Time out

Weary. Tired. Hate my job. Hate not having options. Hate not doing more writing. Hate being overweight. Discouraged. Disfigured. Same old music in my headphones. Protesting a war that’s coming anyway. Will see a grand king of an author Tuesday, leaving me to inevitable fits of comparison and low self-esteem. Worn down by this push from an invisible taskmaster to keep going: You aren’t good enough. No one will want to read you. You are a copy artist, a thief at the foot of titan minds.

A drill sergeant of the soul screaming at this aspiring writer.

I feel terrible for my wife and my co-workers, who never know which version of me they’ll get in the morning. The cranky one. The beacon of despair. The silent, thoughtful nice guy. The jokester. More archetypes than a pre-millennial boy band, all wrapped up in jeans, street hikers, and a black rain jacket.

Song of the Day

“Sax and Violins,” by Talking Heads.

David Byrne is my co-pilot. And his karma ran over your dogma.

If you ever get too full of yourself, bust out TH’s “Sand in the Vaseline” and dance when no one is looking. I so need an iPod for my long slingshot from Seattle to Amsterdam in the end of March.

Today’s Word: Decide

From One Word

You make a choice constantly. Even when you don’t, you do. All the microscopic selections you pick throughout the day. Whether to do yoga, to have toast and not that apple for breakfast. Five more minutes of sleep? The hidden calculus of everything, leading up the exact moment when you rammed your car through the crosswalk and into the child, who also made all the decisions to run into the middle of street, not taking cues from the warning light. Choices. And decisions.

Missing persons

Before I went to sleep, I remembered what I forgot.

With all this worry about terrorist attacks, the French language and Super Bowl ads, I forgot that tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians will be killed or displaced when the war begins.

As you can imagine, it’ll be a humanitarian disaster. However, I found a couple groups that look like they will be there to try to ease the pain. If you have a couple extra bucks, consider passing it their way.

*UNICEF

*World Food Program

The grass is always greener…

There’s a bit of a brouhaha going on right now in the ol’ Letters to the Editor department. If you haven’t heard of “Astrotrufing” you soon will. Apparently, some GOP voters have banded together to start writing letters to newspapers supporting Bush’s policies. They use the same key phrases in each letter, trying to drive a point home, and they blanket newspapers all over the country with the same type of letter, whether it be on the economy or Iraq or Bush’s leadership.

Democrats out on the Web are pissed, viewing the move as an dirty little campaign, a low-scale PsyOp trick to get pro-Bush letters into the Letters to the Editor section of the paper.

You can get a Democrat-centric rundown of all the action up to now here. I picked this site because it represents a good example of the Democratic hue and cry over the astroturfing that's been cropping up lately.

With that, I have just one question for the anti-astroturf squad out there.

Aside the political partisanship, what's the difference between what I do through Amnesty International and what someone does when they get a template to write on behalf of something they believe in?

Amnesty International, the Nobel Prize-winning human-rights group, asks members to write letters to foreign leaders to release prisoners of conscience (opposition group leaders, writers, ordinary folks in the wrong place at the wrong time). To help you out, Amnesty gives you a name, an address, some general background on the prisoner, and tips how to address the letter. If you need more help, Amnesty even gives you a guide. There you go.

A template. A group effort. An organization with an agenda. Sound familiar?

How is astroturfing different from letter campaigns to save doomed TV shows? Or the whales? How is this different from MoveOn.org sending me an e-mail to contact my Senators on something related to the coming Iraq war?

Okay, one more practical reason to give the anti-astroturfers the hairy eyeball: When you get to the heart of it, it’s pretty rude for them to ride in on their high horse, telling opinion page editors how to run their letters section, especially when a lot of anti-war letters are starting to appear. You can’t have it both ways. What they want to have happen, stopping astroturf, smacks a bit of vigilante censorship covered with a dollop of self-righteousness.

That thinking offends me because I used to be an opinion page editor, and let me tell you, you start flushing letters based on certain political affiliations and I recommend buying a good umbrella for all the shit that's about to come your way. The astroturfed letters you are getting may be canned like cat food, but if it’s coming from your local readership, you better run it. As for the out-of-town stuff, decent editors can weed it out until they are desperate to fill space. Editors are also clever with balancing acts, running a couple pro-Bush letters with anti-Bush ones. Opinion page editors are usually tapped into the community…give them a break, or the benefit of the doubt.

Plus when you think about it, the whole thing reeks of a trap. Run the letters and you get crap from Democrat readers. Don’t, and the public finds out, and you get hammered with the “liberal media” tag. Oh, well. That’s democracy in action, people.

So, I don’t care. Write your letter, pick your side, work in teams to create those memes (hey, I like that). Again, it’s termite activism, trying to find a new way around an old medium. In the meantime, let the editors do their job.

Today’s Word: Butterfly.

From One Word, again…dodgy grammar. *Sigh*

Wow. Okay. I see that woman who sat in a tree for a couple years to make sure the tree wouldn’t be removed by loggers. I see an insect at the pinnacle of its life cycle, radiant with color and chaotic agility. It’s a metaphor for that lies beneath, what you can become. So there’s your amateur psychology for today, kids.

Be prepared

Just a warning. I'm going to get grim. I mean, way grim. Grim like Nick Cave opening for Leonard Cohen at a concert full of war widows, terminal AIDS patients and crying girls who just watched their kittens get run over by a truck.

Okay, you’ve been warned.

Maybe it's my nihilism coming back into perigee. Maybe it's the pervading gloom of non-stop clouds in a Seattle winter. Maybe it because part of me, that savage animal which likes to sublet my soul and is bored with all talk and no action regarding Iraq (Christ, if you are going to attack them, do it already and change the headlines).

War is coming. I found myself watching highlights of last night’s Big Speech and I stared deep into the black pits of eyes belonging to a man who verbally swaggers when he talks about torture and the killing of terrorists. Here is a man, guided by the hands of a failed king, to kill for peace, to plunder for prosperity, to lead by defying his friends. It’s all just a matter of time. A man who believes so much in Jesus is ready to go Revelation on us.

And retribution will follow. It may happen first on the verdant plains of England, maybe the shifting sands of Saudi Arabia, the holy history grounds of Israel or the erotically intertwined streets of Paris, but it’ll happen. Despite what the inoculated man in the expensive suit behind the podium tells you, it’ll come and you won’t always be protected. Death will come in the spores of bio-weapons, the clouds of chemical agents or the irradiated dragon teeth of a suitcase nuke.

Whatever it is, I’m close to not caring about the possibilities of weapons of mass destruction anymore. Sure, I live in a city that's a possible target for terrorist attacks, and nothing ruins your day like smallpox blisters or the involuntary convulsions due to VX, but I'm reaching a point where I don't care.

Part of it comes from the ongoing mystery of the Anthrax killer. Remember that fellow (or madam, who knows)? Killed a few postal workers and at least one in Florida. Sent anthrax (fever, cough, then death) to Democrats. And then, disappeared into the ether. People dead, part of our government crippled, a vital part of our infrastructure used as a delivery device and, poof, no one caught. If we can't get the person or people responsible when it happens here in such a small attack, how can we take on a suicide bomber willing to release a vial of Sarin in our airports or at the next All-Star game?

Another part of it comes from my childhood, recalling some failed actor talking tough with 20,000 missiles under his belt, joking about the bombing of Russia happening in five minutes. Oh, that jokester. I suppose I’ve been waiting for the end for quite a while now. And in a fit of juvenile-sized Stockholm Syndrome, I took comfort in understanding that the one side would get wiped out if it tried a pre-emptive strike. After all, thanks to technology, we could figure out the origin of launched missiles and send something to the return address promptly. Hey, we’d all go out together. Now, with this asymmetry, no one knows when and where or even who. When the next major strike hits, it’s going to be a matter of cleanup, not protecting the castle walls.

I don't believe my government will protect me. I don't want to bunker myself and stock antidotes. I suppose it was easier during MAD, thinking that a nuclear blast would kill you instantly. Here, with bio and chem weapons, even dirty nukes, you linger with enough time to tune in that the government or rescue teams won't get to you in time and you'll die by degrees, written off as an acceptable loss, a learning exercise.

Before 9/11, I carried the belief that eventually there's going to be a kind of pocket warfare in neighborhoods and large cities. Thanks to the Web and the non-stop engines of invention and bitterness, people can figure out how to make crude explosives and even basic chemical weapons to get back at the neighbor or attack the home belonging to "the wrong kind of element." And it’s not all that hard. Give some household chemicals, a copy of “Chemistry for dummies” or say, a Costco card and a copy of “The Anarchist's Cookbook” and I can level your local shopping mall, “Fight Club” style, faster than it took God to create the world.

George Case, in the slim and remarkable "Silence Descends," imagines war with nuclear weapons in south Asia as a way of settling first millennium grudges with second millennium technology. It doesn’t matter who has what, it's why we think we need them.

