Happy Easter.
I think I’m just going to take a pass on this one.
Retailers went on the defensive. “There was no intention on our part to offer up a violent Easter basket. We’re very conscious of what will and what will not offend our customers. It was meant to be a lighthearted and fun gift,” says Kmart spokesperson Abigail Jacobs. “It’s in my opinion a harmless toy included in an Easter basket.”
The reaction to a Voice query at Walgreens contrasted sharply, with company representatives retreating instead of digging in. “Going forward next year, we don’t plan to have Easter baskets with toy soldiers or a military theme. The thinking on these Easter baskets was more toy-related and we didn’t really think about it otherwise,” says Walgreens spokesperson Carol Hively. “We apologize to anybody who is offended or felt that this was inappropriate.”
Anyone else want a crack at it?
However could I have forgotten the Generating Stabilizing Electro Carbon Condensating Atmospheric Pro-Cyclonic Compact Dynamic Magnet Box?
There’s been some recent traffic at an old post, one I wrote back in December on kid detectives (and inventors, and magicians) and magic and slandering Encyclopedia Brown (and just as a side note: sitting across the table from Kristen Brennan at Bucca di Beppo’s is a delightful exercise in fragmentary multichannel signal-as-noise watch-me-for-the-changes-and-try-to-keep-up brinksmanship): Mike Tatreau came through, finding the book long since forgotten but rather tenuously described as having “this haunting nighttime flight home over moonlit countryside on a bicycle, and a midnight picnic of sandwiches in a field in the middle of nowhere.” Ladies and gentlemen, it’s Jan Wahl’s The Furious Flycycle! —Except, of course, for the fact that the flight is away from home during (mostly) the daylight, and it’s a noontime picnic (with iceberg watermelon pickles), and there is some haunting moonlight, but it comes later, and anyway, Wahl slanders wolves. But. There it is.
—Now we just need to find that Dutch? German? French? book in English translation with the Purloined Waldo cartoons for each bite-sized chapter-mystery. Anyone? Anyone?
WYPSIDYOPINEPOL USA
Catchy, isn’t it? Just trips off the tongue. It’s a non-binding resolution I’d like to see passed: the Would You Please Stop Insulting the Dignity of Your Office and the Public’s Intelligence by Naming Every Piece Of Legislation with an Unbelievably Stupid Acronym Act.
The RAVE Act (Reducing Americans’ Vulnerability to Ecstasy, HR 718) is back. It amends the federal crack house law to make it easier to fine and imprison business owners that fail to stop drug offenses from occurring on their property—even if they do take steps to stop drug use. (It’s the age of responsibility, after all. Intent doesn’t matter. We only care about results.) —It was shut down by an aggressive campaign of protests, fax blasts and open ridicule last year, but all that is needed for evil to triumph and constant vigilance and yadda yadda. RAVE is spreading like some kind of virus; its basic provisions are in HR 718, the RAVE Act, but over in the Senate they’re S 226, the Illicit Drugs Anti-Proliferation Act (IDAP?) and they’re still buried in the guts of Daschle’s S 22 domestic security bill.
The CLEAN-UP Act (Clean, Learn, Educate, Abolish, Neutralize, and Undermine Production of Methamphetamines, HR 834) has—beyond a semantically null acronym—a doozy of a provision tucked inside. Turn with me to Section 305, which would add Section 416A to the Controlled Substances Act:
Whoever, for a commercial purpose, knowingly promotes any rave, dance, music, or other entertainment event, that takes place under circumstances where the promoter knows or reasonably ought to know that a controlled substance will be used or distributed in violation of Federal law or the law of the place where the event is held, shall be fined under title 18, United States Code, or imprisoned for not more than 9 years, or both.
We don’t even need for a crime to have been committed. Or even alleged. If you promote an entertainment event where you reasonably ought to know that drugs could be used or distributed, you’re busted.
The fine folks at the Drug Policy Alliance have put together a fax for your representative. Go kick his or her ass, would you?
Kelly J. Cooper knows the score.
I’ve been meaning to link to Comixpedia for a while now (and add them to the ever-burgeoning linchinography to the right there); the folks thereabouts are rapidly building a solid rep as the go-to gals and guys when it comes to writing about webcomics. (Is it a one-word neologism at this point? We do seem to have cast aside the usual coy engagement period of hyphenation, leaping alacritously from two words seen together [and gossiped about] with ever-increasing frequency straight to the cohabitation of portmanteaudom—still technically illegal in four Bible Belt states, or so I am given to understand.) —But recent events have forced my hand: they’ve gone and published a review of Dicebox which nets a three-pointer when it’s fourth and ten, a beautiful hanging birdie from just outside the paint. —Um. I should probably point out that a) I am married to Jenn, so objectivity flies right out the window on this one (but we’ve long since laid that myth to rest, surely), and b) I often affect to know nothing at all of sports, or the metaphors thereof.
