Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Hard Port Cornography

Dubai is not the problem. 

Dubai is a gleaming modern city, an avatar of what the Arab world could be if it wanted to.  It’s the Venice of the Mid-East, a harbor capital founded on principles of profit and commerce, not prophecy and containment.  It wants to be our ally because that’s where the money is.  I suppose they’re as well-suited to run a port or six as anyone, including Britain, which hasn’t really ruled the waves for a century.  Dubai is our soldiers’ R&R destination, the site of a major tennis tournament.... The Amazing Race even filmed a segment there.  It’s more of a team player than many of our European allies. 

Given the facts, I don’t think we’d expect any worse from them than from anyone else.  Okay, so they supported the Taliban and two of the hijackers used them as a base of operations.  Maybe better relations with us would have chilled those indiscretions, and let’s face it, the last time before 2001 that our national shrines were hit by foreign operatives, it was the British burning down Washington DC.  They eventually came around.  I really don’t think the problem was Dubai.

The problem that’s hanging like an albatross around the President’s neck is what I call the “foie gras syndrome.” That’s the way they get that delectable gooseliver paste.  The best fois gras is the result of cramming so much corn down a goose’s gullet that its liver becomes grotesquely swollen.  Of course, the bird suffers by this treatment and is eventually so unhealthy that its slaughter is an almost humane end to its discomfiture.  But we do it because we love that rich, pungent pate.

When I hear, revelation by revelation, about this Dubai ports deal, I’m beginning to feel rather like a pate goose.  I suppose it started back in 2000.  I didn’t want George W. Bush as my president, and neither did a majority of Americans who voted - but the Supreme Court ruled that disputed ballots should not be recounted, and thus a minority-elected president was foisted upon me.  His tenure since then has been distinguished by two primary qualities: a condescending and paternalistic manner of pronouncing policy in short, declarative sentences that lack the sophistication and subtlety demanded by the subjects he addresses, and by a greater level of manipulative secrecy than any president we’ve ever had. 

I’m not just talking about twisted pre-war intelligence, though that’s a good place to start: what about environmental policy, fiscal policy, or torture?  The litany of US policies that this administration has cobbled together out of sows’ ears and half-baked analysis is enough to turn my stomach - and, increasingly, I’m not alone in my nausea.  What was once solid support for the Chief Executive, in DC and across the nation, is crumbling like so much of our infrastructure.  We didn’t need a botched response to a national disaster to bring it into unmistakable focus, but now it’s impossible to ignore: our government is crippled by a fatal combination of self-confidence and incompetence.

What’s worse, it’s petrified that we’ll discover this obvious fact.  Rather, they try to distract us with a steady diet of hot-button quick fixes, and pat reassurances that they know what they’re doing.  That’s what got W elected in the first place: his cool, calm confidence that he could handle the problems we couldn’t deal with ourselves.  He knew what we wanted, and he knew how to get it for us.  Now it seems we’ve given the keys to the national minivan to a man who’s too full of himself to ask for directions, and too distracted to read the road-signs.  He’s getting us loster, faster, than we’d ever imagined.  And the worst part is, he’s still telling us he knows exactly where he is and what he’s doing, even as it becomes increasingly obvious to all of us back here that we’re going to run out of gas or off the road before any of us get where we need to go.

All we want is to be kept in the loop.  If the Coast Guard says the DPW takeover of ports could cause security problems, that assessment should have been divulged, considered publicly, and addressed or dismissed as the facts warranted.  If the administration wanted to avoid the controversy about this deal in which it’s now mired, it should have operated more transparently and less clandestinely.  It seems no one in the White House (with the exception of the President himself, who was apparently kept in the dark like the rest of us) anticipated an uproar over this proposal, just as they didn’t anticipate resistance in Iraq or disapproval over social security reform or a category five hurricane hitting New Orleans.  What we want is input, advice, the opportunity to make up our own minds.  What we’re getting is corn, and plenty of it, jammed down our throats.  And though the fois gras may be tasty, we geese will never get to enjoy it. 

Sunday, February 26, 2006

I blog, therefore, I am (a geek)

I was sitting on a beerhall patio one friday afternoon in early 2002, nursing an Anchor and chatting with my new friend about this and that and random things.  She mentioned in passing that she’d written something about something on her.... her something, I didn’t catch exactly what.  I nodded into my beer and the conversation rolled along.  A few minutes later she mentioned it again and I called her on it.  “You posted it where?” “On my blog,” she explained with the patience with which one demonstrates superior sophistication to a small child with a learning disability.  She explained the phenomenon of having one’s own website, for sharing ideas and communicating with friends and even the occasional stranger.  I was intrigued.  She gave me her url and I checked it out the next day.  It was as she’d said, a simple static page of her thoughts, opinions, and self-expressions.  She occasionally linked up information from other sources, too, or a photo she’d found on the web.  I could even leave her a comment and join some sort of on-line conversation.  How very new millenium, I thought.  I was impressed. 

Over the next few weeks and months I started commenting regularly on her blog, and on a few others that sort of linked up with hers.  Many of these were run by her other drinking buddies, but some were from clear across the country and gave my blog-surfing a rather cosmopolitan air.  I started leaving longer and longer comments, until a few months later I realized that couldn’t keep monopolizing other people’s conversations from their comment boxes but had to start a blog of my own instead.  Blogger set me up with a no-frills account and a weird dystopian template, and I was off and running with short, strange posts that were to literature what exfoliation is to callused feet. 

I really enjoyed having this outlet for the foment of my mind, and as I went along I started making friends of my own - all imaginary, of course, restricted to the unreality of the computer screen, and all of us playing at blogging from across the country and around the globe.  It got to be quite a habit. 

Life ambled onward, as is its wont.  My writing got a bit wordier; my posts, more lengthy.  Some of my “imaginary” friends became quite important to me, even though I’d never met most of them.  The ones I did meet, however, were great people and confirmed the positive impression I’d formed of this new medium.  I blogged high and low, far and wide, and felt a real sense of community doing so.