And that’s why I’m terrified the most of what’s coming next. Why countries and despots are armed with such weapons has never been asked. Even the bare ounces of reason that all the protesters, letter writers, scientists, authors, experts and concerned souls pushed forward in marches and missives for peace are going completely ignored. We have lost all reason.

War is coming, and so will retaliation. With a foreign policy like this, the best I can hope for being at ground zero during a full-on nuclear blast, as I did when I was a child and another cowboy king was in office. A bright flash and maybe time for a last thought of something, lingering on my mind like fresh flowers or the smell of coffee on Sunday mornings when my wife gets out of bed long before I do. I want my mind trapped there when revenge comes calling and my eyes are burned away. I know I’ll have little choice where I’ll be when it happens (although I don’t want to be at the mall, a la Coupland’s “Generation X”), but I know I’ll have the choice to go out thinking what I want.

I shall think of my wife, her soft eyes and flowing hair.

I shall hear the purr of my cats, curling up with us in bed as night gives way to the subtle stirrings of morning.

I shall remember when I saw the ocean for the first time and thought, “Japan is over there on the other side.”

I shall see the constellation Orion swirling above my head, like a piece in a grand clockwork.

All in that nanosecond between skin-wrapped thoughts and doomed vapor.

Think of it as a last line of defense for a civilian with little recourse left to him.

Note: this was inspired by a discussion at Salon.com's message boards, a place I sadly lurk like a junkie does at a crackhouse.

Today’s Word: Process

From One Word, grammar errors and all.

Yuck. What a generic word. Sounds as if it’s be dredged up from all those corporate-speak seminars, lessons where you say things that have no meaning or weight. Reminds me of buzzwords from the dot-com era: synergy, outsourcing and all those poisonous non-words.

French class tonight

So no really big listing tonight by me. I apologize that I can't provide counter-programming to the Big Speech tonight.

All I can say is that I'm going to be happy to be stuck in a room for a couple hours straining over silent h's and gender assignments to words instead of listening to...zzzaaapp...sorry, my anti-politics shock collar just kicked in.

Well, at least I have the minefield of plurals to look forward to. Yay.

Of course, when I get to Paris I'm sure two things will happen. First, everyone will speak English, thus reducing my year of erratic study into the verbal Dumpster. Second, if French is ever spoken, it'll whiz right by me like one of those gleaming, fantastic and efficient bullet trains the Europeans and Japanese pulled from our World of Tomorrow imaginations and plunked down in perfect detail. And I'll stand there, hearing words and syllables curve and dance in the air in ways that I can only attempt, yet butcher in the process.

Today's Word: Doubt

From One Word

Geez. Nice choice. It's the driving force I have in me most of time. Are my thoughts original? Will I ever get published? Am I a good person? It's remarkable what you think about, the petty and the minute, when you have a nice home and good health and plenty of food.


Afterthought

If you doubt doubt, what happens next?

Choose wisely

It began to take shape a week or so ago during a MSN Messenger session with my poet friend Cori, who decided she isn't talented enough and is going through the fire hoops of becoming a teacher.

As an assignment, she had to come up with a discussion relating to the following line of poetry, "wrap me in your/red orange rage/'til I ripen in your black field", in the context that here's an artist writing a poem about the civil rights/black power movement in the 1960s and 70s. We put our heads together to try to figure out questions she would ask students about the merging of art and culture at the forge of an artiste-blacksmith.

1) Referring to the lines "wrap me in your/red orange rage/til i ripen in your black field"is rage necessary for the advancement of oppressed peoples? In what cases has it been necessary, in what cases has revolution occurred without rage?

There's little doubt we've entered a time of polarization in this country, revolving on the axis of whether you want war in Iraq. The question is, if an artist takes up a cause, does the artist lose the ability to tell a story wholly? Now, I didn't say "without bias." Obviously authors have the ability to see a conflict and pick up on the meta-themes of freedom, equality, the defeat of tyranny and the like without putting real-life names to fictional faces. It's just so easy to fall into the simple rock throwing of saying "Bush sucks." Noun. Verb. Anger. Nine letters. Easy-cheesy.

2) Should poetry be a document or an advocate? Does the poet have any responsibilities to their reader? When the artist takes a stand, does the art suffer? What is the difference between art and propaganda?

But do you want to be known as a partisan? Does it help you to be known with a distinct political affiliation? Can you stomach sitting on a sideline as the forces clash? Lately, as I've been struggling to kick the habit of writing about politics, those three questions have been haunting me like the Christmas ghosts Scrooge faced. Before I made a mad dash for non-political writing, cringing at the entries I've made here in the past few months, I struggled thinking about the idea of voice, style, honesty and all that noble stuff. When I look back at my anti-Bush comments, I felt like I was part of a mob devoted to snap judgments and cheap political shots. It’s a quick, tasty rush to bang up a couple graphs of a news story, a link and a comment like “What a bozo.” But as I said before in this blog, it just isn’t…me. I want to be original, but I'm tempted to post-n-run.

You see, now I'm trigger ready to slap up a story about how the U.S. recently, very recently, struck a deal to import needed oil for its reserves from...what for it...Iraq. Yes, we're making trade deals with the very country we're supposed to be hating 'round-the-clock.

Part of me wants to post it, but I feel invisible hands holding me back, urging me in hushed tones to not give in. What would I accomplish by posting a news story? What would I gain? How much time devoted to creating original text would be wasted? What's more important? Why have readers come here?

3) Does this poem transcend its time and place, or is it specific only to the black power movement of the 60s?

Suppose you were me and you did post the story...when does it stop? When do you put down your protest sign and become the active writer creating and not the activist reacting? Can the artist look away for the short haul, not lending his or her voice to the din to come up for something larger, like a painting or a novel? Is the artist being derelict as a citizen or honest to his or her craft, skirting beyond society and democracy? Will you continue to be the activist, bending your muse to be the next cause celebre or will you be stuck in an era forever?

"Oh yeah," someone will say in a bookstore maybe 15 years from now, "I remember him, he wrote a lot about the '03 Gulf War. A bit about the abortion-decision riots in '05. A couple good novels, but he's stuck in the past. He’s an era-junkie."

Will my soul ache if, at some point in my old age, I sit back and think about what else I could have done, the marches I could have been in, the debates I could have contributed to, the articles I could have posted up here in a fit of termite activism? It’d be wrong not to act, to just assume someone else will do it. I don’t know.

Maybe I’m going about this all wrong. Maybe there’s room for both sides in the soul: the passionate activist and the aloof, self-involved artist. I can still write what I want and join 80-90 local strangers on Saturday morning to wave signs against the war at a nearby strip mall.

All I know is this: I imagine myself with finite fuel and two options: activist or artist. To which do I devote more resources? To which do I want to be known for? In what role can I make more of a change?

And yes, this is the kind of stuff I think about for fun.

P.S.

For helping me out with this entry, Cori said she wanted to be credited as "Dreaded elf sorceress, friend to the small and oppressed."

So, Cori, there you go.

By the way

I'm probably not posting much today. Have a lot of Paris travel films to watch in preparation for the Big Trip at the end of March.

Anyway, ran into a collection of signatures gathered by "Not in Our Name" to protest the upcoming war with Iraq. One of the signatories had the first-middle name of Zoe-Iris. Occupation, musician. I'm sorry, but if you are born with that name, you have to go into the arts. It's the law or something.

I mean, it's just a waste of a cool, arty name to go into, say, banking or accounting...anything with money. I suppose Zoe-Iris would make a good name for a veterinarian, too. Maybe Egyptology. Zoe-Iris sounds a lot like Osiris, the king who watches over the nether world.

Today's Word: Blackness

From One Word

My eyes hurt. Not enough sleep. Even when you are in bed and the lights are off, there's always some light. You have to work very hard, almost fanatical to wipe out all traces of streetlamps and the blue glow from TVs across the way.

No Sale

I’m more of an Adbusters than Adcritic. Sitting down (actually wandering and out of the TV room while doing laundry, poking my head out for commercials) and seeing something that you know is trying to sell you something you can live without is amazing. I didn’t want to watch the Big Game, but nothing else was on and we’ve all been suckered these days into believing the ads are better than the game in some sort of meta-advertising. Don’t unwrap the present for the present, but for the paper and padding surrounding the gift.

Most of what I saw.

Man drinking a beer through his ass. Crude hot dog joke followed.

Man wearing dog on head to get a beer

Fixation on bosomy twins, thanks to beer.

No, wait. Thanks to Beer!

Marijuana leads to pregnancy. Huh. Did I get the birds and the bees all wrong?

Ozzy Osbourne in faux-panic that his doughy, overexposed children were actually the Osmonds. A fit of wonder while watching Ozzy’s horrified face: How do we know this isn’t what he really sees through the prism of his drug-and-booze-addled brain?

And then, Beer!

Oh yes. Beer! segues nicely into upcoming network TV shows about Grade-B celebrities grasping for the air of television exposure, Exploding Spy Hos in lingerie, and Grumpy Cops.

