Zom B's Survival Guide

Gloating over tragedy is not a virtue, you twat!

2009-03-25T09:10:00.006-04:00

I understand that people get all heated up about the abortion debate. That there are foundational issues of definition that will never be resolved means that we will never be able to have a productive dialogue about this issue which illuminates commonly held ground. We have to agree to disagree until one side or another gives up a bedrock premise on their side of the argument (e.g., whether a fetus is a "child" or not).

But then there's just being an asshole about it.

Case in point, PZ Myers over at Pharyngula noticed a particularly odious rationalization of the recent airplane tragedy in Montana (context, if you haven't seen the news). Myers expresses my disgust as adequately as I can, so I won't reiterate what he's already written. But to summarize, Gingi Edmonds, a writer I had never come across before (because I don't normally read the Christian Newswire), took the opportunity to not only point out a coincidence which one might be able to categorize as a slight irony (albeit one still in bad taste), and instead turned it into a screed that gives her god the credit for murdering the children of a man who owns a chain of family planning clinics (or as the wingnuts read it: "abortion clinics").

Oh the divine justice!

She writes:

We warned him, for his children's sake, to wash his hands of the innocent blood he assisted in spilling because, as Scripture warns, if "you did not hate bloodshed, bloodshed will pursue you". (Ezekiel 35:6)

Yet again the sentiments of the most vocal christians among us demonstrate their zeal for revenge and perverse pleasure taken in the suffering of others. Very un-christian. At the risk of invoking No True Scotsman, I reply:

He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? ... If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? (Matthew 5:45-47)

But that's only Jesus in what Sam Harris would call one of his "better moods." We all know the god of the Old Testament to be... well, how about another quote? Richard Dawkins, can you summarize my feelings on this?

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." [emphasis added]

If it could be proved to me that the god these people worship truly existed, I would certainly believe. But I would also have to take Philip Pullman's stance on the matter and declare that such a being as the god of Abraham "deserves to be put down and rebelled against."

Amazon Recommends You Smoke Crack!

2009-02-27T08:22:00.000-05:00

I have yet to have a computer algorithm recommend a purchase to me that I would actually consider buying. I have a broad range of interests in movies music and film, so you'd think it wouldn't be hard. Recommendations online are not based on what someone who likes a particular piece of music or film would also like given the style, theme, or tone of the piece. Instead it seems recommendations are only based on what someone else who has bought that same thing I did buys next. Thus my recommendations from Amazon, etc. are pretty worthless.

Want examples?

One of the the things I find myself drawn to is Japanese cinema. But not in general. I like Japanese films from the 1930s though the1960s - primarily Akira Kurosawa (the greatest director who ever lived), Hiroshi Inagaki, and Kenji Mizoguchi.

One of my favorite films by Inagaki is his retelling of the 47 Ronin, called Chushingura. Here is the synopsis of Inagaki's Chushingura:

Chushingura means "loyalty," and that potent Japanese theme runs like hot blood throughout this stately samurai epic. It's often called the Gone with the Wind of Japanese cinema... based on one of Japan's most enduring and oft-interpreted historical events. A simmering, deliberately paced drama set during the Tokugawa shogunate in 1701, it centers on 47 loyal samurai who seek vengeance against the arrogant elder statesman who caused their master's ritual suicide... This is a thematically dense, politically complex drama, presented here at its fullest length (207 minutes) and best appreciated after multiple viewings. Masterfully composed with painterly precision, Chushingura weaves its intricate tapestry from time-honored tenets of Japanese culture, offering a challenging but grandly rewarding experience....

Sound good? It is. This film is awesome like a Górecki symphony that swells from an almost inaudible solo soprano in the first movement to the mournful wail of the full orchestra by the end of the third movement. Slow burn. Big emotions brought to boil over a long time.

So, based upon my prior liking of Chushingura, Amazon made a suggestion based on what others who liked it also bought. Here's what Amazon suggests I buy, sight-unseen:

Uh, yeah. Okay. I see where you would get the idea I would like this. An artistic interpretation of one of Japan's most enduring historical tales of loyalty and honor definitely is concomitant in tone and quality to schoolgirl fetish films.

I think I know how this works. Let's see, I liked Jose Ferrer's Oscar-winning performance in the 1950 version of Cyrano de Bergerac, so I should also make sure I also see... the remake of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Hm. I actually do profoundly love both of those films.

Maybe I'm the one ruining Amazon's recommendations page. It once suggested I purchase Surf's Up because I had bought Hostel Part 2.

Even funnier is the most recent recommendation I got from Ticketbastard. Not long ago Comrade Squinty and I went to see our favorite band, Opeth, twice. Our love for Swedish death metal/jazz/folk seems to have broken Ticketbastard's computer because here was the next show it thought I would like:

YEE HAW! PRAISE THE LORD AND PASS THE AMMUNITION!

The U.S. Warmly Welcomes You Home fucker!

2009-01-06T09:06:00.007-05:00

I went through one of those symbolic checkpoints in the state of New York driving back here. It was about 125 miles from the border. In a car with license plate one on it from Vermont. With little letters underneath it that said US Senate. We were stopped and ordered to get out of the car and prove my citizenship. And I said “what authority are you acting under?” and one of your agents pointed to his gun and said “that’s all the authority I need.” Encouraging way to enter our country.

That was Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) speaking at the hearing on the FY 2009 DHS budget request, Tuesday, March 4, 2008. This shit is getting out of hand.

Of the many things I love about living in the United States (and their number has dwindled in the last eight years), crossing the border back into the States is NOT one of them. Having crossed into the States through Niagara Falls, JFK airport, Port Huron, MI, and Atlanta, GA, I have never been made to feel like coming back into the country was something I could take for granted or even something that I was welcome to do. That is not a good thing.

Last summer we drove to Michigan for a wedding (it was marginally cheaper than flying). The most direct route from Boston to East Lansing is through Ontario, Canada, entering at Niagara Falls and exiting through Sarnia. Crossing the border into Canada we were asked the anticipated questions, such as, "where are you coming from," "where are you going," "how long will you be staying with us," etc. No big.¹

Reentering the States, on the other hand, was slightly different. Instead of the warm and friendly "hello, bonjour" we'd received on our way into Canada we were hit with an abrupt demand of "Citizenship?" from the U.S. Border Agent in Michigan. I gladly said, "United States" as I handed the guy our passports.² He then gave us the third degree. Origin? Destination? Any stops in Canada? What are you two doing in Michigan?

Whataminute. He asked our purpose in the United States? Uh, sorry, we freakin' live here. Being in good spirits, we answered, "We're headed to a wedding."

"Friends or family?"

What? You've got to be kidding me. Now, I know what was going on. He was getting details of our story to determine whether we knew enough about what we were doing to be telling the truth instead of concocting some line of bullshit about our possible illicit activities in the Mitten State. We played along. "Friends," I said. "You can enter," he replied, handing us back the documents he'd been trying to bend with his mind a 'la Uri Geller (that's how his expression looked anyway).

Thanks, pal, for letting me back into the country I have every right to be in and not making me call the embassy to explain a three hour detour through Canada.

Other friends who also drove to the wedding from Boston told of an encounter where the driver answered all of the border agent's questions, but before the crossing guard would clear them he demanded that her husband speak English. Since when are people with valid proof of identity and U.S. citizenship required to speak English to get across the border? Thanks, Officer Dobbs.

A.'s husband is as Caucasian-looking as they come, incidentally - so at least it wasn't racial profiling. Are we seriously afraid of French-Canadian separatists infiltrating our country to insidiously plant bilingual signage along the road?

But I digress. The way back for us was slightly more annoying than it had been coming from the East. Entering New York from Canada, we waited in the line of cars at the border until our turn. As the final car in front of us pulled away, a stray border cop talking to the one in the booth ahead of us raised his hand in a "hold on" gesture.³ We waited while Barney joked with his compatriot about how Andy lets him keep a single bullet in his shirt pocket. After a minute or two he wandered off, leaving no one standing in the lane, at which point we figured that it was okay to proceed.

As we pulled forward slowly the person in the booth stepped out with two hands raised and started shrieking, "STOP! STOP!" We did, and she went back to checking her e-mail in the booth.⁴ After another two minutes or more we finally got the "come forward" gesture.⁵

We comply and the woman in the booth started to chastise us for trying to take our place in the queue. "When you receive a command to stop from an officer you obey it." Squinty tried to explain that since the "officer" who'd gestured for us to hold on had departed, we figured it would be fine to proceed. She emphasized that we should have waited for the other officer (i.e., her) to waive us forward. Whatever, jerk. Ask us your stupid questions and look in the trunk so we can go home.

Every single time we travel abroad (and I hadn't considered Canada all that far abroad, but what the hey) we get a chilly reception coming home. It's not that I'm expecting flowers, hugs, and a "we missed you,"⁶ but a slight acknowledgment that we're welcome in our own home would be nice.

Although, I understand. Border guards, transit authority, and parking enforcement ticket writers have all got the same attitude as street cops. By extension, they all think they are part of that thin blue line that stands between good decent people (read: them) and lawlessness (read: us).

Great job you're doing there, DHS. It's a good thing you guys are issued guns, because without them you'd be a complete farce.

¹ BTW, nothing personal Ontario, but WOW is the drive between Hamilton and Sarnia boring. Like deadly dull! Nebraska dull.
² Unnecessary, since the passport requirement for Canadian/U.S. travel by land or water has been delayed until next summer.
³ Or, in the Middle East, a "hey, come on ahead, we're friends, right?" gesture. Perhaps it was a test to see if we were with Al Quaeda in Iraq.
⁴ I don't know what she was really doing, but if she can laugh and joke with a friend while she does it, I'm guessing she wasn't entering the specifics of her last border crosser into the national database. Or perhaps she was, and that's part of the problem.
⁵ The one Bruce Lee gave in the movies right before he wailed on the guy who'd just tagged him.
⁶ Well, maybe in Hawaii or on Fantasy Island.

From the Huh? Files: Goth Cruise

2008-12-16T07:41:00.006-05:00

Airing on IFC¹ is Goth Cruise. Say what?

Goth Cruise the Movie trailer - a 'Gothumentary' from jeanie finlay on Vimeo.

A look at Goth lifestyle around the world, "Goth Cruise" follows 300 British and American Goths as they sail around the Caribbean on a luxury seven day cruise.

Everyone knows at least one Goth. But how well do you know them? The perpetual question of what do Goths do for fun is answered here in this hilarious trip inside a cruise ship where the 'People in Black' share their holiday with 2500 'Norms'. Its not all about severe abuse of eye make up and comparing shades of black. The subculture with global membership in the millions remains a mystery to most outsiders as such open and honest access to its brethren is very rarely allowed. Disregard everything you know about Goth culture. 'Goth Cruise' is a landmark documentary that takes a candid and ultimately redefining look at what it really means to be Goth. [emphasis added to point out the ridiculous]

Okaaaaaay. I guess it could work with lots of sunblock and retro bathing suits. All I know is that I typically react to a sunny day on the beach as other people would to syrup of ipecac.

That is, unless these honeys are hanging about. ROWRL!

¹ Which I might be regretting dropping from my cable package now.

Reason's Greetings

2008-12-09T09:50:00.007-05:00

As an atheist, I celebrate Christmas in the exact same way I acknowledge that Wednesday is derived from Wotansday or Thursday is Thor's day - by ignoring the connotations of the name and living my life as usual. That's not to say that I'm never evangelical about my disbelief (because, often I am), but most of the time I am content to live and let live so long as you follow two very simple rules regarding your particular brand of religious belief:

Don't hurt me
Don't convert me

We can play nice as long as that's the sign that marks entry to the playground.

But then there's Christmas. What's a lonely atheist to do when the nutters come out of the cupboard loaded to the mother-tit with ammunition to fend off the War Against Christmas? Usually, I declare there is no War Against Christmas - it's a false-flag¹ operation by conservative wingnuts to tar and discredit progressives and secularists. But then, the Freedom From Religion Foundation goes and posts this sign in the Washington State Capitol:

Crap.

Its not that I disagree with the statement in the sign, for by and large I think it is accurate. But it also represents two things which don't help: first, it ignores the good things that many people of faith accomplish all year 'round - especially at the holidays; and second, it is unnecessarily confrontational at the de facto² biggest religious holiday of the year.

It's the last line on the sign that's the issue: "Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds." God dammit, FFRF, you're playing into their hands. To riff off of John Lennon, there is no War Against Christmas unless you want it. What does that last sentence gain anyone who supports the separation of church and state, or who wants to reassure the rest of the nation that atheists are not evil and ought not to be the most reviled and mistrusted subculture in the country? Very little, I'd say.

Anyone who knows me knows that I often say outrageous things with the intent to stimulate discussion. But I also know when not to be an asshole. Like this weekend. I was in a friend's wedding as an usher and showed up in Connecticut wearing the little enamel "A" (Out Campaign) pin that I keep permanently affixed to my favorite hat. But when we went into the Catholic Church where the rehearsal and wedding were, I took off the pin, because it wasn't the right time to have a debate about whether there are any gods and if I believe in them. It was time to celebrate Joe and Dawn's nuptials.

It seems that the holiday display is a similar circumstance. There's a time to be challenging and confrontational, but there are also times to display tact and respect for other people's feelings appropriate for the occasion. I totally support putting up an atheist display (even or especially around the holidays) like this one that recently was erected on billboards in Philly:

The message is to reassure atheists, not attack Christians. But why does the FFRF have to then fulfill the expectation that atheists are arrogant, confrontational assholes determined to destroy Christmas with their display right next to a "holiday tree" and a creche?

It's less reasonable than I would expect an organization that exalts reason to be.

¹ It's a false-flag and not a straw man. Bill O'Reilly and his ilk who love stirring up this pot every year do it to stifle the voices of people who support the separation of church and state as well as the Constitutional guarantees of religious freedom, which necessarily must include the freedom to have no religion if the other guarantee is to have any meaning whatsoever.
² Yeah, I know Easter is a bigger deal in the religious calendar, but it doesn't get half the effort people of faith throw into Christmas.

If you ask me to be consistent...You're asking me to be silent.

2008-11-27T08:11:00.006-05:00

Recently, my family converged on my sister's house out West to attend an art opening of hers and celebrate her graduation from college.¹ While there, we kids spent what seemed like an inordinate amount of time picking on Mom -- partially because she needs it to keep grounded and partially because she an easy target.

Most of the ribbing was generational. We were in a little town that just seems overrun with 60's era and neo-hippies. My sister complained that her car smelled like hippie: full of patchouli and shame. I later asked why Nore's town needed four guitar stores within two blocks of one another (U of I is not a music school). Mom replied that the town was the center of the state's "counter-culture," to which I replied, "where? All I see is the predominant culture foisted upon us by aging Baby Boomers."²

So, now flash forward three weeks to today and picture me tearing apart my apartment looking for our most treasured Thanksgiving tradition: my Arlo Guthrie Alice's Restaurant CD. I can't find it to save my life, and it won't be fucking Thanksgiving if I can't hear Arlo Guthrie sing about sitting on the Group W Bench at the military draft office opposing the war in Vietnam. Damn hippies are part of my freakin' Thanksgiving culture!

Fortunately for me, iTunes has come to the rescue. Arlo recorded a 40^th anniversary live retelling of the Massacree in 2006 and I bought it so our holiday would not be ruined (by the lack of patchouli and shame). ;) I hope he translates it well into the present situation in Iraq. That would make me happy.

I hope everyone out there has an excellent Thanksgiving holiday with plenty to be thankful for, and very very little shame. CHEERS!

On the iPod: Country Joe and the Fish - I Feel Like I'm Fixing To Die Rag

¹ Thank you again for having us out.
² It was harsher than I inteded to be, and I'm sorry, Mom. She was right BTW, in that state, I suppose hippies are still a counter culture to the faux-cowboys and Republicans. Here in Cambridge, they're as ubiquitous (and as culturally challenging) as stretches of sidewalk.

Wins and Losses

2008-11-20T17:26:00.005-05:00

So I lost today's trial, although I am totally putting this one in my personal Win column. I knew that this client's case was dogshit, but it was dogshit about which reasonable people could differ in their opinion, so it was worth trying on the off chance that a jury would see my side of things. Turns out, only one of six of them saw things my way.