(Psst. Kelly: “Peh” is a gender–non-specific pronoun [as opposed to gender-neutral], used when you do not wish to assume the gender of the person you’re addressing. The media in Dicebox use it as a regular formality, says Jenn [hear, hear, says I]; it’s also common to use it when addressing someone in authority [again with the hear, hear]. —Not there’s any way for you to have known this from context [yet], which is fine, which is perhaps part of the point; immersion and all, and I’m reminded of a post about reading The Hobbit at a young age and missing most of the big made-up words but loving it anyway, which cited information theory, but I’m not going to link to it because it already looks like I have a massive crush on the languagehat, so. —But! Three cheers for kicking the puzzle around. It’s what it’s there for. Right?)
—Um. Lemme just get out of the way. Go, read the review; read the comic; if you haven’t started it yet, I’ll even shove you straight into Chapter 1, Scene 1.
I’ll just leave you to it then, shall I?
I will live at home unbulled—
—beautifully dressed and wearing a saffron-coloured gown.
That’s from the oath Lysistrata gets her women friends to swear over a spilled jug of unwatered wine, to withhold sex from the men of Sparta and Athens until the insane war between the two city-states is ended and peace is declared. Which is not what I’d suggest, literally, in this day and age; no. We are most of us more enlightened these days as to one’s sex, one’s gender, and the roles they play in determining one’s destiny and fitness for combat, and anyway, it would open us up to charges of not supporting the troops, and we can’t have that, now, can we?
Instead, the ever–with-it James “The Goods” Capozzola points us to the Lysistrata Project, who are organizing readings of Aristophanes’s rollicking, ribald Lysistrata around the world tomorrow, Monday, 3 March 2003. (As well as a National Moratorium on 5 March.)
Portland area readings include:
- Bridgeport United Church of Christ, 7.00 pm;
- PSU (either Smith Memorial Amphitheater or Lincoln Hall Studio Theater), 1.00 pm;
- the First Congregational Church, 7.30 pm;
- and a reading at Lincoln High School (contact Erin Jones), the details of which are not as yet listed.
Attend a reading, here, or wherever it is you are if it isn’t here; read it yourself to your friends or your affinity group or your spouse or your dog (like our Rittenhouse Reviewer will); find snippets you like and quote them where you can and spread the word. —Live at home unbulled, because (Rabelaisian as it may be) that’s the key and the heart of it all, right there.
That we might all live at home, unbulled.
(Color of gown is, of course, optional.)
Oulipo, oubapo,
OuLiPo, OuBaPo,
Let’s call the whole thing off.
Actually, let’s not. Languagehat is priming the pump to run oulipo up the Daypop word burst chart (and here, by the way, is a site that presents you with one of Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes, in English, every 60 seconds); I just thought I’d slip in a mention of comics’ version: oubapo. Ouvroir de la Bande Dessinée Potentielle, or Workshop for Potential Comics, was founded in 1992 by Thierry Groensteen and various members of the Parisian publishing collective L’Association, which included the always-divine Lewis Trondheim. The Oubapo-America site is a wee bit out-of-date (there’s still some traffic at the message board), but is nonetheless a nice little collection of links to some formal considerations of comics and experimentations with form—such as Matt Madden’s takes on the basic idea behind Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style.
Bring it, you ill-tempered, foul-mouthed Father-Coughlin–wannabe who’s so fucking pathetic you have to get your creepy-ass deep-pocket think-tank buddies to bulk-buy your book up the bestseller lists.