It was also fun for me to find myself engaged, for a change, in a topical fad.  I’d lived through the summer of love but missed it completely; likewise the cb radio craze, the roller disco freakout, Melrose Place madness and cocaine mania.  I’d always missed the big social phenomena.  But here, I seemed to be on the leading edge of a very popular curve.  Within a few years blogs were everywhere and the curious cybertoy I’d embraced had become an important international phenomenon. 

As the same time, while a few of my imaginary friendships had become truly significant to me, even occasionally infringing into my “real” life, several of my original blog buddies began to ebb away over time.  With the first few, I noticed their absence but didn’t really feel it - the ‘sphere was crowded, and getting crowdeder.  As the ranks of ex-bloggers continued to grow, though, I started feeling as if quitting blogging was the new blogging.  It came to pass that many of my original crowd of drunk blog friends stopped maintaining their sites, and, in an unrelated development, I stopped hanging out with them so much.  As for the others, I found myself sometimes actually losing interest in meandering reportage and rants and harrangues and nonsensicalities.  I had enough of my own to work with. 

Recently I noticed that the woman who’d first told me about blogging hadn’t updated her site for five months.  Over the years I’ve had to switch out most all my links when other people had called it quits.  Several of my remaining favorite sites go months now without new material, leaving me to wonder if I should still keep them among my list of links.  I can’t keep up with most of the others that provide new material regularly.  I rarely comment anymore, and rarely get many comments on my own blog.  Besides that, traffic at my site has been, as of early 2006, on a slow but steady decline.  My parents give me more feedback on this blog than my friends, real or imaginary.  I dont’ know what this community is anymore, or even if it is.

So what’s this all about for me now?  It’s a question I’ve had to think through carefully.  I didn’t start writing when I started blogging - I’d been doing little essays and poems since grade school.  When I look back on them, thumbing through the drawers of stale paper and longhand scrawls, I’m struck by the quantity of material, and how awful most of it is.  Self-indulgent, sappy, clumsy and pointless, almost every page is a lesson in shoddy writing.  And that was fine, because no one but me would ever read any of it.  But here on this site in its various incarnations, I’ve known that other eyes will see my work, and see it as an end product, a piece of literature or at the least of creative expression, not juust as the sublimation of some random burst of mental energy I needed to disperse before I could fall asleep. 

In a sense, having readers I can no longer identify and whom I often don’t know, even if there aren’t many of you, compels me to write better sentences, urges me to find a more meaningful point to make or at least a joke that’s worth your time to read.  My success, I see when I look back over the archives, has been uneven - sometimes I feel like I’ve really articulated something that could have value, even if only entertainment value, which sometimes is value enough; sometimes I’m embarassed by what I’ve somehow deemed fit to post and I can only bear not to delete it because it provides an instructive example to me of my own vanity and hubris. 

But I do know, by the very nature of the internet, some people will stumble across the words I post, just as I know my own nature well enough to be sure that these ideas will keep clamoring in my mind to be reduced to writing.  If I am going to keep writing, I can use this site as a tool to hone my work, so that I can embarass myself minimally and offer the greatest possible incentive for you to return again to read more.  The community I had imagined myself to be a part of may yet exist, or maybe it never really did.  But the constructive value of parading my naked soul here before you has only grown more powerful for me over time.

So, I am drawn to conclude, I write to satisfy some internal compulsion over which I seem to have no control.  I blog because it forces me to give the product of that compulsion greater clarity, better structure.  If I am to tramp around naked in public, I should at least have the decency to present my best aspect.  It is your critical derogation or approbation that provides the whetstone to whatever skill I possess. I respectfully thank you for the motivation towards improved writing.  I will try not to let you down too often.

Friday, February 24, 2006

Redecorating

We’ve replaced your window of opportunity with a doggy door of ambiguity. Don’t let it hit you on the ass on the way out.

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

K.I.S.S.: SIMPLISTIC SYRUP

I’ve had occasion lately to look back at some of what I’ve posted here over the years, and rediscovered a recipe or two that I’d forgotten I’d invented.  It’s fun to make food in the kitchen when the end result is unexpectedly tasty, and it’s even better when you realize so long after the fact that you can still make fire mangoes or pan-fried chili-fennel salmon chunks that will turn a frustrating, soul-sucking day into a sleepy, blissful, grease-smeared pleasure. 

But I’ve also been reminded as I read through some of those dusty old recipes of two additional points: that I have not been coming up with much lately in terms of instructions for comestibles, and that some of the people who wander through these hallowed cyberhalls have disclaimed the ability to boil water.  “I can’t boil water,” they gleefully self-denigrate in the comments; “how the hell do you expect me to butterfly a porkloin?”

Well, first of all, “butterfly a porkloin” doesn’t mean what you think it does, so get your mind out of the insinkerator.  And second of all, like hell you can’t boil water.  If you wanted to boil water, you’d be able to do it.  It’s really easy.  Put the water in a pot, put the pot on the stove, turn the heat up nice and high, and don�t wander too far away.  Set a timer if you think you’ll lose focus, or stand there and watch it, or I don’t care what you do.  It’s true, I have boiled water for so long that it all evaporated and I ruined a nice old enamel soup tureen, but in my defense I was distracted by someone at the front door who wanted to talk about a very complicated thing I was involved in at the time and I kept thinking, I ought to go up and turn off that flame under the asparagus, it’s going to be inedible, and anyway I should put on a shirt, and I kind of have to go to the bathroom, and still I stood there gabbing like an idiot until I heard my smoke alarm going off and had to run upstairs at top speed before I set fire to my kitchen and my bladder exploded, though these two consequences could have been self-cancelling.  So I know it’s possible to screw this up.  But you have to work at it.  It�s easier to boil water than to ruin boiled water. 