So, why a win? Well, first, I survived a motion for a directed verdict at the close of the Plaintiff's case¹ that I totally expected to close us down halfway into the trial. So that meant a case that could have been lost without the defendant uttering a word, went to the jury. During the defendant's cross-exam I totally made him lose his temper. That's a good thing.² Ultimately I convinced one of the six jurors to find in my favor. Not great.

But the REAL reason for putting this in a win column, was that after the jury was dismissed the judge held us back and complimented both me and opposing counsel. He said, "It is truly rare in these courtrooms in this current legal climate to find counsel who are as professional and well-prepared as the two of you."

Fucking sweet!

That's as close to a judge-hug as you can get. So now, I'm all high on adrenaline and trying to get out of trial mode before Comrade Squinty gets home (she doesn't like it when I cross examine her over cocktails). This might be the greatest feeling loss of my career. Professional. Well-prepared. Fuck yes!

BTW, here's a picture of me (at a benefit dinner long ago³) with Johnny Cochran and my friend and study partner, Kat (all the way to the left). I should have been in there closer with JC, but Professor Ford (in between us) was Coch-blocking me all night. Could she tell I only wanted the picture for ironic purposes?

¹ Me being counsel for the plaintiff.
² Although I should kept pushing, I might have made him jump out of the jury box at me. That would have been sweet.
³ See my hair?!!?

Worst Job in the Universe

2008-11-19T17:31:00.003-05:00

I've spent the last few weeks preparing for a trial I have tomorrow and the last couple of days have been a couple of the worst I have ever suffered in my professional life. But I suppose it could be worse:

If the judge produces a phaser tomorrow and disintegrates me, AVENGE MY DEATH!

Not Everyone Won on Nov. 4

2008-11-11T07:36:00.002-05:00

Write my name in the book of love.

Testify!

Searching for the Gray Lady

2008-11-05T16:10:00.004-05:00

Today by the numbers:

Book stores: 3
Newspaper stands: 2
Coffee shops: 2
Malls: 1
Bus rides: 2
Copies of the New York Times I was able to buy: 0.

Crap!

YES WE CAN!

2008-11-05T07:24:00.003-05:00

I believe in PRESIDENT-ELECT, Barack Obama.

We Voted!

2008-11-04T07:55:00.004-05:00

I was just thankful that today is a reasonably warm fall morning because we had to wait in line for forty-five minutes before we got in -- and we showed up as the polls opened. When we were done, the line was snaking almost all the way down the block!

This was so awesome. Hopefully, I can maintain this positive feeling.

Must go. It's off to Starbucks for my free coffee!

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery FAIL

2008-11-03T18:38:00.002-05:00

I am coming ever closer to carrying a Sharpie marker with me everywhere I go just so I can vent my spleen at public displays of idiocy like this.

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery FAIL
Originally uploaded by Zom.B
The terrible, TERRIBLE irony is that this sign is posted within spitting distance of the graves of Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, and Ralph Waldo Emerson!

Regardless¹ of that blip, the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Mass. is an absolutely lovely place to visit. It's a must see!

¹ If I worked for the Concord Public Works Department I'd write, "irregardless." Don't get me started on whether the friggin' deceased can appreciate anything!

I think this is optimistic

2008-10-30T20:32:00.001-04:00

1 minute, 19 seconds

Created by Bunk Beds.net

Oh, Minneapolis...you had me at "Zombie Pub Crawl"!

2008-10-23T17:31:00.006-04:00

When my friend Sandra was last in town she mentioned that the fourth annual Zombie Pub Crawl was going to be happening soon in Minneapolis. I only wish I could have been there. =(

That's right: Last Saturday was the 4th annual Zombie Pub Crawl, a night of debaucherous mayhem with a slew of drunken zombies. Though there's no way of telling the exact headcount, estimates place this year's festivities at about 1200 zombies. It was a night of pure drunken mania, as everyone got into character and roamed the city streets like it was the apocalypse. Every bar on the itinerary was packed to the gills, with free live music at each stop and drink specials themed around brains and brain-related ingredients. [full blog entry]

So awesome!

Boston has its share of zombie -related events, but I always seem to miss them for one reason or another. The only one I know of that's coming up is Boston Swing Central's "Calling All Zombies" Halloween swing dance party. That does indeed sound swell, but neither the missus or I swing dance, and the next night we're hosting our (semi-)annual Halloween party. =(

Just in case you're a lurker from outside the Boston aaaaarea, there are zombie walks coming up in El Paso, TX, Omaha, NE, Dover, NH, Portland, OR, Shreveport, LA, Detroit, MI, Watkins Glen, NY, and Huntsville, AL, among other places (a lot of these are charity food drives as well as zombie-love) . And of course there's World Zombie Day at the Monroeville Mall in Pittsburgh (Mikey?).

BRAAAAIIIIINNNNSSSSS!

Schadenfruede Teil Fünfhundert und Sieben

2008-10-22T07:30:00.001-04:00

It is to laugh!

That Movie Sucked My Aslan1

2008-10-21T06:45:00.013-04:00

So, yesterday, in a fit of doldrums I weighed the options of watching various movies with characters named Henry. Finally, after dinner and a strong cocktail I was feeling like I ought to watch something that I know Comrade Snarky has no interest in seeing.

That avenue typically leaves me with little option because we enjoy almost entirely the same things (although she's got a strange obsession I can't describe for The Cutting Edge²). But I know that she had no interest whatsoever in seeing the adaptation of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. So I sat down last night to give it a go.

Big mistake. I should have followed my wife's lead.

Ugh! This movie combines many of my most-hated movie conventions:

precocious children and unrealistic children's dialogue;
talking animals (I'd forgotten that one of the main characters in the story was a friggin' beaver);
everyone good who dies is resurrected;
(a literal) deus ex machina ending.

Yeah, I know, it's the Chronicles of Narnia - what do I expect? I was just starved for some good escapist entertainment, and thought I might be able to feed the fantasy/sci fi beast, knowing that if I watched any part of Lord of the Rings³ without the Missus my bachelor evenings would be the last I spend not sleeping on the sofa. I should have stuck with the Henries. Anything would have been better than the spawn of the unholy union of Disney and C.S. Lewis. The movie completely lost me at the moment that Santa Claus gives children deadly weapons for x-mas in the Spring. What a horrendous piece of shit.

Yet another movie in which I identify with the Devil.

On a side note, last year I bought Chris Hitchens' the Portable Atheist, and stuffed inside was a small three-fold tract with the Aslan image you see above on the front. Inside, the producers of the pamphlet decided that they'd spoil all the surprises⁴ in LW&W and explain all of the obvious imagery to anyone so dense that they couldn't follow the plot of a Disney movie based on a book that conceals its conceits about as deeply as a puddle in a pothole.

From the pamphlet, Christian Allegory
for Complete Bloody Idiots.

If I had anything positive to say about the movie, it would be that the winter scenes were beautiful and made me long for the upcoming season, and secondly, that Tilda Swinton (the Winter Witch - "Jadis, the White Witch" in the book) is fucking HAWT! My laws!

Her Boadicea impression at the end of the movie is total stroke material. And isn't that what C.S. Lewis had in mind all along?

She's not the only one.

¹ This is your one and only spoiler alert for a three year-old movie based on a fifty-eight year-old book.
²She'd claim the same is true of my love for Hawk the Slayer.
³ Also a x-ian allegory.
⁴ I read the first book when I was a kid, so there weren't any, but still...

My Center...

2008-10-20T16:26:00.005-04:00

...is off center.

Comrade Snarky is in Princeton, NJ doing highly-skilled research scientist stuff and I am a bachelor until Wednesday. What am I doing with my alone time? I rented Regarding Henry, the movie that asserts that in order for a lawyer to be a decent person he must first be shot in the head.

I am not feeling good about what I do today. No reason. Just hate my cases/clients/career. Perhaps I should put Regarding Henry aside for the time being and watch something like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer instead -- remind myself there are people who do more odious things than I do.

Or I could pull out Kenneth Branagh's Henry V. Yeah, I'll watch Henry V tonight. ONCE MORE INTO THE BREACH, DEAR FRIENDS, ONCE MORE!

I survive

2008-10-14T07:47:00.006-04:00

That's good enough for now.^*

74%**

BTW, thanks, Sandra, for going out with us Saturday night. We had a great time indeed and I hope we didn't get you back too late for you to get up early to enjoy the beautiful weather on Sunday. =)

^* Watch this space for a regular update after I'm done with today's deposition.
^**I lied in this poll - I don't own a gun and I would drive across town to save Comrade Squinty. My chances are actually 48%, but today I'm here, so that's got to count for something.

Kill me now

2008-10-09T14:39:00.004-04:00

Why did I ever think that real estate law would be a nice way to make extra money. I am so going to look for library jobs! If I can survive the next 21 hours.

Wink wink nudge nudge

2008-10-03T13:49:00.004-04:00

Is Sarah a goer? KnowwhutImean knowwhutImean? Wink wink nudge nudge.

A wink's as good as a nod to a blind bat!

Seriously, though. Every time she does this I want to vomit. Is anyone really swayed by this "folksy" shit? Doesn't it look as forced and insincere as it does to me to everyone watching? What is it about the geegollywillikers and you-betchas that she and Willard Romney have in infinite supply?

Maybe I'm just one of those cynical East Coast evildoers who doesn't get how REAL 'Mer'cuns in the heartland think and feel. I just feel so Eurodirty when she winks at me. Time to go shower again.

Brains

2008-10-02T14:10:00.003-04:00

Hilarious Sean Bieri illustration used without permission.

Effing METAL!

2008-10-01T09:09:00.004-04:00

Not long ago I blogged about High On Fire's comically bad showing as the opening act for my favorite band. My main complaint was that the show was too freakin' loud.¹ When I was a kid (and listening to metal) I used to parrot the trite cliché that if it is too loud, you're too old.

Well, I guess I can officially declare myself middle-aged, because yesterday I read an article in the Wall Street Journal about how metal fans think music these days is too damn loud. You don't believe me?

Even Heavy-Metal Fans Complain That Today's Music Is Too Loud!!!

But even though Metallica's ninth studio release, "Death Magnetic," is No. 1 on the album chart, with 827,000 copies sold in two weeks, some fans are bitterly disappointed: not by the songs or the performance, but the volume. It's so loud, they say, you can't hear the details of the music.

****

Responding to a Metallica fan's email about loudness, [Death Magnetic's mastering engineer, Ted] Jensen sent a sympathetic reply that concluded: "Believe me, I'm not proud to be associated with this one." ...

Actually the engineer's full response to the fan was:

I’m certainly sympathetic to your reaction, I get to slam my head against that brick wall every day. In this case the mixes were already brick walled before they arrived at my place. Suffice it to say I would never be pushed to overdrive things as far as they are here. Believe me I’m not proud to be associated with this one, and we can only hope that some good will come from this in some form of backlash against volume above all else. [forum]

It is sad when your sound engineer thinks the album sucks before he even has a chance to work on it. And yes, the new Metallica album stinks. aside from a complete lack of dynamic range, Lars' drum tone is only slightly better than it has been (dessicated feces is still feces²), Kirk Hammet's noodling solos are dull as dirt, the bass is completely lost, and the whole album feels like a huge step backwards artistically. Coming from a band that hit its peak over 15 years ago and has been in decline ever since, you'd think they'd try to create something that demonstrates unequivocally how relevant they still are, instead of releasing a caricature of their best album. But that's just the opinion of a man who was once a boy who thought Metallica saved metal from spandex and hairspray.

I digress. Recording an album that is an impenetrable wall of sound is just lame. When the mix is too loud you can hear clipping and distortion (not guitar distortion - popping and generally muddy sound). And since everyone is recording digitally in the studio, you can't even go to vinyl for high quality sound. THERE'S NO ANALOG MASTER! You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!

This trend sucks! And it affects more than metal. As the WSJ notes, listen to the newest Springsteen album, or anything by U2 in the last ten years to hear what damage is being done to listenable music³ by mastering for cheap earphones and bar jukeboxes.

Oh, and for my friend Slick specifically, if you don't understand metal, here's a primer from Homestar Runner.

I come for the wuggas, but stay for the jiggy juggas.

¹ That they played badly was actually subordinate to the sound level problem.
² Lars seems to have graduated from pots and pans to plastic paint buckets. Maybe someday he'll find that old drum kit he used for Ride the Lightning and start playing on that again.
³ Of course, U2 hasn't been listenable since the Joshua Tree for reasons completely other than the loudness wars.

Comics

2008-09-30T08:51:00.003-04:00

Sometimes, a single panel is all you need.

The whole comic is awesome, however.

PROTECT update

2008-09-28T10:02:00.003-04:00

A recent e-mail from Protect. Thanks to all of my friends who stood up and helped convince law makers to pass this bill.

Just minutes ago, Congress passed the PROTECT Our Children Act.

It was a long, hard campaign... one that started with committed PROTECT members like you and then grew to over half a million Americans after it was featured on the Oprah Winfrey show. Many Washington insiders said we would never win. We wanted you to be the first to know that we did!

As our campaign showed America, law enforcement now knows how to locate and stop hundreds of thousands of criminals who assault children and traffic in child pornography. But despite years of empty rhetoric from politicians, less than 2% of these cases are even being investigated. That begins to change today, with the passage of the PROTECT Our Children Act.

In the coming days, we'll share many of the details about this landmark bill and how it was passed. But we didn't want you to wait to hear this news. Please take time today to celebrate what we've accomplished together, because this never would have happened without you!

--The Staff and Volunteers at PROTECT

YES!

Secret Societies

2008-09-26T11:11:00.004-04:00

In my life there are a couple of really easy conversational openings in certain company. That is to say that I can have a fairly easy conversation with any of the following people:

Bald men
Tattoo collectors
Home Brewers

At any time, if I meet a fellow bald man/tattoo collector/home brewer I know that we can have an engaging and rewarding conversation about any number of topics ranging from singing the praises of the Gillette Mach 5 to whether to pre-bake pumpkin meat before adding it to your ale wort for a decent seasonal beer.

Recently, I discovered a whole new fraternity of instant friends: the zombie novel reader. Let me explain.

Last night, She Who Must Be Obeyed went to a networking event for women in healthcare. I, being a bachelor for the evening, got together with one of my very few lawyer friends for dinner. We agreed to meet in Kendall Square before heading over to Cambridge Brewing Company to eat. I arrived early, so I ducked into the Coop to satisfy a fetish and look at books, and before I knew it I was in line to check out with my new anthology of zombie-themed short stories, The Living Dead.

At the cash wrap, I was pretty astounded to be met with incredible enthusiasm about the book (which, because of intellectual vanity, I was a little apprehensive to buy at the M.I.T. Coop) and got into a pretty (re)animated discussion about zombie literature ranging from World War Z to Monster Island. Cool. Guy at bookstore is a zombie nerd like me. =) A nice encounter, but hardly a trend.

I paid, left and went to dinner with my friend. We had an excellent evening and were finishing up inside (buying growlers of beer for the road) when a guy behind me noticed the book I had set down on the railing next to me. I turned around and began to have a repeat of the conversation from earlier at the Coop with one of the brewers at CBC about zombie novels. His enthusiasm was great and we had a really engaging and satisfying exchange about reading that led into talk about brewing.

It seems that if I want to have instant friends out in the world, all I need to do is carry a book around with the unquiet dead on the cover. I think I need to test this hypothesis further. It's nice to know that I am not the only dork in Cambridge with an unhealthy love of the undead.

Suspend Suschmend

2008-09-25T08:10:00.002-04:00

Born Against Christianor ... Keep it to Yourself Please

2008-09-24T12:18:00.007-04:00

Recently I went for a really nice hike with She Who Must be Obeyed and two and a half¹ of our friends at the Middlesex Fells Reservation. We hiked as much as we felt like of the Skyline Trail (7 miles / white blaze) and had a great time. But when we got up to the highest point in the park (not all that high, it's Medford after all) I noticed that in the area of Wright's Tower there was unsanctioned commentary.

This was the view of the locked door to Wright's Tower overlooking the Boston skyline.