A certain bigot (and those on the right who want to claim him as their own, a necessary corrective to the liberal American mediasphere, be my guest; every time he opens his mouth he makes rain for us) with a brand spankin’ new MSNBC TV contract (whose fingerprints are those on the knife in Donahue’s back?) is making some waves by calling for the arrest of the leaders of the anti-war movement once the Shock and Awe start raining down. (A link to his front page is provided as reference, should you need to verify this fact yourself. Be warned: ugly type and blinking graphics await.) —Savage (whose bearded mug glares at me on my commute every morning, since the local talk-radio outlet has a deal that splatters him and Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly and Savage and local wannabe Lars Larson on the backs of busses, and there’s an irony in there, somewhere, a sick, stunted little thing that’s the best we can do, these days) also demonstrates an utter lack of familiarity with the middle school American History curriculum by linking favorably to the text of the 1918 US Sedition Act, repealed in 1921 and since repudiated as a grimy nadir, along with the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts. We can giggle, if we like, at his historical ignorance (doubtless he would wail and moan about goddless, communist NEA teachers slandering American history—much as he will twenty years from now, the four years of Bush 43’s term long since rubbing elbows with Harding’s and Grant’s at the bottom of the presidential barrel, the odious USA PATRIOT Act having been repealed, joining the US Sedition Act and the Alien and Sedition Acts down there with the slimy fear-mongering stuff that honestly, we see it now, it’s a bad idea, we’ll never do it again, promise); certainly, giggling is better for the health than glowering worrisomely at the millions of nativist brownshirts who presumably hang from his every slaver-drenched word. But I say what the hell. Let him have his Sedition Act. Go back and read it. Forget the latter “willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States” language; these are all gimmes, as no one on the anti-war side is mocking the First through Fourth Amendments like Ashcroft, or insulting drafted servicefolks like Rumsfeld. Nah. Check out the opening lines of the act Savage wants to champion:
Whoever, when the United States is at war, shall willfully make or convey false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United States, or to promote the success of its enemies…
That, ladies and gentlemen, is what’s known in the biz as a “money quote.” (Thanks, Sully. Oy.)
- Given that the Bush administration has made and conveyed false reports and false statements regarding Iraq at every turn;
- Given that “such systematic distortion of intelligence, such systematic manipulation of the American people” is to directly interfere with the operation and success of the military and naval forces of the United States, sending them into a conflict without the international support we require;
- Given that by every sober, informed estimation of the situation, the coming conflict will destabilize the Middle East to an unprecedented degree, providing new waves of recruits and new sources of arms to Al Qaeda, thereby promoting the success of our ostensible enemies, and putting this country in the path of a danger for which we are criminally unprepared;
- Well.
—I think it’s quite clear that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Wolfowitz, et al, would be the first to face charges of sedition under the renewal of this act, by golly.
Hey. It could happen. It could.
(Aw, forget the Father Coughlin ref. Father Coughlin’s too good for the likes of Savage.)
Tender is the mouth.
I now have a little plastic ziploc baggie with three teeth in them. One of them has an ugly little patch of corruption near what used to be its backside, on the inner gumline. Sneaky little bastard. The fourth, the fourth tooth cracked on extraction. Between the cavity and the old filling it pretty much lost its structural integrity. Had to be drilled or sawed or something; I’m not too clear on the details. Somehow in all the excitement I also managed to miss them pulling the upper right, missed it completely. (How does one not notice something like that?) I was lying there in the chair trying to figure out some polite way of getting their attention, um, excuse me, I think y’all forgot one, only I had a block clamping my jaws open and I couldn’t figure out how to make my tongue work and I didn’t want to go grabbing the sleeve of the guy who was sewing part of my gum shut. Bad form. And anyway all the nitrous (“Have you ever had to have nitrous before?” the nurse? hygienist? asked. “Well,” I said, “recreationally,” and we both laughed) leaking through the little nose mask made it terribly easy to suppose, you know, that maybe (weird as it seemed) I’d missed it, they’d already pulled it and I hadn’t noticed, and what do you know.
When I was kid I relished going to the doctor or the dentist. Well, not so much relished. But I remember, say, the pediatrician in—was it Charlotte? I was in second grade then, eight years old—or was it Kentucky? Three years later. Even if I can’t place it, I remember the basics: the doctor had the same freaky-deaky eyesight I do, a ridiculous range of focus, reading highway signs out on the horizon or books dangling from your nose; we used to piss off his nurses by standing all the way across his office from the eye chart and reading it there, all the way down to the bottom, grinning. —His nurses all wore glasses, you see.
My wisdom teeth started coming in early, when I was about 13 or so, and they were straight and even and well-behaved. Never had a cavity growing up. —And if it’s a child-like pride I take in my clean bills of health (“My,” the dentist says, peering at my teeth, “you must have grown up with a lot of fluoride in your water”), so be it; doctors and dentists are rather parental figures. Pleasing them touches something atavistic. Oh, would you look at you, growing up so big and strong. —Unlike aunts and other relatives, doctors and dentists are in a position to know.
t’s with something of a sense of betrayal that I’m looking down at this little baggie as I type. My chin is still someone else’s. I brush my beard from time to time with the idle thought, so, this is what it feels like to Jenn. Helps distract from the holes in the back of my mouth. They’re full of blood and gauze at the moment, but I can still feel where something isn’t, despite the numbness of my jawline; I can feel as I type the empty place where the pain’s going to come roaring in. (Jenn just called to check up on me. There’s something amusing about being able to type as effortlessly as ever, even though I’m rendered a mush-mouthed rube. Wah. If oo go to Ho Fooze, cou oo ge me some soup?)