Next, remember the AIDS ads saying that if you sleep with someone, you’ve slept with everyone they slept with in the past 10 years? Well, they’re back with a whole new twist. Now, ghosts haunt people who buy drugs through some Kevin Bacon-style of indirect guilt by association. Um, instead of haunting the guy who may have bought a dime bag of weed about 15 years ago as a stupid college sophomore, why not haunt the asshole who shot you?

Missed “Hulk” commercial, raised eyebrows through “Daredevil,” got dizzy and giggled through the new “Matrix” ads. Keanu still flies? Why? Why not just teleport from point to point if you have so much skill in the virtual world? As for the super-duper swing dance/kung fu battle against the black-suited foes in the schoolyard, silly led to dizzy led to remembering what George Lucas pointed out to us in Episode II: You can overdose on wild camera effects, spinning the dervish so fast you liquefy the script. My friend Cori points out that the first film gave the impression that the machines no longer had all the power. Why make a sequel? Well, think of it this way: Matrix 2! Keanu Jesus is back from the dead and is going to kick Caesar’s ass!

I gave up during halftime, bloated from Al Michaels namedropping Monster.com as if it was a player on the field. Halftime equaled the teams, Cirque du Banal. Sting, Shania Twain and No Doubt, all with their inoffensive Muzak of words, notes and sentiments. Nothing too offensive, nothing quite memorable. My wife and I couldn’t put a finger on it watching an artificially youth-perky Gwen! from No Doubt prance across the stage, rubbing up to Sting!, bored with his half-song appearance and the whole thing looking like a Hollywood pitch of a family values ad where the dad flies around the world from a business appointment so he can be there for the daddy-daughter dance.

And close-up on that family smile, so slightly Lolita on her implanted cheeks. Fade out and cue the next ad.

For Beer!

And this is “football" music? Where’s the rowdiness? Is it relegated to the street vibe of the NBA? Watching the No Doubt drummer, shirtless and painted like some baby-goth intern, I thought about the late Joe Strummer (pre-Jaguar “London Calling”) and how The Clash would have pounded the corporate arena the Big Game was in to the dust. Sting? Bring on the Police and all their dysfunction energy, a team full of egos banding together to play because it’s slightly more rewarding than beating each other up. Back then, Sting played the bass and was moody. Bad for band relations, good for lyrics. Now, he’s tantric and pleased with his VH-1 style. What I wouldn’t have given for Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers to descend in manic waves, plug in his bass and try to drag Sting back to his rock-reggae roots. Have fun, dammit. Go wild. You’re in front of a zillion people.

Turned off the feed from San Diego and watched the second half of BBC’s “Gormenghast” on DVD. My friend Rachel tells me that the author, Mervyn Peake, was so insane near the end of writing the book on which the movie is based that he had to dictate some of it and leave the rest to some intrepid author.

No ads during the film. A good thing.

Today’s Word: Satellite

From One Word

At first, I thought it said Seattle, where I live. I’m a satellite for my wife and my writing idols. I’m trying to break free and find my own voice. One day, my imagination will be carried on a satellite, drifting forever, a last Ark of minds and hopes. Sputnik. There, I said it.

Beware of breaking news

Another reason why I'm not writing about politics anymore

The article "Look Away, Dixieland" [Jan. 27] stated that President George W. Bush "quietly reinstated" a tradition of having the White House deliver a floral wreath to the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery — a practice "that his father had halted in 1990." The story is wrong. First, the elder president Bush did not, as TIME reported, end the decades-old practice of the White House delivering a wreath to the Confederate Memorial; he changed the date on which the wreath is delivered from the day that some southern heritage groups commemorate Jefferson Davis's birthday to the federal Memorial Day holiday. Second, according to documents provided by the White House this week, the practice of delivering a wreath to the Confederate Memorial on Memorial Day continued under Bill Clinton as it does under George W. Bush.


I linked to the earlier version of the story a while ago in a breathless rush to score some sort of ethereal cheap shot, I suppose, against people I really, really don't like. It was wrong. I was wrong. I'm sorry.

Exception to the rule

Okay, I’ve said long and hard that I wasn’t just going to link a story and run away. I’ve said I wasn’t going to write about politics. I’ve even done a couple pieces on the recent anti-war protests in Washington D.C. I pledged I was going to write more about myself.

And then I caught this.


Valerie Lucznikowska, a 64-year-old Manhattanite and public relations executive, carried a sign with a picture of her 37-year-old nephew, Adam Arias, who was killed as he fled from the World Trade Center. The legend: "Not in His Name."

Lucznikowska is a Democratic activist who thinks her party "eviscerated itself" by endorsing the war resolution in Congress. She resents the idea that bombing Baghdad would somehow ease the suffering of the victims' families. "The 9/11 families can't be healed by seeing other people's families being destroyed," she says grimly.

Through the Internet she met a gentle-spoken veterinarian from Durham, N.H., whose husband died in a United flight heading for Los Angeles on 9/11. Bob LeBlanc was a geography professor at the University of New Hampshire, and he loved to travel. Their tickets for India were on his desk the day he died.

His wife lost interest in life. Lucznikowska talked Andrea LeBlanc into the peace march.

"For the first time, I felt better," LeBlanc said of the cold day. "I think my husband was right there with me. I felt as though I were in a river of peaceful people."


Something to cheer you up, I guess

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the unholy union of Mr. Spock and Tolkien. It's so foul and out there, I wouldn't be surprised if I die a week after watching this.

You need Quicktime to view it. It's so worth it.

Now I know why the “evildoers” hate America. It’s even beyond Vogon poetry. If you were trapped in The Village from “The Prisoner,” this would be on their VH-1.

Incidentally, I have learned Radiohead did a cover of this. I so need a copy.

Today’s Word: Graphic

From One Word

Could be gross. Could be an arty novel. Could be a type of design that I can't do. Wish I could draw. Life would be so much different, to move beyond the banal, two dimensionality of words. Ah, envy again.

Two Star

The archives are back, and there was much rejoicing throughout the land. Yay.

In case you haven't been around your favorite news source lately, today is the 30th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, the legal decision that made abortion legal in the United States.

And to celebrate, dedicated soldiers on both sides of the issue traveled to Washington D.C., a town already nursing the hangover from the antiwar rallies on Saturday. Marching like good troopers not wanting to give up the battlefield, they converged on each other in front of the Supreme Court, the biggest symbol in a day full of tokens and icons.

I was thinking about writing something about the occasion, but four things pulled me back to earth.

1) Mark Morford wrote most of what I was going to say.

2) Abortion is one of those topics, like the Death Penalty, where the majority of people have not only made up their minds, but they're adamant about it...so, why bother writing another thing about it? At this point, unless your trying to bridge the chasm between the sides, it's just preaching to the choir or adding fuel to the fire.

3) Referring back to Morford, abortion has always been around. Making abortion illegal again in the United States is going to just underground the whole damn thing. Abortions will still continue, but the anti-abortion folks will be sitting self-satisfied with their little victory. Don't bother helping out scared pregnant girls with pre-emptive, secular and accurate sex education or even try to give women the dignity of making a choice about their bodies. Hell, forget about helping a mother that's down on her luck and with a newborn child in this economy. Just do everything to protect that fetus.

4) I'm a male, and frankly, we - as a gender - should shut the hell up about it. It's a woman's choice. She has to live with the outcome. I'm pretty positive that no woman in the history of abortion has hopped-skipped-and-jumped to an abortion provider, just giddy at the thought of what's coming next. Women know what abortion is, and they don’t need some lunkhead with a cross telling her she’s going to hell. I don’t think that’s what Jesus would do.

I have no idea what's on the horizon with abortion in the United States. Personally, I think if it is made illegal, we have the ingredients for a Second Civil War brewing up nicely.

Whatever happens, it shows that "1984" isn't the only book on our Isn't It Ironic That It's Happening Just Like In That Novel reading list. Now, we have to dust off "The Handmaid's Tale," too.

Today's Word: Tarnish

From One Word

A corrosion. That whisper you shouldn’t have made to that certain someone who isn’t your lawfully wedded spouse. Oh yes, I knew her, and she knew me. I suppose we were adults, but we acted like children, not knowing the good things we had with our respective lovers. Desire is poison in the wrong hands.

Have you seen me?

The archives are missing. I'm not happy.

I mean, I understand if the "comment" section goes all blankey. It's third-party code connected to another piece of third-party code in a sort of Kevin Bacon-game of scripting. It's bound to get a wee bit wonky.

But I like my jumbled, rambling archives. I made them. They are mine. Plus they are technically "on" the Blogspot servers, so they shouldn't be porting in from anywhere else.

I hope they reappear soon.

Light

An entry to say that there will be no entry tonight.

Ponder that one.

