like envelopes and presents. As in the one painted black with the red lettering: “For W.” On the side, a quote scrawled: “You’ve done a great job Brownie,” recalling Bush congratulating former FEMA chief Michael Brown while tens of thousands of New Orleans’ citizens waned in the heat, five days after the hurricane. Random graffiti is written on others, but most are just blank white boxes with tape around them, too toxic to open. A month of subtropical heat and a flood are not ideal conditions for refrigeration equipment. In some parts of the city they lie next too each other, like tombstones, on the neutral ground.
Many of the basics of everyday life in post-Katrina New Orleans, symbols of normality and domesticity we normally take for granted, have gone awry. A living room sits by the highway, ashen with the dust of the flood, arranged in a circle as if for a chat.
Most of the houses themselves are marked with spray-painted symbols indicating that a rescue or an attempt at it had been made. Large Xs mark the doors or sidings, numbers and letters around it to say if a person or pet has been found. It’s like a kind of rescue voodoo, cryptic and ominous. Occasionally, there are markings that take no deciphering. One house in the Treme reads, in addition to the date and troop that came to the house and the fact that no bodies were found: “One Chicken Rescued.” At the nursing home near my apartment in the lower French Quarter, a magic marker on the door reads: “3 Bodies in Courtyard off L4.” And some have added their own graffiti. “U Loot U Dead” reads one house. Another in the Marigny tells in no uncertain terms that the pet that lives there is with its owner: “Take my dog & I’ll shoot.” On Saint Claude Avenue, a group of houses have one word – “HELP!” – spray-painted in black over and over.
The flood lifted things up and placed them down in the wrong places, and even those of us whose houses were not flooded have found that our lives have also been tossed up and set down wrong. Even the light is different, the broken trees no longer offering shade. The sound of helicopters is nearly constant, some of them hovering so low they drown out conversation. Along the river, a huge white boat with a red cross replaces the Carnival Cruise ships.
But those of us who have returned love the city and want to see it live again. Sometimes just breathing here has felt like a kind of victory. As some people here say, “We’d rather die here than live somewhere else.” We try to do what we can to help people return. When my friend Jimmy calls and sees the city for the first time since the storm, I listen to his grief and try to comfort him, telling him things will get better. He is dealing with his refrigerator. He plans to turn the thermostat down overnight before he cleans it. “Do you think maggots freeze?” he asks. I don’t see why they wouldn’t. I meet another friend at Molly’s bar to commiserate and share what news we’re getting. At one point in our conversation, a woman walks up and asks if she can take our picture. She wants to prove to her family that people are actually here.
It’s true that talking to people outside of the city shows how little people know about life here. It seems people think we are either wiped off the map, dealing in hand-to-hand combat with looters or swimming through toxic sludge. In fact, it is less dramatic. For those of us who were fortunate enough to have a place to return to, the problems are dealing with everyday life, letting the scope of the damage sink in, trying to come to terms with how the life we fled is not the one we are coming back to.
Thankfully, the garbage men are coming around regularly in the Quarter, a luxury not shared by everyone in the city. The other night, around 2 AM, I heard the familiar squeak and break of the truck and was oddly comforted by the recognition. Then I heard the whistle. My heart sank. These were not New Orleans’ garbage men. The garbage men here have a call, like tropical birds or tribesmen. A long hoot or a double fluting of the throat somehow communicate with the driver to stop or slow down, etc. There is nothing like it. I’ve pointed it out to friends who visit. Now there is the usual, standard whistle. I also think I heard a “Hey! Hey!” and thought I would cry.
Sending or receiving mail is both an incomprehensible and unattainable goal. Like sending a post card from a foreign country, one must acquiesce to the fact that the act is largely symbolic. Your return may precede the postcard, if the postcard arrives at all. But you tried. The problem is when you really want to send or receive something. Like a movie. As there are no movie rental places open – Khaled and I still have the six films we rented when we planned to stay for the hurricane – we haven’t been able to distract ourselves from our reality with films. When we thought we had mail service again, I thought I’d found the solution in joining Netflix and having movies sent to us. I lovingly filled my queue with a variety of titles we could look forward to. What I did not realize was that that joy-filled moment of seeing the postman for the first time since the disaster was a singular experience. He came once, and that was it. Apparently, the postal service has 20 percent of the staff it needs. I get hopeful emails telling me the next movie is on its way. But they never arrive.