So here’s a recipe for those of you who want to make something with your stove other than shrinkydinks.  And here’s the setup:

You’ve just poured yourself a cold beverage, and you taste it with great anticipation, but ultimate disappointment.  It needs to be sweeter.  What beverage is this?  Iced coffee (your morning coffee that you never finished but stuck back in the fridge)?  Iced tea?  Some kind of lameonade that you thought was a clever way to get rid of extra lemons, but it turns out to be so sour that your teeth start beating up your tongue?  That’s the one I tried.  I got a bunch of wonderful meyer lemons from my dad and squoze them down for lemonade, but even though these are relatively sweet lemons, the damn stuff was still way too sour for ordinary drinking purposes. 

So anyway, you’ve got this cold liquid and you want to make it sweet.  You dump sugar in it.  Is it any sweeter?  LIKE HELL IT IS.  Sugar dissolves in warm or hot water, but in cold water it just hangs out at the bottom of the glass like so much wasted potential, not unlike my own youth.  You stir it up and the little crystals cheerfully spin in an impotent flurry, melting not one whit.  You wind up with a big glass of unsavory liquid that you drink anyway, hoping that it’ll get better as you go, and then the last mouthful is basically a mass of disintegrated rock candy.  Blerg. 

The thing here is, you need pre-melted sugar if you want to sweeten up a cold beverage.  And that’s where boiling water comes in.  Here’s a recipe that’s totally useful, totally fun, and so goddamn simple that they actually call it:

SIMPLE SYRUP

Get a pot and put in it equal measures of water and granulated sugar.  Not powdered sugar.  Not brown sugar.  Just regular crystals of granulated sugar like they have in the little packets.  But take it out of the packets first, if you happened to have stolen it from a diner, you classless wanker.  I just made a batch of this stuff using a half-cup of water and a half-cup of sugar, but you can use any amount you like.  Smaller amounts cook faster, though.  If that’s your thing, I mean. 

Then, stir it a little.  You’ll need a spoon that’s long enough so you don’t singe yourself when the stuff starts heating up.  If you can’t manage this hurdle, you really shouldn�t have access to a kitchen, much less a stove.  But anyway.  When you stir the sugar and the water, you’ll see that the sugar just kind of spins around and laughs at you.  This is when you turn the tables.  Get the heat going nice and high on the burner and set the pot on top of it.  Yes, that’s right, there you go. 

Hang out next to this pot as it heats up.  Stir it every so often as it comes to a boil.  As the water starts to bubble, the sugar suddenly all dissolves and the water becomes clear again.  Turn off the heat and let the stuff cool down a little, and then pour it in a jar and stick it in the fridge. 

That’s the whole recipe.  Now you’ve got simple syrup and you can use it for sweetening pretty much anything.  And with that kind of power, comes great responsibility.  Life can be a bitter thing for some people.  It need not be so any longer for you.  So go in peace, my friend, and spread your sugary liquid far and wide.  The world will be a better place for it.  It’s just that simple.

Monday, February 20, 2006

a little joke, then a much longer and less funny one

Ad lib during the visit to the family:

Grandpa: Do you know who’s on the $10,000 bill?
Grandson: No.
Grandpa: Salmon P. Chase.
Grandson: Who’s that?
Chuckles: Some guy who used to run around after fish urine.

ba-dum.  I’ll be here all week, folks.  Which is to say, I start back to work tomorrow.  God knows if I’ll have any time to write or post as I dig out of 5 weeks of emails and re-embrace the application process which by now should be in full swing.  Therefore, I tremble with hesitation to present to you, in the extended entry, a very long analysis of a very short book.  Enjoy it while it lasts.

Roadtrip: the Visual Aid

Welcome back, I heartily tell myself, from a long and challenging road trip.  Connie thanks all of you who have offered her your strength, and she looks fabulous for it.  In the meantime, we had uneventful drives down to LA and back, and scattered showers all weekend long up and down the state made for fabulous air and stunning vistas.  This is saying quite a lot, since our route, I-5, is renowned for being one of the least interesting drives in the north-west terrestrial hemisphere.  Regardless, I was able to snap off several photos during the drive (I mean, during the bits when Kel was driving) that I rather like, so in lieu of crushing your spirit with a 5000 word essay on a childrenÕs book right off the bat today, IÕll soften you up with these images.  DonÕt say I never did nothing for you.  ItÕs a double negative and will make people think youÕre coarse.

The drive took us past acres upon acres of almond orchards.  They look, in the springtime, like this.

On the way down we stopped at a roadside rest stop right near the Merced-Fresno County border.  ItÕs fenced in, thusly:

Then on the way back, I got to take some nice shots, starting in the Ògrapevine,Ó where the freeway winds out of the southland through a mountain pass and into the San Joaquin Valley.  HereÕs a bit of the rugged geography:

When you come out of the Grapevine, the road stretches before you in a straight line that would give Euclid a wet dream. 

It goes on like that for hundreds of miles.

However, along the way, there are subtle changes that seemed less subtle as we rode along today.  For example, the wild mustard seems to be coming into bloom in some places already.

At another spot, we passed by sheep and egrets grazing together contentedly.

And throughout it all, the sky was huge and the clouds were dramatic.

Finally, we made a rest stop (both southbound and northbound) at a charming little spot in the Pacheco pass called Casa de Fruta.  ItÕs got a kiddie train, a petting zoo, lots of candy and fruit for sale, a deli called Òcasa de deli,Ó a wine shop called Òcasa de wine,Ó plenty of restrooms (in a building called Òcasa de restrooms,Ó ISYN), and a playground for road-wired children.  And for Chuckles, thereÕs a great collection of worn out trucks and farm equipment that I couldnÕt stop photographing. HereÕs a few of my favorites:

And that should be enough for tonight.  My casa de caffeine coffee jolt is finally wearing off.  I have one more day at home, and then on Tuesday I go back to work again after five weeks of leave.  Talk about feeling rusty.