Tonight was French class. It proves what I already know after a year of French classes: I can read it no problem, but I chew marbles when I speak it. Tonight, I botched pronouncing the "un" and "une" articles, swapping the sound of one ("on") for the other ("ohoon"). Embarrassing, since "un" and "une" are the masculine and feminine versions of the article "a" (as in "a" pen, "a" cat). Basic stuff.

My teacher, whom I had before for a French cultural class and who likes me, smiled politely after I botched it and said to me, "Oh, I know you mean well."

And there I slink down in my chair, jotting in phonetic crib notes.

My teacher, by the way, looks like the French equivalent to Sharon Osbourne, minus that pesky colon cancer or obscenities hanging over her like brown clouds over Asia.

Creative erosion

A friend of ours has been torturing me with pictures she took at the recent San Francisco protest, giving me pangs of guilt that I should have made the effort to go to Washington D.C. or S.F. for the recent massive anti-war marches there. Funny thing, guilt. It doesn’t inflict anything on you, like some bacteria you pick up from badly cooked beef. It just amplifies what you already have churning away in you. Deep down, I knew last weekend’s protests were going to be big. I knew what was about to go down wasn't going to be exactly historic, but flirting with its event horizon.

Alas, some of us have to sit on the bench during the big game, but we hope we’ll get to go into play soon.

Actually, I hope I don’t. I hope the protests of last weekend act like a stake through the heart of this beast that so eagerly wants to make war. I’m optimistic when I say that, but I feel…I don’t know, a kind of change in the air.

Stuck at work today and paging through news accounts of peace rallies around the world, I was struck by how all these protestors in countries around the world are growing larger, more vocal, emboldened somehow. A tide is shifting, at least at last in America.

On one hand, there’s the protestors in the streets. On another flank are the ultra-rich saying, "That’s okay…we’re embarrassing wealthy enough as is." Meanwhile, even once Bush backers are getting queasy of an Imperial crusade in old Babylon.

What's going on? Death of a thousand cuts from protestors. No.

Chinese water torture with the GOP base revolting against Bush? No.

Wait…something’s there. A note was plucked, shaking something familiar in my head.

Erosion on a microscopic level, acting all at once on many fronts. Corrosion. Consumption. I’ve heard of this before.

Termites.

A quick search got me to "Termite Art", a critical way of thinking about culture that suggests certain performers break out of the walls of convention to create something off-kilter and remarkable in small nibbles.

And then it hit me: Termite activism.

It’s sort of a kin, maybe a cousin in spirit. Both are trying to find new ways around the problem. New holes created in the fabric. Subversive. Maybe dangerous. Numerous groups at once found a way to break through old paradigms. Protest groups, using the Web, got embraced by middle America. The wealthy realized they didn't want a neo-aristocracy.

Maybe it’s a mass awakening of sense, a time even when the generals are trying to pull the demons off the firing keys in master control. Combine the minimum 100,000 in D.C., the 20,000 in Portland, the tens of thousands in S.F. and the groups protesting in smaller numbers in the U.S. and all over the world, mixed in with the rich feeling embarrassed to be too-rich and the warriors going ill at the thought of a slaughter on their souls and you start to get this feeling that something is coming together.

And yet, this giddiness easily spoils into dread if you leave it out in the sunlight too long.

The continued fury of right-wing radio demagogues and stories about tiny, but vocal counter-protests at the D.C. march prove some wouldn't mind an endless war or soaking the poor for all their cash. Perhaps we’re coming to something in this country. A new model is emerging where two societies are growing up and apart: One believing all the spin doctoring coming out of the White House and through the glided tongue of the FOX News Channel. Another reading the foreign press and marching in the streets, fighting to break through the newsroom barrier and be heard.

And I don’t know what will bring us together. Blood of our sons and daughters? Defections from the Pentagon? Something either very wonderful or very brutal will shake us together as a nation.

But for now, it’s a game of mutation. Who will come up with the freshest angle, the most force, the best argument? Who will alter themselves so they can burrow in and win the hearts of those not yet marching, and almost-sure of wanting war? The White House or the marchers?

Today’s Word: Smile.

From One Word.

Happiness. Trust. Something I don’t have a good one of. Smiles are invitations. Smiles mean no one is mad at you; you made someone happy. Smiles are free, if they are honest. If they are lies, they cause all sorts of problems. I love it when my cat looks like she’s smiling. A human reaction.

I really shouldn't be surprised

Mississippi has combined the birthday celebrations of Martin Luther King Jr and Robert E. Lee.

I'm speechless

From Time magazine

George W. Bush has quietly reinstated a tradition, that his father halted in 1990, of paying homage to the greatest hero of the Confederacy -- Jefferson Davis, TIME's Karen Tumulty and Michael Weisskopf report.

Last Memorial Day, for the second year in a row, Bush's White House sent a floral wreath to the Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery. It's not clear why, after more than a decade's lapse, the current Bush White House resumed this symbolic tribute to the Old South. But one of the organizations connected to the ceremony is the Sons of Confederate Veterans, whose "Chief Aide-de-Camp" is Richard T. Hines, an influential figure in South Carolina politics. In that state's brutal 2000 Republican primary, Hines reportedly helped finance tens of thousands of letters blasting Bush rival John McCain for failing to support the flying of the Confederate flag over the state capitol. Despite repeated requests by TIME, Hines declined to comment, TIME reports.

We hardly know ye

Via Tom Tomorrow's blog and FAIR's archive about the MLK you won't see on today's pre-packaged TV segments.


By 1967, King had also become the country's most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his "Beyond Vietnam" speech delivered at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 -- a year to the day before he was murdered -- King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."

From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was "on the wrong side of a world revolution." King questioned "our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America," and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions "of the shirtless and barefoot people" in the Third World, instead of supporting them.

In foreign policy, King also offered an economic critique, complaining about "capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries."

You haven't heard the "Beyond Vietnam" speech on network news retrospectives, but national media heard it loud and clear back in 1967 -- and loudly denounced it. Time magazine called it "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi." The Washington Post patronized that "King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."

In his last months, King was organizing the most militant project of his life: the Poor People's Campaign. He crisscrossed the country to assemble "a multiracial army of the poor" that would descend on Washington -- engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be -- until Congress enacted a poor people's bill of rights. Reader's Digest warned of an "insurrection."


You can read "Beyond Vietnam" here. I've heard a broadcast of it recently on Alternative Radio. It's pretty damning.

Dream

If you go nowhere else on the Web today or Monday, go here.

It's like I know what I'm doing

Knocked out three items on my to-do list in 30 minutes, thanks to some Internet commerce and a bit of derring-do on the script side.

You know how it is, unpacking and all

So, the new template is up and running. A few troubles. Have been bouncing around and looking at the site from other computers, taking note of what needs to be fixed.

A partial checklist:

*Bump up the headline in size
*Bring back the feedback section
*Remove the top ad (which will cost about $5 a month or something)
*Figure out the "posted by" entry so my name appears after it

In short, I need to create some dominant points on the body-text area. I see a bunch of blogs in a day and they all give me ideas. I should take more notes about what I want, but then I get bogged down in the technical aspect, forgetting why I’m running a blog in the first place: words.

That’s pretty much how it’s been with me and the Web. For a while, back when the Web was the cool new thing, I earned a living as Web site designer/manager. Sure, creating an information resource out of mere HTML script was fun at first, but then came all the catch-up work with every new language or script built by ambitious wannabe cartographers eager to map out the Web in their own half-assed, Version 1.0, incompatible-with-major-browsers voodoo.

Also, I didn’t care about back-end programming; I wasn’t a programmer. I was more like Rick from “Casablanca,” trying balance the front-end allure of my café with the back-end dirty work done by mercenary coders. I always thought there’d be a place for front-end HTML scripters/content folk like me on the Internet, coding an attractive, literate edifice to hide the ungainly wiring in the back. However, the brave visionaries of the Web World adhered to a Bizarro philosophy of content being secondary compared to the method of delivery. When faced with budget cuts, they tossed overboard the content writers and editors for PR flacks and left HTML scripting to next-generation WYSIWYG tools or Flash animations.

Ah, memories.

Speaking of memories, you still can torment your eyes with the old version of this blog, which is version 2.0 actually. You don’t wanna see version 1.0.

More important stuff

Today is my 43-month wedding anniversary. Yay.

I love you, my darling.

Street people

Caught a lot of Washington D.C. protest coverage on C-Span today, markedly more than the professional news channels combined. I’m sure C-Span will rerun coverage from the antiwar rally and march this weekend. Try to check it out if you couldn’t make it out to the D.C. or San Francisco rally. If I wasn’t saving money for my upcoming England/Scotland/Paris jaunt, I would have taken some time off and flown to D.C. to be part of the fun. Always wanted to see the Smithsonian anyway.

Good news: Found out about a weekly protest in my neighborhood every Saturday morning. If I can’t be in D.C., I’ll wave my sign with my community at the nearby shopping mall.

A few notes from my C-Span crow’s nest.

