January 2005 Archives

Last week, before my kitten was sealed in the walls by either an unconscious, incompentent or malicious plumber, I filled out a survey on the website of the corporation that owns my apartment complex detailing the bullshit that I've had to put up with since I arrived at the Ballena Village Apartments (Where Coming Home Is The Best Part Of Your Day). On Sunday, of all days, I got an email back from Veronica Dickerson, Regional Portfolio Manager (what the fuck is that?), empathizing about my less than positive experience and wanting to know what she could do to make it better. I'm dying to hearing her response when I tell her that my cat was entombed by the maintencance crew. She'll have to be fairly creative to "provide resolution to [my] concerns." She can start by making sure the fucking plumbers stay the fuck away from my cats. Then she can finish by giving me a free month's rent.

Here's the letter.

Dear Mr. Hecht,
Thank you for taking the time to complete our on-line resident survey. Customer satisfaction is our number one priority here at Sequoia Equities and we rely on feedback from our residents to help us achieve excellence in customer service. I apologize that you have not had a positive experience and I would like to speak with you to provide resolution to your concerns. I left a message for you and I look forward to speaking with you. Please feel free to contact me at (925) 945-0900 at your earliest convenience.

Sincerely,

Veronica Dickerson
Regional Portfolio Manager
Sequoia Equities
(925) 945-0900
vdickerson@sequoiaequities.com

If you have a blog, you've probably been hammered by spomments at one point or another. Even if you don't you'll love to read this interview, anonymous of course, with one of the spammers.

Don't be a victim of this petty marketing bullshit. Get your site protected with Typekey, MT-Approval or MT-Blacklist.

Ok, so I'm not really blogging from the shithouse, but I could thanks to my shinny new wireless router and a little help from Bill at D-Link customer support (I was frankly shocked not to be speaking to someone from Bangalore). Welcome to the 21st century.

I came home from the casino early Sunday morning around 3:30am. My nose was clogged from the combination of cigarette and cigar smoke that hangs like a low fog on the gaming floor. I went into the bathroom to grab the little of nasal saline spray in my toilet bag and accidentally "rubbed" the tip of my thumb against my razor. It didn't really hurt at the time, but it's in such an annoying spot that it's become unbelievably irritating. Note to self: stop being such a dumbass.

Saturday was a busy day on the mountain. The combination of new snow and warm weather drew folks from all over the place. It was so busy that I couldn't get over to the Nevada side because I didn't want to wait in the 100 person deep singles line on the Sky Express. Instead I stuck it out on the California side, moving from the Canyon Express to the Powderbowl Express and skiing where no one else seemed to want to ski, in the trees. The snow was still really great between the pines. There was 6-12 inches of fresh fluffy powder and no one around.

By lunch I had skied about 25 runs and was exhausted. I was planning on skiing a few more runs and then hitting the road, but at the last minute I decided to join the ski tour with a US Forest Service Ranger, a nice older guy named Mike. It was a small group, just Mike, me, and a snowboarder from Palo Alto named Beth.

We skied a few runs, stopping at places on the mountain where Mike would talk about the trees, the wildlife, the relationship between Heavenly and the U.S. Government (the whole resort in on public land). It was interesting, but mostly unmemorable. That is, until Mike told us about the dead of Lake Tahoe. Mike said about 6 people per year drown in the lake.

There are all sorts of accidents, he said. Sometimes people get drunk, fall off the boat, and get hypothermia before they can be rescued. The lake is cold. It's so cold, says Mike, that unlike in other places where drowned bodies decompose, release gas and rise back to the surface, the dead bodies of Tahoe just sink to the bottom and stay there, perfectly preserved in a lake with an average depth of 1000 feet.

Supposedly there are hundreds of bodies down there. Accident victims. Murdered Chinese railway workers. And certainly some wearing concrete galoshes. There are rumors around that Jacques Cousteau took a film crew down to the depths of the lake, but decided to destroy the footage saying something like, people are not ready to see what's down there, but it's just a rumor.

Days Skied This Season: 5

The wireless network at the Tahoe house is up and running, so I now I can blog on the weekends. It's cool to have, but it's really strange sitting around the dining table with 6 or 7 other notebooks in action,

This is the motto my apartment complex. It just seems weird that any apartment let alone my apartment has a motto, but there it is. It would be an acceptable motto, if they could, you know, live up to it. I mean, who wouldn't want coming home to be the best part of your day? However they don't even come close so coming home tends to be the most aggravating part of my day, and I don't particularly care for my job, so this is saying something. So when I call the management office to talk to someone about a problem and I get the voicemail message that says, thank you for calling Ballena Village Apartments where coming home is the best part of your day, I want to rip the fucking phone out of the wall. Rest assured, in the unlikely event that I do ever own an apartment complex, you can bet your ass that it will not ever have a fucking motto.

Good. Now that I've got that off my chest, I can get down to business. I've been in my place about a month now. I should have been writing about my experience as it was happening, but it was a slow drip, like Chinese water torture that only finally came to a boil last night. Let me try to recap some of the problems.

I visited the apartment on a Monday and decided I would take the place. I was told I would be able to move in on Thursday. It turned out that I wasn't able to move in until Saturday. The reason: the guy who showed me the place was off Tuesday and Wednesday and no one else in the office wanted to do the paperwork. I should have taken this as a bad sign and told them to fuck off.

The day I come with the movers, the elevator is flooded and inoperable. This wouldn't be so bad except the key they gave me doesn't work in any of the outside doors.

I'm told that the office will accept packages that are too big to fit in my mailbox, but the first time I get a package, it isn't accepted and I have to go all the way to the Oakland airport to pick it up in person during my lunch hour.

The first time I tried to do laundry, I put a load in the washer, then I put the soap in. I went to put the quarters in, but there are no quarter slots, only a slot for a card. There's no machine in the laundry room in my building to buy a card. I go down to the main laundry room near the pool to get a card. There's a machine, but there's a hand written sign on it that says it's broken and won't be fixed for two days. So my laundry is sitting in the washer covered with soap. I have to take it out, put it back in the hamper and drive to the closest laundromat. Did I mention it was freezing outside?

I gave a list of things that needed to be fixed in my apartment to one of the onsite managers before I moved in. He said it would all be taken care before I moved in. Was it? Of course not. It took a month of persistent pestering to get them to work on my place.

There's a note taped on my door the first week after I move in telling me that the water needs to be turned off from 8:30-4:30 one day. Not a problem since I'm not in the apartment, usually, during those hours. When I come home after work and turn on the tap, it gurgles to life and spits out an effluvia of brackish brown sludge like some third world nightmare hotel. This water kills my Brita filter that's supposed to be good for three months in less than a week.

On December 31st, less than two weeks after I moved in, I get a long letter from the management telling me that there is going to be major plumbing work in my building and in my apartment. Did they mention this when I was thinking about moving in? Take a guess. People are going to have to come in and out my place for 7 days. I'm instructed, if I have pets, and I do, to keep them in the bedroom and keep the door shut. This is great advice except there is no door between my bedroom and the bathroom in my apartment. I tell them this and they provide an apartment two floors down where the cats can stay during the day. Bringing Fil down is no problem. But every time I take Mak out of the apartment, he wails like we're headed for kitty Auschwitz. It's even worse because there are all these plumbers around making horrible noises as they cut through dry wall and pipes. I have to leave my cats in this empty apartment all day.