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Snatching Victory

My last post, about the Olympics, was a bit cheeky.  HereÕs another angle on the events.  Read it slow, it has to last through sunday - we’re leaving tomorrow morning for a visit with my folks in LA, to help Connie shore up a bit of strength for a herculean effort of a non-athletic kind.  Wish her luck, and us too - 16 hours in a small car with a one-year-old will be a trial.  But in the olympic spirit, I think it’ll all be okay.

There was a time I lived in utopia, and it was the summer of 1984.  I didnÕt have a girlfriend, a job worth talking about, or a place of my own, but I could hardly complain: it was Los Angeles, the Olympic City, and the place had been cleaned up like never before.  Employers had staggered their business hours so traffic flowed more smoothly than ever, and the infamous rush hour logjams evaporated.  An adequate public transportation system was imposed, and people actually used it.  Banners, flags and festive posters appeared on streets and buildings everywhere.  People were friendly and helpful all of a sudden and the city was awash with first-rate art and performances from all around the world Ð I saw about ten of those events that summer, if not more.  (StockhausenÕs suite on the solar system, simultaneously performed on five different stages in a big park, was a noteworthy example.) The weather was great and there was hardly any smog.  Plus, there was the Olympics. 

I know I saw more than 20 athletic events that summer, from velodrome cycling to soccer to track and field to gymnastics to basketball and a bunch of other stuff I can fain recall these 20 and more years hence.  In particular, I recall going to the basketball venue with my cousin, three months older than me by the calendar but generally a decade or so ahead of me behaviorally.  We watched one game of a double header, and then during the 20-minute break he offered me a chew of tobacco.  IÕd never tried it, but I took a pinch atween my cheek and gum anyway and let it work its magic.  By the time the next game started I couldnÕt stand up for the anthems.  My head spun and my stomach was fomenting a most unpleasant revolt.  I had to conclude that none of the five Olympic rings were left by a Skoal can in anybodyÕs back pocket.  IÕve never chewed again. 

Anyway, with all the urban and civic improvements, and all the incredible demonstrations of creative energy, and the amazing athletic endeavors, and even the face-numbing, body-wrenching introduction to oral tobacco usage, the one thing that still really sticks in my mind was the weightlifting.  No, really. 

Our weightlifting tickets were not among my most prized.  I loved the bike racing at the new velodrome, respected the track and field events at the magnificent Coliseum, appreciated the spectacle of international soccer at the Rose Bowl (we saw Yugoslavia and waved little Yugoslav flags, bellowing Yu! Go!  Slav-i-a!), but weightlifting was not of any interest to me.  It was something my dad did in the garage that caused him to make terrible noises and me to avoid the vicinity when he was there.  It was undramatic, flashless, and crude.  There were no head-to-head competitions.  And the venue, a small college down by the ocean, was of no interest to me.  In short, who cared. 

And Òin shortÓ was the operative phrase, since our tickets were for the lightweight class Ð bantam, or flyweight, or waif, or something.  The little guys.  If I didnÕt even care about the big guys, I was actively apathetic about the little ones.  But we had the tickets and I wasnÕt going to miss the pageantry, even of a dorkball event like this, with its embarrassing nomenclature like snatch, clean-and-jerk, and prolapse hoist.  So when the time came, I went.  And it was a very wise decision.

One at a time, these human fireplugs, all shorter than I was, would step up to the podium and confront a metal bar loaded with so much iron that it made the floor bend.  TheyÕd slap chalk on their hands and their singlets and on the cordwood they used as thighs, and then the room seemed to shrink down around them.  Their concentration was so intense that we all synched up, breathing as one, the whole crowd locked in on a single goal Ð overcoming gravity.  Since we all keyed in on just one man at a time, all the details that would have been lost in a crowd were clearly illuminated under the spotlight.  As individual athletes stood one at a time to make their weights, subtle differences emerged in technique and style, as well as larger differences in personality.  Some were stoic; some were nervous; and some were on an altogether different plane of reality than the rest of us.  Each, though, was very much an individual.  And their diminutive stature was the last consideration on our minds, from the first lift of the first bar. 

There was the thoughtful matter of personal arrangement, placing the feet and hands just so, arching the back, setting the neck.  Then theyÕd unleash their strength, muscles bunched and bulging, every sinew straining against an obstacle our species was never meant to overcome.  Then, suddenly, the bounds of gravity would snap, and the huge barbell flew into the air.  ThatÕs when individual style and true mastery took over.  Could he stop the damn thing from tipping over backwards?  Could he hold it in place?  Could his legs stop shivering long enough to get credit for the lift?  Could he create a moment of perfect harmony between power, momentum, and inertia? 

After each failed attempt, the man on the dais was crestfallen and his enormous shoulders slumped with shame.  Every person in the darkened theater knew what it meant, what it felt like (though without the hundreds of pounds of weight and public exposure and nationalistic disappointment), and we sighed his sorrow with him. 

But successful lifts were ecstatic, in a way IÕd never known ecstasy and never, on my own, could.  TheyÕd stand there with a billion pounds of steel balanced in their two little hands over their fragile brainpans, teetering on the fragile platform of their two small human feet so far below them, and then let it all go, the huge barbell plummeting like an elevator cut loose in a shaft, slamming so hard into the stage that it bounced several times in a way IÕd never seen steel bounce before.  Their muscles went instantly from a clenched mass of rock to elated flexibility, and the air in the venue brightened with their triumph. 

When Guoqiang Zeng of China lifted 235 kilograms to win the gold, his national origin was a matter of the utmost irrelevance to us as we cheered him.  I can remember clearly his face wreathed in smiles, and his enormous barrel chest bursting with pride at his accomplishment.  HeÕd lifted nearly five times his body weight, in a strange foreign land, in a competition with the best and strongest little men in the world.  But it seemed that his real triumph was over the inanimate disks of iron, rather than over the other men against whom heÕd struggled.  He had done the impossible, on cue.  His elation still shines within me, and reminds me that, no matter how heavy the weight I face, if I concentrate and take my time, I have a decent shot of lifting it. 