* I hope that protestors aren’t going to be portrayed more as coddling Saddam Hussein than wanting a more peaceful method to removing the man, perhaps through his gassing of his own people in the 80s. I’ve said it before: If Slobodan Milosevic can be hauled in on war crimes, why not the Iraqi dictator?

* The speakers (mostly belonging to progressive interests) at these rallies really have to tone it down from the shrill talk-shout they use at the mike. Martin Luther King Jr. was a master at the booming, attention-getting, nearly hypnotizing speaking method. Let the words have the weight, not the pitch. I have King's "I Have a Dream" speech playing in my mp3 player right now, and it's giving me chills just hearing him speak those words.

* Speaking of speakers: Give more mike time at the rallies to the non-professional rally speaker. A few months ago, I was at a large antiwar rally/march in Seattle. Out of all the people who got to the microphone to pump up the crowd, the most moving and energizing speaker came from a mother whose son was jailed under very shady circumstances. She was only told "terrorism" and off her son went, into the black hole of John Ashcroft’s Justice Machine. Her quivering voice, her honest fear in public speaking, her unpretentious plea for her boy back gave the proceeding a silent validation. We’re here today for him, and us, and truth, and making this country something more than Pinochet’s Chile.

* We need an antiwar concert, akin to the Free Tibet concert pulled off a few years ago. What’s U2 up to? Radiohead? Sting? Patti Smyth spoke and sang in Washington D.C. today. It’s a start. Yes, it violates my rule about not wanting the celebrities to run the show, but I remember the Amnesty International shows of the 1980s and how many young people joined the human rights group after they saw U2 and Sting take the stage and give a few words about how they, the crowd, can save lives. "Live Aid" raised $100 million with two simultaneous concerts in 1985. Just think of what can be done again.

* Upon retrospect, Congressman Charles Rangel’s (D-NY) proposal to bring back the draft (under the guise that everyone –rich and poor – would share the burden carrying out Team Bush’s foreign policy of invasion and intimidation) is a really bad idea. While I see what Rangel is trying to do, giving Team Bush more cannon fodder (let’s face it, the rich kids will find their way away from combat) by proposing a draft weakens the only weapon the public had against a Bush-backed draft: outrage. If Team Bush was seen as dragging kids off to war, there would be a massive backlash on campuses and by parents across America. Now, a democrat is offering up something that Bush could grudgingly accept as good, fair policy while secretly cackling over getting more grist for his mill. Also, Rangel misses another snake in the basket: Namely, how the draft is obsolete when you have at least one out of 10 American soldiers in reality mercenaries for armies belonging to shadowy companies like DynCorp, MPRI and the better known Halliburton, former roosting ground for Vice President Dick Cheney.

No one knows the exact number of protestors in D.C., but the C-Span cameras showed great masses of humans marching down streets and chanting. Some placed the number as low at a few tens of thousands to 200,000 or more. There are no official estimates, but more than 20,000 were identified as marching today in Portland. Whatever. I’m sure we have a solid idea of the number in D.C., but I’m guessing it’s enormous, something that’s giving Team Bush fits of demoralization. We’ll probably get some impressive number later in the week. I’m guessing it was at least 100,000.

Again, this is before the shooting starts.

Best snip from the Washington Post’s protest coverage. As Jon Stewart would say on "The Daily Show": Here it is, your moment of Zen.


"You guys should go get a job," said a man traveling in the passenger side of a black SUV that pulled over briefly to heckle protesters in the morning on Pennsylvania Avenue NW. Later in the day, on the Pennsylvania Avenue SE march route, a group of people sharing a bottle of champagne on one building's second-floor balcony displayed a sign reading, "Hippies Go Home." Protesters responded, "We are home."


Today’s Word: Noose

From One Word

I see the hangman, unhappy with his task. I see the crowd, mired in the rain, looking for closure. I see the boards under my feet and the preacher before he slips the leather hood over my head. This fabric separates the crowd from the harsh face of their vengeance. The coil of rope has come.

Note: The hanging motif was common in other responses. Hard to slip away from the ready-to-go, ingrained image with a word like “noose.” Reminds me of the comedian who joked that the name Hitler was tarnished forever and, as a consequence, you’ll never see a sign advertising “Hitler’s Fish and Chips.”

Painful irony or simply cruel?

Sacramento -- While it contemplates cutting free lunches for the elderly and slashing services for the blind and disabled, the Legislature has recommended boosting its own budget by $8 million to pay for its cars, salaries and catered meals.

The state budget plan released last week calls for increases in funding for running the Legislature to $206 million, including salaries for 120 lawmakers and their staffs. It's one of the few divisions of state government earmarked for an increase in Gov. Gray Davis' 2003-04 budget proposal.

The $226,000 requested by the Legislature for catered meals would cover about 40 percent of a statewide senior lunch program that Davis wants to eliminate in the budget he presented to the Legislature.

Story here.

Facelift

Okay, here it goes.

I'm choosing a new template today. I'm tried of this and I found one that's striking, albeit minimalist in appearance...which, come to think of it, is what I try to be everyday.

I'll be making the change soon, so bid adieu to the chunky red-black-yellow scheme.

Due to the alteration, some elements will be grafted back over a period of time. The feedback feature, for example, will need a bit of tweaking in the new set-up. I'll try to drop in the links as soon as I can. Until then, you can e-mail me here

Expect some delays due to the inclement conditions.

Okay, let's do it.

Danger: Wandering Minds

Crap. Misplaced a text file of thoughts I was working on…alpha-release fiction concepts. I write them in a blank e-mail slate at work and send it to myself at home at the end of the day. Wondering if I sent it to the wrong address and now some poor soul is bombarded by illiterate, dashed off thoughts. How embarrassing.

I do want to add something about the essay I wrote yesterday regarding politically partisan blogging. What it boils down to is this: A lot of the political blogging resorts to cut-n-paste commentary with news stories or opinions posted on the Web. In between, the blogger sprinkles comments like some steroid-rage MST3K 'bot dosed on too much Lexis-Nexus and Google. It’s just sniping with semi-witty jabs. Little thought, just fists-a-flying in the name of preaching to the choir. Sound fun to you? Do you want to be a cover band all your life or do you want to stand up and sing something original?

Trust me, I've been there and it's not a healthy pastime.

There. It’s a bit cryptic and late in coming. Chalk it up to esprit de l’escalier, the witty remark thought of too late.

Oh, wait. Found what I wanted to add about the post today about anti-war marches.

John Le Carre writes an essay, Sheryl Crow wears a T-shirt at an awards show and Viggo Mortenson speaks out (here and here) on "Charlie Rose," but nothing is going to really change via Iraq until the masses get up and make their voices heard, whether it be hitting the streets in a march, contacting their elected officials or creating some kind of civil disobedience.

It’s nice to have the visibility of celebrities out there drawing news cameras to the antiwar cause, but the pro-war pundits and newsmakers have trained the public to dismiss activist actors and actresses as loony liberals looking for a fashionable cause. The real power will come when folks from different ethnic, income and religion brackets come together to show oil-mad leaders and the punditocracy that loves them that, yes, there is opposition out there to this oil war. Don’t relax thinking celebrities will save the day. They may have great hair and teeth, but in the end, it’s up to us.

With that, I’m off to scout out spots I want to visit in Paris come April.

Today’s Word: Room

From One Word

Boom. Boom. Sounds like room. Room to breathe. Think for yourself. Life of Brian. Yes, we must think for ourselves. How the hell did I get here? Time’s running out. Running out of room to type. Time enough at last. Twilight Zone episode. Room with a view. Wife loves the book and film. Never read it. Done.

Gun barrel fairy tales

From the great Ted Rall. Sadly, it's just a little too dense to be good protest sign material. Need to keep anti-war messages simple for the TV camera, ya know.

Take a walk

In case you didn't know, there's going to be some massive protests against the wannabe war in Iraq this weekend. Unlike previous anti-war demonstrations, this one is going to happen before the shooting starts. The major protests are slated for San Francisco and Washington D.C., but I'm sure there's going to be some vigil or event going on in your area during MLK weekend (a fitting time for an anti-war statement, if there ever was one).

If you want to get out and make some sort of stand about a war that would be catastrophic in the short and long terms, click here, here or here and figure out what works best for you.

The last time there were massive, organized marches on the nation's capital regarding attacking Iraq, it drew somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000, numbers not seen since the height of the Vietnam War protests.

And remember, this is before the shooting starts.

Oh, if you make the trip to San Francisco or D.C., be sure to bundle up, wear comfortable shoes, bring a buddy for company and don't do something knuckleheaded like vandalize a Starbucks. That's so Seattle 1999.