If Jesus is the answar, wut wuz teh kwestchun?

A little while later we came across a group of middle-aged² women standing in a circle praying near this rock. I don't believe they were praying to or even because of the rock, but my noticing them (and subsequent annoyance) was amplified by their proximity to the rock.

god dammit!

My message directly to religious believers of all stripes who feel the missionary call: I understand that you're likely at any given point in time feeling moved by the spirit of the lord and want to share your joy with those "less fortunate" than you. But keep it in front of churches and on subway platforms clearly wearing your sandwich board proclaiming who among us is going to Hell³ so we can choose whether or not to have a dialogue. The majority of us -- and I imagine this includes quite a lot of religious believers as well as non-believers -- would prefer you not deface public parks and ruin the beauty of the nature you believe your particular brand of deity created.

Addendum for vandals of all creeds - this goes for you too. No one cares how much you love smooth bedsheets (I'm talking to the "Satin Rules" crowd) or if you go to Tufts.

If you're not as talented as Banksy, find another way to express yourself.

Update 2008.09.25: Thanks to the commenters on this post, I have learned that this is Wright's Tower (reedited above to reflect the proper name for this beautiful landmark) and that the graffiti is already being dealt with. I am truly impressed, and as I mention in my own comments, although this was our first hike through the Fells Reservation, it will not be our last. Thanks for the reassurance, fellas. It's nice to know that there are people really taking care of awesome spots like this.

¹ Actually, RB is a 100% complete person, but he's just pint sized for the time being.
² I write, having only recently admitted to myself that I too am middle-aged.
³Apparently everyone but you.

Nigerian E-mail Scam Redux

2008-09-24T09:49:00.004-04:00

This landed in my inbox recently. I think I'm going to be sick.

Dear American:
I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury Paulson

PROTECT!

2008-09-23T16:33:00.004-04:00

I don't send out a lot of click here to send a letter e-mails, but I've been a member of Protect since the beginning of '05 and I feel very strongly about this issue. Until BushCo. drove this country into the ditch I used to be a single issue voter, and children's welfare was it. If you decide to click the link below and send the message, I thank you for taking the time to help make us be heard.

From PROTECT.ORG:

Left: Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), Right: Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV)

Since PROTECT's campaign was featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show last week, nearly half a million Americans have flooded Senate offices with phone calls and emails. Thanks to this tidal wave, we now have 52 Senate sponsors. So, the good news is that in a 100-member Senate, we have all the votes we need to pass this bill and protect thousands of children! The bad news is that we might never get a vote... unless you act now!
Believe it or not, there are just two men in Congress who now hold complete power over whether the PROTECT Our Children Act becomes law. Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) says he'll let the bill be "hotlined" and passed if it includes another bill, John McCain's SAFE Act. Senator Harry Reid (D-NV), the Majority Leader, could simply send the bill to the Senate floor for a vote, where it would pass by a landslide. Each man claims the other is playing politics. You don't have to take sides. Just make your voice heard now. Tell Sen. Tom Coburn and Sen. Harry Reid to rise above politics and pass the PROTECT Our Children Act before it's too late! Send an email [at their website]... and if you would like to call, you'll be directed to phone numbers to do that.

And if you'd like to join...

WHAT?

2008-09-20T09:57:00.003-04:00

Jeff Matz and Matt Pike of High On Fire
Originally uploaded by HeadOvMetal

Metal Lesson One: If you are an opening act with only ten feet of stage space and a complete lack of proper soundboard mixing and personal talent¹ then just keep cranking the volume. Seriously. To eleven.

My fucking ears are still ringing after High on Fire's stoner metal shit-storm. And Matt Pike (pictured left) needs to go on Jenny Craig. Hip-slung jeans and a late period Jim Morrison physique are not working for you like they did for the Lizard King. You seriously look like Jack Black's untalented older brother.

Opeth, OTOH, was SICK! More on that when I can hear again. I hate when I forget earplugs!

¹ Seriously, this was diet metal for sure: talent-free. Even the hard core fans behind us were ridiculing HOF.

Gothenburg West

2008-09-19T08:44:00.006-04:00

These days it seems that Comrade Squinty and I are in Swedish melodic death metal heaven. Our three favorite bands are going to be playing near here all within six months of each other. Tonight we're going to see Opeth (again¹), and in February we'll get to see Soilwork. The bad news is that we'll have to skip In Flames' show on December 6 as I'm in a wedding in Connecticut on that day. That will be the second time we've had to skip seeing In Flames because of a commitment to friends.

All I can say is that this wedding had better be Fucking Metal^™!

¹ They're indisputably my favorite band, but there are bigger fans than me.

The Angels Whispered Danger

2008-09-17T08:18:00.006-04:00

Although I hate MySpace, I love music, and the two songs on this band's website just make me as happy as a little schoolboy! If you can handle the horrors of sub-literate social networking sites enjoy The Angels Whispered Danger's Requiem for Dead Souls and Khatam. The music is about midpoint between Japanese shoegaze band Boris and Canadian post-rock Godspeed You Black Emperor.

All right Southern Lord, sign these guys already!

Swearing the Oath

2008-09-16T08:15:00.010-04:00

Lately, several of my internationally relocated friends have been (or are about to be) sworn as citizens of the United States of America. Given our standing in the world presently it may seem like a tarnished accomplishment, but in my mind it is not. That someone would want to come here and be a participatory member of this society is one of the most welcome and satisfying things I can think of. I only wish that natural-born citizens took the obligation to participate in society as seriously as my friends from Germany, India, and Russia.

Irrespective of natural vs. naturalized citizens, I come to an interesting question, raised tongue-in-cheek, by another good friend of mine:¹

...what if only ex- or active-service men and women could vote? Let's go ahead and include the reserves and any profession where an oath is sworn (cops, firefighters, doctors, prosecutors, etc) before taking the job. How different might our lives be today?

The fact that a significant number of people might vote based solely upon identity politics or uncritically accept the lies of one side (or an unaffiliated advocate for a side) of a political debate could suggest that voting might be considered an act more justly considered a privilege than a right -- a service that you have to prove you're worthy of participating in, because we all suffer the consequences of some collection of jackasses taking electoral choices lightly and voting for the guy they "could have a beer with."

The rhetorical questions I have are, what is it about swearing an oath that means something, and how many people who take them really comprehend what they've sworn to do and live up to the oath?

I took an oath to uphold and defend the constitutions of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the United States of America. I take it deadly serious, but I recited the oath standing next to some of most avaricious and dimmest people I've ever encountered. I'm not saying that no lawyers who take the oath reflect upon its meaning at the moment of its swearing or afterward - but if a majority do, I'd be shocked to hear it (and I suspect that they'd be surprised at the obligations of what they promised bestowed upon them). I doubt that enough people who have the obligation to swear an oath really speak truthfully when they vow to perform the full range of positive actions required of the oathtaker.

The answer to Slick's question is that I don't think life would be much different if only Marines, doctors, lawyers, etc. could vote. There are enough people who perform faithlessly in all oath-taking professions to discredit swearing fealty as demonstrating anything other than that the oath taker can repeat-after-me. But then, I'm coming off a huge letdown from an old mentor.

I'm just not sure swearing fealty is enough. Demonstrating loyalty is more important. But then we run into a whole other set of definition problems.

"Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels - men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion." Dwight D. Eisenhauer New York City, May 31, 1954.

This comic panel was published the month and year I was born.

¹ Native-born citizen and a former Marine.

MOBA

2008-09-15T18:05:00.004-04:00

A brand new branch of the Museum of Bad Art just opened a few blocks from my house. YES!

A rt too Bad to Be Ignored

Oh, now I really can't wait to go see The Dark Knight again (admission can only be purchased along with a movie ticket).

Trivia question: which one is good art and which one is bad art?¹

¹ HINT: I only actively despise ONE of these paintings.

Fidelity and Honor

2008-09-12T08:19:00.004-04:00

I am bumming lately because my former supervisor in Connecticut has been convicted of stealing, in part,¹ from the state crime victim compensation fund. Come on! You ~~are~~ were a prosecutor, L.M.H.! The victims' compensation fund?!!? WTF!

There is no end of disappointment here.

This was one of the first guys who taught me to be a lawyer, and working with him and the Kevins² was the best job I ever had in my life.

There is a lesson here. One of the Kevins is the one responsible for initiating the investigation when he noticed L.M.H. behaving strangely. Despite their friendship, Kevin's obligation to the people he served came first. I know they were friends and doing that was probably unimaginably hard, but Kevin upheld the duties and ideals of a public servant. Now if he can do that, how hard is it not to fucking steal in the first place?

When a person betrays the standards he swore to uphold that person betrays everyone who admired him for representing those ideals.

¹ He also apparently embezzled from his union and forged his name on checks given him by misdemeanor defendants to pay restitution by making charitable contributions.
² Three of the attorneys in that office were named Kevin. L.M.H. gave everyone nicknames so we wouldn't be constantly asking "which Kevin?" My nick was "Conan McBracken." It always made me laugh when he said it.

Ready to Lead

2008-09-12T07:39:00.000-04:00

2008-09-11T08:46:00.001-04:00

Another Bad Movie Review

2008-09-10T23:22:00.000-04:00

The Life Before Her Eyes
The one second review: CRAP!

In depth: an incidence of the preview slapping lipstick on a turkey.¹ After watching the trailer I was gangbusters to see a sensitive portrayal of post-traumatic stress and survivor's guilt play out over a person's lifetime. [BUZZER] I should have rented something else then.

What I got was a blunt Catholic anti-choice propaganda piece masquerading as a school-shooting drama with an obvious-at-mid-point quantum immortality twist. If you see a good adaptation of Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" the plot twist isn't obvious until the very end. Jacob's Ladder is a perfect example of how this is well done. Instead TLBHE is a poor simulacrum of an After School Special about the consequences of being a slut.

Aside from the religious guilt trip over reproductive freedom, another major problem with the film is that it was in actuality less than an hour long. The director took what should have been a script for hand-wringing, episodic TV and padded it up to ninety minutes with LOTS of slo-mo footage of bees pollinating flowers and birds flying through trees. Yeah, yeah, I get it already. The world is just so fucking beautiful. Gag!² Someone needs to fire his color corrector.

¹ As much as I love bacon, calling this movie a pig would still be a compliment.
² Before you start feeling too sorry for me having to sit through a "chickflik", this movie was my pick, not Comrade Squinty's. I'm the one more likely in our relationship to bring home a sensitive romcom or heartfelt drama. Next rental is going to be The Machine Girl.

The Long Lost Word Metrics

2008-09-09T16:28:00.004-04:00

Long ago, when I had a writing blog on another host, I used to post regular word metrics to keep track of progress on my novel. Today I decided I'd start that again so I can create some further incentive for finishing the edit of the (mostly) completed thing.

Affliction Literacy
Words today: 3,334
Words total: roughly 115,979 (manuscript pages: roughly 464)
Reason for stopping: fatigue/hypoglycemia

This book has been working itself out over a matter of years and I'm ready to be done with a readable draft of it. I love the characters, but I need some new imaginary friends.

Department of Metahuman Affairs

2008-09-09T07:31:00.002-04:00

Now I'm official. Soon the criminal underworld will fear the sound of my slavering shamble.

check the Metahuman Activity Map

Zom B

SoonIWillBeInvincible.com

McCain't

2008-09-05T09:20:00.007-04:00

Heh heh. I'm a petty, petty man.¹

While I'm being that way, before it was taken down it appears that Levi Johnston began writing his autobiography. Behold words direct from the mind of the ~~boy~~ MAN² as written by his own hand upon his MySpace page (now defunct):

“I’m a f**kin’ redneck who likes to snowboard and ride dirt bikes. But I live to play hockey. I like to go camping and hang out with the boys, do some fishing, shoot some sh*t and just f**kin’ chillin’ I guess. Ya f*ck with me I’ll kick ass.”³

Well, YEE HAW! Ahem, I mean, huzzah sir. Well said. With an attitude like that you could be president one day.

I am resisting the urge to post a picture of him holding a shotgun (also from his MySpace page) now that it is pointed at him. I honestly do feel bad for this ~~kid~~, ahem, ~~jock d-bag~~, I mean MAN.

¹ I readily admit this has nothing to do with politics or anyone's fitness for office. I just think it's funny to jab sticks at people with guns.
² And don't you ever forget it, hear?
³ Again, I doubt I would have written anything more eloquent at 17, although my preferred bravado would have included D&D, playing guitar, and running from cowboys swinging axe handles.

Dog Whistles

2008-09-04T14:01:00.006-04:00

Last night during Gov. Palin's speech I caught at least one Dominionist dog whistle when she talked about having a "servant's heart." Ugh! I thought I was through having to pull up bible websites at the end of every political speech now that Bush is nearly out of the picture. [BUZZER!] Think again!

UPDATE: No surprise that her address reminded me of a Shrub speech, it was written by Matthew Scully, his former speechwriter.

Sarah Palin's Record

2008-09-04T09:15:00.007-04:00

Here's a comment appended to a recent article from the Washington Independent on Sarah Palin from someone who alleges to know her well (since 1992):

****
[Sarah Palin's] experience is as mayor of a city with a population of about 5,000 (at the time), and less than 2 years as governor of a state with about 670,000 residents.

During her mayoral administration most of the actual work of running this small city was turned over to an administrator. She had been pushed to hire this administrator by party power-brokers after she had gotten herself into some trouble over precipitous firings which had given rise to a recall campaign.

Sarah campaigned in Wasilla as a “fiscal conservative”. During her 6 years as Mayor, she increased general government expenditures by over 33%. During those same 6 years the amount of taxes collected by the City increased by 38%. This was during a period of low inflation (1996-2002). She reduced progressive property taxes and increased a regressive sales tax which taxed even food. The tax cuts that she promoted benefited large corporate property owners way more than they benefited residents.

The huge increases in tax revenues during her mayoral administration weren’t enough to fund everything on her wish list though, borrowed money was needed, too. She inherited a city with zero debt, but left it with indebtedness of over $22 million. What did Mayor Palin encourage the voters to borrow money for? Was it the infrastructure that she said she supported? The sewage treatment plant that the city lacked? or a new library? No. $1m for a park. $15m-plus for construction of a multi-use sports complex which she rushed through to build on a piece of property that the City didn’t even have clear title to, that was still in litigation 7 yrs later--to the delight of the lawyers involved! The sports complex itself is a nice addition to the community but a huge money pit, not the profit-generator she claimed it would be. She also supported bonds for $5.5m for road projects that could have been done in 5-7 yrs without any borrowing.

While Mayor, City Hall was extensively remodeled and her office redecorated more than once.

These are small numbers, but Wasilla is a very small city.

As an oil producer, the high price of oil has created a budget surplus in Alaska. Rather than invest this surplus in technology that will make us energy independent and increase efficiency, as governor she proposed distribution of this surplus to every individual in the state.

In this time of record state revenues and budget surpluses, she recommended that the state borrow/bond for road projects, even while she proposed distribution of surplus state revenues: spend today's surplus, borrow for needs.

She’s not very tolerant of divergent opinions or open to outside ideas or compromise. As Mayor, she fought ideas that weren’t generated by her or her staff. Ideas weren’t evaluated on their merits, but on the basis of who proposed them.

While Sarah was Mayor of Wasilla she tried to fire our highly respected City Librarian because the Librarian refused to consider removing from the library some books that Sarah wanted removed. City residents rallied to the defense of the City Librarian and against Palin's attempt at out-and-out censorship, so Palin backed down and withdrew her termination letter. People who fought her attempt to oust the Librarian are on her enemies list to this day.

Sarah complained about the “old boy’s club” when she first ran for Mayor, so what did she bring Wasilla? A new set of "old boys". Palin fired most of the experienced staff she inherited. At the City and as Governor she hired or elevated new, inexperienced, obscure people, creating a staff totally dependent on her for their jobs and eternally grateful and fiercely loyal--loyal to the point of abusing their power to further her personal agenda, as she has acknowledged happened in the case of pressuring the State’s top cop (see below).