Just so long as itÕs not a real weight, of course.  My little lesson of personal strength was matched by the spectacle of superhuman physicality each of the competitors represented.  And that was another lesson Ð those little guys can pack one hell of a punch.  This is a lesson that takes on more resonance every day I spend with my new son.  IÕm looking forward to taking him to the games some day and letting him learn a few Olympic lessons of his own.

Monday, February 13, 2006

Olympic Opening Ceremony Recap

I’m a total sucker for the Olympics.  I love the opening ceremony, the effusion of maudlin commercials, the fanatical pursuit of perfection in a discipline that has no relationship to the world as I know it.  If you’ve missed the show so far, or have watched it with the sound turned off so you can listen to old Pink Floyd or some kind of hippie music instead of the compulsive nattering that is supposed to form the sound track to the world’s greatest athletes, here’s a recap for you. 

At the outset of the coverage there is an interview between two employees of the same network, who exchanged prophesies.

- You know, this is the most recent of all the Olympic games.
- That must be because all the prior ones took place in the past.
- But let’s look beyond that, to the spirit that drives these athletes to excel.  After this message from our sponsors, Altegra - the drug only your doctor’s insurance administrator can discuss with you.
- No time for that, we’ve got a breaking report of goodwill and miscegenation.  These youthful, hormone-packed, finely-tuned young Adonises and -ettes have finally broken the unspoken barrier of mutual human shame.  Is a new race of ubermenches in our future?  We’ll have an in-depth report later tonight, so don’t try changing the channel or you might miss something juicy.  And now, let’s look into this year’s new competitions.  Galvin?
- This year sees the introduction of two new sports in the winter Olympics, an ancient competition that is fought even today just exactly as the ancient Athenians did on their crude snowboards and their hammered bronze ice skates.
- Two new sports, then, eh?
- Okay there big fella, don’t go all Canadian on me, there are two new sports.  There’s the Bi-Avalon, in which androgynous Bryan Ferry impersonators replicate bloated ‘80s pop, and the Nardic Combined - a brutal, emasculating event in which athletes endure two procedures on their persons that can only be referred to in figures of speech: the freestyle equipment series, and curling.
- Ouch, Gavin.  Up next: the heartwarming story of a dog and his pick-up truck. Only in Torino, people.  Stay tuned.

I did, but with the magic of TiVo, I was able to skip around pretty efficiently for this four-hour block of programming.  Here are the highlights you need no longer admit to having missed:

During the opening ceremony I was shocked to see dancers zipping around with flames shooting out of their lycra body-coverings.  I can still remember my RA telling us never to set those things on fire, no matter what they came out of.  Then they had an Italian speaker make an announcement in English that sounded like a “Welcome to the assleaks of the XXth Olympiad.” I join her in warmly embracing this misunderstood community, but you know there’s a reason why the stadium has no roof. 

Worthy of special introduction from our media team on site, was Georg Hakel, the German Luge star (these people, they actually worship lugers), known to the adoring millions as “The speeding white sausage.” Really.  Inspired by his example, and expecting that most people won’t be able to prove you wrong, here’s a short list of other “Olympians” and their nicknames, so you can say you’re rooting for somebody if you’re asked:

* Downhill: the aging but indomitable Khazak aristocrat, Flambus Kokramak, the Plummeting Puce Walrus
* Short-track Skating: the Samoan sensation, Faulu Ulufalulufalu or “Foo-Foo,” the Raging Red Winnebago
* Ice Dancing: Liechtensteinian waifs Ebo and Albu Narkenugi, the Drooping Maroon Spoons
* Super-G: Argentinian playboy Serge Fantabular, the Slithering Sepia Snake
* Biathalon: New Zealandinian Ewan Gloot, the Plucky Little Cornflower Cornflower.

The parade of nations was spruced up a little bit by the use of ‘80s pop hits instead of ponderous Olympian tropes.  Thus, we got Iran’s team walking out to Funky Town, a coincidence I canÕ´ help but think has political implications.  I now wish they’d gone a little further with this musical commentary, as by letting the Two Koreas march out together to the strains of “Tainted Love,” or Cuba to “Dancing With Myself.” Anyway, it seems now like a missed opportunity.  Come on, “Come On Eileen” for Eileenia!  You can’t make this stuff up! 

Anyway, after that Yoko Ono and Peter Gabriel sucked all the life out of the place and we all remembered that Benito Mussolini built the stadium and got sort of freaked out and some skier lady went to light some fireworks in the middle of everything with the torch and it set off a bunch of fireworks and then they lit the main torch which I thought was cheating but okay MISTER TORINO OLYMPICS you can have it your way but I don’t have to like it. 

The rest of it seems to be going well enough, though.  The U.S’s Flying Red Tomato won a gold.  Said he was “stoked.” Okay, the baby’s up.  Hope this was helpful for you.  I found it personally fulfilling, myself, despite failing to meet my personal best.  That’s what human endeavor is all about, eh Gavin? 

Thursday, February 09, 2006

Comic Relief

I have not been keeping up with the world on-line, limiting my input to television, radio, and the legitimate stage that all the world, as some say, is.  So I don’t know if what I have to say here is already old hat or done to death or offensive to Allah or anything else.  I’ve just been stewing for a while on too many subjects, and finally I’ve had it with this one. 

I’m a big believer in free speech.  Hell, I’m a blogger, aren’t I?  I paste my opinions on the cyberether at least a couple of times a week, and I don’t want anyone telling me what not to say.  Then again, I’m sensitive to the fact that I could hurt someone’s feelings, and I’ve actually retracted a few lines or posts here and there when I failed to honor my own standards of decency to others.  I know that words and images can hurt, and I don’t want to minimize that.

That was kind of heavy.  Here’s some comic relief.

