The Clog

ONE MORE REASON YOU WON'T LIKE LIVING IN NEW ZEALAND

2009-07-18T22:36:00.000-07:00

I hate to disappoint my American friends, but you won't like New Zealand because they aren't really interested in military porn. They are savages, those kiwis. They think about things like peacefully coexisting with their neighbors, avoiding conflicts with folk who have nothing at all to do with their affairs. Obviously, they have a problem, what with their chronic capacity for military underachievement. Have you seen their tanks? Yugos, every last one of them. I think their missiles, if properly aimed, could reach -- prepare yourselves -- Tasmania, perhaps even Fiji. Scary, eh?

How do they survive? How can they possibly exist, let alone thrive? It's a mystery with which you should not concern yourself. You'll be bored to tears. God knows I am.

TOM CRUISE

2009-07-18T22:22:00.000-07:00

Oh, and by the way, as I sit here writing blog posts, my dad is firing up Valkyrie, that movie with Tom Cruise as a Nazi somethingorother. Its opening "trick" to explain away the fact that Tom Cruise is soooo not German is one of the weakest I've seen, um, ever. On this topic I have nothing else to say.

THE FAGIFICATION OF AMERICAN SERVICEMEN

2009-07-18T21:56:00.000-07:00

Thank you, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, for fucking everything up. Somewhere over the last fifteen or so years -- around the time that queers decided that they didn't want to be different anymore, that they wanted to be just like the heterosexual Joneses -- American servicemen decided that manscaping was some sort of aspirational ideal.

Bad skin, dandruff flakes, and blousy sports jerseys gave way to astringent-toned pores, flawless hair-gel scapes, and tight shirts and jeans that in the previous decade had been worn only by faggy clones who bore the brunt of scorn from the very macho men who now strut about like faggity fags, but with chicks instead of dicks on their minds.

Its a disturbing and unacceptable turn of events. I went to a baseball game at Nationals Park tonight, in the nation's capital. Servicemen were bloody everywhere, you couldn't get away from them. Like roaches congregating in the kitchen, they pranced around, sashaying as if their bubble butts were their most potent weapons. Biceps like those of the gymbots I see every day in the Castro. Their hair coiffed and gelled to perfection -- better than mine, the bitches!

Eyebrows like calligraphic strokes, so pretty they can't possibly occur without the use of arithmetic, and shorn leg hairs, every one of them approximately 2.5 millimeters in length. Beautiful, pimple free skin that one achieves only with the use of tempered witch hazel tonics followed by the liberal application of a t-zone friendly emollient that probably features some ingredient from the Amazon.

What the fuck? Who gave these straight fags permission to horn in on a domain previously owned by, well, gay fags? It's all part of the great homogenization of America, a disgusting and lamentable epoch that makes me miss the days when I was called a fag by a straight man because I was nothing at all like him.

Now, straight fags are not only just like me, they look better and take pride in looking damned good for their wimens.

But don't look a straight serviceman up and down like he's a hot specimen; his precious exterior, so carefully sculpted, will crumble, revealing the ugly homophobe that only a flimsy layer of Clinique hydrator conceals.

ATTENTION ALL PINKO PEACENIKS

2009-07-18T15:42:00.000-07:00

On my way down the escalator at the Pentagon City Metro, I passed a mini-billboard with three sexy jets flying toward me. In bold letters right above them was this phrase: "Peace through strength. Lots of strength."

TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE MONUMENTAL BORES

2009-07-17T21:56:00.000-07:00

I loathe Michael Bay movies, his commercial-slick direction and so-called mastery of spectacle are masks for deafening stupidity. But I enjoyed the first Transformers more than I care to admit, and reluctantly resigned myself to seeing the sequel.

In this latest, Mr. Bay has achieved new levels of plagiarism, stealing liberally from his own numerous loud-ass movies, including the first Transformers. Because the robot battles are often so visually incoherent and the gun fire, rocket fire, missile fire, and laser fire so repetitive, the whole thing sinks into a platitudinous military porn movie.

And, man, is it unpleasantly long. I got a headache during the movie, but had fully recovered by the time the credits rolled, about 7 or 8 hours after the whole affair began.

AMERICAN CHARITIES: CULTURAL FASCISM OR PORN?

2009-07-17T12:50:00.000-07:00

The result of charities is great work for a lot of communities and individuals. This post does not question that. What it questions are the abhorrent means by which charities raise their monies, most notably the perversion and, in some cases, commandeering of institutions that have little if anything to do with charity work.