As Mayor, Sarah fired Wasilla’s Police Chief because he “intimidated” her, she told the press. As Governor, her recent firing of Alaska's top cop has the ring of familiarity about it. He served at her pleasure and she had every legal right to fire him, but it's pretty clear that an important factor in her decision to fire him was because he wouldn't fire her sister's ex-husband, a State Trooper. Under investigation for abuse of power, she has had to admit that more than 2 dozen contacts were made between her staff and family to the person that she later fired, pressuring him to fire her ex-brother-in-law. She tried to replace the man she fired with a man who she knew had been reprimanded for sexual harassment; when this caused a public furor, she withdrew her support.

She has bitten the hand of every person who extended theirs to her in help. The City Council person who personally escorted her around town introducing her to voters when she first ran for Wasilla City Council became one of her first targets when she was later elected Mayor. She abruptly fired her loyal City Administrator; even people who didn’t like the guy were stunned by this ruthlessness.

Fear of retribution has kept all of these people from saying anything publicly about her.

When then-Governor Murkowski was handing out political plums, Sarah got the best, Chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission: one of the few jobs not in Juneau and one of the best paid. She had no background in oil & gas issues. Within months of scoring this great job which paid $122,400/yr, she was complaining in the press about the high salary. I was told that she hated that job: the commute, the structured hours, the work. Sarah became aware that a member of this
Commission (who was also the State Chair of the Republican Party) engaged in unethical behavior on the job. In a gutsy move which some undoubtedly cautioned her could be political suicide, Sarah solved all her problems in one fell swoop: got out of the job she hated and garnered gobs of media attention as the patron saint of ethics and as a gutsy fighter against the “old boys’ club” when she dramatically quit, exposing this man’s ethics violations (for which he was fined).

As Mayor, she had her hand stuck out as far as anyone for pork from Senator Ted Stevens. Lately, she has castigated his pork-barrel politics and publicly humiliated him. She only opposed the “bridge to nowhere” after it became clear that it would be unwise not to.

As Governor, she gave the Legislature no direction and budget guidelines, then made a big grandstand display of line-item vetoing projects, calling them pork. Public outcry and further legislative action restored most of these projects--which had been vetoed simply because she was not aware of their importance--but with the unobservant she had gained a reputation as “anti-pork”.

She is solidly Republican: no political maverick. The State party leaders hate her because she has bit them in the back and humiliated them. Other members of the party object to her self- description as a fiscal conservative.

Around Wasilla there are people who went to high school with Sarah. They call her “Sarah Barracuda” because of her unbridled ambition and predatory ruthlessness. Before she became so powerful, very ugly stories circulated around town about shenanigans she pulled to be made point guard on the high school basketball team. When Sarah's mother-in-law, a highly respected member of the community and experienced manager, ran for Mayor, Sarah refused to endorse her.

As Governor, she stepped outside of the box and put together of package of legislation known as “AGIA” that forced the oil companies to march to the beat of her drum.

Like most Alaskans, she favors drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. She has questioned if the loss of sea ice is linked to global warming. She campaigned “as a private citizen” against a state
[initiative] that would have either a) protected salmon streams from pollution from mines, or b) tied up in the courts all mining in the state (depending on who you listen to). She has pushed the State’s lawsuit against the Dept. of the Interior’s decision to list polar bears as threatened species.

McCain is the oldest person to ever run for President; Sarah will be a heartbeat away from being President.

There has to be literally millions of Americans who are more knowledgeable and experienced than she.

However, there’s a lot of people who have underestimated her and are regretting it.

****

Anne Kilkenny
annekilkenny@hotmail.com
August 31, 2008

With a record like this, I can finally see why McCain has selected this person as his running mate: she's a little-pond version of GWB/Cheney. Add another chit to the McSame column.

Catch it While it Lasts

2008-09-03T16:57:00.000-04:00

Palin: average isn't good enough

2008-09-03T10:52:00.003-04:00

Sam Harris writes: She's not qualified to be president, and in picking her, McCain shows that he has little respect for the presidency.¹

And this from People for the American Way:

Time Magazine today reports that Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin attempted to ban books from her local library as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, and then threatened to fire the librarian who stood up to her for not giving “full support” to the mayor. [link added]

Of course I shouldn't be surprised she either doesn't understand or doesn't respect the basic principles of the First Amendment. This pick just gets worse and worse. The only upside to this that I can see is that her potential vice-presidency will wield considerably less unaccountable power than Cheney's has.

Oh, and I'm also supposed to notice that apparently she's attractive. Maybe to guys into this:

¹ Sam Harris follows up his OpEd piece with this addendum:

I've received more than the usual amount of criticism for my recent opinion piece on Sarah Palin, most of it alleging sexism and/or an unseemly infatuation with Barack Obama. For those who care, I'd like to briefly respond:

My alleged sexism: It is true that I used some hackneyed, gender-slanted language in the piece ("get sassy," "girl-next-door," etc.). This was deliberate. Clearly, I played this game at my peril. I can say that if Sarah Palin were a man of similar qualifications, I would have used equally slanted language to describe him. I might have called Mr. Palin a "frat-boy" or a "lumberjack." I would have invoked some silly macho phrasing like,"Watch Cousin Jim flip Putin the bird." My concern is not that Mrs. Palin is a woman. My concern is that she is a totally unqualified and poorly educated woman who was added to the Republican ticket as a token woman (and Creationist wacko). For what it's worth, the article was vetted by the two women closest to me (wife and mother) and by two female editors at the LA Times. If anything, the editing at the Times made the piece even more "sexist."

My alleged Obamamania: Many McCain supporters have written to say that (1) Obama is also unqualified (or even less qualified than Palin) and (2) I have shown myself to be a hypocrite by not objecting to Obama's religiosity. Briefly: My criticism of Palin should not be construed as uncritical acceptance of Obama. Needless to say, I find Obama's religious pandering repulsive. The suspicion that he is pandering, out of obvious necessity, and not quite as religious as he makes out, is somewhat comforting, however. But even if Obama were precisely as religious as he appears, he is not a Creationist, Rapture-Ready blockhead. Palin, by all appearances, seems to be one. This is a difference worth noting. Whatever you may think of his politics, Obama is very intelligent and reasonably well educated. Palin thinks the universe is 6000 years old. Unfortunately, I wrote my article before some of the most disturbing signs of her religious extremism came to light.

So, let me simply declare that I would be overjoyed to have a qualified woman in the White House. I would, likewise, be overjoyed to have a qualified African American in the White House. In fact, I would be overjoyed to have a qualified WASP man in the White House. I will be guardedly optimistic to have a very smart (and somewhat qualified) Barack Obama in the White House. And I would be frankly terrified to have a religious bumpkin like Sarah Palin in the White House. I think you should share this last conviction. Hence my latest opinion piece.

Best,
Sam

Books I've read Since 28 August 2008

2008-09-03T09:14:00.008-04:00

Recently, as you may have noted below, Comrade Squinter and I went on a trip to her family reunion Out West.¹ There's not much for me to post here about this since every single person I met (some I hadn't seen since my wedding 14 years ago) was very nice and welcoming.

The real point of this is to just give a list of books I read on the plane rides out there and back.

From Boston to Dallas, TX; Dallas to Jackson Hole, WY:

This is a good book, although it was a little dry at times. I could have used less of his memoir about touring the "holy land" and more of his insights into why ownership of that area is disputed and how to resolve the conflicts. All in all, it was an engrossing read.

From Jackson Hole to Dallas:

I can't recommend Holocaust memoirs² for long plane rides. It's just not conducive to the kind of mood that allows one to easily dismiss the person behind you bumping your seat. They make me angry, anyway. Thankfully, the book is short. Glad I didn't bring the whole trilogy.³

From Dallas to Boston:

This one was for pure brain reboot: a novella about a an aspiring artist trying to recover from abuse and drug addiction while trapped in a literal limbo. When I read De Lint it's either a home run or a complete swing and a miss. This book was an out-of-the-park homer -- opposite of his last book about this character (this one's a prequel, incidentally). Where I'd wished Widdershins to be half as long, I wanted Promises to Keep to be twice as long. I'll take what I can get when he's good. The Onion Girl is Charles De Lint at his absolute best.

Yeah, I can't typically sleep on a plane.

¹ And I got in no fights. The no politics rule worked its magic, despite the announcement of Sarah Palin as veep. Watch this space for rumor-mongering and character assassination.
² I'm not sure this is purely a "memoir," in the sense I understand it and think I would have rather read a more direct translation of the Yiddish text to get a fuller sense of his real feelings. From Wikipedia:

Wiesel began the Yiddish version with: "In the beginning was belief, foolish belief, and faith, empty faith, and illusion, the terrible illusion. ... We believed in God, had faith in man, and lived with the illusion that in each one of us is a sacred spark from the fire of the shekinah, that each one carried in his eyes and in his soul the sign of God. This was the source — if not the cause — of all our misfortune." (Wiesel, Elie. ... un di velt hot geshvign, Buenos Aires, 1956, cited in Franklin[, Ruth. "A Thousand Darknesses", The New Republic, March 23, 2006]).

[I]n the Yiddish, Wiesel writes that, after liberation, some of the camp survivors, the "Jewish boys," run off to "fargvaldikn daytshe shikses" ("rape German shiksas"), whereas in the French, they are just "young men" who go "coucher aves les filles" ("to sleep with girls").... Seidman, Naomi. "Elie Wiesel and the Scandal of Jewish Rage," Jewish Social Studies, December 1996.

³ I also peeled the Oprah sticker off the book immediately after buying. Even when she picks intelligent books I still don't want that association.

Frustration

2008-08-26T15:27:00.000-04:00

Recently, I had an old friend from law school come up for a few days. I enjoy his company, but his visits are labor-intensive since he is a complete contrarian. Seriously, he's the type of person to contradict every single utterance that sounds within his earshot. He either disagrees or, if not, points out how he has a better grasp of the subject than you do. I am not kidding. If I were to declare that the sky is blue, he would likely intone that while that is true, the proportion of white and gray to visible blue sky is a more significant measure of its color on cloudy days which, incidentally, outnumber pristine skies.¹

His other irritating propensity -- typically when he's beaten -- is to adopt my position, rephrase, and then parrot it back to me as his winning salvo. It goes something like this:

Me: You see, by definition two plus two can only ever equal four.
Gerry: But sometimes it can be five.
Me: No. These are definitional constructs without fluidity. Two must always be more than one and less than three. Otherwise it is not two. Two twos become four according to both the definition of two and four. You can't have five without redefining the principles of twoness and fourness or adding an additional one.
Gerry: Yes, but of course, since two is one plus one, and four is one plus one plus one plus one, two plus two has to also be four.
Me: That's what I've been saying.
Gerry: No. You've been ignoring ones this whole time.
Me: But what about five?
Gerry: What about five?
Me: Two plus two is never five.
Gerry: Right. So now you see my point.

Despite these infuriating traits, normally when I argue with him it's always collegial, friendly jousting. That is until this weekend when he realized he was losing the particular debate and decided to go personal (he runs campaigns for local politicians in his hometown, so I presume this personality flaw is a hazard of his work). At the moment where I issued my strongest statement about why his argument was unconvincing, he responded by saying "well, that just displays your ignorance of the subject."

My first reply was "fuck you!" I realize that he did not necessarily say I was ignorant overall, but he was wrong about how well I knew my side of this subject and I thought the comment was unwarranted.

I continued to argue with him, but was so furious that I know that vein in my neck was bulging out. I reiterated previous points, but was so frustrated that I am sure I was not at my most convincing. Finally, it came to the point where I think I was on the precipice of convincing him (an entirely political point that he denied, but make more sense than anything else), and he attempted his debater's judo and hit me with a point I'd made only moments before. My reply? "God dammit Gerry, that's the point I've been fucking making. Why won't you answer the fucking question!" I can't say that was me wearing my good host hat.

I can't recall, because the berserker rage had almost compelled me out of my seat, but I think that Comrade Squinty was the one to put an end to the conflict at that point by suggesting we either have a drink or bare-knuckle box on the back deck. Either way, the debate ended and I settled back down.

Later, after Gerry left I decided to fact-check my points, admitting that perhaps I was wrong, Gerry's initial point was valid, and I owed him an apology. Nope. Nearly everything from the appellate brief filed by the ACLU to OpEd articles written by a Yale Law professor amplify my point. I was so ready to restart the fight over e-mail, but then decided that it was better to just let it go, no matter how steamed I am still feeling.

I have got to be on my best behavior next week at Squity's family reunion. Her Uncle S. and I are likely to be diametrically opposed on every subject that tends to get my Irish up. Since we don't have the relationship that Gerry and I have that assumes a nearly constant series of friendly disagreements, I'll keep my big mouth shut for the sake of family harmony.If only I could pack a meditation cushion in my suitcase.

¹ This friend is also rarely 100% on the mark with those observations. That's not to say he's never right, but he's not always as correct as he thinks he is.

Dan Savage is my hero

2008-08-22T08:59:00.004-04:00

I love reading Dan Savage's "Savage Love" sex-advice column. I get no end of pleasure out of seeing that there are plenty of people out there with hangups and weird kinks who are willing to work it out to make their lives (and presumably their partners' lives) better. Plus, I get a bit of guilty pleasure when Savage, uh... savages someone in his column for being a closed-minded idiot.

But this isn't about random Dan Savage love; the reason I bring his column up is because I had a hearty guffaw this morning at a one liner that nearly made me spit my coffee all over my computer monitor. It's probably only really funny to me, but I wanted to throw it out there for entertainment purposes.

A reader wrote in to ask what to do about his wife who wants to peg him first before he gets the keys to the back door. This is the relevantly hilarious part of Savage's response:

And yes, MOWO, there are "homosexual implications." (There will also be homosexual exclamations: If she pegs your ass properly, you should be squealing like a gay-pride float dancer or an Idaho Republican.)[emphasis added]

So awesome! With a dreaded trip to Idaho in my immediate future, I'm just going to have to call this line to mind again and again. Thank you DS for making my trip west infinitely more tolerable.

Se7ens

2008-08-17T20:17:00.000-04:00

7 things I plan to do before I die:

Become a librarian
Publish my novel(s)
Be a good father
Celebrate my 50th wedding anniversary
Go to Prague
Feel consistently good about myself
Read a ton more books

7 things I can do:

Lift 146 pounds over my head for reps
Try a case in court
Find something I have in common with almost anyone
Make people laugh
Research
Play the guitar (not well, but I can)
Differentiate many varieties of hops in beer by taste

7 things I cannot do:

The splits (any more)
Keep an opinion to myself
Stand to be a lawyer for much longer
Skip rope
Remember the recipe for a sidecar
Eat Mexican food
Forgive my step-father

7 things that attract me to the opposite sex:

Uncommon intelligence (ideally a PhD)
A nice smile
Good conversationalist
A big ass
She loves the outdoors
Gray hair (it's a weird one, I know)
Lots of tattoos

7 things I say most often:

Fuck
What do you want to drink?
Xander! (ferret one)
Willow! (ferret two)
Knock it off! (Squinty chewing her cuticles)
Yeah, I guess it hurt. (get lots of tattoo questions)
No, really, I'm a lawyer.

7 celebrity crushes:

Helen Mirren
Fairuza Balk
Karyn Crisis
Alison Hannigan
Parminder Nagra
Cecile DeFrance
Alex Borstein

7 people who need to do this:
I don't have seven internet friends who blog, and I already ganked this from Sandra.
I suppose Nitsirk, if she's reading and my sisters.

Happy Birthday Sandra

2008-08-15T07:31:00.006-04:00

I suppose the title says it all. Here's to wishing you an enjoyable anniversary of your arrival on this planet. I hope dinner and drinks tonight are awesome! Have an excellent day. =)

CHEERS!

Bible Passage of the Day

2008-08-14T11:36:00.000-04:00

Song of Solomon 5:4: "My beloved put his hand by the hole of the door,
and my bowels were moved for him."

YUM!

So, it's come to this?

2008-08-13T14:19:00.011-04:00

Recently, people in the media have been bemoaning "The Big Sort" and the fact that like-minded people are congregating in areas where other people like them already reside, or "way-of-life segregation." The thesis is that this increasing ideological polarization is doing harm to our nation. It may be, but let me tell you, I got the memo and I'm not interesting in living in the middle of a group of people who oppose my values and actively want me dead.