Dismounting from the high horse

If you’ve been following this blog for any protracted amount of time, you’ll know that I’ve taken it on myself to break away from ranting about politics. Instead, I planted links to news sites I visit. You want the news I read and the opinions that I mostly share about current events…well, there you go. The ‘toonists I picked out for the link bar on the left also share my feelings most of the time. So, why bother. I tried writing about Team Bush and Iraq and all it got me was a new identity as a card-carrying member to the vast army of bloggers who just regurgitate wire stories or previously filed blog reports. It’s an easy shot to make from the Internet sniping post…little thought involved and you’ll be in large company…and there’s something always comforting about being with the crowd than against it. It’s no surprise that instant political punditry is to blogs as porn is to successful Web ventures. There’s an easily filled niche, and too much is never enough for it.

That’s not to say there aren’t good politically oriented bloggers out there. I mostly read alternative ‘toonist Dan Perkins’s (a.k.a. Tom Tomorrow) blog, because he constantly has sharp and fresh views despite his thorough dissection of everything about Team Bush, their incessant corruption and their bipolar attitudes regarding Iraq and North Korea. I admire Dan for his hard work and creativity, but, like all bloggers, it’s still a one-note orchestra if you pull back and watch it from a high vista. It’s either “The GOP are racist, clueless boneheads ready to ruin the world and your children’s future by creating a world with no rights and CEOs as overseers” or (if you are a GOP fan) “Liberals are demons managed by Klinton to ruin the world and your children’s future by having them taught by gay teachers and forced to get abortions." Or something like that. Your mileage may vary.

(For the record, Dan’s non-political essays, including about life in New York during and after 9/11, are astounding. Troll the archives and you won’t be sorry.)

So, I stopped my little foot soldiering in the Insta-Pundit Blog Army (I.B.P.A…sounds like a revolutionary group out in the jungles) when I got worried about how bloggers are quick to takes sides and stay there, no matter what. It’s the Web equal of the “Gangs of New York,” arming up with their colors and leaders to do battle on the streets of blogspace, tearing each other a new one in the name of “truth” or “fairness” or whatever the hell keeps them going through press releases and news reports, forming opinions and high-fiving each other when they post, thinking they’ve just taken a shot across the bow of the enemy.

I can’t do it. I can’t just line up into a groupthink on a daily basis like that. Hell, I don’t know what I’m going to wear in the morning. I change my mind from time to time and I try to go slow and read deep before jumping to conclusions. Years ago, when I just got out of school, I took a job at a high-tech recruiting firm tracking down personal data to revive old files. My wanker of a then-boss once labeled me as someone who’s “more deep than quick.” As much as I didn’t like the guy, I found it a decent assessment, one I try to hang on to in the Instant News culture of the Web, where anything can come down the wire at any moment…and still be wrong. I’ve gotten burned by “breaking” news before, and coupled with the groupthink, I decided to leave the political blogging to the partisans as they gather in the hills, singing their songs of home and hope well into the night. Let them. I’m going for more personal and imaginative posts here. Frankly, the Web needs them wrapped in a blog. With the death of “Farscape” and “Firefly” on the Sci-Fi channel and FOX, respectively, and the ascension of more “real” and reality-like TV cop shows, I think it’s time to break away from police procedures and corporate-funded “true life” programming and try to make art wherever we see it. I think I’ll still be able to form my own opinions without resorting to the crutch of running back into the ranks of the blog’s amateur Punditsphere.

Since I’ve stopped writing about politics, my brain has gone into its blissful, creative niche in the right brain, veering away from the analysis basement of that left lobe. I can read the news without having a primal reaction to slap it up here and say, “That George Bush sucks rocks.” It frees up time to dream up fiction when you stop thinking you’re running some important news outlet. You’re writing about you, dimwit. Leave the news to BBC and leave the tribal warfare to the political bloggers, always eager to tear down and hurl word bombs.

What it comes down to is, when you are writing to along with the crowd, you aren’t writing about things about you. Who is more important?

I’m happy, something I wonder if those bloggers ever are.

Today’s Word: Sin

From One Word

Sin is the basis for creating saints. Without sin and its cousin, temptation, there wouldn't be holiness or heaven or angels or whatever. Sin is vital to survival because it points out what drives us as humans. I guess.

Lingua franca

I start French classes again tonight as part of my on-again/off-again attempt to jam something new in my brain in time for my April trip to Paris. It's a refresher course, French 1...something with which to Spackle the cracks in my Francophile sand castle. My main strategy is to work on pronunciation. My cousin Tommy once suggested Berltiz tapes, but my Walkman can't sit there, eyeing my lip twists and listening to tongue rolls for errors and lingual gaffes.

Nor would I want it to.

Today's word: Symbol

From One Word.

Symbols are languages not invented yet, where words fail and numbers go dumb. Symbols are free and brave and can bring down countries. They are the rebels of language and culture. Prince was a symbol.

About me

Or where the author gets vain for information sake.

One of the most common complains I run across on "The Weblog Review" is the lack of a page devoted solely to the author's likes, dislikes, pets, favorite food, favorite movie, some pretty-pretty celebrity that gets the blogger all hot and bothered, etc.

And as you may have noticed, this blog doesn't carry a biographical page. Frankly, I consider this entire blog a giant "About Me" page. Plus "About me" pages tend to let the air out of the balloon. Once you know everything about someone, demystification sets in, if you can trust s/he isn't lying to you in the first place. It's most interesting to reveal yourself in bits in pieces in this textual soap opera. Life isn't always laid out neatly, and it's more intriguing to find the bits and pieces, akin to the character Senhor Jose in Jose Saramago's "All the Names," gathering the vital pieces to the puzzle in the shape of an anonymous woman. Sometimes you have to be patient and thorough in learning about the person in front of you.

Ironically, you see celebrities, people who are in the glare of the public spotlight, with "About Me" pages on their sites, and it always turns my head. Why? We know who they are...that's why we Googled their site. If you're a fan, you already know about any movie roles or side projects. "About Me” pages on celebrity sites are just a bit of an ego pile-on, words I know that'll come back to haunt me if I ever get famous.

So, I suppose I have to reveal some bits about me. Some are tedious...well, all are tedious, but it's about my life and you are reading it. Remember, if it appears self-indulgent, remember that you're in blog country.

For the record, I:

*have bad dreams after eating day-old Caesar salad.
*own a Gamecube and Xbox.
*invent new swear words daily during my commute to work/home.
*have one contact in my MSN messenger thingy.
*was born in 1972.
*came from a divorced family. It was for the best.
*listen to Bjork, Radiohead, Massive Attack, Peter Gabriel and anything with an Indian/trance vibe to it.
*don't listen to all of them at once.
*am currently listening to The Clash.
*have never taken hard drugs.
*can't play a musical instrument.
*was a semi-finalist in the Dow Jones Newspaper Contest in 1994.
*write poetry for my wife.
*have two pairs of brown corduroys, two pairs of blue jeans and two pairs of black jeans.
*am married and am the father of two cats.
*work at a Seattle newspaper.
*hung out with Penn Jillette for about 10 minutes.
*want an iBook because it looks cool and I can blog from my couch, once I get a wireless modem installed.
*live near Seattle.
*vomited from alcohol overconsumption once.
*have a master's degree in journalism from ball state university.
*have recurring bad dreams about "missing an assignment for some class in some school." It's all vague and maybe related to the bad salad I eat.
*lived in or near Chicago, Houston, Muncie, Indiana, and Colfax, Washington.
*spend way too much time in Salon.com's message boards.
*rarely look at the people I talk to. It’s nothing personal.
*am getting bored writing about myself like this.


Tick Tock

My entry at One Word today. The word to write on, in 60 seconds, was "flash."

It happens like lightning, this felling in my head. I see it temporarily and then try to piece together the after-effects, like a blast of light from someone taking my picture. I see after-images, halos of thoughts dancing like angels.

Note: spelling as is...note to self: need word-of-day calendar.

It's sort of heartbreaking, typing for so long and that's all the words I could crank out in a minute. Except for "felling," it's coherent, if not dreadfully self-referential.

Yeah, I know, blog country.

Some fluff with this cotton candy

Otherwise known as a Bridget Jones moment.

I gave the book critic at my job the URL for William Gibson's blog. He's supposed to interview WG in a couple of weeks and didn't know about the site's addy, his blog or the whole brouhaha about galleys and uncorrected proofs of Gibson's new book appearing on eBay. Looked v. smart. Go me.

Best videogame ever

Gotham Games has just released the list of celebs who will be lending their likeness to their new game, Celebrity Deathmatch, and the list is varied to say the least. While there are some obvious choices to be found, a few of the names are quite surprising. Without further ado, here is the list of stars:

- *NYSNC
- Carrot Top
- Cleo
- Shannon Doherty
- Carmen Electra
- Ron Jeremy
- Mills Lane
- Tommy Lee
- Marilyn Manson
- Cindy Margolis
- Debbie Matenopoulos
- Busta Rhymes
- Dennis Rodman
- Anna Nicole Smith
- Jerry Springer
- Mr. T

So, I get to smack around Carrot Top as, say, Mr. T?

I. Can't. Wait.

Story via Xbox.Ign.com

No, really. I'm working.