Meanwhile the plumbers are working away on my apartment. One day I come and the toilet seat has been ripped from the toilet. No note. No nothing. Just the broken toilet seat. I say something and the next day I come home and the toilet seat has been replaced but the toilet doesn't work. One Sunday I came home from Tahoe to find that the plumbers had turned on the heater and left it running all weekend. They always leave the fucking lights, inconsiderate bastards.

Then I got a call from the management who said that the plumbers needed to work on the apartment where the cats were staying during the day and I needed to lock them in the bedroom of that apartment. On Tuesday, I ran into the foreman who told me that on that day and on Thursday (yesterday) I wouldn't have to move the cats downstairs, because they wouldn't be working on my place. They'd only need to come in for an inspection.

On Thursday I get a call from the management telling me they rented the apartment where I have my cats and I can't keep them there any longer. I'm not given another apartment as a replacement. When I come home Thursday night, the cat food and blankets that I left in the borrowed apartment are sitting on my door step. I open the door. Only one cat comes. This is unusual, but not alarming. Maybe Fil was sleeping when I came home and didn't want to get up.

I start looking for her. I can't find her in the usual spots. I look some more. Then I hear some faint meows coming from the bathroom. I look, but no cat. I can still hear the meows. They are coming from BEHIND THE FUCKING WALL. Like I said, the plumbers had cut massive sections of dry wall to get at the pipes. Fil had wandered in there and the stupid ass plumbers encased her in the walls. I got out my power screwdriver and liberated her. She was stunned.

I was so fucking pissed. And this on a day when the plumbers, according to the foreman, were not even supposed to be working in my place. When I talked to the foreman this morning, he apologized profusely, but insisted that he didn't me tell not to move the cats on Thursday. What was I going to do, sit there and argue with him about what he told me? Unbelievable.

The big question now is what to do. I don't want coming home to be the worst part of my day, but I fully expect this sort of bullshit to continue over the next 11 months. The complex is owned by a large real estate conglomerate located conveniently in Walnut Creek. I think I'm going to have to go pay them a little visit.

My brother is in town for the weekend. I'm going to have lunch with him and my siter in a few minutes here. It's been a while since I've seen him--he came out to Vail for a few days of skiing last spring--so it will be nice to catch up. The dilema is that he's only here for the weekend and I want to go skiing at Heavenly. It's been raining down here in the flats which means snow in the Sierras, a foot of new stuff to be exact. So should I hang out in the city with my brother or take off for Tahoe? Maybe I can split the difference and get one good day in.

I came across the Terra Server this morning and it's like a new toy that I can't put down. I don't know why I'm so fascinated by this, but I can't help myself. I've been looking at old addresses like my childhood home (it's the u-shaped one on the right with gray roof and the swimming pool) and the place I live now (zoom out a few bars to see how close I live to SF. I've been looking at mountains, stadiums, the White House. It's very cool, not that the pictures are great or anything. Only certain urban areas have high res color shots. The rest is filled in with old black & white USGS survey pcitures, but even that's cool.

Here's some stuff I've been looking at:

San Quentin Federal Penitentiary, Marin, CA
Dodger Stadium, Los Angeles, CA
Mt. Rushmore, Rapid City, SD
Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, CA
The Grand Canyon
The Jefferson Memorial, Wasington, DC
The Pentagon, Arlington, VA
The Central Intelligence Agency, Langley, VA
Wrigley Field, Chicago, IL
Stone Mountain, Atlanta, GA
Beaver Creek Ski Resort, Avon, CO
Heavenly Ski Resort, South Lake Tahoe, CA
The Hearst Castle, San Simeon, CA
The Claremony Hotel, Berkeley, CA
The Astrodome, Houston, TX
Microsoft, Redmond, WA
Bill Gates' House, Medina, WA
The Playboy Mansion, Los Angeles, CA
The Hollywood Sign, Hollywood, CA
The Happiest Place on Earth
The Winchester Mystery House, San Jose, CA
Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, CA
The Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA
San Francisco Botanical Garden, San Francisco, CA
Stanford Stadium, Palo Alto, CA
The Rose Bowl, Pasadena, CA
Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, Los Angeles, CA
Memorial Stadium, Berkeley, CA
Husky Stadium, Seattle, WA
The Cottom Bowl, Dallas, TX
The Orange Bowl, Miami, FL
Mile High Stadium, Denver, CO

If you find some place cool, let me know.

I'm trying to find words to accurately sum up this story on the AP wire about using women to "break Muslim detainees at the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay by sexual touching, wearing a miniskirt and thong underwear and in one case smearing a Saudi man's face with fake menstrual blood." Here's what I've come up with so far:

Makes You Proud to an American
We'll Show Them the Meaning of Freedom
The New Freedom Initiative: Become a Terrorist, Get a Lapdance.

Read the whole thing and decide for yourself.

Thank you Condoleezza Rice, Alberto Gonzales and expecailly George Bush for making it extremely unlikely that I will return to travel in a muslim country any time soon.

Guantanamo Bay: Female interrogators' tactics aired

Female interrogators tried to break Muslim detainees at the U.S. prison camp at Guantánamo Bay by sexual touching, wearing a miniskirt and thong underwear and in one case smearing a Saudi man's face with fake menstrual blood, according to an insider's written account.

A draft manuscript obtained by The Associated Press is classified as secret pending a Pentagon review for a planned book that details ways the U.S. military used women as part of tougher physical and psychological interrogation tactics to get terror suspects to talk.

"I have really struggled with this because the detainees, their families and much of the world will think this is a religious war based on some of the techniques used, even though it is not the case," the author, former Army Sgt. Erik R. Saar, 29, told AP.

Saar didn't provide the manuscript or approach AP, but confirmed the authenticity of nine draft pages AP obtained. Saar, who is neither Muslim nor of Arab descent, worked as an Arabic translator at the U.S. camp in eastern Cuba from December 2002 to June 2003. At the time, it was under the command of Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who had a mandate to get better intelligence from prisoners, including alleged al-Qaida members caught in Afghanistan.

Saar said he witnessed about 20 interrogations and about three months after his arrival at the remote U.S. base he started noticing "disturbing" practices.

One female civilian contractor used a special outfit that included a miniskirt and thong underwear during late-night interrogations with prisoners, mostly Muslim men who consider it taboo to have close contact with women who aren't their wives.

Some Guantánamo prisoners who have been released say they were tormented by "prostitutes."

In one case, Saar describes a female military interrogator questioning an uncooperative 21-year-old Saudi detainee who allegedly had taken flying lessons in Arizona before the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

One suspected Sept. 11 hijacker, Hani Hanjour, had received pilot instruction in 1996 and 1997 at a flight school in Scottsdale, Ariz.