What I’m concerned about, today, is the uproar over cartoons that are insulting to the Islamic community.  I feel their anger and their frustration, and I understand their desire to respond in the strongest possible terms.

Comic relief.

However, I also feel, very strongly, that they are so monumentally wrong about so many aspects of this debate, especially the violent, vituperative nature of their response, that those who have engaged in these actions have given up any right to the respect of the international community, including the right to have their religion or their autonomy respected. 

Comic relief.

I understand that it’s insulting, a violation of Islamic law, to depict the prophet Mohammed – a towering historical figure for whom I hold no antipathy.  And yet this insult was dealt to the community of his followers.  They have every right to be outraged.  But their outrage is hypocritical and so far out of proportion to their actual injury, as to be beyond any shadow of justification.

First, let’s recognize that the cartoons did not show Mohammed eating babies; they did not encourage anyone to kill Muslims, or suggest that the Islamic community is rewriting world history in order to gain sympathy or credibility for atrocities they are committing.  Nothing of the sort was even implied by any of the Danish cartoons.  The cartoons, rather, depicted, at worst, a face under a hat that was a bomb, and a prophet guarding the gates to heaven.  There was no genocide, suggestion of satanic influence, or intimation of revisionist historicism. 

Comic relief, as if you needed more.

Limitations on speech that neither actively incites violence nor is obscene (without redeeming social value) are contrary to liberty and free thought.  The western world has chosen to honor the values of liberty and free thought, and as a result, the horrific cartoons I’ve linked above have never resulted in the burning of a single embassy, nor the issuance of a single death-threat against a cartoonist or editor.  I am profoundly saddened by those images, but not shocked by them, because they were produced by a culture that has established a long record of insults, defamation, and revisionism.  And it is a tenet of my political philosophy that they are free to vomit this hideousness on their own walls anytime they want.  I am insulted, offended, and injured by their words, but it is my duty to bear these injuries, because the alternative – forced silence and prior restraint - is much worse.

Any nation that wants to limit the free speech of its inhabitants is free, I suppose, to do so, at least until those individuals rise up to defend the rights I believe are theirs by virtue of their mere humanity.  So if Palestinians or Indonesians or Iranians want to outlaw speech they find offensive, they have it within their power to do so.  But when they seek to restrain others from political speech they find offensive, I must protest.  Would they want to be prohibited from depicting Jews as eating human flesh, which is a fundamental violation of the laws of kashrut?  To show them as devils?  As Nazis?  For all of these are as offensive to the small minority of this world’s citizens who are Jewish, as it is to the 1.3 billion Muslims to depict Mohammed as a warmonger. 

And this brings me to my second, and more important, point:

Hard-line fundamentalist Islamists are now mounting a contest to find the best Holocaust cartoons.  Let us put aside the fact that many in that community claim that the Holocaust never happened, that it is yet another fabrication by Jews who have rewritten world history for their own purposes.  It is obvious that the choice of subject matter in this contest was chosen solely for the purpose of causing the greatest possible outrage and pain to the Jewish community.  The advocates of this exercise suggest that it’s a test for world media – will they publish something offensive to Jews just as they published something offensive to Muslims?  Of course, it’s a fatally flawed experimental model, since the purpose of publication of political cartoons should not be to offend but to express some editorial comment on current events.  The Danish cartoons, for example, offer a perspective on militant Islam, which is a very hot topic these days.  There is no such comment that is currently worth making with images of Hitler in bed with Ann Frank. 

In fact, anti-Semitic cartoons have been published non-stop since before printing presses were invented, and though the Jewish community has always sought to speak out on its own behalf in such cases, it has never stormed embassies or called for the death of the defamers.  Other cartoons have offended the Christian community, sometimes featuring Jesus on the cross or performing miracles.  These people have a right to be offended, but they have no right to beat, burn and kill those who have offended them, and they have responded with a strong arm and a stalwart heart and with political power and all legal means at their disposal. Even when a blasphemer blatantly violated the law of the land in making an offending statement, the recourse was in court and not via the KKK.

And let’s face it: making fun of the Holocaust is nothing like making fun of Mohammed.  In one case, we’re talking about a historical figure, dead for over a thousand years.  The Holocaust was the slaying, not even 70 years ago, of 12 million innocent people – Jews, Roma, Catholics, homosexuals, people of African descent, the physically or mentally disabled.  These people were slaughtered wholesale, as rapidly as the world’s most sophisticated culture could manage to dispose of the bodies.  If you don’t believe it happened, I will not be able to persuade you to the contrary – but even disbelievers must recognize that making fun of genocide is not akin to commenting on the violent misuse of ancient religious texts.

If the fundamentalists in the madrasas want to verify that the world offers them an even playing field for offensive images, the ones they’ve already published should suffice.  Rather, it seems to me that they’ve finally gotten a taste of their own medicine, and it’s so bitter they want to kill their doctor and burn down his hospital. 

I wish I could hear the moderate Islamic response over the cries and bellows of the offended fundamentalists, but it doesn’t really carry very well.  In the meantime, I can only hope that the blind fury of the outraged Muslim community finally succeeds in alienating the European nations that have accused Israel for so many years of instigating the difficulties in that region.  These were difficulties that needed no instigation.  When you are dealing with maniacal zealots, the best you can hope is that they find someone else to hate – but hatred is their ultimate religion and eventually it will seek and find a new target.  The pen is only mightier than the sword when you put the sword down.  It seems that the fundamentalists here have a pen in one hand and a sword in the other, and they’ll take the hand or head of anyone who dares follow in their bloody, selfish footsteps.

I now return you to your regular whatever.  Thanks for letting me get that off my chest.

Wednesday, February 08, 2006

Don’t Humphry that Howard

Sure I’m immature.  That’s why i found it so amusing that the main gallery at the big Asian Art Museum is named after “Bogart Johnson.” All I can think is that this is someone who doesn’t know how to share the wealth. 