Spent today in an all-day meeting talking about the company I work for and how we can improve it. I signed up for it after my co-worker Heather went through it weeks ago. She raved about the gig, thinking that she actually got through to a manager about how shitty some staffers are treated and how we are completely missing a major demographic. I had no idea how I’d be talking in front of strangers, but at least I'd get a day out of the cubicle.

The biggest fear I had going into it was that this whole exercise was going to be one of those hopelessly fatal circle jerks corporations get themselves into where they act employees to think outside the box, create new paradigms and all that bullshit business yoga zillions of us had to do in the dotcom era instead of doing our jobs (which might have spared some of us the ax). These thinking sessions also mark the opening notes of a company's death spiral, a time when the brain trust behind the business admit, in the most articulate way possible, that they have no idea how to run the office, so let's open the floor to suggestions. Imagine if the president walked by the White House gardener and said, "That North Korea, huh? So, what would you do?"

The second-biggest worry I had was that all the free talk and constructive exchange would rev us all up and turn us idea monkeys out into the workplace charged up for change, only to see nothing happen, returning to our jobs and the same old crap, dying from the inside like ecstasy users suffering the Tuesday morning blues. Coming from the high-tech sector, I've smelled plenty of good ideas brought up in brainstorming session rotting on the vine because the bosses betrayed the idea of "imagine anything" that we were chartered with. If they won't play along, why should we hope for change?

Anyway, this morning, myself and three other volunteers were sequestered in a room with a magnificent view of Elliott Bay and walls full of ideas gleaned from previous get-togethers with staff. Over time, we would see our own idea spring, like Athena from the head of Zeus, onto a window or nearby wall...proof our words had weight, at least in this room.

First, we had to sign a nondisclosure agreement because we were getting some sensitive survey data that, for the life of me, I can't remember, so it's not like I'm going to be a major threat now. All I remember from the oodles of data is that our rivals are skunking us and a lot of people in Seattle watch The Discovery Channel and The History Channel.

Then, we got lunch.

After lunch, we talked about what we would like to have our company do to reach our audience better. We talked about changing the name of the company since our customers don't recognize the name anyway. I brought up using our print product as a daily primer and our Web site as more of an in-depth resource, akin to BBC News' online venue. Also, hire some more support staff. We lose one guy in the mailroom and everything goes downhill.

Then, feeling braver, we talked about our company's culture, including how social retarded the managers treat those in the lesser ranks. It's at a time like this you want to cry out for help, but not sound like you're whining. So, I measured my comments and said I was told there was no way I was getting a promotion to a copy editor until either a) someone died or b) it was five years later. I talked about how there's no feeling of investment by the company in you, and how everyone is regimented into certain groups (designers, editors, managers) and you never, ever can cross those lines. I suggested we create internal internships were you could switch to a new editorial wing or try design for three months, something to create a more diverse workforce that doesn't get bored easily. I also suggested the company reimburse anyone willing to take classes outside of work to learn a new language or any other body of knowledge useful to the company. We argued that the company, theoretically, wouldn't want to pay you for developing a skill set that you could take elsewhere in six months, which saying something very cynical about corporate culture. It expects you to be trained, but hen-pecked enough so you stay in one place forever and are expected to like it.

One of the axioms were we told today was that people in Seattle are loyal to their careers and not the company. Frankly, I can't think of more of a nightmare for businesses than workers looking to find greener pastures all the time. Let the worker grow and develop unknown skills. Maybe you'll unearth a new editor or artist, but at the very least you have an engaged mind at work, trying new things and seeing how different parts of the company are run.

Six hours later and released from service, we volunteers were told we brought up great ideas (you've been a beautiful audience, really…give yourselves a hand) and to continue the process by sending ideas to a certain e-mail account. The whole reimagination project is supposed to go on for another nine months, and we'll get the chance to bitch and brainstorm again somewhere on the calendar. Somehow, it makes the idea of getting up and going to work much better, much more freeing that someone, somewhere listened in a corporate climate which more resembles the Indian caste system than a meritocracy. We’ll see.

Oops...sorta

This is from Tom Tomorrow's blog yesterday. It's an update to something I posted from him yesterday.

UPDATE: I am informed this is at least partly ADIR (Another Damned Internet Rumour). According to Snopes:

Origins: This item is true in the sense that people can call the White House at the phone number given above to offer their comments about whether or not the USA should initiate military action against Iraq, but the phone service was not set up specifically to record public opinion about the Iraq issue. It's simply the general White House Comments phone line, which callers can use to express their opinions about any issue on their minds. (One has to call between 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM Eastern Time on weekdays to speak to a real person, though; otherwise the number just plays a recording inviting the caller to try again when the department is open.)

So, yes you can still call the White House, but they don't have a separate "Iraq" line. It's splitting hairs, but something I should take the responsibility of clearing up, too.

Anyway, it can't hurt to call.

There goes the neighborhood

Story here. Need to register, yada yada.

A senior official in the left-wing government that took power last week has set off a furor here and alarmed neighboring countries by arguing that Brazil, Latin America's largest nation, should acquire the capacity to produce a nuclear weapon.

"Brazil is a country at peace, that has always preserved peace and is a defender of peace, but we need to be prepared, including technologically," Roberto Amaral, the newly appointed minister of science and technology, said in an interview with the Brazilian service of the BBC that was broadcast on Sunday night. "We can't renounce any form of scientific knowledge, whether the genome, DNA or nuclear fission," he added.

Mr. Amaral's remarks, coming as the United States faces a nuclear crisis with North Korea and is preparing for war with Iraq over its weapons programs, has reawakened debate over Brazil's own nuclear energy and research program, the most advanced in Latin America.

On Tuesday, a spokesman for President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was quick to distance the new president from Mr. Amaral's pronouncement that "mastery of the atomic cycle is important" to Brazil, saying that the minister's remarks were not an expression of official policy. "The government favors research in this area solely and exclusively for peaceful purposes," the spokesman, André Singer, told reporters at a news briefing in Brasília.

Heck, I better get me some nukes while I'm at it. I mean, it's prefectly legit with the Second Amendment and all, right?

Fight the power

Full story here

Train drivers yesterday refused to move a freight train carrying ammunition believed to be destined for British forces being deployed in the Gulf.

Railway managers cancelled the Ministry of Defence service after the crewmen, described as "conscientious objectors" by a supporter, said they opposed Tony Blair's threat to attack Iraq.

The anti-war revolt is the first such industrial action by workers for decades.

One for the road

The Army gets itself a bitchin' ride. Story here.

A modified Chevrolet Silverado platform fitted with modules of counterterrorism equipment just might be the next big thing for homeland security.

“SmarTruck II is engineered to meet the nontraditional challenges of today’s military,” said Dennis Wend, executive director of the Army Tank-automotive and Armaments Command’s National Automotive Center (NAC). “It provides built-in flexibility and offensive capability [for a variety of situations].”




I dunno about you, but when I look at this truck, I can only imagine a group of hard-working Homeland Security Joes heading off to the mountains for a relaxing weekend after slugging it out all week doing food-riot urban pacification in major U.S. cities after Bush's tax cut takes effect, crippling the states and giving more tax money to the wealthy families with kids.

But will the Army support terrorism?

About time, I say. It may require registration, blah blah blah.

Ratcheting up the debate over sport utility vehicles, new television commercials suggest that people who buy the vehicles are supporting terrorists. The commercials are so provocative that some television stations are refusing to run them.

Patterned after the commercials that try to discourage drug use by suggesting that profits from illegal drugs go to terrorists, the new commercials say that money for gas needed for S.U.V.'s goes to terrorists. "This is George," a girl's voice says of an oblivious man at a gas station.

"This is the gas that George bought for his S.U.V." The screen then shows a map of the Middle East. "These are the countries where the executives bought the oil that made the gas that George bought for his S.U.V." The picture switches to a scene of armed terrorists in a desert. "And these are the terrorists who get money from those countries every time George fills up his S.U.V."

A second commercial depicts a series of ordinary Americans saying things like: "I helped hijack an airplane"; "I gave money to a terrorist training camp in a foreign country"; "What if I need to go off-road?"

At the close, the screen is filled with the words: "What is your S.U.V. doing to our national security?"

Here's a related story about TV stations that don't want to run the ads.

It's Your Call

That nifty Tom Tomorrow has a blurb on his blog gleaned from another blog about contacting the White House to register your opinion about Iraq. Well, if Team Bush is truly honest about listening to the voice of the people, all you have to so if call 202-456-1111 between 9 a.m.-5 p.m. EST during the week and eventually you'll get connected to a real person. Say "I'm against this war in Iraq and I vote" (or whatever, you can say what you want) and that's it.