"His female interrogator decided that she needed to turn up the heat," Saar writes, saying she repeatedly asked the detainee who had sent him to Arizona, telling him he could "cooperate" or "have no hope whatsoever of ever leaving this place or talking to a lawyer."'

The man closed his eyes and began to pray, Saar writes.

The female interrogator wanted to "break him," Saar adds, describing how she removed her uniform top to expose a tight-fitting T-shirt and began taunting the detainee, touching her breasts, rubbing them against the prisoner's back and commenting on his apparent erection.

The detainee looked up and spat in her face, the manuscript recounts.

The interrogator left the room to ask a Muslim linguist how she could break the prisoner's reliance on God. The linguist told her to tell the detainee that she was menstruating, touch him, then make sure to turn off the water in his cell so he couldn't wash.

Strict interpretation of Islamic law forbids physical contact with women other than a man's wife or family, and with any menstruating women, who are considered unclean.

"The concept was to make the detainee feel that after talking to her he was unclean and was unable to go before his God in prayer and gain strength," says the draft.

The interrogator used ink from a red pen to fool the detainee, Saar writes.

She put her hands in her pants and the detainee then saw what appeared to be red blood on her hand, he says.

"She said, 'Who sent you to Arizona?' He then glared at her with a piercing look of hatred.

"She then wiped the red ink on his face. He shouted at the top of his lungs, spat at her and lunged forward" — so fiercely that he broke loose from one ankle shackle.

"He began to cry like a baby," the draft says, noting the interrogator left saying, "Have a fun night in your cell without any water to clean yourself."

Events Saar describes are similar to two previous reports of abusive female interrogation tactics, although it wasn't possible to independently verify his account.

In November, in response to an AP request, the military described an April 2003 incident in which a female interrogator took off her uniform top, ran her fingers through a detainee's hair and sat on his lap. That session was immediately ended by a supervisor and that interrogator received a written reprimand and additional training, the military said.

In another incident, the military reported that in early 2003 a different female interrogator "wiped dye from red magic marker on detainees' shirt after detainee spit on her," telling the detainee it was blood. She was verbally reprimanded, the military said.

Sexual tactics used by female interrogators have been criticized by the FBI, which complained in a letter obtained by AP last month that U.S. defense officials hadn't acted on complaints by FBI observers of "highly aggressive" interrogation techniques, including one in which a female interrogator grabbed a detainee's genitals.

About 20 percent of the guards at Guantánamo are women, said Lt. Col. James Marshall, a spokesman for U.S. Southern Command. He wouldn't say how many of the interrogators were female.

"U.S. forces treat all detainees and conduct all interrogations, wherever they may occur, humanely and consistent with U.S. legal obligations, and in particular with legal obligations prohibiting torture," Marshall said late Wednesday.

The book, which Saar titled "Inside the Wire," is due out this year with Penguin Press.

An old friend of mine from elementary school, Evan Arnold, has been making appearances on The West Wing, which is pretty cool. Evan has been a struggling actor for years. He did some commercials when he was younger. I went with him to a couple of auditions and I can remember seeing all these kids that ended up with the gigs and became somewhat famous. This is a long time ago, mind you, and my memory is shot, but I can vividly recall seeing Jason Hervey at one audition for a Bubblicious ad and then seeing him in that commercial. Evan went for a lot of gigs like that and mostly came up empty.

Then he scored an appearance on The Facts of Life and landed a somewhat recurring role on Growing Pains as Ritchie the garbage boy, which was big. The show spun off into Just The Ten Of Us, Evan joined that cast, but the show bombed after one season.

I would continue to see him here and there in various commercials, which was just so strange. I mean, I was in the fucking cub scouts with this kid and now he's in a beer commercial. That's just too bizarre.

I knew he'd done some things but it was shocking when I saw the list of his credits on IMDB. He's been busy. He was in fucking Spiderman. How did I not know that? It was a small part, but he's in the movie. And I've seen it. And I don't remember seeing him. I'm going to have a take another look.

Evan has always been a wild man. I haven't talked to him a while. He's married now, but I doubt he's calmed down much. My favorite all-time Evan story happened when we were in junior high. My brother Brian, Evan and I had gone to UCLA to play tennis. Evan's brother John picked us up in his old beat-up brown Celica. We were driving off campus when we passed a cyclist on the inside. Evan decided it would be smart to lean out the driver side window, flip the guy off and scream, "HEY FUCK YOU!!!" at the top of his lungs. Remember, this is a 13 year old punk kid. So we make a left and head down towards Sunset Blvd where we inconveniently ran into a red light. The cyclist came up to the driver side window and said something like, if you're going to flip someone off, make sure you have a green light. At which point John, desperately trying to cover for his asinine little brother, said, he wasn't flipping you off, he was flipping me off. Whatever. I don't think the cyclist bought it. We laughed about it all the way home.

It's a silly story, but it still makes me laugh more than 20 years later. That's the genius of Evan. He was always able to make everyone around him laugh.

Just testing out w.bloggar, a desktop application that lets you easily post to your blog. I actually used it when I was in Samoa, but I've had to reinstall it and configure it for the new host. Here goes the test.

UPDATE. It works, but it doesn't publish the category so I have to go in and manually publish it from the MT interface. What's the point of that?

It's not perfect yet, but it's getting there. At least the site looks more or less the way I want it to and most of the images are in the right place. I'm still having a few problems, most notably with the navigation column sticking out over the border on pages where the nav column in longer than the entry, but that should be an easy fix. The most annoying issue is that the cool inline extended entry JS was breaking the CSS for some reason. I'll have to sort that out. I've removed most of the links from the old site, including internal site links that didn't automatically change over. The next big task is to tackle the photo galleries. I think I might have to start from scratch there. I like the way they look, but I think I can do better. Anyway, I hope you're enjoying the improved performance. If you find something that doesn't work, give me a holler. Thanks.

Obvious hyperbole, yet despite the article's title, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts has penned as elegant a critique of the present administration (only a few months too late, I might add) as anyone I have seen. And he's a conservative. He'll certainly take a lot of heat from the faith based realm for this.

Thanks to Jason for sending around this article.

End-Timers & Neo-Cons

The End of Conservatives

by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy during 1981-82. He was also Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review.

I remember when friends would excitedly telephone to report that Rush Limbaugh or G. Gordon Liddy had just read one of my syndicated columns over the air. That was before I became a critic of the US invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration, and the neoconservative ideologues who have seized control of the US government.

America has blundered into a needless and dangerous war, and fully half of the country's population is enthusiastic. Many Christians think that war in the Middle East signals "end times" and that they are about to be wafted up to heaven. Many patriots think that, finally, America is standing up for itself and demonstrating its righteous might. Conservatives are taking out their Vietnam frustrations on Iraqis. Karl Rove is wrapping Bush in the protective cloak of war leader. The military-industrial complex is drooling over the profits of war. And neoconservatives are laying the groundwork for Israeli territorial expansion.

The evening before Thanksgiving Rush Limbaugh was on C-Span TV explaining that these glorious developments would have been impossible if talk radio and the conservative movement had not combined to break the power of the liberal media.