You missed the memo, you say? No you didn't. It's just been parceled out over the course of the last several months and years. Here are a few of the recent highlights:

Just today - Gunman wounds Arkansas Democratic party chairman -- some wackjob walked into the Democratic party headquarters in Little Rock, into the chairman's office and shot him three times. We still don't have a report for his motives, but I bet I can guess one of the major themes of his manifesto. Get the message?

Yesterday - Christians publicly pray to harm others -- Albeit a slight harm, these nutters just want rains of "biblical proportions" (I'm assuming that the members of Focus on the Family in Colorado should be building an ark) to fall during Barack Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention. If you don't agree with someone, pray for god to SILENCE THEM!

A few weeks ago - Man shot churchgoers over liberal views, police say -- This time it's Knoxville, TN. Apparently those liberal sodomites in the Unitarian Universalist church who support social welfare programs like food stamps are to blame when your food stamps are canceled. Let god sort them out.

(Funny thing about this is if you Google image search
"conservative hunting permit"¹ you get the exact same pictures.)

Not long before that - Scientist receives death threats for threatening to desecrate a cracker -- before PZ Myers actually drove a rusty nail through a communion wafer to illustrate his point, people were sending him death threats for contemplating such an act and calling the "host" a "cracker." All of that was after a Catholic university student, who "stole" a communion wafer to show to a friend curious about Catholicism, was also sent death threats for "holding the body of Christ hostage."

And don't forget this billboard which deliberately misplaces the blame for the most heinous faith-based initiative implemented within America's borders.

These are just the items that have popped up since summer started, and I haven't included things from overseas like the Saudi cleric's fatwa against liberal Muslims or King Abdullah's call for an interfaith alliance to eradicate the threat of atheism. I can't wait for all of these "religions of peace" to start holding hands and singing Kumbaya at us.

I'm not naïve and I know that there are progressively minded folks out there who are as messed up as these people. Still, news stories about left-wing cousin-fuckers blowing people away for being registered to any political party, dragging people to death behind hybrid trucks, shooting anti-abortion protesters, etc. are in pretty short supply. (That doesn't mean I'm unfamiliar with ELF, ALF, and PETA).

Since when did our differences become so pronounced that we have to threaten and kill our fellow countrymen instead of debating them? Oh yeah, since the Bush administration decided that the culture war could be the curtain obscuring its crony-capitalist plan to completely gut our economy, international standing, and way of life. When you've got nothing, I guess you've nothing left to lose. I'm just thinking, perhaps it's safer for us all to stay in our respective corners until some of the stress that's sending us nearer the edge can be dealt with.

¹ Without the quotes. With quotes you'll not get a single image hit.

Hollaback -- Ugh! facepalm

2008-08-11T17:35:00.006-04:00

There are times when it really amazes me how idiotic people can be. I mean really really stupid.

I live next door to a gas station run by a Lebanese guy who apparently has absolutely no social filter or sense. I'll call him J.A. Typically, he's a fairly good neighbor. He plows our driveway in the winter for free (it works well for his auto inspection service, so it's not at all because he is altruistic) and tends to keep an eye on the place when we're gone.

Sadly though, he is a dirty old man. He often addresses me with slight innuendo and suggests to me that my wife and I don't have kids because I'm not "doing my job." Fine. It's lame, but not assaultive. Today, though, he crossed a line.

Across the street from us is a three story building that typically fills up with women attending Lesley University. Today, as I got home from work I stepped over to say "hello" to J.A. and a couple of his employees (keeping our relationship cordial). At the same time as I was chatting with J.A. about something I can't remember now, J.A. sees a couple of the neighbors leaving their apartment. He gets their attention by yelling "Hey girls," across the street at them. Once he has them looking over he gestures at the five of us standing in the parking area of his station and asks (still yelling), "are you two ready to take on all five of us guys?"

WHOAWHOAWHOA!!

You gotta be kidding me! I stood there shocked for a moment as one of the women from across the street stepped closer with a perplexed look on her face. I don't know if she couldn't hear what he shouted or just couldn't believe it, but he made sure he was understood by shouting it again. So lame and embarrassing.

I was so thrown by his sudden uncouth (to say the least) outburst, that all I could do was slink away. One of his employees (a really nice guy named C.) offered to hold J.A. still while the women beat him up. All I wanted to do was escape before one of the women produced a cellphone and we all ended up on Hollaback Boston.¹

So lame. If he talked to my wife or one of my sisters like that I would so be inclined to kick his ass thoroughly. Where do guys get the idea that that kind of talk is entertaining or funny in the least? It's certainly not going to get his fat, hirsute ass lucky. I've got to plan an apology to the two he was shouting at. Even though I didn't say anything to them, I didn't say anything. Cowardly.

¹ HollabackNYC is a way better site with more photo-shaming, BTW.

Welcome to the Grindhouse

2008-08-09T11:23:00.006-04:00

This summer, a friend of mine had a fantastic idea overflowing with generosity and class: "Barbecue-X." He put together a menu covering every weekend of the summer and then issued a standing invitation to his and his wife's friends. Just check the menu, see which weekend (e.g., chicken churrasco, grilled lamb chops, and/or crosscut short ribs) you wanted to attend, and then come over to grill, eat, and hang out (bringing along minimal food and financial contributions to ensure that it wasn't a bankrupting proposition). We opted in for the jerk chicken weekend and had an incredible time.

Afterward, his idea inspired me. Being generous, but lacking class, I thought to myself, "self, wouldn't it be fun to program and entire summer of grindhouse-style double features, and then invite our friends to come over whichever weekend of the summer they wanted to watch good/bad movies on the 50", drink, and generally have fun?" Yes. yes, I think it would.

Sadly, though, not as many of our friends enjoy exploitation cinema as much as barbecue. =( For entertainment purposes, here's the list (categorized by theme) I compiled:

Zombie Fun:
Planet Terror
Return of the Living Dead
Don't Go in the Woods:
The Howling
Cabin Fever
Vérité:
Last House on the Left
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
Keep Driving:
Vanishing Point (U.K. cut)
Death Proof
Frenchploitation:
Frontiere(s)
Haute Tension
Giallo (Italian):
Suspiria
Cannibal Holocaust (animal cruelty free cut)
Psycho Families:
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1973)
The Devil's Rejects
Romero Zombies:
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Dawn of the Dead (1978)
Revenge:
I Spit on Your Grave
Kill Bill Vol. 2¹
(alternate: Memento)
Ugly Americans Abroad:²
Eurotrip
Hostel

Yeah, the list is horror-heavy, but I don't have a lot of giant monster movies like Terror of Mechagodzilla or sexploitation like Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS.

There's a lot of fluidity here too. The potential exists for an originals and remake night (Halloween, Psycho, Texas Chain Saw), or fast v. slow zombies (NOTLD, new Dawn of the Dead), or completely unrelated night, Hostel and Urban Cowboy. The possibilities are limitless.

Again, sadly, I think we'd be pretty lonely most weekends.

¹ Yeah, KB2 is a reaaaaallllly long movie, but it'd be good to help wash away the taste of Spit.
² This pairing is especially great, IMO, because the plots of these two films are nearly identical right up to the point that one becomes a teen sex comedy and the other a survival horror film.

As You [Don't] Like it

2008-08-03T14:37:00.005-04:00

I LOVE Shakespeare!

I should alter that statement. I love Shakespeare's tragedies and histories; I'm not so crazy about his comedies, but I have been known to enjoy them, if well done.

Since Comrade Squinty and I have lived in the Boston area we've been regular devotees of the annual summer Shakespeare on the Common free play series. It's just such an awesome thing to pack up a couple of chairs, a picnic dinner, conceal a couple of bottles of wine, and catch a free Shakespeare play in the nation's oldest city park.

This first year we went, the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company staged Henry V -- set in a London Tube tunnel during the blitz. Awesome! We had a crowd of about six of us along. The next year was Macbeth, starring the biker best friend, Ziggy, from Rosanne as the Scottish Thane. That actually worked¹ and we had a crowd of about eight along with us that year. "We are advertis’d by our loving friends."

The next season's pick, Much Ado About Nothing, was performed very well (and was an apt pick for the time as the Commonwealth was enjoying the spread of civil liberties among same-sex couples). However, that year we lost a few of the picnickers that would attend with us. No real reason, other than that it didn't seem to work into everyone's schedule that year (and I think a little bit of attrition among friends who aren't so nuts about all of Will's plays).

The following season's play was Hamlet, starring the guy with the van from "Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2." It wasn't a bad production (and Jeffrey Donovan, the GWtV, was another surprisingly decent player in the role), but it illustrated a point about Shakespeare: his plays are prone to bring out the worst in over-actors.

This is especially true of his comedies.

Case in point. This year's production on the Common (ending tonight) is As You Like It (not a favorite - but it is the source of the "all the world's a stage" soliloquy and for my pet name for my wife, "О wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful! and yet again wonderful..." -- yeah it's a lot to say, but she's that awesome).² The actors this year in the lead roles were some of the worst hams I've seen outside of a delicatessen. Fred Weller as Orlando was so bad that I wondered throughout the play if he'd learned his lines phonetically. He recited his lines like William Shatner in a Tennessee Williams production³ of a block of wood. Horrendous.

A few of the other actors were decent. Johnny Lee Davenport clearly has handled Shakespeare before and the woman playing Rosalind was good 90% of the time. But IMDBing this year's cast is like looking at a veterans roster for soap operas and Law & Order. Ugh. Central Park gets Kevin Kline and Patrick Stewart and we get Ziggy from Rosanne and the kid who handled the camcorder in Blair Witch 2.

It is a production like this that sours people on Shakespeare entirely. I wonder if we'll be able to get any friends to go with us next year.

¹ Jay O. Sanders being a surprisingly good actor.
² We skipped over Taming of the Shrew (2006) and A Midsummer Night's Dream (2007) because I despise the way TotS is often staged, and AMND was rained out every weekend we had free.
³ All characters shouting all the time.

WTF?Oh, it must be art.

2008-07-20T09:36:00.005-04:00

I was shopping a few days ago in my favorite music/movie store when i came across this absurdity as I was checking out:

A Ho Chi Minh statue? Really?

The picture doesn't do it justice. The thing is 16" tall and the hat and Kalashnikov are removable. In researching this on the web I ran across a variant. Instead of displaying HCM's name, the base on the red flocked variant is inscribed with the words, "Fuck you G.I. You die!" The copy on the website is "[Frank] Kozik continues his mildly sarcastic line of figures in Communism with this limited Ho Chi Minh hand cast resin sculpture."

The pop-art substrate of contemporary art is especially inscrutable, IMO - but at least it can be playful. I comprehend Kozik's other statues. The droog Ludwig Van Beethoven and Chairman Mao wearing Mickey Mouse ears are weird/funny/awesome, but I'm just missing the statement with HCM. It's very punk rock/confrontational, I suppose. Where El Che moved from a countercultural figure to a pop culture icon due largely to ignorance, giving HCM a similar treatment ought to still ruffle a lot of feathers since a lot of people still call Jane Fonda "Hanoi Jane." How would those ~~bikers~~people respond to this?

Go figure. My prediction is that Newbury Comics isn't likely to move all fifty of these at $200.00.

Pseudo-criticism

2008-07-18T10:17:00.006-04:00

Our culture can get a lot of mileage out of a single word. Lately, the one that's been stinking the place up is "pseudo," as in pseudo-intellectual¹ (refer to recent navel-gazing about the New Yorker's readership), pseudo-topical (see Stephanie Zacharek's crap review of The Dark Knight) or pseudo-elite (listen - if you can without wanting to regurgitate - to any bloviating conservative going on about about effete, latte-slurping, liberal blah blah blah).

No one wants to be called out for being insensitive, so they hide barbs in language as obfuscating as they claim their opponent's arguments are. If I were to say that person X is "fucking stupid," I'm just engaging in an ad hominem. But if I call someone a "fake," then the burden seems to shift to the target of the barb to prove that they are, in actuality, genuine. I posit that calling someone a pseudo-intellectual is the pseudo-intellectual way to call someone stupid without coming off as cruel.

I prefer Nietzsche's tendency to have called it like he saw it. Not only did Socrates (Socratism/Platonism) murder tragedy, but he was ugly too!

I don't know about you, but as soon as I hear someone trot out "pseudo" as a modifier for anything I am led to the conclusion that the person using it is more than a little intimidated and possibly baffled by the target of their criticism. I suppose that that's the nature of ad hominem criticism as a whole.

Having said all of that, deconstructionist and post-structuralist social criticism is pseudo-intellectual garbage written by doodie-heads.

¹ The larger problem with pseudo-intellectual in particular, is that I do not think most people who trot it out know what they are saying and are using the word as a synonym/stand-in for "pretentious." That in itself is a near-irony given that the majority of people who accuse others of being pseudo-intellectual do so in the furtherance of their own pretentious, self-contradictory anti-intellectual arguments. The down-to-earth, common sense, Heartland^® commentators who like to criticize people on the coasts for being falsely intelligent are at the same time eschewing the very intelligence they claim their opponent lacks. So are they dumb like you, are you dumb like them, or are we all just different sides of schmuck?

There are two types of people: Those who dichotomize and those who don't.

2008-07-15T07:29:00.009-04:00

Boston is a city that like to draw bright lines of opposition. You are either on one side of the fence or fuck you -- I mean, or the other. It gets really tiring at times.

Take, for example, its two significant MSM¹ newspapers,² the Globe and the Herald. The split is like that between Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts. People are into one but not the other and don't tend to cross lines. Strangely enough, to a degree (but not universally) one's choice of paper and one's choice of coffee purveyor seem to go together. That is (although I'm sure it happens) I've never seen someone reading the Herald in a Starbucks.

But, apparently, it goes further. Recently in the Herald we were informed that good strong 'Mer'can values go with the double deuce, and the most vile kind of deviltry comes from Seattle (via the Boston Atheists blog):

In her column titled "The Star(bucks) Stop Here," Boston Herald writer Margery Eagan reveals that she, too, subscribes to a common prejudice: that atheists are latte-swilling urban foot soldiers in the assault on good ole American salt-of-the-earth Christians whose caffeine of choice comes, one assumes, from Dunkin Donuts only. Eagan asks, "Do you want to sit next to totally pretentious secular humanists, agnostic/atheist effete pseudo-elites (Starbucks)?" God no, who would... [emphasis in original].

Nice.

Unfortunately, people here do get really sideways about what someone else is drinking in the morning, resorting to stereotypes about the kind of person who must like one brand over the other. e.g.:

Starbucks: Pretentious yuppie scum who don't think twice about spending $4.35 for a cup of coffee but won't throw the $0.65 change into the tip cup.³
DD: Boorish working-class schlubs who bristle at the idea of ordering coffee in Italian⁴ even though 90% of DD employees speak Portuguese as a first language.

The idea that customers of these two stores must be at war with one another is already ridiculous, and now there's something else to divide us: Atheists! Drink! Starbucks! Coffee! OH NOES!

Stupid. The only difference between DD and Sb customers in Massachusetts is whether they like their tall glass of warm milk slightly flavored with watered down or burnt coffee. Fuck it. I'm headed to Diesel Cafe to read the Times and be thankful I don't live in Philadelphia.

¹ Not "Men Seeking Men," "Mainstream Media" you pervs.
² Not counting free alternative papers like the Phoenix and birdcage-liner like the Metro.
³ A medium (grande) cup of black coffee at Sb is less than two dollars, incidentally.
⁴ Grande is Italian for "large" (although that's the medium size), Venti is Italian for "twenty" and is served in a 20 oz. cup, natch. "Short" and "Tall" sizes are conventions from the Seattle stores, but no one orders those sizes anyway - I NEED MY FACKIN' CAWFEE!

Happy Bastille Day!

2008-07-14T15:08:00.002-04:00

Jour Heureux de Bastille! Vive la France!

Oh noez, dey stoled mai majic cracker.

2008-07-09T15:29:00.006-04:00

I was going to blog about this news story about a college kid who has been getting death threats for keeping (but not eating) a communion wafer, but PZ Meyers did such a great job already, I'll defer to him and come up with something else. In the meantime, don't go kidnapping nobody's magic crackers, kay?