Charities in the last couple of decades have come out of the closet, using PR machinery that would make corporate multinationals jealous. Since the advent of the dreaded AIDS ribbon, charities realized that not only can they guilt celebrities into hawking their causes, they can guilt massive institutions like baseball or police forces into towing the charity line. I almost want breast cancer so I can tear up and feel proud every time a gigantic pink ribbon flutters in high definition across the giant display at Giants ball park in San Francisco. Prostate cancer is huge, too, competing at every turn with breasties for valuable pennies. It's a bit like watching Coca-Cola and Pepsi duke it out for market share. In other words, it's crass, if not a little nauseating.

PEOPLE WHO SHOULD BE KILLED, PART XVIII

2009-06-22T17:49:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a beautiful day to wash my beloved Pup Bug, the fire-engine red '79 convertible VW Super Beetle that has given me so much joy over the last five years. I hosed it down, taking particular pleasure in watching the black streams of dust and soot as they poured over the car's bubbly contours and drained away in the gutter. Soaped up a sponge and started rubbing the shine back into my favorite toy.

That's when I noticed it. A 6-inch wide, half-inch deep horizontal dent at the base of the boot cover, the equivalent of the tip of your nose. Front and center, like it had been punched in the face.

Unfortunately, I don't have a garage. One of the most disheartening aspects of owning the Pup Bug is watching from my window as inconsiderate assholes try to parallel park near it, usually with the subtlety of a frazzled monkey. Because the Pup Bug has extended rear and front bumpers, I usually don't have to worry, although it is entirely possible that some idiot could hit one of them hard enough to punch it back into the body.

This dent, however, was created by a car that is much taller than the Pup Bug, with a bumper whose bottom is above the top of mine. We'll call the offending car -- oh, I don't know -- a goddamned SUV?

To create a dent that wide and deep you would have to have backed into the Pup Bug at something along the lines of 5 m.p.h, or you would have had to made contact with the car and then gunned the engine while still in reverse. It is unlikely, unless you are blind, deaf, and retarded, that you would have been unaware of causing that kind of damage.

However it was done, the person who did it is one of millions of inconsiderate (or perhaps just sloppy and incompetent) assholes who should be killed. Painfully and in public, preferably under the wheels of their own cars. Jerks.

WALK THE WALK, TALK THE TALK

2009-06-14T18:28:00.000-07:00

My friend Karen Wiederholt introduced me to a traditional learning rhyme that I had never -- in 43 years -- heard. It goes like this:

When two vowels go out walking, the first one does the talking.

Because of my interest in linguistics, the walking-talking rule set my brain in motion -- I'm always interested in how well or poorly a rule for language holds up to scrutiny.

Common words like ‘great,’ ‘freight,’ and ‘buy’ put the lie to the ‘talking’ of the e or the u. I’m also not sure how the rule addresses the sometimes elusive nuances of the dipthong. 'Great,' 'freight,' and 'buy' contain dipthongs, though not as obviously so as, say, ‘pluot.’ Of ‘around,’ ‘town,’ and ‘road,’ only ‘road’ seems to obey the rule. I say 'seems' because phonetically 'road' is like the sound you get when you mash together o and u. It is precisely the same sound you get from the word 'pose.' 'Road' and 'pose' contain dipthongs and are excellent specimens for understanding how spelling and phonetics have less to do with each other than the rule unfortunately implies.

So, if the walking-talking rule's verisimilitude decays on a pass involving only 7 examples, as I've used in the previous paragraph, what happens to the rule when you throw it at a database of 25,000 frequently-used English words?

For the answer, I turned to the Core Knowledge Foundation, where I learned that the rule is so famous and so ingrained in learning that PBS has a music video to celebrate it. (I certainly never heard anything like this on Sesame Street, Captain Kangaroo, or Mister Rogers.)

The Foundation's Matthew Davis wrote a thoughtful article on the rule.

The database tells us that the rule points the reader to the correct pronunciation for 2,634 words. (Click here to see a list.)

That seems pretty powerful—until you count up the cases in which the rule leads the reader astray. It turns out that there are 2,592 words in the database that a reader would pronounce incorrectly by following this rule. (Click here to see a list.)

Would you ever rely on anything that only works '50.4%' of the time?

As fascinated as I am by the invalidity of the walking-talking rule, I'm more fascinated by the fact that neither my Mom, Dad, nor any of the teachers I had from Montessori school through Catholic elementary school ever uttered this rule. My boyfriend confirms that it's at least as old as his long-deceased grandmother, from whom he first learned it.