In the Thanksgiving issue of National Review, editor Richard Lowry and former editor John O'Sullivan celebrate Bush's reelection triumph over "a hostile press corps." "Try as they might," crowed O'Sullivan, "they couldn't put Kerry over the top." There was a time when I could rant about the "liberal media" with the best of them. But in recent years I have puzzled over the precise location of the "liberal media."

Not so long ago I would have identified the liberal media as the New York Times and Washington Post, CNN and the three TV networks, and National Public Radio. But both the Times and the Post fell for the Bush administration's lies about WMD and supported the US invasion of Iraq. On balance CNN, the networks, and NPR have not made an issue of the Bush administration's changing explanations for the invasion.

Apparently, Rush Limbaugh and National Review think there is a liberal media because the prison torture scandal could not be suppressed and a cameraman filmed the execution of a wounded Iraqi prisoner by a US Marine. Do the Village Voice and The Nation comprise the "liberal media"? The Village Voice is known for Nat Hentoff and his columns on civil liberties. Every good conservative believes that civil liberties are liberal because they interfere with the police and let criminals go free. The Nation favors spending on the poor and disfavors gun rights, but I don't see the "liberal hate" in The Nation's feeble pages that Rush Limbaugh was denouncing on C-Span.

In the ranks of the new conservatives, however, I see and experience much hate. It comes to me in violently worded, ignorant and irrational emails from self-professed conservatives who literally worship George Bush. Even Christians have fallen into idolatry. There appears to be a large number of Americans who are prepared to kill anyone for George Bush.

The Iraqi War is serving as a great catharsis for multiple conservative frustrations: job loss, drugs, crime, homosexuals, pornography, female promiscuity, abortion, restrictions on prayer in public places, Darwinism and attacks on religion. Liberals are the cause. Liberals are against America. Anyone against the war is against America and is a liberal. "You are with us or against us."

This is the mindset of delusion, and delusion permits no facts or analysis. Blind emotion rules. Americans are right and everyone else is wrong. End of the debate.

That, gentle reader, is the full extent of talk radio, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal Editorial page, National Review, the Weekly Standard, and, indeed, of the entire concentrated corporate media where noncontroversy in the interest of advertising revenue rules.

Once upon a time there was a liberal media. It developed out of the Great Depression and the New Deal. Liberals believed that the private sector is the source of greed that must be restrained by government acting in the public interest. The liberals' mistake was to identify morality with government. Liberals had great suspicion of private power and insufficient suspicion of the power and inclination of government to do good.

Liberals became Benthamites (after Jeremy Bentham). They believed that as the people controlled government through democracy, there was no reason to fear government power, which should be increased in order to accomplish more good.

The conservative movement that I grew up in did not share the liberals' abiding faith in government. "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Today it is liberals, not conservatives, who endeavor to defend civil liberties from the state. Conservatives have been won around to the old liberal view that as long as government power is in their hands, there is no reason to fear it or to limit it. Thus, the Patriot Act, which permits government to suspend a person's civil liberty by calling him a terrorist with or without proof. Thus, preemptive war, which permits the President to invade other countries based on unverified assertions.

There is nothing conservative about these positions. To label them conservative is to make the same error as labeling the 1930s German Brownshirts conservative.

American liberals called the Brownshirts "conservative," because the Brownshirts were obviously not liberal. They were ignorant, violent, delusional, and they worshipped a man of no known distinction. Brownshirts' delusions were protected by an emotional force field. Adulation of power and force prevented Brownshirts from recognizing implications for their country of their reckless doctrines.

Like Brownshirts, the new conservatives take personally any criticism of their leader and his policies. To be a critic is to be an enemy. I went overnight from being an object of conservative adulation to one of derision when I wrote that the US invasion of Iraq was a "strategic blunder."

It is amazing that only a short time ago the Bush administration and its supporters believed that all the US had to do was to appear in Iraq and we would be greeted with flowers. Has there ever been a greater example of delusion? Isn't this on a par with the Children's Crusade against the Saracens in the Middle Ages?

Delusion is still the defining characteristic of the Bush administration. We have smashed Fallujah, a city of 300,000, only to discover that the 10,000 US Marines are bogged down in the ruins of the city. If the Marines leave, the "defeated" insurgents will return. Meanwhile the insurgents have moved on to destabilize Mosul, a city five times as large. Thus, the call for more US troops.

There are no more troops. Our former allies are not going to send troops. The only way the Bush administration can continue with its Iraq policy is to reinstate the draft.

When the draft is reinstated, conservatives will loudly proclaim their pride that their sons, fathers, husbands and brothers are going to die for "our freedom." Not a single one of them will be able to explain why destroying Iraqi cities and occupying the ruins are necessary for "our freedom." But this inability will not lessen the enthusiasm for the project. To protect their delusions from "reality-based" critics, they will demand that the critics be arrested for treason and silenced. Many encouraged by talk radio already speak this way.

Because of the triumph of delusional "new conservatives" and the demise of the liberal media, this war is different from the Vietnam war. As more Americans are killed and maimed in the pointless carnage, more Americans have a powerful emotional stake that the war not be lost and not be in vain. Trapped in violence and unable to admit mistake, a reckless administration will escalate.

The rapidly collapsing US dollar is hard evidence that the world sees the US as bankrupt. Flight from the dollar as the reserve currency will adversely impact American living standards, which are already falling as a result of job outsourcing and offshore production. The US cannot afford a costly and interminable war.

Falling living standards and inability to impose our will on the Middle East will result in great frustrations that will diminish our country.

Please excuse the mess while I make some changes including shifting my entire site which had previously been very generously hosted by one of my former colleagues in Peace Corps Samoa to my own host. It's a serious chore, as the site was spread out over two hosts, but one I have it all sorted out, a long overdue change, my life will be so much easier. The previous server, while a godsend at the time, was seriously slow. It took forever for anything to work on the site, from posting comments to rebuilding templates. The new server is super speedy. On to the future.

Have you ever taken off in a plane on an overcast day. It's miserable on the ground. It's grey. It's cloudy. It's probably cold. The plane leaves the runway. It ascends through the clouds and emerges into brilliant sunlight. If you know that feeling, then you know how I felt skiing Heavenly this past weekend, skiing above the clouds.

I had read the weather forecast and it was supposed to be over 40 so I was surprised when I woke up at the house on Saturday morning and it was all fogged in a looking miserable. I bundled up, called the shuttle and headed for the California Lodge. It was chilly on the lift at 9am, but as I made my way to top, I broke through the layer of clouds and fog and emerged into a sea of sunshine. Below me, the lake was invisible, completely shrouded in puffy grey clouds and ringed by snow-capped peaks. It was absolutely beautiful.

I skied hard all morning then met up with Kristen and her friend, a novice snowboarder and took it easy in the afternoon. Sunday was exactly the same, nasty cloud cover in town and brilliant and sunny on the mountain. And forget 40 degrees. It was easily 50. I was skiing in one of my Samoan shirts. Spring skiing in winter is a novelty to be sure, but we can't keep this up and have much of a ski season despite all the recent snowfall. Early word is that it's supposed to snow this week.