I hate the taste of gauze.
My straight-shooting, well-behaved wisdom teeth were just too far back to clean properly. (It’s a poor craftsman blames his teeth, but hey.) The cavity in the lower left ten years ago, first blemish on my perfect record, was just a warning shot. The traitorous little bastards were harboring all manner of noxious critters hell-bent on destroying my gums and rendering my wonderfully solid fluoride-rinsed teeth homeless before my dotage. And the upper right (yeah, I’m looking at you, you little creep) was nursing a cavity of its own like a sunken scab, a weird gravelly scar etched across that smooth ivory face. —And if you’re having two out, you know, you might as well go ahead. Get it all over with. In for a penny and all.
Ah, well. At least my eyesight’s still freaky-deaky.
This is getting embarrassing.
Los Angeles got its act together and passed one.
Across the country, 113 cities and counties have passed resolutions urging President Bush to work for peace, to exhaust all diplomatic options, to keep military force firmly where it belongs—as the last possible resort. These aren’t by any means binding resolutions that have a hope in hell in and of themselves of affecting anything. But they’re yet another telling sign of the profound distrust growing daily in this country regarding the coming (but not inevitable; never inevitable) war. —If you scan that list, though, you’ll note a rather glaring exception: Portland, Oregon—the most livable city, a progressive’s dream, capital of the People’s Republic of Multnomah County—axed an anti-war resolution on a 2 – 2 vote.
Erik Sten voted for it. Pro-business law-and-order mayor Vera Katz voted for it. Dan Saltzman, though he’s on the record as opposing the idea, ducked the vote that day. Randy Leonard mumbled something about not having enough information, and voted “no.” —Randy. Baby. You got elected to know enough about stuff to make decisions. Okay? That’s what being on a city council is all about. But a tip? You really, truly don’t know enough about something, you abstain. You don’t vote against it. Okay?
And Jim Francesconi—
Francesconi said he saw no point to the resolution. Despite having written a letter as a private citizen to President Bush objecting to unilateral military action. He’s keeping mum about the why, but there’s a number of guesses. Most hinge on a memo sent to the city commissioners the day before the vote from Portland Business Alliance head Kim Kimbrough, which stated, “Time spent by the City Council during Council meetings debating, hearing, or acting upon the proposed resolution only helps to diminish the credibility of the Portland City Council.” Perhaps this is what Leonard didn’t know enough about; why Saltzman skipped the vote; why Francesconi voted no. —If so, well, as the Willamette Week put it, “A single letter from Kimbrough trumped the marchers and the thousands of cards, emails and phone calls City Hall received in support of a resolution against attacking Iraq.”
(“Diminish the credibility of the Portland City Council.” You know what else diminishes that credibility? Aside from ignoring the will of the voters? Having our city’s public education woes held up as an object lesson in the funny pages. What’s that? No connection? It’s not your fault Salem can’t get its act together? We should blame the Brainstorm readers who voted down Measure 28? One city resolution against unilateral military force won’t do a whit to help the kids? —Well, yes. And no. There is no direct benefit; no magic money will suddenly come pouring into any coffers because the city council stands up and says, hey, folks? We over here in Portland just want to go on record as saying this is, you know, a bad idea. But. There is a direct and profound connection between the educational crunch we’re facing all across the country and the 150-some-odd-thousand troops waiting for Turkey to vet our credit history. Doonesbury makes it. Body and Soul spells it out a little more clearly.)
This war is wrong. More and more Yanks are coming to realize this every day and are speaking out against it. One of the ways we have of speaking out is to ask our elected representatives to say something for the official record. City councils and county commissions do this all the time, every day, across the country. Thousands upon thousands of Portlanders stood up to ask our city council to say something for the official record against this war—and they declined.
That is what diminishes the council’s credibility most of all. —Trust me. I think we’re going to have a hard time forgetting this one.
Post no bills.
Okay, so I’m a little late on this one. Better than never. Just before the 15 February march—no, wait, rally—in New York City, the Baghdad Snapshot Crew posted thousands of copies of photos of Iraqi citizens throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. In the course of which, Emilie Clark and Lytle Shaw were arrested and held overnight on misdemeanor charges. Their trial date is set for 13 March.