Speaking of Team Bush

Okay, I know I'm getting into a rantbot zone with the White House, but I saw this and I have to pass it on. It's about David Frum's new book about his time in the White House as George W. Bush's speechwriter. Frum's credited with inventing "Axis of Evil," and his new tome about the White House's insides is kinda juicy. He saves some dirt for key Bush aides Karl Rove and Karen Hughes, where we learn:

"Rove was a risk taker and an intellectual. Hughes loathed risk and abhorred ideas. Rove was a reader and a questioner -- a curious man, always eager to learn. Hughes rarely read books and distrusted people who did -- anything she did not already know she saw no point in knowing." (emphasis mine)

Distrusted people who read books...that's so damn depressing.

That whoosing sound...

...you hear is the Constitution vanishing. Story here.

A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that the government can hold U.S. citizens as enemy combatants during wartime without the constitutional protections afforded Americans in criminal prosecutions.

In overturning a lower court ruling, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., said the status of 22-year-old Yaser Esam Hamdi as a citizen did not change the fact he was captured in Afghanistan while fighting alongside Taliban and al-Qaida fighters.

"Judicial review does not disappear during wartime, but the review of battlefield captures in overseas conflicts is a highly deferential one" to the government, the three-judge panel wrote.

Hamdi, the court added, is not charged with a crime in the United States but is being held under "well-established laws and customs of war ... the fact that he is a citizen does not affect the legality of his detention as an enemy combatant."

Attorney General John Ashcroft hailed the decision, calling it "an important victory for the president's ability to protect the American people in times of war."

"Detention of enemy combatants prevents them from rejoining the enemy and continuing to fight against America and its allies, and has long been upheld by our nation's courts, regardless of the citizenship of the enemy combatant," Ashcroft said in a statement.

Remember, kids, John Ashcroft and George Bush get to pick who the enemy is.

(on edit: And when we're at war)

Funny, I don't remember this when white militants blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City, or when the World Trade Center was bombed the first time.

New contagion

Maybe it was the "Anne Nicole Smith Show," decked out in bloated fluff and the most addled of brains, so jacked up on Vitamin Narcissism that the veil could be removed and we could see what a waste watching celebrities meander around, trying to show they ARE INTERESTING, DAMNIT when the cameras at their day job are off.

Maybe it was Sept. 11, the ultimate in reality TV and drama. After all, what's more real than death in the big city on live TV, smoke and burning steel flailing away 80 stories up and only broken by the cascade of jumping souls, voluntarily or involuntarily, spreading thin ribbons of humanity from God's blue sky to the metropolitan canyon floor. In show business terms, you can't top that.

So maybe it makes sense that reality TV would undergo a sort of Darwinism, adapting to the climate to produce a life form that, if not thrive, then survive until the next reproduction cycle, passing on its stronger genes. We've sat through reality shows with people in glamorous locations joining clans and voting each other away in a mix of British Parliament and “Lord of the Flies.” We watched as perfectly sane women got all catty in perfectly social fashion to marry a millionaire they never met before on live TV. We've watched couples split up and be tempted by half-naked members of the opposite gender…all in the name of love and trust. To quote Bjork in "Dancer in the Dark," I've seen it all.

But just when you caught your reflection in the greasy bar mirror after puking in the toilet with the broken handle, swearing out loud, "I gotta start taking better care of myself," you get drawn back in, stumbling out of the bathroom and ordering another round from the television.

It's called "Joe Millionaire." It's a FOX reality show. You know what'll happen. You'll be both attracted and repulsed at the same time. You'll get a few kicks out if it, marveling how evolved you are and then, as the end credits flash by mixed with the "Bleeds-It-Leads" local news teaser, you'll feel dirty and queasy, as in a just-lied-to-a-nun sort of way. But the show is addicting like absinthe, and carrying with it the green liquid's ability to be revealing about human nature when intoxicated. Remember: a little tells the truth; too much tells lies.

The gist of the show is this: 20 women come to a big-ass chateau in France which looks enough not like Cinderella's palace to not get sued by Disney. The women are told they will be vying for the heart of the man who lives on the estate, an American who just inherited $50 million. Week by week, the man picks off the women until one remains standing. And in true Dickensian fashion, a secret is revealed: He isn't worth $50 million; he's a construction worker pulling down $19,000 a year.

In the first episode, which aired last night, the women arrive on the estate and get briefed. Apparently, this millionaire has everything in the world but love and that's why they have been flown to America to be there. (It seems all the women in France turned him down.) The women get a tour of the castle and are told about the bank account this guy has. And then the hammer falls: What happens when competent working women are pulled out of their everyday lives and dropped into the archetypical setting of fairy princesses and "happily each after"? How fast would you start dreaming of being Cinderella or the princess bride?

Meanwhile, our blue-collar hero Evan gets tutored in high society and starts to feel remorse, just before he makes a grand entrance on a horse. Evan, who in a tuxedo would pass for Bruce Wayne's younger, dimmer brother, realizes when he's in France that he, surprise, is part of a gigantic lie. It's a hallmark of FOX reality shows, and noir crime novels, that the main character starts to sink under the weight of his morass because he never thought things through first. But when the secret comes out, it'll be a dandy race to high moral ground after toying with the baser instincts over several weeks.

"You aren't worth $50 million? You lied to me?
"Well, you're only after my money. Who's the bigger asshole?"

But for now, Evan's playing along, tortured (again, like a good tragic lead in a noir story) with visions of a much better life, even if it's all a lie that should end badly. The women meanwhile, all mid-level wage earners (except for one generic "physician"), go from articulate and educated women to scheming harpies and gold diggers when all 20 have to fight over 20 dresses for the evening ball. The dress selection comes down to showing us a) their pettiness and b) reinforcing the stereotypes of women at a discount clothing sale. Add into the mix a possible pre-planned FOX trick of putting out dresses that would fit no one. Tears are shed and dagger-stares are shot when one woman hogs three dresses, styling one after another in front of the mirror, casually dismissing calls for "I got next on that one" by the ladies around her.

Divide. Conquer. Ratings.

It's a show that would easily fail if the gender roles were reversed. Imagine: 20 guys tromping around some chateau trying to woo a millionairess, who in reality is a part-timer at Hooters. Frankly, even if they knew she was pulled down 20 hours a week at a Tits&Ass&Burger joint, they'd still fall over each other for her. Although, the territorial battles alone with all the testosterone flying around the maison would be entertaining viewing, especially if the final twist was, oh, she finds out after all this time with these guys, she's actually a lesbian.

But "Joe Millionaire" works, nearly works, as a subtle social commentary, if not corralling a herd of disturbing logistical questions.

First, how sad is it that a guy who works hard building houses and other physical places only can rake in $19,000.

Second, just how did FOX gather these women? Was there an ad?

Did the other women know there would be competition? Did they ever think this was wrong to fight over a guy for money or did they see it as a challenge to their female qualities, real or imagined?

Are these women that fed up with the idea of being independent that they would reduce themselves to playing a life-sized game for a guy they hardly know?

Do millionaires have to put out a booty call for prospective wives?

After the first episode, after the first eight contestants on the meat rack were tossed out for not being as prime of a cut, I had to flush it out of my system. If you plan to watch the whole thing, I recommend reading some Jose Saramago afterward, maybe the collected speeches of Gandhi. Failing that, the show will compel you to mend your ways with an act of charity. Perhaps this time you’ll give up that kidney for some Bosnian war refugee, eh?

I'd like to think somewhere along the way there will be a revolt, some kind of enlightened woman's protest flat out asking Evan if he is getting some kind of kick out of watching women vie for his love. The revolutionaries will kick over tables and sound equipment saying, "This is not what Laurel Ulrich meant by 'Well-behaved women rarely make history.' " Maybe they'll vote Evan's corduroyed-and-cable sweatered ass along with his oafish grin out of the chateau and the women will split the residence for themselves. A good French estate that big has to sell for some good cash...enough I imagine to make their lives in the states a bit more independent.

I dream of it, but my crystal ball is more pragmatic than I am. In the Magic 8-ball method of divining the future, "All Signs Point to Ho."

Sinus Update

I swear to God if I don't stop blowing my nose in the next few days, I'm going to stick the nozzle attachment for my vacuum up my nose and flip the switch. It's been at least a week since I felt uniformly better and I'm still draining my nasal passages. Just how is my body generating this river in my nose all the time? I don't drink that much water, so I'm assuming I should be a dried-out hunk of Blogger Jerky on the floor by now.

Reason to live

Trip-hop pioneers Massive Attack, one of my sources of power, have a new album (is that word too 20th-century?) coming Feb. 11. I really like the promotional site for the new release, too. See it here.

Feb. 11. Hmm.

Crap. I have to wade through the Super Bowl and the State of the Union speech before it hits stores. Good news...at least it’ll break up the wait for "Knights of the Old Republic," slated for Feb. 24, according to the good folks at IGN.com.

But as cool as Massive Attack is, it can't compare with Johnny Cash's new cover of Nine Inch Nails’ "Hurt." Whoa.

Speaking of music

Thought of the worst name for a rock band while I was cleaning up after dinner.

Lazy Anus.

That is all.