Days Skied This Season: 4

Naturally the common people don't want war. But after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.

--Hermann Goering, Hitler's Reich Marshall, at the Nuremberg
Trials after World War II.

A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt...If the game runs sometime against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake.

--Thomas Jefferson, 1798

Evil has a new name, and that name is SpongeBob. That is, of course, only if you take seriously anything radical cleric James Dobson has to say. If you think he's a loco wingnut, as I do, then you can laugh with me as he gathers his followers in the fight to defend the nation's kids again SpongeBob. Remember, just because he's tidy and optimistic, doesn't make him gay, not that there's anything wrong with that.

Here's the whole article as reported by the New York Times.

Conservatives Pick Soft Target: A Cartoon Sponge
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

Published: January 20, 2005

WASHINGTON, Jan. 19 - On the heels of electoral victories barring same-sex marriage, some influential conservative Christian groups are turning their attention to a new target: the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants.

"Does anybody here know SpongeBob?" Dr. James C. Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, asked the guests Tuesday night at a black-tie dinner for members of Congress and political allies to celebrate the election results.

SpongeBob needed no introduction. In addition to his popularity among children, who watch his cartoon show, he has become a well-known camp figure among adult gay men, perhaps because he holds hands with his animated sidekick Patrick and likes to watch the imaginary television show "The Adventures of Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy."

Now, Dr. Dobson said, SpongeBob's creators had enlisted him in a "pro-homosexual video," in which he appeared alongside children's television colleagues like Barney and Jimmy Neutron, among many others. The makers of the video, he said, planned to mail it to thousands of elementary schools to promote a "tolerance pledge" that includes tolerance for differences of "sexual identity."

The video's creator, Nile Rodgers, who wrote the disco hit "We Are Family," said Mr. Dobson's objection stemmed from a misunderstanding. Mr. Rodgers said he founded the We Are Family Foundation after the Sept. 11 attacks to create a music video to teach children about multiculturalism. The video has appeared on television networks, and nothing in it or its accompanying materials refers to sexual identity. The pledge, borrowed from the Southern Poverty Law Center, is not mentioned on the video and is available only on the group's Web site.

Mr. Rodgers suggested that Dr. Dobson and the American Family Association, the conservative Christian group that first sounded the alarm, might have been confused because of an unrelated Web site belonging to another group called "We Are Family," which supports gay youth.

"The fact that some people may be upset with each other peoples' lifestyles, that is O.K.," Mr. Rodgers said. "We are just talking about respect."

Mark Barondess, the foundation's lawyer, said the critics "need medication."

On Wednesday however, Paul Batura, assistant to Mr. Dobson at Focus on the Family, said the group stood by its accusation.

"We see the video as an insidious means by which the organization is manipulating and potentially brainwashing kids," he said. "It is a classic bait and switch."

I have a knot in my stomach today that won't go away for some reason. I think it might be that my soul is trying exit my body through my bellybutton.

Late in the afternoon on Sunday, I was going up single on Canyon Lift. The two guys to my right were talking about cholesterol drugs. Guy #1 was doing most of the talking. He was saying to Guy #2 that he was worried about his cholesterol drugs because his doctor told him that one of the side effects was liver failure. Guy #1 said he'd been taking these drugs of one kind or another for 8 years. Guy #1 said that he'd much rather not take the drugs and get arteriosclerosis, which can be "cured" with bypass surgery than have liver failure and. Guy #2 nodded in agreement.

This conversation went on for the entire 5 minute ride. Not once during that entire time did either Guy #1 or Guy #2 mention anything about watching what Guy #1 eats, such as reducing or eliminating fried food, red meat, or saturated fat. Not once. Mind boggling. These guys probably left the mountain and went right to a fucking steak house for scotch and prime rib because Guy #1 thinks his Lipitor is some kind of miracle drug. Where does this mentality come from?

I get the same exact feeling from watching heartburn medication commercials which continually pop off on the idea that it don't matter what you eat, you big, fat lard ass (implied), because if you feel like shit after eating that bucket of fried chicken, just take one of these little purple pills, and all is good. And you wonder why we have a health care crisis in this country.

Pleas don't give me any shit about the way this page looks at the moment. I had the site looking all sweet and tasty after implementing CSS Design a few weeks back. It looked great in IE, but was totally broken in Firefox. Since I've started using Firefox, I want my site to look right in Firefox, damn it. Also, an increasing number of people are coming here using Firefox.

Anyway, I spent all night tonight tweaking the code, trying to get it to work right, but I just couldn't do it. I had it working offline perfectly. The navigation sat there right next the blog entries exactly the way I envisioned, exactly the way it looked with tables. But when I ran the code through MT, it kept turning into a clusterfuck. I tried several times, and ended up with different, but equally broken results. I have no idea what I'm doing wrong. I want to move and redesign the site completely, but not before I get this design working. I'll keep at it, but I don't want to waste too much more of my precious time trying to figure it out.

It was good to finally get up to Heavenly for the weekend. The skiing was great. The weather was beautiful. The drive was manageable. The cats survived. Here's the recap:

I was talking to this couple from Palo Alto on the lift Sunday afternoon. He was telling me they had a rough time this weekend. Their car broke down, so they rented a car to make the drive to Tahoe. He also told me that they had rented their ski equipment from some local place in PA, but didn't look at closely because when they got to Tahoe, they realized that he had two left ski boots. This was funny enough, but then he said he tried a left boot on his right foot and said it fit. I told him he was probably a great dancer. His wife/girlfriend was laughing. It took him a second, but he finally got it.

It's going to take a lot of convincing to get me to believe that our current president is not a complete scumbag, but it doesn't help when he barfs up garbage like this in a Washinton Post interview:

We had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 elections. The American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates, and chose me.

For one thing, the insinuation that the entire election was about Iraq is absurd. It had more to do with the fact that so many Americans are Evangelical Christians and vote in a unified Republican block than anything else. Voters came out strong for Bush in spite of his Iraq policy, not because of it. So to insinuate that the election ratified the president's policy is crazy.

More importantly, the idea that a president, any president, can do anything in the first term with impunity as long as the re-election campaign is a sucess is not only asinine, it's offensive. It might be different if the president's Iraq policy has widespread bipartisan support, but it doesn't.

Lauren, one of the two people who are the driving force behind the ski lease, told this joke on Friday night. It killed all conversation dead.

How do you stop a dog from humping your leg? Pick it up and suck its dick.

I want to believe that she didn't realize that she was speaking out loud. However, there were about 15 people around listening to her when she said this "joke". Does it make it worse that she brings her yappy Daschund to the house every weekend?

I know a lot of people freak out about it, but I've always been sort ambivalent about going to the dentist. I love to have my teeth cleaned and polished. It feels great. You don't realize how much crap builds up on your teeth until it's blessedly picked away by the dentist.

I've been lucky in my life. I've never had any major dental problems. Yes, I had braces, but that wasn't a huge deal. Up to this point I've never had a cavity. My wisdom teeth came in without incident. My gums are slightly receded from brushing like a maniac, but are in decent condition.