I’m sure they’ll be pleased to learn that Microsoft got off with a $50 fine. —Of course, no one at Microsoft got arrested, insofar as I can tell. Or at IBM or Nike.
Nike—y’all want corporations to be treated as individuals when it comes to freedom of speech. You still sure about that?
On a clear day you can see forever
You can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
—Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Funny thing about waves: give ’em a little time, they come rolling in again.
Can we just cut the fucking ironic humor and ask a simple question?
Ashcroft adds yet another compelling argument to the ever-growing heap in favor of forcibly ejecting him from the office of Attorney General. (It’s a Get Your War On reference. In case you were wondering.)
Word to the breakaround, y’all.
Or something like that. —If there’s any blogger I’d ever want to be (aside from myself, that is), it’s the languagehat. The man’s polylingual like a fittstim, snarky like an illywhacker, he’s all-too comfortable brachiating happily through the madly glorious exfoliations of the liberal arts, and every time I think of him as the Rosetta stoner, I break out in a fit of Flight Lieutenant Biggles; if nothing else, he raises the bar for links to cool stuff you might otherwise never have heard of but now can’t imagine living without, you know? Which, for me (cue standard MeFi lament), is what the web is all about.
His write-up of the New York Times obituary of Robert K. Merton, for instance, which, in the course of firmly cementing another book into my teetering must-read-soonest stack, reminded me of the all-too-terribly cool word “anafractuous,” in the course of seeking a quickie etymology of which I stumbled over this lovingly detailed exegesis of John Bellairs’ “The True History of St. Fidgeta, Virgin and Martyr.”
In other words, today I had a good coffee break. —So. Thanks, ’hat. Look on this perhaps as sincere flattery, inspired if nonetheless inept; I just wanted to give a little something back. Yo.
No blood for duct tape.
From Boing Boing we get this squib from the Washington Post—
That most lamentable duct tape suggestion last week by a Homeland Security official—which drove countless panicked citizens out to buy the product—has been widely derided as useless and pretty crazy.
But maybe not so crazy. Turns out that nearly half—46 percent to be precise—of the duct tape sold in this country is manufactured by a company in Avon, Ohio. And the founder of that company, that would be Jack Kahl, gave how much to the Republican National Committee and other GOP committees in the 2000 election cycle? Would that be more than $100,000?
Sales are through the roof; Kahl’s son (and CEO) reports the duct tape plant’s running 24/7, even though duct tape is a lousy sealant. —And you thought this stuff was beyond the pale.
(Actually, it’s all a grand metaconspiracy to drive sales of tin foil. My father specializes in aluminum engineering; I’d say more, but
Cookie break.
I got mugged by a couple of giggling Girl Scouts coming out of the grocery store. I got away six bucks lighter with a couple of boxes of Samoas perched precariously on top of my bag of groceries.
So I thought I’d point out, you know, that the American Family Association believes that “Girl Scouts seem to revel in their belief that all religious concepts are equal”; the International Organization of Heterosexual Rights is upset because “20 years ago, Girl Scouts learned about how to sew and cook, today they learn how to successfully hold a feminist rally”; the National Review cries that “the Girl Scouts is arguably one of the most politically correct organizations in the country”; and the American Heritage Girls are organizing as an alternative based on Judeo-Christian values (non-denominational)—all of them staunchly following in the 50-year-old footsteps of the American Legion its own bad self.
Makes you want to go buy a truckload, doesn’t it.
t.A.T.u. en passant—
Elena posts some interesting insights from Russia into that phenomenon known as Tatu—who, I am given to understand, are 50 cents shy of the number one spot on TRL. (There’s a moral or something in that, or maybe it’s an ironic O. Henry twist, but I don’t give too much of a damn. I’m enjoying h too much for that.) —I’d just note that in the version I’ve seen of “Prostye dvizheniya,” it’s not at all clear Yulia’s, well, jilling off; she was assembling a time bomb to blow up her school (metaphorically, maybe; these music videos are irresponsibly slippery when it comes to the Truth) because Lena was making out with some guy in the middle of a slo-mo carousel. But that video was I’d thought for “30 Minut,” so what do I know? —I’d also note that mentioning t.A.T.u., Taty, or Tatu prominently on your website is a great way to score traffic from web searches.
Burlesque.
Browsing Blogdex, I stumbled over two lit-crittish burlesques of our current sitch, from either side of the howling divide: that side, and this one. —Unfair, perhaps, but it is rather nice to have one’s prejudices reinforced now and again, isn’t it? (Meanwhile, in the real world—)