What do they say about idle hands?

2008-07-02T17:18:00.006-04:00

So I had a little time on my hands this afternoon. I should have been working on my book, but come on! This was too easy!

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Yeah, I know I've got problems, but you're the one reading Zom B's blog. What do you want?

And now we begin to really reap the whirlwind

2008-06-27T15:22:00.004-04:00

The lasting damage that the second GWB term will do to America over the next hundred plus years is taking flower right now before our eyes. While I agree with the Supreme Court's ruling in Kennedy v. Louisiana to invalidate the death penalty for the sub-humans who rape little children, I am not convinced by its rationale as much as the fact that the death penalty in and of itself is immoral and fundamentally flawed in a practical sense.¹ And as PROTECT wrote yesterday, don't fool yourself about the Louisiana law in the first place.

Whether you believe in the death penalty... are morally or practically opposed to it... or simply find it outrageous that the rape of a child would be treated as a less than heinous offense... the truth is that child rapists, in the rare instances when they are criminally prosecuted at all, are more likely to get probation or short prison sentences in the United States than sentences of either life or death. There is no long line of prosecutors just waiting to charge the death penalty for child rape... or even 25 years to life.

But that's not what's got me going today. Instead, it has yet to be seen how yesterday's gun control ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller is going to affect lives in cities like D.C., Chicago, and Boston and whether the damages remittitur in Exxon v. Baker will permanently hamstring courts and juries in their attempts to discourage billion-dollar-a-year corporations from behaving badly.

Add to that the fact that we've now had time to read the ruling in Giles v. California. Honestly, it seems like a windfall for an accused criminal if the inability of a murder victim to be cross-examined regarding her prior statements about the accused's propensity to beat the living daylights out of her is the result of the very crime for which he stands accused! This seems like a text-book fucking instance of an allowable exception to the hearsay rule due to the declarant's unavailability for live testimony. Oh wait, it used to be a textbook example.

Let's all welcome C.J. Roberts and J. [Sc]Alito to the court, and hold our collective breaths for the next majority opinion penned by Antonin Scalia.

¹ A point where the majority of the SCOTUS, Barack Obama, John McCain, and I part company and the subject for a different post some other time.

Rockin' Out With Your Sauerkraut

2008-06-27T08:58:00.003-04:00

I have nothing to add other than that this picture makes me as happy as a little Schulmädchen!

Germans (perhaps Austrians) rocking the fuck out!

Marriage Equality

2008-06-25T19:06:00.001-04:00

George Carlin

2008-06-24T08:43:00.004-04:00

Requiesat in Pace

We miss you.

George Carlin
1937-2008

Hat Trick

2008-06-23T17:34:00.007-04:00

This weekend we went camping in Pillsbury State Park near Washington, New Hampshire, and we pulled a rain-out hat trick.

The first two days we were in the woods were gorgeous. It had rained in NH a little before we arrived at Pillsbury, but by the time we got there everything was clear and beautiful for our mile hike into our campsite. We loaded our friends' canoe, sent them off and Comrade Squinty and I started hiking to meet them at the portage site where we would have to hump all of the gear to the next lake (possibly 100 yards) and reload the canoe.

Eventually, we reached the site (along the way we saw scores of little orange salamanders¹ that we were careful not to step on) and set up our tents, etc. The next day was beautiful; we gathered more firewood (GP is a pyro), hiked back to the trail head and gathered water and did some paddling on the lake.²

The next day we enjoyed the first of three close calls. Having done all of the set up labor we needed to do, Sunday was dedicated entirely to leisure. We walked back to the trail head and took a short hike up one of the other trails. After that we scoped out a couple of other campsites and then walked back to our site. Just after we arrived in the site, the skies turned gray and then black and then opened up.

Fortunately, we had read the weather forecast and knew that rain was a possibility, so we had a siltarp already strung above our seats and cooksite. We waited out two squalls (one with a lightning strike so close and so loud that my wife immediately reached for my flask) before GP and I decided to give it a shot fishing in a deep sector of the pond that we'd discovered the day before.

We each caught a perch and threw them back before we decided that what had looked like the end of the storm was beginning to look like the eye of the storm. We pulled in our hooks and began to truck for shore. We arrived, got the canoe out of the water and back under the siltarp just before the skies opened and dumped the hardest it had on us yet that day. Close call no. 2. Finally, the weather broke and we made a fire, cooked dinner and enjoyed the nice (if a little humid) evening.

Sunday night was beautiful. Monday morning, not so much. We awoke to more rain (in the middle of the night, actually, as another too close for comfort lightning strike woke us all up around 4 a.m.). We scampered from our tents to the shelter of the tarp so we could make coffee and cook breakfast and wait out the storm. Eventually, the skies cleared (and the mosquitoes came out) so we could strike camp. We dismantled our gear, aired out our tarps and tent footprints before packing everything up. It was a lovely (if a little labor-intensive morning). We then repacked the canoe and began the hike back to the portage so we could help JB&GP move the bulk of the gear across to the other lake. Along the way it started to lightly rain.

By the time we had gotten the car, moved it around to the loading site, and had all of our stuff out of the canoe, it had started to rain harder. We got everything loaded and settled in the vehicle when it began to really dump. Close call no. 3 and a hat trick.

All in all, it was a fantastic weekend since we got to have our fun and every time it rained we'd just made it back to the safety and comfort of shelter just before the action started. Nice.

I will blog more later. I apologize if any of this entry is unintelligible, but I am loopy on Benadryl (for my spider bites) and vodka (to quiet the voices). ;)

¹ Pictures forthcoming.
² The lakes at PSP are absolute shite that are choked with weeds. It is impossible to fish and one has to be doubly vigilant for large treacherous rocks just under the surface.

Don't Walk...

2008-06-18T09:28:00.003-04:00

ROCK!

My sister took this awesome photo on a recent trip to San Diego. Well done 'Nore! I lift my goblet of rock to toast you and all those who truly rock.

I don't believe in the kind of karma you believe in.

2008-06-18T08:25:00.001-04:00

Karma is possibly the least understood concept in Buddhism¹ and the most abused by mamby pamby new-age crystal-gazers who want to feel empowered in the face of their inability to take real action. There's almost nothing that frustrates me more when I hear someone say that Karma will pay someone back for what they did - like it is some sentient force in the universe with a scorecard. It's bullshit. Without accountability, people who do wrong to others often simply continue living charmed lives, never for a second being tasked to reconcile accounts.

Andrew Vachss lays it out better than I ever could:

Revenge is like any other religion: There's always a lot more preaching than there is practicing. And most of that preaching is about what not to practice. "Vengeance is mine" translates to: "It's not yours." The karma-peddlers will tell you how doing nothing is doing the right thing, reciting, "What goes around comes around," in that heavy-gravity tone reserved for the kind of ancient wisdom you find in comic books. Every TV "counselor," every self-help expert, every latté-slurping guru ... they all chant some version of the same mantra: "Revenge never solves anything." Their favorite psalm is Forgiveness. And their hymn books are always open to the same page. Get it? When you crawl away, you're not being a punk; you're just letting the cosmos handle your business. Whoever hurt you, they'll get theirs, don't worry. Just have a little faith. Down here, we see it different. We don't count on karma. And you can count on this: hurt one of us, we're all coming for you.

Testify brother!

¹ Varying between predestination and "cosmic [i.e., divine] justice" depending on whether the speaker is describing his own "good" karma or someone else's "bad" karma.

13 Second Movie Review: Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf

2008-06-03T07:13:00.007-04:00

THE BEES! THE BEES ARE IN MY EYES!

Having watched the movie, "kill" is the wrong verb for this scene!

And WTF is up with the high-heeled, uh, heels?

I loved this poem when I read it in high school and I loved it more re-reading it in college. Although, I think I need to have another read because I totally don't remember Beowulf schtupping Grendel's mom (unless Zemeckis interpreted Beowulf finding a sword in Grendel's Mother's lake the same way any twelve year old would imagine finding a sword in someone's mother's anything). Ugh!

This was supposed to be a thirteen second review, so I won't get into the waxy CGI character rendering or the horrendous dialogue. Just, wow! My expectations for this movie were incredibly low and yet I was still incredibly disappointed! Watching it was kind of like this:

Bruttissimo H2; Bravissimo Jeff!

2008-05-28T10:58:00.005-04:00

From the casual braces¹ to the choice of backing music, Jeff is a man with style and flair. Well played, sir. Well played!

Oh, and this wily woman should also have recognition for her whimsical style of foreplay. Nice!

¹ Suspenders.

Wouldn't you like to be my neighbor?

2008-05-23T15:35:00.004-04:00

Having today off from work, I decided to take a little stroll around my neighborhood to take in what sights there might be worth seeing. Not far from my house I came across this interesting cause for concern.

This is an office building with a first floor below the sidewalk. Passing by, I couldn't help noticing that they had signs on several of the lower level windows.

Taking a closer look, I realized that perhaps I shouldn't have moved so close to take the photograph.

Wisely moving back, an entirely other problem became apparent.

There have got to be safer ways to keep people from smoking outside your office windows. I really think irradiating them is just a tad severe.

Last night was freakin' awesome... or...

2008-05-21T07:53:00.013-04:00

The camera in my phone sucks a leaky bag.¹

Last night, Comrade Squinty and a couple of friends went to see the Progressive Nation Tour in Boston at the Orpheum Theater. On the bill were Three, Between the Buried and Me, Opeth, and Dream Theater.

We arrived about a half hour late and got into the Orpheum just in time to hear a guy yell, "WE ARE THREE! THANK YOU; GOOD NIGHT!" Eh. Fine with me. I'd never heard of the band before and after sampling their music on Last.FM I was fine missing them. They're okay, but I was there to see BTB&M and Opeth.

Between the Buried and Me was next, and they were awesome. They played a thirty-minute set and were able to get through two songs. =) That's a band I can get behind. They describe themselves as "adult contemporary progressive death metal." Yep, that's pretty much it. On the album Alaska, they have a song called Selkies that sends me into paroxysms of joy.

Insert first instance of how shite the Motorola RAZR's camera is here.

If you squint, you can see the guitarist in the lower right hand corner. The rest of the band is the blur behind him. Thanks Motorola.

After BTB&M were done it was time for Opeth to take the stage. These guys are undoubtedly My Favorite Band™ and the reason we went to the show. Their new album, Watershed (however I might have come to hear such a thing before the official release date), is inspired. Mikael Åkerfeldt has a hilarious sense of humor, declaring in between brutally beautiful songs, "the E string is now in tune," "this song is about bunnies, the sun, and soft days on the beach - RRRROOOWWWWWWWRRRRRR!" and "If you love us, come see us again. And if you hate us, come see us again so you can hate us even more."

If you haven't heard them, Opeth is a band that effortlessly travels between Swedish Death Metal, Jazz, and 70s-style folk all in the span of the typical eleven minute song. ² Everything I love in music!

Hit me again, Motorola!

Oh yeah. The nice thing about seats at the Orpheum is that the ones in the rafters still offer a pretty decent view. Since I ordered our tickets the day after they went on sale, we were stuck way up on the second balcony. Okay view in front of some chatty French dudes. See? Metal makes the world come together.

I have no idea how long Opeth played since I was reeling from their wonder in a nigh-orgasmic fugue (70 min?). All I know is that closing with The Drapery Falls nearly made me achieve release.

I only wish I could have taken a picture like this one:

And then the arrogant cock-prog juggernaut Dream Theater came on stage. They entered playing a metal rendition of Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra. Yeah, we get it: Dream Theater is a prog monolith and it's full of stars. YAWN!

Actually, they're an incredible band with two fatal flaws - 1) they are prone to incessant noodling/instrument-wandering, and 2) their songs are incredibly formulaic. I often love the band (and sometimes I hate them), but seeing them live can be a test of one's patience -- one we were unable to pass as we left about forty-five minutes into their set (they played for another hour or so) to get a beer next door. This is significant, because one of the friends we went with is possibly the biggest DT fan ever and he was the one who signaled that it was time for a beer (his fiancée had fallen asleep in her seat about twenty minutes into their set - a first for me at any metal concert).

My phone must have sensed my disappointment as it chose to render this picture as small as it possibly could.
I still enjoyed DT as they played a couple of songs from an album of theirs I prefer, but they are not the band to follow Opeth. Who, incidentally, promised to be back in Boston in September. I can't wait for the summer to be over!

¹ Not that a camera/phone sucking should be news to anyone; they almost universally do.
² Honestly, they're like the Doobie Brothers cross-pollinated with Entombed and Terry Reid.

...In the Stairwell

2008-05-20T15:12:00.006-04:00

Recently, an old childhood acquaintance of mine ran into me on Classmates dot com. He e-mailed with an offer to catch up a little on what we've been up to since the last time we ran into each other. Sounded good. I was friendly with him as I mentioned, and his mother is an absolutely wonderful person who always stood up for me when other kids' parents wouldn't. But as soon as I sent him my actual e-mail he started barraging me with stupid e-mail forwards (like the kind your auntie sends you), culminating with the following prose poem, or whatever the fuck it is.

'MEET ME IN THE STAIRWELL'¹

You say you will never forget where you were when
you heard the news On September 11, 2001.
Neither will I.

I was on the 110th floor in a smoke filled room
with a man who called his wife to say 'Good-Bye.' I
held his fingers steady as he dialed. I gave him the
peace to say, 'Honey, I am not going to make it, but it
is OK..I am ready to go.'

I was with his wife when he called as she fed
breakfast to their children. I held her up as she
tried to understand his words and as she realized
he wasn't coming home that night.

I was in the stairwell of the 23rd floor when a
woman cried out to Me for help. 'I have been
knocking on the door of your heart for 50 years!' I said.
'Of course I will show you the way home - only
believe in Me now.'²

I was at the base of the building with the Priest
ministering to the injured and devastated souls.
I took him home to tend to his Flock in Heaven. He
heard my voice and answered.

I was on all four of those planes, in every seat,
with every prayer. I was with the crew as they
were overtaken. I was in the very hearts of the
believers there, comforting and assuring them that their
faith has saved them.

I was in Texas , Virginia , California , Michigan , Afghanistan .³
I was standing next to you when you heard the terrible news.
Did you sense Me?

I want you to know that I saw every face. I knew
every name - though not all know Me. Some met Me
for the first time on the 86th floor.

Some sought Me with their last breath.
Some couldn't hear Me calling to them through the
smoke and flames; 'Come to Me... this way... take
my hand.' Some chose, for the final time, to ignore Me.
But, I was there.

I did not place you in the Tower that day. You
may not know why, but I do. However, if you were
there in that explosive moment in time, would you have
reached for Me?

Sept. 11, 2001, was not the end of the journey
for you. But someday your journey will end. And I
will be there for you as well. Seek Me now while I may
be found. Then, at any moment, you know you are
'ready to go.'

I will be in the stairwell of your final moments.

[signed,] God

Now that "god" has stopped extorting you, the actual (anonymous) author adds this guilt-trip postscript.

During the next 60 seconds, stop whatever you are
doing, and take this opportunity. (Literally it
is only 1 minute.)⁴ All you have to do is the
following:

Stop and think and appreciate God's power
in your life, for doing what you know is pleasing to
Him. If you are not ashamed to do this, follow the
instructions. Jesus said, 'If you are ashamed of Me, I will be
ashamed of you before My Father'

If you are not ashamed, copy and send this message...only
if you believe 'Yes, I love my God. He is my
fountain of Life and My Savior. He Keeps me going day and
night. Without Him, I am no one. But with Him, I can do
everything. Christ is my strength.'

I am not ashamed. I do not believe in any gods.

¹ All errors, whether grammatical, ineffable capitalization, punctuation, or logical are in the original. Also the first picture and a shitload others more gorge-inducing that I left out of this post were included in the e-mail.
² Lovely. Catch the not-so-subtle spiritual extortion in the message? Here it is again in case you did not: "Of course I will show you the way home - only believe in Me now." Translation: "Don't believe in Me? Get fucked!"
³ We could have used you in Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, the District of Columbia, and Pennsylvania, dick.
⁴ 60 seconds is literally a minute? Don't blow my mind, dude!