On the other hand, there's nothing I look forward to less than suffering through the dental x-ray business, which I'm sure is against Article II of the Geneva Convention. Forget waterboarding, if the CIA really wants good information out of the Gitmo prisoners, they should threaten them with a series of bite-wings.

This new dentist, who travels around the Bay Area and operates out of a Winnebago by the way, doesn't use the traditional paper x-rays. She's got a digital system, so instead of forcing little pieces of rigid paper as far into your mouth without making you gag as possible, they've got what looks like a heath bar sheathed in condom and they shove this thing in your mouth instead. It's very unpleasant and I would gladly reveal national secrets to avoid it.

I went into this appointment with a few serious concerns. I hadn't been to the dentist since October 2003 when my insurance with the Peace Corps ran out. Since then, I've had trouble with my bite which seems to be shifting alarmingly towards an underbite. And I've had some pain in my lower right wisdom tooth. It was probably just some food stuck back there, but I wanted it checked out.

It turned out that, at least according to this dentist, that there was nothing wrong with my bite. She said I had a perfect bite. She also said there was nothing wrong with my wisdom tooth. However she did find a small cavity on one of the upper left molars which we're going to fill in three weeks.

This is not what I wanted to hear at all. I'm bummed about the cavity, but I can't do much about that. It's minor and will take 10 minutes to fix. What really concerns me is that the dentist denied what I am certain is a serious problem with my bite. I don't really know how to take this. I'm sure I'm right. I mean, it's my fucking mouth I have to live with everyday. So what do I do? Go see another dentist. I honestly don't know.

Every year when Martin Luther King, Jr. day rolls around, I can't help
thinking about comedian Steve White talking about white supremacists not wanting to celebrate MLK day. Basically he said, you've got to be racist as hell not to want to take a day off a work... I couldn't agree more (as I sit here at work, trust me, I'd rather be taking the day off).

Off topic, but worth sharing while your attention, Mr. White is the author of one the best "driving while black" jokes. He said the cop took one look at his driver's license and said, "What's your middle name? Ain't?"

If you're one of the unfortunates who's never heard of Steve White, he's a classic old school comedian who's been in a bunch of Spike Lee pics.

Speaking of Spike Lee, he and his brother have been combing through the Magnum photo archives and have put together a retrospective of MLK photographs from the major moments in his life. Of course, the show is only on in NYC, but you can check it out online. There are some really amazing photos from the Magnum giants and the Lee brothers have done a fantastic job putting this whole thing together.

I'm going to see the dentist today for the first time in over a year. I'm psyched, because I really want my teeth cleaned and have someone take a look at my wisdom teeth, which have been giving me some trouble as of late. I probably should have flossed more in the last year, but there's nothing I can do about that now.

There was also this issue about whether or not I was going to have coverage which got cleared up last week. The consulting company I work for offers benefits. They're not great, but they offer them. I signed up for basic coverage, just to have it, but somehow there was a technical snafu, and I was told that I didn't have dental and there wasn't anything I or they could do about it until the next open enrollment period, this time next year. I was pissed because I know I signed up for dental, so I requested they do an investigation. They did and, although they didn't call me when they discovered the truth, I had to call them, the end result is that I now have coverage and will get my teeth taken care of for 10 bucks or so.

Even better, there's a traveling dental group that comes to my workplace, so I just need to hunt down the right office on our massive campus, and I don't have to drive to some dental office in Oakland or Berkeley. Such convenience.

I'm always curious about credits cards and security, especially these days when it's so easy to use a credit card without any ID. I'm not overly concerned about because the credit card companies take all the risk. They must have found some balance between ease of use and fraud that makes them happy, so why should I care?

Anyway, for years now you've been able to swipe a credit card at a gas station and pump gas without any ID. Nowadays, more and more retail outlets have a swipe/signature computer so the salesperson doesn't even have to see the signature. It's a total joke for security, but if more people are using credit cards, then the Visa and MasterCard people are probably thrilled.

Ever since these things were introduced, I screwed around with my signature, scrawling little happy faces or making my signature completely illegible, just for fun, but this guy has taken it to a whole new level. Read through it. It's funny as hell. Just a warning, you might want to have an empty stomach when you read his Super Size Me-esque Olestra experiment.

I'm off to Tahoe tonight to finally break in my season ski pass at Heavenly. I was planning on going each of the past two weekends but for one reason or another (no skis, too much snow, roads closed, mom in town) I didn't make it. No more excuses. It's time to hit the slopes.

I'll bring along my camera and I should get some decent pics. I should also have some good stories about my ski lease. I rented a place with 16 other people in South Lake Tahoe for the rest of the season. I've only met one of them. He seemed nice. Who knows about the rest. I'm sure it will be interesting. All I really care about now is making it up there safely and coming home in one piece.

Feeling hungry? Then you have to check out this commercial for the latest in McDonald's offering in Israel, the McSwarma. The commercial plays on the famous MCD conversation between Vincent and Jules in Pulp Fiction (who can forget Royale with Cheese?).

Okay, so it's a spoof, but the characters look good enough that the first impression is that it's actually Travolta and Jackson. The kidnapping humor at the end is a little questionable, but funny.

Go Get Yourself a McSwarma!

Don't eat yellow snow.

Am I just totally blind or have we reached new heights of propagandism in this country? I'm so outraged over the Armstrong Williams fiasco, the latest in administration attempts to control the news with either complete bought and paid for partisan hackery or fake produced administration news stories presented as reality. It's one thing for some blowhard pundit to be doing this on his own, it's entirely different when it's the administration using taxpayer dollars. They are using our fucking money to promote programs that are complete and total crap. It's not just about No Child Left Behind that Williams was paid to schill. You can bet the administration has others on the payroll hocking garbage about everything from Democracy in Iraq to the Social Secutiry crisis that Bush is working so hard to invent. Do you think there's a snowball's chance in hell that any congressional hearings will be held to get to the bottom of this business?

Frank Rich sums it up nicely over at the NYT. Margaret Carlson has a pretty good take on accountability in government here.

I like my life to move along smoothly. I like the car to start in the morning. I like to be on time. I like everything to work they way it should. And I sure as shit like the toilet to flush when it's supposed to, like after I've taken a honking big crap, for example.

I've been to some strange places and shit down some seriously questionable holes. But there's one advantage to shitting down a hole, namely a hole doesn't backup turning your toilet into a fecal soup threatening to overflow into your otherwise pristine bathroom and ruin your life.

I just moved into my place, so I didn't have the implements of destruction needed to take care of the situation. I tried to borrow a plunger from the maintenance guys, but every time I went down to their office, no one was there. I would come back up to my place, note that the water had gone down (leaving a lovely ups-brown excrement scum in its wake) and I would decide to try to flush again, hoping that it would finally take all the shit down with it. No luck. You don't have to tell me, I know, I let this go on for far too long.

Last night, with my sister and her newborn coming over with my mom to hang out, see the apartment and meet my cats, I had to take of it once and for all. I went to Walgreens to buy a plunger. They had two options, the standard pink suction cup on a wooden stick and some new-fangled "master plunger". I too a look at the sorry thing on a stick and bought the latter. Big mistake.