By the same token, I was talking with a good friend during the superbowel, so-named because his young son was soiling diapers hand over fist, so to speak, throughout the game.  We began to refer to the distasteful byproducts young Aaron was emitting as “Soylent Brown.” “Soylent Brown was people,” I suggested to Jon as a marketing slogan.  He bested me with, “Soylent Brown is poople.”

and that’s why I love sports.  and I’ll leave you with these.  And now back to revising the hagadah and my 15 page essay on “goodnight moon.” oh you wish I was kidding.

Knowledge is Flower

I’ve been writing a lot lately but none of it is ready to post.  However, as I hear Zach start to stir from his nap, I will take this opportunity to share a few words about a few words. 

Knowledge being immutable, the dictionary and encyclopedia always had an esteemed place on our shelves when I was growing up.  The old Britannica stayed in dad’s study for his professional use, and we got the World Book up in the TV room – and just below the World Book lay the unabridged Random House Dictionary.  We had an unabridged OED, too, the two-volume set with the magnifying glass, but the RHD was the one we really enjoyed using, with its concise definitions, nice friendly typeface, and all sorts of fun extra stuff in the back about the solar system and the development of the alphabet and so forth.  It also, naturally, contained all the words, every one of them – including those that were obscure or obscene.  It was my first favorite dictionary.  From it I developed my belief that a good dictionary would answer any question, for time immemorial.

But the RHD stayed behind when I went off to college and I had to make do with my old Little OED from grade school – a serviceable reader’s dictionary but significantly abridged, and lacking any of the entertaining extras to which I’d grown accustomed.  What I needed was one of those huge, shelf-eating dictionaries, with dark cloth binding and thousands of speckled page-ends. 

Within two years, my wish was granted, though not as I would have had it: My grandfather Herman passed away and didn’t need his dictionary anymore.  It said OED on the spine in gold letters and it weighed a billion pounds.  It was perfect for lending gravitas to my quirky sophomore party den, and it seemed to contain all the arcane sesquipedalia up which I had occasional need to look.  What’s more, pressed within it was the carnation my dad wore to grandpa’s funeral.  So it was huge and comprehensive, and just as it represented a path to ancient wisdom, it also represented my own hereditary path as well.  Etymology and genealogy, all in one enormous comprehensive package. 

This giant OED served me well enough through college. While in law school, though, I stumbled onto a great deal for a good cheap dictionary, one like the old RHD from my childhood, with cut-out letternotches and color sections on space exploration and U.S. presidents; yet it was lightweight, even while it contained more pages than grandpa’s old OED.  I got the new dictionary and the old one was relegated to reserve status.  Eventually it disappeared from sight into a box of second-tier books, and that’s where it was when I found it again not too long ago.

I pulled it out and thumbed through its musty pages.  The paper seemed fragile and stiff; the typeface, outmoded and old-fashioned.  I checked the copyright date: 1947.  Herman would have bought it at the apex of a successful career.  I turned to the “c”s and looked up “computer.” The terse definition was “a person or thing that computes.” This struck me as unduly circumspect, even to the point of inaccuracy.  I looked up “transistor,” but it wasn’t there.  Neither was “gluon” or “Velcro.” Despite having all the redolent articulations of Milton and Yeats, no matter how archaic, it didn’t have any words invented after the end of World War II.  Its history was too historical, too limited.  It just didn’t do anymore. 

It soon came to pass that many boxes of once-treasured material possessions had to be jettisoned from our apartment to make room for Zachary.  One of those boxes wound up containing grandpa’s old OED.  I pulled it from the stack for a final perusal, and the cloth binding began to disintegrate and shred in my hands.  I let the book fall open where it would, and saw myself staring at a once-white carnation in sepia tones, flattened crudely and unceremoniously within its pages.  Never properly dried, it was by now a bit moldy and much worse for wear.  I held it to my nose and was relieved that it still bore the carnation’s own bare fragrance, hardly to be scented, and not the thick stink of decay.  The pages in which it had been pressed were stained and rippled from years of hiding the dead bloom. 

I held it up to the light one more time, watched the sun cast through its translucent petals, and then, with a sigh, dropped it in my little garbage can before I put the dictionary back in the box of books.  The memorial for Herman was long, long past, and the meaning of that flower would be lost on anyone else who found it.  For some reason still not clear to me, I didn’t want it falling into the hands of someone who wouldn’t know what it symbolized.  The thought of leaving it in that dictionary so it could be discarded with all the other excess printed matter we were donating to wherever, felt like a dishonor to my grandfather.  Better, I thought, to release the flower with finality and due recognition. 

But about the dictionary, I was less sentimental.  It had served its purpose, and then significantly outlived it.  It had no colorful supplemental sections and it was missing a lot of important words.  The immutable truth it once contained had moved on and left it, bound in a printer’s frame, far behind.  Its hidebound words, once so authoritative, had been made to look like fools from the vantage of a new era.  And for the end of that heavy volume, no tears needed be shed and no flowers strewn.  The immutability of truth was more evident in a dried carnation than in the recieved word of academics, but even that truth eventually earned reconsideration.

Friday, February 03, 2006

The Evil Panty, or Why I’m a Bad Blogger These Days

“Paternity leave.” A month ago those five syllables sounded just barely less idyllic than “tropical island” or “undulating vibrations” or “on-call gourmet chef.” No more of that bogus “get up before dawn, cobble together a lunch out of lawn clippings and newsprint, and stand in the rain till a bus full of angry weirdos comes to take me to my dingy scrivening-garret for ten hours.” The life of a working stiff was over for me.  I would henceforth be the opposite of a working stiff – an “idle flaccid,” I guess, which doesn’t sound so great now that I think on it.  But I was psyched to be on leave, anyway.  After years of sweating my blood for THE MAN, I’d be able to luxuriate in the private splendor of my own home, with no clock to watch and no one to answer to but my own self.  I’d earned it, and it was about time I cashed in.