New Ink - Final Work

2008-05-14T09:16:00.004-04:00

Yesterday I went back to Jason Loui and had the half sleeve pin up tattoo that he's been working on finished.¹ I couldn't be happier. Since the piece is done, I'll give you three views for a tour around my right arm.

We'll start with the rear of my arm. Jason painted the skull in such a wonderful way I can't believe it. Instead of clean white bone, the green and black lividity gives it a sense of rot that's just wonderful.

Next up is the center view. He colored in the banner (I love the purple, again, a color of bruising and lividity) and added white highlights to Kala's corset to set off the opaque gray beneath and complete the reflecting leather suggestion. He also added color to her jewelery. The pendant that she's wearing, incidentally, mirrors the shape of the original piece that this is covering up. Although, I grew tired of the tribal face, I still find the shape pleasing.

Finally, the view from the front of my arm. This is actually the part where I get the most comments -- almost always, "phew, those are some high heels!" I think women who look at my tattoo instantly get shin cramps from the idea of her footwear. I'm not a foot fetishist, but they work with the whole piece. I prefer my real life women in comfortable kicks.

There we have it. Yesterday we discussed the possibility of darkening her skin tone some more in order to further obscure the ghosting of the old image on her thigh, but we agreed it might make the piece a little too heavy. We also scuttled the idea of adding a cushion for her to sit on so not to cramp the "real estate" I have below my elbow where something else could go.²

And finally, a picture of how it all began. =) I am glad to see this go. I won' be getting tribal again unless I'm in New Zealand. Have I mentioned that already?

Next on the tattoo agenda, a rest while I forget how much this process hurts, and then, back to finishing my back piece.

¹ For previous steps in the process you can look here, here, and here.
² Although, since getting home last night, I had the idea that she could be sitting in a pile of bones like the skull she's holding up. I think it'll make the piece too bottom heavy, however.

Crossroads

2008-05-09T08:54:00.004-04:00

Lately, I've been thinking about crossroads. No, not the shitty movie with Ralph Macchio.¹ More like places where there's an unclear choice to make that might affect the rest of one's life. But not exactly like we would stand at one now and decide which direction to take. I've been taken with looking back at a life, and realizing that there was a direction that had once been possible, despite the choice being long since gone.

As a masochistic thought-experiment, I've been prone in the last couple of weeks to revisionist reflection. What could have been if I (or other people) had made different choices on the way here? How would my past have been different and how many of the things I hated about my childhood and adolescence might have been avoided if I had taken (or been led down) the right hand path instead of left? But a burgeoning new friendship has given me some useful perspective that's kept me from descending into an utterly depressing and useless period of navel-gazing.

If I had made any different choices at any point between here and there I likely never would have gone to college where I did, and I never would have met my wife. I also likely would not have ended up in Boston. Comrade Squinty is the absolute love of my life and eastern Massachusetts is a home where I feel like I finally fit. And that's the end point of all those variables that became certainties in my past. Where I am and who I am now is the culmination of long gone joy and pain come together to form a predilection for one fork in the road over another.

The point is, although I have regrets for past experiences that left long scars, right now I'm very glad that my life took the direction it did. Despite a general dis-ease in my professional life (which is alterable) the state of my present family of choice suggests that the right time is now - not then.

¹ Although I love the end duel with Steve Vai where RM defeats him using Yngwie Malmsteen licks. Clearly, this scene takes place in Hell -- where else would a white metal musician headline a southern, Black blues club? And where else can the Karate Kid outplay a guy who used to play with Zappa?

This. Is. AWESOME!

2008-05-07T15:18:00.001-04:00

Take that, pansies!

2008-04-24T16:48:00.001-04:00

Watch this Space

2008-04-22T08:01:00.004-04:00

I am alive, I swear. I've just been preparing for a trial I have coming up a week from today. After that I've got a guest coming for a visit from out of town. After next week, I'll update this blog, I swear.

Until then, here's a pretty picture I took. Discuss.

New Ink Part 3

2008-04-05T09:28:00.003-04:00

On the 31^st of last month I got some new work done on my pin-up cover up tattoo. Jason added blue highlights to her corset and brown tones to her skin to equalize the earlier ruddiness. He also added some purple highlights in her stockings. Next time (and likely the last sitting - we're up to about ten hours, give or take, in this piece) he'll finish up the corset by adding white in the spaces still showing gray (for a sharper reflection effect), finishing the skull and banner, and adding a cushion beneath the girl to balance out the piece and so she's not floating in air.

Note, in this picture¹ you can't see her shoes which are also now blue, matching the rest of her outfit. The flesh around her shoes is black and blue turning yellow and brown as it seems that work on the front of my bicep make me bruise heavily. It's worth it. =)

I love her so much.

¹ Photo Credit: this one was taken by my tattooer, since Squinty has the camera at a conference on the opposite side of the continent.

Photo Booth at Diesel in Davis Square

2008-03-31T09:30:00.004-04:00

Squinty was a little late getting into the booth , so photo one has a little more movement than we intended. But the third photo in the series is one of my favorite pictures of us ever taken. Extra big thanks go to Margie and Jaime for encouraging us to do this and for visiting Boston in the first place. We had a great time hanging out and meeting you for the first time, Jaime.

Fellow Travelers

2008-03-28T10:22:00.002-04:00

The view from the road between Boston and Portland, ME.

.

2008-03-14T08:14:00.002-04:00

You Should have Perfected the French Drop First, Eliot.

2008-03-11T08:54:00.014-04:00

I love up-close magic. Watching a talented magician¹ make me believe I saw something I didn't is just good times. Even though I know that it is highly-trained slight of hand and, more importantly, misdirection, the trick still makes me happy. But that is when it is a dove disappearing from a collapsing cage!

One of my pet peeves for the last several years has been the practice of disgraced politicians trotting out their families in order to amplify their half-hearted mea culpas. But what really makes me angry is when a politician caught with his dick inside someone not his wife drags his beleaguered spouse on stage to redirect his public shaming. Most recent case in point: NY Governor Eliot Spitzer.

While Silda² Spitzer may honestly love her husband and want to heal her marriage, she is standing there because Eliot wants our eyes firmly locked upon his beautiful assistant while he violently shoves the dove into a hidden pocket in his jacket. Don't believe me? Amy Ephron asks the question I am answering in a short article featuring a slide show³ of exactly the phenomenon I am talking about. Go ahead and go over to peep at Dina Matos McGreevey, Wendy Vitter, Suzanne Craig, and Hillary Clinton's public shaming. I'll wait for you.

Back now?⁴ You starting to see the trick? Who looked embarrassed and distraught and who looked resolute and in control in each one of those photos? We're meant to sympathize with the spouses and thus have our attention diverted while the trickster gives his public statement that is an honest expression of neither regret nor contrition.

Did you believe Eliot Spitzer's apology? Do you think he really regrets paying to have sex with whores?⁵ No? Maybe the trick isn't as good as these guys think it is.

UPDATE: 1147 hrs.

I suppose I ought to interject something here to clarify. If Spitzer had been busted having an affair with a mistress, fine. Lame, but fine. Going to prostitutes, however is different than having a girlfriend. As far as prostitution goes, I am uncertain whether or not it ought to be decriminalized and regulated. I do believe that Europe has a more enlightened perspective on "scandals" involving public figures like this, but my biggest problems with Spitzer's failings are the hypocrisy (same as with David Vitter and Larry Craig) and the crime. If Spitzer hadn't been known for prosecuting prostitution rings in the past and condemning this activity, I suppose I might feel differently about him frequenting prostitutes. At the same time, I am hard pressed to believe this is a victimless crime and am close to being convinced that even legalized prostitution is exploitative of the women who "choose" this vocation. Additionally, as a former D.A., attorney general, and now governor, he ought to be required at the very least to obey the laws he is asked to enforce. Should he choose as a matter of principle to not enforce an unjust law or seek to undermine it (as with Gavin Newsom in San Fransisco - who also had an affair, but didn't break the law in the process) then maybe he deserves some consideration. But to prosecute people for paying for sex and then do the same thing (albeit at a much higher price-point) is hypocritical and an abuse of the public trust.

All that being said, the point of the post above is to call out the shameful practice of parading one's spouse in front of the cameras when she should not be forced to share one's humiliation but instead be entitled to righteous indignation for having a partner break a solemn promise to her.

¹ Everything has its antithesis.
² I love that name - it apparently means "solitary" which is what she may be after her divorce and/or where Eliot could end up if he can't cut a deal with the Feds.
³ From whence I ganked the image of the Spitzers.
⁴ Among all of those pictures, there is something special in the way Wendy Vitter looks. Of all of these wronged women, she looked like the one most likely to have responded appropriately on the ride to the press conference and the ride back home: by encouraging David to buy locks for the knife drawers if he wants to wake up in the morning.
⁵ It's a different blog post, but worth mentioning here that, while I think screwing around on one's spouse is incredibly lame, paying for sex is irrefutable confirmation of one's status as a fucking loser.

New Ink Part 2

2008-03-07T14:28:00.006-05:00

Previously, I documented the beginning of a cover-up piece that my tattoo artist, Jason, is doing for me on my right arm. The big black tribal face was awesome when I was 20 and the tribal-style was still fresh. These days the freshness label is peeling off of all tribal not done in New Zealand or Cambodia. It's time to move on.

About two weeks ago he added much of the black cover up as well as some opaque gray shading to tone down underlying black in areas where he wants to place color (sorry, no picture). Last night, he did some more blacks and shading (in her stockings) and then added color, mostly for her skin tone. Right now, her color is very ruddy, but as the tattoo heals in the next few weeks, it'll tone down into a more naturalistic skin tone (darker than my own, natch).

Next sitting (March 31) he'll replace the opaque grays in her corset with a turquoise blue highlight to give a reflecting leather effect, finish the skull, and color in her jewelery. I couldn't be happier about how well this piece is turning out. We started off with a piece he designed for me sight unseen, and right now it is exceeding both of our expectations for a cover up.

If my arm had been blank, I think we would have made different choices about her hair, but one has to work with what one has. Irrespective, I am so in love with this woman.¹ Thank you Jason!

Incidentally, she looks Indian to me (not surprising, given my artist's penchant for Asian art), so I am thinking of naming her something like Mythri (beautiful) or Kala (art).

¹ I think my wife is too, since she keeps kissing her on the lips. ;)

Zom B's Reading List 2007

2008-03-05T09:57:00.009-05:00

Since 2002, I've written a letter to the United States Attorney General listing the books I read in the last twelve months as a act of petulant disapproval of section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act (which gives the FBI access to anyone's library and bookstore purchase records). ¹ However, after several years of writing and receiving no reply, I have decided that Attorneys General are bad correspondents.² So, in lieu of writing to Michael Mukasey for the first time this year, I've decided to just blog-post my list in the event anyone (law enforcement or otherwise) is interested in my reading habits.

Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam by Michel Onfrey - Awesome book that is exactly what it purports to be: a manifesto.
Memory and Dream and
Widdershins by Charles DeLint -- Although DeLint is a favorite author, I disliked both of these books. When he misses the mark, he misses entirely! Here's hoping that Promises to Keep, sitting on my shelf, picks up some of the slack.
Casino Royale by Ian Fleming -- I doubt I'll read another 007 book; I guess I'm just too far removed from the author's generation to be able to just skim past the literary Bond's casual misogyny.
The Children of Hurin by J.R.R. Tolkien -- this one rates somewhere between The Silmarillian and The Lord of the Rings as far as readability goes. It definitely feels unfinished.
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens - Hitch does his bit the way he always does by peppering razor-sharp reason with snarky personal insults. Suited my mood perfectly.
Into the Wild and
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer -- I've never read anything by this author before last year. Boy, was I missing out! Under the Banner of Heaven is presently sitting on the to-read shelf.
Mask Market and
Terminal by Andrew Vachss -- Vachss is a favorite, and even at his worst he's pretty good. They need to invent a new category of noir just for him.
Hannibal Rising by Thomas Harris -- Slightly more substantial than the movie, but the HUGE print and short page count makes me want to categorize the book more as a novella or even a long short-story. Also feels unfinished.
Brewing up a Business : adventures in entrepreneurship from the founder of Dogfish Head Craft Beer by Sam Calagione -- I generally hate business books. This one was not bad.
Monster Planet and
13 Bullets by David Wellington -- Another writer I am fond of whose last two left me feeling gypped. MP was okay (but not as good as its two predecessors) but 13B was just plain BAD! I'll be skipping 99 Coffins and Vampire Zero, and I've got diminished expectations for Plague Zone.
Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis -- Freakin' brilliant meta-fiction horror. I wanted to reread this one as soon as I finished it.
Life of Pi by Yann Martel -- Unmitigated crap! I wish I could get those two days back!
Nashville Radio: Art, Words and Music by Jon Langford -- an art book and partial memoir. It's best for the pretty paintings of Roy Rogers as a skeleton and alt-folk CD that it comes with.
Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay -- Not as good as the Showtime series in most respects, but the book delves a little deeper into Dexter's internal life which was fun.

I've also read selections from the following books:

The Best in Tent Camping: New England by Lafe Low
The Portable Atheist ed. by Christopher Hitchens
The Good Beer Guide to New England by Andy Crouch
The Undead and Philiosophy ed. by Greene and Mohamad
America: The Book by Jon Stewart et al.
The Complete Krav Maga by Darren Levine and John Whitman

I'm sure I'm missing something.

In retrospect, 2007 was pretty fiction-heavy (like most years) and I didn't read any political non-fiction (unless you consider the atheism books political) as in past years. I had about 90 minutes of political enthusiasm before it was killed by the current race for the White House, so I doubt I'll be adding any political analysis to my list this year. But you never know. If you've got any god suggestions, let me know.

¹ Examples are here and here.
² Of course, since I haven't been ~~kidnapped~~ subjected to an extrajudicial rendition to ~~Gitmo~~ an undisclosed location for ~~torture~~ enhanced interrogation, I guess I should count my blessings that Ashcroft and Gonzalez didn't read their fan-mail.

Let's Have the Good News Instead

2008-03-03T16:06:00.008-05:00

Life lately has been pretty routine given the spate of uninspiring weather we've been having around here lately and so I've been waiting for something to move me enough to make it worth blogging about. In the last week I ran into some options:

The Bad:

Rented a 70's exploitation movie called Cannibal Holocaust that seriously bummed me out with unsimulated scenes of animal cruelty (causing me to lose a lot of respect for Eli Roth, whose favorite film it is). I know, it is billed as an extremely unsettling (and by many accounts, tasteless) film, and I should have known it would be unpleasant, but I have an occasional partiality for the grindhouse so long as no one really gets hurt.¹ Lesson learned.
Saw a Youtube video of U.S. Soldier (or Blackwater mercenary) appearing to senselessly kill a puppy. (That link is not direct to the video, btw.) I gotta nip this one before it becomes a trend.

The Good:

Scored the 6 hour extended cut of Das Boot on DVD for under $20.
Rolled sushi with dear friends and made a new friend who lives in D.C.
Got new mummy sleeping bags and hiking packs at an incredible discount from REI using the last of our x-mas gift certificates.²

And the winner is:
GOOD: Trent Reznor released the new Nine Inch Иails album on the web two months ahead of its physical release for a totally affordable price (or free, if you prefer) and under a Creative Commons share-alike license.

It's a two hour long album of industrial/ambient instrumentals that you don't even need to download to listen to for free.

We encourage you to share the music of Ghosts I with your friends, post it on your website, play it on your podcast, use it for video projects, etc. It's licensed for all non-commercial use under Creative Commons.

Sweet release! I love NIИ and love that he's pushing new boundaries with regard to creating, distributing, and sharing art. It's the simple generosities of people who create beautiful things that make it worth going out my door in the morning.

Thank you Trent!

¹ Ruggero Deodato, the director, has come out and said that he regrets making the film in the first place and wanted the distributor of the picture to remove the animal scenes for re-release (which it did not do). Of course, now, he wants to make a sequel, so I wonder how much of his mea culpa was merely press. In any event, unlike my unabashed love of the zombie sub-genre of horror, I am definitely not inclined to become a devotee of the cannibal boom of Italian films. Just lame.
² Actually, I'm most excited about the sleeping bags and the packs given the experiences I intend to have with them, but there's not much to say since so far since we just brought them home to immediately store in anticipation of camping later this summer. We have, however, already booked two camping trips in Vermont, and may try to squeeze in some camping in the Tetons if we can swing it. Okay, I guess this is turning out to need its own entry. Next time, true believers!