I brought it, thinking my worries were about to end. I plunged away. The master plunger sucked. Literally. It sucked in shit water and spit it out all over the place leaving the bathroom a mess and the toilet still stopped up. Fucking piece of shit. I tried a few more times and then gave up and decided to run the fan, light some vanilla incense to mask the smell with a plan to escort my sister or my mom to the gym restroom, should the need arise, which, of course, it did, but without incident.

In the morning, I tracked down Roman, one of the maintenance guys, who lent me a plunger that looked startlingly like the one I passed up at Walgreens. I brought it up to my place and plunged away, but the plunger kept inside-outing itself instead of clearing the shit-strewn toilet. It was nasty, it smelled bad and looked worse. It was making me gag, but I finally got the thing to work and cleared up the plumbing issue once and for all.

The next big question is do I have the chutzpah to take back the "master plunger" to Walgreens? Something to think about on the way home.

Every once in while (more often these day's of Christian governance) you see something that makes you wonder how it's possible to have been born and live in the same country with some of my fellow Americans.

I was surfing the web this afternoon and I came across a post discussing a Scarborough Country show from last week on god and the Asian Tsunami (is there a connection? how can this possibly be a serious topic for a political show?). The gist of the segment was how could a merciful god allow such death and destruction.

First up, Anne Graham Lotz, daughter of Billy Graham, went on and about Jesus dying for our sins before saying that the victims of the tsunami were going to die anyway, eventually, so it wasn't a big deal. The important thing, to Anne, was "where are we going to spend eternity?" She concludes with "so, this is a tragedy and it's a disaster, but it's not a reflection on the fact that God doesn't love us, because God loves us and the proof of that is the cross." Yes, the cross. I see.

Next up was Jennifer Giroux, soccer mom (of 9) and web publisher of Women Influencing the Nation or WIN, a website subtitled (you can't make this shit up) "The Greatest Gift You Can Give Your Child Is Another Sibling." Gasp. Well now, Jennifer starts off by saying, "Well, you know, throughout history and reported early in the Bible, God has always used plagues, floods and natural disasters as a source of punishment" and launches into an anti-abortion tirade about the "lost generation of 40 million aborted babies". Supposedly there's some sort of connection. In Jennifer's mind, god is punishing sinners (aka abortionists) in America by killing 150,000 South Asians. Makes perfect sense to me. Of course, Jennifer can't stand up to the grilling from host Joe Scarborough who simply asks, "So, are you saying, Jennifer, that God may be killing people in Asia because of the sins that Americans are committing here?", a more than fair assessment of her point (see above). She just replies lamely, "no, I'm not saying that at all, Joe." Right. If you're going to believe these things, and she clearly does, why not have the cojones to stand up for beliefs?

What follows must have made for some really absurd television. Rabbi Shmuley Boteach accuses Jennifer of blasphemy and they start arguing and accusing and arguing and such with Jennifer saying "Rabbi, you have a selective memory of the Bible" and the Rabbi responding, "God is not a terrorist".

What's the point of all this? The point is that people can discuss this all they want, it's not going to change the fact that god had nothing to do with the earthquake in Sumatra or the subsequent tsunami, nor did god have anything to do with killer mudslides in Southern California, nor did was he responsible for your toilet backing this morning. Even if god did, there's no way to prove it, so it's pointless and tireless to sanctimoniously argue that he did. End of story.

I'm glad I didn't see the show live. I probably would have thrown a brick through my TV.

If you want to see a really crappy film, go rent King Arthur. I stayed away when it was out in theaters, but curiosity got the best of me, I Netflix'd it and I really wish I hadn't. If you're at all a fan of the Arthurian legend, you're going to hate this take where Arthur is nothing more than a pawn of the Roman government of Britain. Who's knows if there's any veracity to it, but who cares? Why take a great legend and spoil it with historical accuracy when the new story is so mundane?

Here's the basic storyline. Arthur is the leader of a group of horseman conscripted by the Romans as youths from their province where Eastern Europe is now and taken to Britain to keep the peace against the Saxons on the north side of Hadrian's Wall. On the eve of their freedom, a bishop from Rome commands that they take on one last mission, to save a Roman family behind enemy lines. Of course, there are subplots and a few twists and turns including Arthur rescuing Guinevere from a Christian torture chamber. Some of the fighting scenes are spectacular, but shit, the movie as a whole is a piece of excrement.

It was always pretty, but the Rams managed, for the third time this season, to beat the Seahawks and move on in the NFL Playoffs. They are now the only team in NFL history to get into the playoffs without a winning a record (they finished 8-8) and actually win a game. But these Rams, just getting into the playoffs in the first place made them a very dangerous opponent.

Next up are the Atlanta Falcons, perennial doormat of the former NFC West Division, beaten up regularly by the Rams in year's past, now the champs of the NFC South. Granted they're much better now, especially with Michael Vick running crazy all over the field. But the game is in the Georgia Dome and the Rams kick ass on turf. Also in 3 out of the first four games, the road team won. Lets see if the Rams can continue the string and make it to the NFC Championship Game.

I was planning on hitting the road to Tahoe and skiing this weekend, but so much snow is dumping in the Sierras (again) that the road is closed, even for all-wheel drive cars, like mine. It really blows becaue this is the starting weekend for my ski lease. I and 16 people I haven't met rented a house in South Lake Tahoe between Heavenly and Kirkwood for the rest of the season.

With all the snow we've already had this year, it should be an awesome season. Hopefully I'll be able to get up there at least every other weekend.

How did people survive before remote control? I can't be getting up from the couch everytime I want to change the program. Honestly, I can't believe how dependent I am on flipping through TV channels for entertainment. I don't know how much longer I can wait before I have to buy a replacement.

Comments are up and running again, so, you know, say somethng.

This morning I finally let the braying cats back out on the balcony, mostly just to see if Fil would make the leap to the tree or navigate her way somehow down the facade to the ground. She did neither. Instead, she casually walked down to the east end of the balcony and lept onto the roof. She looked down at me briefly as if to say, who's in charge now, ass hole, and then disappeared.

I was calm and rational about it. There's no way for me to get on the roof, so I just had to wait her out. I figured in about a half an hour, she'd find her way down to the ground and I could head out and call her. Thankfully, I didn't need to find her. She just reappeared on the balcony in about ten minutes.

I need to find some chicken wire or something and block off her acccess to the roof. I really want to be able to let the cats out there unsupervised, but I can't do it if Fil is going to run all over the show.

My comments are down again. This time I can't blame the spammers. I made a little adjustment to the site and I, like a the complete idiot that I am, I didn't test to see if it worked. I'll have it fixed and up and running before lunch so you can leave me your pearls of wisdom. In the meantime, if you want to comment, you can fire off an email.

Everyone I know has been reading The Davinci Code, so I finally borrowed my sister's copy to see what all the fuss was about. I was hooked quickly. Not because it's well written, because it's not. Not even because the story was that compelling, because, well, it isn't. Not about the secret societies, which Dan Brown obviously loves since he's woven at least two of books around them (see Angels & Demons, which is a superior novel). But because it fits so perfectly into my anti-church sentiments. I also love art history, but that's really secondary.