What I’d forgotten was that I was the only one on leave.  Kel is still getting up at 6:30 to go to work, give or take a few snoozes for which I remain responsible since the alarm clock is on my side of the bed.  And once the bathroom light goes on in the early morning darkness, blasting me directly in the face with hideous brightness, any hope I have of sleeping is pretty much dead. 

So I roll out of bed before 7 anyway, despite my “on leave” status, and shower and shave, and settle in for ten minutes of therapeutic stretching and exercise.  I unfurl my mat and lie on my back, starting by gently coaxing my vertebrae to return to a healthful alignment, sighing out my tension.  This action, silent and subtle, invariably somehow awakens Zach in the nursery down the hall.  The gurgling coo of his revivification is an unmistakable prelude to a keening wail if I don’t move quickly enough to get him out of bed, so, with resignation overlaid upon my accumulated backtension, I rearise almost immediately from the floor and pluck him, grinning and giggling, from his crib.  I change him, prepare him a tasty and nutritious breakfast, and helplessly watch him spit it into his hands and then smear it up his cheeks and into his thick luxurious hair, all the healthier for the oatmeal-yogurt conditioner he so regularly and enthusiastically applies thereto. 

And from that point forward, it’s all about Zach – as it should be.  That’s why I’m here, instead of at my downtown desk with the free coffee and uninterrupted internet access.  So I clean up breakfast (mostly by swabbing the boy’s head and hands, and picking up renegade Cheerios and Kix before they’re ground irretrievably into the rugs), and then play for a few hours.  “Play,” in this case, meaning “run around after Zach as he pulls over everything that’s not bolted to the wall, crawls under everything with at least six inches of ground clearance, and desperately tries to explore and empty our many cabinets of poison and heavy blunt objects.” I’m surprised, actually, that I managed to survive here myself for so long, with so many death traps everywhere.  Just lucky, I guess. 

The clock I mentioned before that I don’t have to watch while I’m on leave, goes off two to three hours after Zach gets up, to tell me to put him down again.  Whereas, at work, I just do my job till some arbitrary period of time has elapsed, at which point I just go and do something else, here on paternity leave I am now responding to a variable timeline over which I have only the most tenuous control.  I just need to keep alert for the signals that the next phase of Zach’s day is imminent – usually, a subtle glassiness around the eyes, some rubbing of the face, and increasing tantrums against gravity and inanimate objects.  That’s when I scoop him up, choke his tears with six ounces of warm formula (or “warmula”), and gently lower him into his crib. 

He hates relinquishing consciousness, though, and often protests vigorously as soon as he realizes he’s horizontal.  These protests are especially violent if he’s actually already asleep, but eventually he stops complaining and succumbs to the inevitable nap, giving me a chance to clean up his breakfast, finish my own, and put away those of his toys I’m most likely not to notice till I trip over them and hurt myself.  Then I can sit down to check my email, play a quick game of Spider, open my blog for a little surfing – but before I’ve gotten far, I hear him sputter and cough back to life in the next room, and, all too soon, he’s awake again, crying piteously. 

At this point I remove him again from the crib only to discover, to my dismay, that during his nap someone snuck into his room and filled his diaper with a richly aromatic mass of used vegetables and bilirubin.  I hasten to cleanse his undercarriage and then we play for another half hour (he just loves the surge protector, the top-heavy spindle table, the torchiere lamps and the kitchen garbage can) before I strap him to a chair and grind up some food for his lunch.  The afternoon then proceeds pretty much as the morning had, but I do get about an hour during his post-prandial nap to write, clean the house, do the laundry, and maybe get some rest while he’s in his crib sleeping, or, possibly, cursing me out like a furious, pre-verbal sailor.  By the time Kel gets home around five, I’m sorely whipped, my to-do list is openly laughing at me in derision, and Zach is working diligently at removing, first my eyeglasses, and then my eyeballs.

We feed him, then ourselves; then we bathe him and get him into a sleeper, read him a few books (“Goodnight Moon” is now my favorite work of existential literature), dump another bottle down his bottomless gullet, and put him to bed with gentleness and trepidation and fervent prayers that he goes down and stays down.  This leaves me with just enough energy to watch a little mindless television and go to bed, so I can awaken the next morning and do it all over again.

All of which is to say that paternity leave is every bit as fulfilling, gratifying, and emotionally powerful as I’d ever hoped it would be – but as far as relaxation goes, my old desk at work had a lot more going for it than I’d realized.  It’s not for nothing that the anagram of “paternity leave” is “re: eat evil panty.” I’m not sure what that means, but you just know that it sounds like a lot of work.

Thursday, February 02, 2006

dinner companions

last night some of zach’s friends came over to play with him and feed us chinese dumplings.  want proof?  here’s laila and jeannette in our dining room with the little man.  I wouldn’t say I’m jealous, but I’m not saying anything else either.

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

THE POWER OF STEVE

There’s a lot to do today - friends are coming over for supper so I have to do some cleaning, and there’s laundry and writing and ever so much crap to wade through.  But that doesn’t mean I won’t check my email.  And when my gmail screen shows this phrase:

Lightning Bolt - http://www.Xoxide.com - Steven Seagal‘s Energy Drink Taste the Power of Steven Seagal

- as an ad at the head of the page, well, I just gotta blog it.  Taste the power of Steve!  Go on taste it you weakling!  In fact shake it up first so it sprays all over you!  THE POWER OF STEVE COMPELS YOU!

My favorite part is that it’s missing some punctuation.  Steve Seagall may be a real man, a well-energized man, but that doesn’t mean he gets involved in pansy-ass niceties like punctuation.  If he needs a colon he’ll just tear one out of a nearby henchman.  Commas are for sissies, or occasionally he puts people into them with a kick to the brainpan.  I’m not even going to tell you what he said about periods. 

Okay, now I can do my laundry.  I feel strangely energized.  Steve Seagall, energy dork.