Enter Do Not Enter

2008-02-25T08:02:00.004-05:00

I tried to go to Target ~~Great~~Wasteland yesterday, but I couldn't figure out how to get through the doors.

Ba dum dum tsssss!!

Happy Birthday Chuck!

2008-02-12T09:28:00.000-05:00

And Happy Darwin Day to the rest of the world! Today is the 199^th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and this year is the 149^th anniversary of the publication of "The Origin of Species." Yet, the Institute for Humanist Studies reminds us that all is not well in the modern world.

Recent Gallup polls show that 43 percent of Americans reject the theory of evolution and instead believe that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so." And at least four 2008 presidential candidates have said they do not believe the theory of evolution.
"There is a continuous threat to evolutionary biology and to science in general that has been posed by fundamentalists who reject entirely a Darwinian worldview because they feel it threatens their religious beliefs," said Massimo Pigliucci, Ph.D., a professor of evolutionary biology at the State University of New York-Stony Brook. [full press release]

Richard Dawkins has provided a nice counter-point to this statistic in the Guardian this week entitled, "Why Darwin Matters." Worth a read if you have even a passing interest.

Cheers!

P.S. The entire Guardian coverage of the beginning of Darwin's bicentenary is here.

YOU WILL TASTE MAN SPA!

2008-02-05T16:02:00.000-05:00

A while ago my friend, Errick - a fellow bald man - suggested that we go to a barbershop that he'd heard of recently called Floyd's 99 Barbershop, whose motto is, "Look like a rock star, pay like a has-been." For $24 (+tip) one can get a whole head shave with the hot towel treatment, heated shave cream and a straight razor followed by a neck and shoulder massage. Sounds awesome. We vowed someday to try this service.

I wasn't pushing to go do this for a couple of reasons, not the least of which being that I am exceedingly ~~cheap~~ frugal (except when it comes to horror movies and comic books), and I wasn't inclined to pay $24 for something I can do at home. But I figured it was a safe bet as my male friends and I often make plans that for one reason or another never come to fruition.

Someday arrived sooner than I anticipated, however, when Errick received a gift certificate to Floyd's from his wife. Being a good sport and a little heavy in the wallet due to a couple of extra hours the week before (as well as actually interested to see what it's like to have someone else shave my head) we scheduled. Our first appointment was canceled because Errick's mate, Erica, was feeling sub-optimally and he is a dutiful husband. But we soon rescheduled what had then been termed "Man Spa," by his wife and mine.

Flash forward to last Saturday. I arrived at the Mass. Ave. Boston location (the one that was mutually inconvenient) early and checked in. I should have waited outside for Errick. But being a slave to schedules and appointments (it's a lawyer thing), I went in and got started.

I took a seat hoping that my barber would be the one who looked like this:

and not the Jerry Garcia lookalike with the blue perm. I guess I got the middle ground inasmuch as an average-looking guy came over to work on me. Eh.

The bad part started when he began by asking me what I do. Lately, I have taken to telling people that I am a freelance embalmer, because one, no one wants to talk about embalming, and two, the idea of being a freelance embalmer amuses me. But on this day I was truthful and said "despite appearances, I'm a lawyer." Cue endless boring talk about the real estate slump.

The guy was nice, but whenever I say I'm a lawyer people just want to do one or both of two things: pump me for free advice, and/or complain about lawyers/anything-else-even-tangentially-related-to-law. I tried to steer the conversation back to my spa man. "How'd you get into this business?" I asked. "My parents are stylists." Well, that was a non-starter. Got a job from Dad. Stuck with it. Now I do the same thing somewhere else. Okay. What else is there? Back to the sub-prime lending crisis, I guess.

The shave was comfortable. The hot towels felt great (I do the same thing at home with hot washcloths), and the heated shave cream was a nice touch. Although, despite using a straight razor, I get a closer shave at home. I like to have a baby-soft smoothness to my scalp when I'm done. But that requires shaving with the grain of my hair-growth first and then following it up with against the grain finishing.

After about fifteen minutes, my barber re-wrapped my scalp with a hot towel and set about giving me the neck and shoulder rub. He grabbed a machine from his station that I recall seeing in my grandmother's house
and began gently rubbing my traps and neck. It was nice while it lasted - which was, unfortunately, not long at all. Then it was "wham, bam, thank you man," out of the chair and make your way to the register. Shit.

Errick had arrived late (exactly on time, which for me is late) and was getting the whole head plus face shave as well as an engaging conversation. He was going to be a while, so I paid, took a seat in the waiting area and started to read a book with a chapter about an embalming in Mexico (no shit). Forty minutes of sweltering decomposition and 80's rock later (not much difference in my mind), he was released and we were on our way to get beer.

Do I regret going? No. Because I had a good time hanging out with my friend, and he was really jazzed to go have the experience. But afterward did I have that slightly nauseous feeling I get when I just got taken for a ride? Oh yes.

I need some time in the tattoo chair to relax, get my money's worth, and get over it.

I Voted!

2008-02-05T15:22:00.000-05:00

I used to be the only person I knew who voted in primaries. All of my friends accepted that I was a political geek who started handicapping candidates from the moment they formed exploratory committees, and ridiculed me accordingly. But since Shrub, all of my friends vote in primaries.

Who's the geek now, BITCHES!?

Okay, I still am. =)

P.S. Props to Alex Ross for the badass t-shirt!

New Ink Part 1

2008-01-21T09:17:00.000-05:00

Late last week My tattoo artist, Jason Loui, started work on my new pin-up half-sleeve cover up. I am already in love with it despite it being just an outline over another tattoo. I can't wait for our next session! See here:

This is maybe a little less than a third done. Next session Jason will add shading and the dark blacks that should cover up most, if not all, of the tribal piece beneath. There's likely to be some ghosting of the face's beard on her thigh, but I can live with that. After blacks and shading, then we'll do one more session a month after that to add color.

Just in case you can't read it, the banner at the top of the piece reads: Memento Mori.

The world will turn when we are earth
As though we had not come nor gone;
There was no lack before our birth,
When we are gone there will be none.
- Omar Khayyam - "The Tent-Maker"

The View from Crimebridge

2008-01-11T16:55:00.000-05:00

Lately, life our little corner of the People's Republik has been more like Saturday night on the Fox network than usual. Living in New England isn't all This Old House and Antiques Roadshow, fo sho. Neither Comrade Squinty nor I have any illusions about what it means to live in a city, especially after her purse was snatched in Harvard Square a little over a year ago, but two recent events reminded us why we always pay our renters insurance premium on time.

A few months ago we noticed, about four doors up from us on the opposite side of the street, the neglected former auto body workshop was newly occupied. Although the new proprietors hadn't gotten their official signage installed yet, there were a couple of small hand-painted signs that indicated that indeed the shop was open, and "please come around to the side."

Occasionally, CS and I walk by this establishment on our way to catch the T and we had opportunity during the summer months to have a peek inside. Cambridge streets are a rough sea of potholes and loose asphalt debris upon which people sail Volvos and Subaru Outbacks in disproportionate numbers to national sales figures. But there wasn't a single forest green hatchback wagon or boxy boomer rust-bucket in the shop. It was all Ferraris, Bentleys and Lotuses. No shit.

In only recent weeks has the place closed after a few local residents tried to take their own cars to be repaired and were turned away without exception. The local neighborhood exotic sportscar repair shop apparently did not do work on plebeian BMWs or Mercedes Benzes.

Not unless they were stolen, I would hazard a guess.

Yep, the place was a chop shop. We should have guessed by the contents of this picture I took as we walked by.Okay, this is a still from the chop shop scene in xXx: State of the Union (possibly the funniest non-comedy ever made), but anyone with half a brain knows that if you refuse to work on high end cars, your high end auto shop is going to be investigated by the police faster than any "legitimate" business in a movie starring both Ice Cube and Xzibit.

BTW, any parts recovered from "wrecked" Lamborghinis that you're waiting to arrive from your Ebay seller are probably tagged and bagged in an evidence garage right now. Go ahead and feel free to leave negative feedback.

But the fun doesn't stop there. As we were sitting on the sofa last night finishing our preprandial cocktail we noticed blue flashing lights in our living room window. Not being sensible people we immediately rushed toward disaster and threw open the blinds so we could be specifically targeted in the hail of gunfire about to erupt.

All right, I'm exaggerating. It was a traffic stop -- but Squinter and I have known the love of watching a traffic stop turn into a full blown drug bust when the cops pull a pillowcase-sized bag of marijuana from under the spare tire in the trunk and hold it up like an Olympic torch so the couple watching from their bedroom window can fully enjoy the show. So we watched.

One cop help the passenger at a distance with his hand on the butt of his (holstered) sidearm while his partner performed a search on the driver that came very damn close to requiring rubber gloves and KY Jelly. All of this in the parking spot right next to our car, fifteen feet from our living room window.

To make a long story short, the bag of whatever white powdery substance one normally tapes to one's scrotum finally came loose from the driver's uh... scrotum, as did the baggie of pot and 7 ¼ inch fillet knife from the inside of the driver's side door of their vehicle.

Note to self, look up expense of renting slip space for bass boat in Mystic River.

Obviously, I didn't take a picture of the cop working the bag of smack off of the suspect's wedding tackle as I sincerely never want to be tasered, but we have an artist's illustration of the frisk:

I know. Cheap shot. Massachusetts cops don't dress like Bobbies. But the funny hats make me smile.

In any event, it's never a dull moment at Casa de Zom. Well, unless you're inside with us watching Battlestar Galactica reruns on DVD. It's the people outside that seem to be enjoying all the hijinx.

At least we can relax knowing we don't live in Philadelphia.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

2008-01-01T09:03:00.001-05:00

FUCKING HELL!

2007-12-27T17:08:00.000-05:00

Why does the world have to suck so much?

One of Bhutto's supporters wails with grief
as he is surrounded by death and destruction
following the suicide bomb.

In related news, Bhutto blames Masharraf from beyond the grave.

Post-Holiday Glow

2007-12-26T09:39:00.000-05:00

We had a very low-key holiday yesterday. Christmas isn't really a big deal for me and Comrade Squinty. We love to have a day off, and we love to spend time with our friends, but we don't feel moved by the sense that this day of the year is the most significant moment in the year that we must solemnize and treat with reverence. It's just another day, albeit one during which we indulge our inclination to shower our friends with presents.

Although we would have preferred to take advantage of the universal day off to spend some time with friends, our circle somewhat dispersed this year and didn't come together the way we would have liked. So we instead decided to design our day around two things: Battlestar Galactica on DVD and a 2003 bottle of Bonny Doon vineyard's Le Cigare Volant red wine. Of course, not together.

In the morning we gathered in front of our black x-mas tree (yes, it is really black¹) and opened our presents from family while sipping coffee (in my case, also black). We made out very well, incidentally, and we got several gift cards to REI so we can continue the trend of updating our camping equipment -- on this year's shopping list is a siltarp and synthetic mummy sleeping bags.

After calls to family to say 'thank you' we settled in for a short marathon of BSG season 2.0 episodes. Then Squinty began the process of preparing a dinner designed to match the wine we'd selected while I fixed a cocktail.²

All told (with one minor missed step where we weren't able to solidify a visit plan to/from some very dear friends) we had an excellent day where we essentially did nothing, and loved it. The bad news is that tomorrow I'm back to work. =(

New Year's Eve is looking good, however!

If you're reading this (and even if you aren't), we hope you had and will be continuing to have and excellent holiday season. CHEERS!

On the radio: NPR - On Point with Tom Ashbrook.

¹ I'll try to update this entry with a picture when I've got a change to download one from the camera.
² Hell's Libido: 6 oz. Chambord, 6 oz. Vodka, 6 oz. fresh squeezed lime juice. Serves two (or three non-alcoholics).

Stange happenings

2007-12-20T16:39:00.000-05:00

I work in a small law office and that is so very rarely entertaining (it's mostly just a paper flood). Today, however, was marked by a couple of experiences that really made me smile and totally took the sting out of having to scrape through the three inches of ice on my windshield this morning.

First, I was stepping into the hallway in the common area of the building to call my wife at lunch when I ran into a guy with a long blond ponytail trying to get my attention. With a completely straight face and no hint of irony he asked me, "Where is the place you go to pee in a cup?"

I immediately flashed to the PSA that ran promoting Fight Club.

Is this code? Am I going to have to fight you? Have you seen Tyler Durden? Is he me?

I quickly rebounded and the wheels in my mind started to churn; I had to parse this interrogatory because I so infrequently have the opportunity or the desire to pee in a cup myself¹ and I haven't had a fight in months.

Once I realized he wasn't quizzing me about my own urological peccadilloes or challenging me to a round of bare-knuckles boxing I came to the conclusion that he was the person who needed to pee in a cup and was looking for a suitable, perhaps even a designated, place to do so. Okay. I'm with you now brother.

Suddenly my mind alit upon the neighbor in the building that moved up the street two months ago. I asked the man, "Are you looking for Mount Auburn Occupational Health?" He replied, "the place you pee in a cup," with a look of deadpan seriousness. This was going no where fast and was turning into fun for only one of us.

I made the snap decision to assume the best: that he was someone with a new job who had to submit to a drug test at OH before he could begin work (despite the droopy red eyes and slack jaw). "Sir," I informed him, "Occupational Health has moved up the street to 727." A pause while he continued to stare at empty space behind me. "You'll have to drive to another building." In my head I was shouting, hold it, dude, hold it!

He kindly thanked me and went on his way to find the place where he would have to provide a urine sample and I made my mid-afternoon phone call to my wife.

After the call I returned to my office to finish an angry letter to the court-reporting agency that doesn't know the difference between Boston and Cambridge or how to spell "council," "believe," or "else's" (in the transcript they appear consistently as "counsil," "beleive," and "elses").² After a few minutes I began to hear opera. But not a full opera - just a single a capella fortissimo voice.

It was clearly a woman singing and not a recording. Two things informed me of this: one, there was no accompani- ment, and two, it was like she was in the room with me. I got up, went to my boss' office and asked if she can hear singing. Of course she couldn't. So I requested that she come back to my office.

I arrived just as the singer belted out the last few notes she had in her, with my boss a step behind me. We both stood there for a moment listening to the dead silence of my office while her mini x-mas light necklace blinked red and green -- mocking me.

"I don't hear anything," she finally said giving me a look that suggested, should I be making this lawyer pee in a cup? and walked away.

Work is so much better when it's surreal.

On the iPod: Diablo Swing Orchestra - Pink Noise Waltz

¹ The last time being when I had to go to the E.R. for my appendicitis.
² A different entry altogether.

Back

2007-12-19T10:17:00.001-05:00

I've been away from blogger for a very long time. Lately, I just haven't felt like anything I had to say was worth putting into print, although there have been more interesting things happening in recent months than I care to put a number to at the moment. Despite all of the news (both good and bad) I'm just feeling so flat that I've had no comment to add here. There are so many reasons for this it's hard to list, so I'm not even going to try.

I like to write something every day but in recent months I've been blocked both in terms of this journal and my novel; when I'm in front of the keyboard, the words just won't come. I've had a lot of distractions in recent months, but I think the primary reason for my lapse is laziness. Thus, my pre-New Year's Eve resolution is to try to devote more time to this blog.

In defiance of that last sentence, however, I'm struggling today to find something engaging enough to write about -- I'm just having a problem identifying a state of mind worth dwelling upon. Perhaps my next blog entry can be about my extremely prolonged state of boredom.

In any event, I'm back to give it another try. See you soon.

On the iPod: Dëthkløk - Murdertrain a Comin'

They must clank!

2007-12-07T10:24:00.000-05:00

And by that I mean the balls on that douche, Romney.

Seriously, you are no Jack Kennedy, you asshat!

WTF!

2007-12-06T17:06:00.001-05:00

Uh, Wasn't Matthew Shepard murdered in the Equality State for being gay? I'm just sayin'...