Things simply don’t make sense. I have felt this way traveling in “third world” countries: Central America, Brazil, Egypt, where sometimes making a phone call can be a baffling experience. But there at least, I could blame it on a language I did not know well or at all. But we speak the same language here. It just doesn’t help.
Since our refrigerator died soon after we cleaned it, we’ve had to keep a constant supply of ice in the coolers. The summer is lasting well into October, and things don’t stay cold for long. When we first came back to live in the city a few weeks ago, one of the first things we did was try to figure out where to get ice. The grocery stores were not yet open, and there were no other visible outlets for it. We headed toward the wide white tents we’d noticed along the river on Decatur Street in the Quarter. But we didn’t have to get too close to see the signs posted on the fence around them saying NO PUBLIC SERVICE. I also noticed a lot of large white trucks with the words Incident Catering on the side. A catering company for “incidents"? Is that how the hurricane is referred to, as an “incident"?
I went up to a badged and uniformed sentinel standing near the entrance and asked him where the public might go to get ice.
“The public?” he responded.
“Well, yes, you know, the people who actually live here.” He looked surprised, as if it had not occurred to him that people lived here, then he walked over to ask another uniformed man the question. The other did a kind of shrug, and the first man shook his head at us. We walked away, puzzled and iceless.
A while later, we saw two guys carrying a pizza box. We’d seen people with pizza boxes a couple of other times, and it was an odd sight. Where on earth was there an open pizza joint? We asked them where they got it, and they said that locals with proper ID were apparently entitled to one free pizza from a Domino’s truck on Iberville Street. They also told us they had heard there was a Salvation Army on Canal Street that might have ice. We got our pizza, headed to Canal, and found the Salvation Army set up in front of the Sheraton Hotel. But they were there to serve individual meals, give individual bottles of water, not bags of ice.
Still, every day gets a little better. Just the other morning I woke to the sound of church bells, and it was like the return of a long lost friend. For many years, when I have not had to wake to an alarm, I have savored the moments in bed when I could wait to hear the church bells to know what time it was and face the day. Since returning, the absence of them had saddened my heart.
And there are other, odd manifestations of hope. Yesterday, while walking along Esplanade Avenue, I saw a woman carrying a tuba. I remembered one of the most powerful images I’d seen in that horrible week following the hurricane when the city’s suffering was televised but not alleviated. Three black men walked away from the camera on the highway, trying to find a way out of the city. The one in the middle was a huge man with a tuba. To see a large black man with a tuba in New Orleans was once a common, wonderful sight, a sign of the music and celebration that marked our life. In that context, of course, it meant something else entirely. It meant survival. For this man, the tuba had to come with him if he was to go on. The woman on Esplanade Avenue told me that she was going to musicians’ houses to save their instruments. I imagined her adding a mark to the rescue voodoo to say as much. One Tuba Rescued.
The Red Cross recently set up at the corner of North Rampart and Esplanade, in a field at the edge of the Quarter. Here you can get your shots if you haven’t done that yet, and pick up ice, water, and a variety of useful items that change day to day: mops, bleach, hand sanitizer, rubber gloves, meals that need no electricity to heat. Each day I walk through the line alongside cars and the occasional bicycle or electric wheelchair to get my rations. Some of the water is in cans that look like beer. The black words “DRINKING WATER” are printed on the silver can, along with the logo for Anheuser-Busch. One day I got a real shock when they gave out Trump Ice, water bottled by Donald Trump with his face and family crest on the label. I just don’t know where to file this in my head. I store it under my stairs with the other jugs, occasionally catching a glimpse of small Trump faces staring out at me from the bottles lined up in a row. Food not Bombs has also set up in a park on Frenchmen Street, giving out free meals and, apparently, medical help in small stalls created from siding and blue tarp. Pup tents are scattered across the grass where the Berkeley-based group presumably sleeps.