What's amazing to me about the book is not that the anti-Catholic Church, well, it's hard to call them undertones, overtones, that form the subtext of this novel. What I'm amazed about is not that they are there, but that there is more made of it in the media considering what a huge phenomenon this book has become.

A huge crux of The Davinci Code is that the Catholic Church has been cherry picking documents, Gospels in particular, to disseminate to the public in the form of the New Testament, for example, that fit into their vision for what people should think about Catholicism in general and Jesus in particular. None is this new news. But the fact that it plays a major role in a seriously popular form of mass media is.

But where is the backlash? Where are the Christians demanding to see the Books of Fatima or the missing Gospels? If it's there, I haven't seen or heard it.

If you have lots of free time on your hands and like to keep up with the blogs, you might want to consider checking out Bloglines. It's a free web-based service that's allows to manage all the blogs you frequent by subscribing to the RSS feeds. Like with your browser bookmarks, you can setup up folders and keep your blogs organized. Unlike a browser, however, Bloglines will tell you if there are any unread posts, and how many, so you don't have to check each page you read to see if it's been updated. You simply open Bloglines and all your blogs are laid out before you. It's genius.

I came home last night and Fil was gone. I was looking everywhere, all her usual hiding places, if you can call them usual since I've only been in the new place two weeks, but she was nowhere to be found. Mak was following me around in my search as if he was trying tell me something. I think he was trying to tell me that Fil flew the coup. I was freaking out.

For the first time, I had left the sliding glass door on the balcony open so the cats could come and go as they pleased and Fil came and went. I live on the third floor and there's no simple way off the balcony. It's either a 25 foot drop to the hedges below or a leap of faith to the branches of the large tree in front of my place. I can't imagine that Fil did either, but she got down somehow.

I went down to search for her totally expecting to find a dead or severely damaged kitten in the area just beneath my apartment. I started hearing muted meows within a few minutes of walking around and whistling for her. Within about 15 minutes I found her down on the ground looking as if nothing was wrong. She just sailed past me with her tail vibrating as usual.

I have no idea how she got down. Maybe the tree, but who knows. One thing I do know is that outside privileges have been revoked indefinitely.

I love The West Wing. The reasons I love The West Wing is that the writing is so smart, the acting is so sharp and the cast preforms well as an ensemble. The show also deals with a myriad of issues, albeit most of them from a progressive point of view, that other media outlets completely ignore. Here's one for example.

Last night I was watching the Bravo The West Wing and there was this episode from Season II called The Midterms which had the quintessential Jen Bartlet monologue.

The president of the United States was about to address a gathering of radio talk show hosts in the White House. As the president entered the hall, they all stood and applauded. All, that is, except one — a woman with strikingly blond hair, wearing a bright green suit. At first, her presence rattled the president. He lost his train of thought several times before he finally spoke directly to the sitting talk show host.

"Excuse me, doctor," the president said to her. "It's good to have you here. Are you an M.D.?"

"A Ph.D.," she retorted smartly.

"In psychology?" he pursued.

"No, sir," she said.

"Theology?"

"No."

"Social work?"

"I have a Ph.D. in English literature," she replied.

"I'm asking," continued the president, "because on your show people call in for advice and you go by the title 'doctor,' and I didn't know if maybe your listeners were confused by that and assumed you had advanced training in psychology, theology, or health care."

"I don't believe they are confused. No, sir," she responded.

"Good," said the president, raising his voice sarcastically. "I like your show. I like how you call homosexuality an abomination."

"I don't say homosexuality is an abomination, Mr. President," she replied haughtily. "The Bible does."

"Yes, it does!" he shouted.

"Leviticus 18:22."

"Chapter and verse. I wanted to ask you a couple of questions while I had you here. I'm interested in selling my youngest daughter into slavery as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. She's a Georgetown sophomore, speaks fluent Italian, always cleared the table when it was her turn. What would a good price for her be?"

"While thinking about that, can I ask another? My chief of staff, Leo McGarry, insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly says he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself or is it OK to call the police?"

"Here's one that's really important, 'cause we've got a lot of sports fans in this town. Touching the skin of a dead pig makes one unclean, Leviticus 11:7. If they promise to wear gloves, can the Washington Redskins still play football? Can Notre Dame? Can West Point?"

"Does the whole town really have to be together to stone my brother John for planting different crops side by side?"

"Can I burn my mother in a small family gathering for wearing garments made from two different threads?"

"Think about those questions, would you? One last thing. While you may be mistaking this for your monthly meeting of the ignorant tight-ass club, in this building when the president stands, nobody sits."

If you're interested, you can hear the interaction here.

This dialogue gets to the point of what I have been saying for a long time, namely that Christians, especially the bible-thumping, holier-than-thou types, tend to cherry pick from the bible and the teachings of Jesus what is important to them and them preach about it as if it is some sort of natural truth, which it clearly is not. Does "homosexuality is abomination" trump "love thy neighbor as thyself". I don't think so, but so many Americans don't agree with me. One of the many problems with organized religion is that it has an agenda. And that agenda doesn't take into account the needs of the people, or modern society, it only takes into account the needs of perpetuating the status quo of the church, temple or mosque.

The Rams may have been in St. Louis for ten years now, but they will always be the Los Angeles Rams of my youth. The team that went to Super Bowl XIV in 1980 led by Pat Haden, Wendell Tyler, Nolan Cromwell and Jack Youngblood. That bitch Georgia Frontiere maybe be able to move my team out of Los Angeles, but she can't move them out my heart.

So I still follow the Rams when I can. This season has been a rough on. Injuries to QB Marc Bulger left ancient, interception-prone Chris Chandler at the helm. Despite a great start, the Rams were 6-8 with two games to play and facing an off season of doubt with Mike Martz's head likely on a plate.

But the Rams finished strong, beating an undermanned Eagles team on Monday Night Football two weeks back and sneaking past the Jets in OT last Sunday on a Jeff Wilkins field goal. 8-8 is nothing to be proud of, but now that they've made the playoffs in the weak NFC, anything can happen. The first task is get past Seattle who won the division despite two losses to my Rams. If the Rams can beat the Seahawks again, they might make it all the way to Jacksonville with nothing but sup-par teams in the way of their 4th Super Bowl appearance. It's a long shot, but you never know.

It's a new year. Time to start fresh with a clean slate. So I spent a good chunk of time yesterday restoring my laptop. Mostly I needed to fix this nagging problem with the DVD+RW/CD-R drive which wouldn't recognize discs unless I put it in, ejected it and then put the disc back in again. Oh, and then there was that issue of not being able to burn discs. At all. So I shifted all my files to my external hard drive (what a godsend) and re-formatted and re-installed everything. I took a long time, but it's very satisfying to have the stupid piece of computing shit in working order again.

Can you believe it? 2005 already. Seems like these last 5 years have gone by in a blur. If the amount of snow that is falling in the Sierras is any indication, this is going to be a great year.