Such efforts are comforting. They tell us that people know we are here, that they want to help us. This is not a fact we will ever take for granted again. One of the most helpful efforts has been the United Broadcasters of New Orleans, groups of radio stations and personalities who broadcasted through the disaster and continue to do so, without any advertising whatsoever. In addition to call-in shows in which people can voice questions and concerns about housing, jobs, medical services, water and sewerage systems, etc., there are also public announcements to direct people to the proper channels for help. One such recurring message asks: Do you feel you can’t go on? Has the impact of the storm made your life seem unlivable? The gist of it is that there is help and one need not feel alone or consider suicide as an option. But something about the slow, serious voice of the male announcer and the repetition of the question sometimes sends me into an emotional tail spin.
Then there are the Christian pamphlets being given out, along with small copies of the New Testament entitled The Gift. One pamphlet is intended for children. Its title is Do You Wonder Why? and asks if the reader wonders why bad things like fire and flood happen to people. There are badly drawn images of firemen, floodwater and drowning boats. The children are depicted carefully—black, white, Asian—to represent a multicultural world. They are all crying and sad. The pamphlet simply and straight-forwardly explains that bad things happen to people because we are separated from God. If we had not sinned, God would not have to punish us. Essentially, it is somehow our own fault. Somehow this is meant to comfort children.
Part of being here means to try to counteract the negative messages and hopelessness, to fill the city with life again, with the beautiful sensual pleasures our city has always offered. At the moment, it is essentially sensual damage control, but we do our best. I ride my bike around the city and light incense on corners. A pizza place on Decatur Street has finally opened and offered free drinks to locals on opening night. Local poet and organizer Dave Brinks reinstituted the Thursday night poetry readings at the Gold Mine on Dauphine Street, and the opening night turned into a three hour marathon of readings, camaraderie and revelry.
We are all trying to do our part. Khaled and I discovered that our disaster food stamp cards are accepted at a Middle Eastern grocery store about a half hour’s drive away. In August, we had planned to roast a lamb and have a feast and party for my birthday, September 2nd. Needless to say, there was no party. But why not have one now? So a friend drove us out to the grocery store, and I used up the rest of the money on my card and some on Khaled’s to buy a small lamb and all the fixings. Khaled spent nearly two days cooking, and I called the friends who we know are in town. We planned the party to start at 7 PM, keeping in mind that the curfew is midnight. At 6:56, there was no sign of anyone. It is not unusual to be late in New Orleans, but we wondered if people just weren’t in the mood.
Around 7:15, there was a rush of guests. The feast was laid out, and there were reunions and even meetings of new friends. Poets, painters, teachers, musicians, all of us gathered in one room. I poured red wine and distributed it in Red Cross cups, the kind with the paper handles to put your thumb and finger through that you get when you give blood. There was laughter, hugs, recounting of survivals and evacuations, and there was a tremendous amount of eating and drinking. While the apartment still has many missing windows, it felt like the old days, abuzz with life and revelry. Somewhere late into the evening, a group began to gather by the window. There was a huge column of smoke rising from a fire. A pit formed in our collective stomach. Many of us stared, numbed and disbelieving. Another part of the city was being destroyed.
A while later, two friends returned with the news that it was a house with no one in it. It had dampened our moods, but it wouldn’t shut us down. I pulled out a bottle of champagne. I had bought it for the birthday party, and rescued it from the horrors of the refrigerator, the only thing I did not throw away. I wiped it down with bleach and water and kept it on ice these weeks. Who knew if it was still good? If it did, it was a true Katrina survivor. It would have witnessed the horror and abandonment that went on inside that fridge and still kept its effervescence. Sure enough, the cork popped off and we passed around the bottle so everyone could get a taste. Then we toasted our lives and our continued survival, grateful to be home.