As Matthew Davis and others point out, the rule, as clever and hummable as it may be, actually prohibits critical thinking about the way language works and how its volume of exceptions and violators contributes to the richness and variety of spoken language.

In the second half of the video the "non-talking" vowels (actually letters in an indivisible vowel sound) protest with "But..." It's as if they are trying to interrupt the parade of innaccuracy by saying "But I can easily dismantle this rule if only someone would let me sing, too."

RECESSION RESMESHION

2009-05-04T19:51:00.000-07:00

The financial, political, and international forces of our time, by all accounts, are just now taking a breather from the greatest depression since the greatest depression ever in the universe of time, ever.

Sales down, unemployment up, companies crumbling, national economies in tumbling freefall, like dark matter careening in a toilet-bowl spiral toward the event horizon of the black hole called the greatest depression since the greatest depression ever in the universe of time, ever.

For months, it was easy to remain immune. But now, many many months into this, it's all starting to sound a little tedious. And marginal, and emotionally charged with American Dreamania, and whatever.

If you owned a home you couldn't afford and which consequently went into foreclosure (sooooo 2008!), I guess you can nod your head smugly, grimly, and line up behind Paul Krugman at the NY Times to moan about the (clearing throat) Economic Apocalypse(tm). Or if you are a big, wasteful, sloppy, lazy, inefficient, obsolete company that has squandered the fortunes of fools and sheep, you might be nodding your head grimly as you feel the bite of illegal and misguided government intervention in your affairs, affairs which the free markets would creatively destroy and reassemble in more nimble aspects.

But I'd like to talk about Main Street, because that's where my elected officials apparently think I keep my address. San Francisco is not Detroit, Stockton, Fresno, Sacramento, or any one of the towns I am told -- with heartfelt music and regular-people gumption -- are bearing the brunt of the greatest depression since blah blah blah. My Main Street was razed to the ground after the internet bubble popped back in 2000. I'll match any grovelling-for-income story from 2002 with anyone else's grovelling-for-income story from 2009. Pound for pound, wheat cake for wheat cake. We all find ways to survive, even when it feels like we may be on the street in a matter of weeks. Recessions, upturns, downturns, are normal, no matter how they were caused. You buck up and navigate through it, with your wits, and with your drive to not fail. If you're lucky, you do it without any assistance from the government. You hold your head even higher when things turn around and you realize you persevered because of YOU and not because of some magical alignment of union agreements and government spending programs.

It's May. Work for me was thin for about two months around the turn of the year. Nothing disastrous. I've learned as a freelance contractor how to make a dollar go a long way. In February, things picked up and have been peachy since. I'm getting ready to serve two clients at the same time, doubling my income for a short period of time. I still find time to buy Bluray discs, eat high-quality sushi at least once a week, shop frequently at Whole Foods, buy new clothes, and sock money away.

But that's just me. Let's talk for a minute about this Main Street thing. Even the loosest interpretation of this ridiculous "body" leads one to the conclusion that things just aren't that bad -- unless, of course, you live in one of a statistically unimportant handful of communities disproportionately crushed by the failures of local industry.

My local Best Buy is constantly packed with customers slouching under the weight of new HDTVs, gaudy laptops, silly little digital cameras, camera phones, and MP3 cameras. I have never seen supermarkets like Safeway, Whole Foods, or Rainbow Grocery more stuffed with bitchy consumers sniping at each other over a place in one of the looooong lines to the register. If anything, the length of time I stand in line at a supermarket has increased dramatically since the onset of the greatest depression since blah, blah, blah. I frequent sushi bars like a whore on her claimed corner, and I'm happy to report that they are always full, often with wait times. Sushi dining can hardly be called frugal, so what, exactly is going on?

San Francisco may be a hotbed of overeducated, overcompensated opportunists, but it's certainly not lacking in low-income individuals: the college set, the three-renters-to-an-apartment set, the ethnic families, and my favorite, the I'm-30-and-don't-have-to-do-a-goddamned-thing-my-aging-liberal-parents-think-I-should-do set. Video stores, bars, grocery stores, corner stores, coffee shops, these all are socioeconomically flattening indicators of any economy's consumer health. If I landed in San Francisco from another planet and you tried to convince me that we were experiencing the greatest depression since the beginning of space and time, I'd laugh in your face -- if I came from a planet with vocal chords and laughter as a social convention.

So, whether human or alien (the verdict is still out), I laugh in the face of this great recession/depression/ragnarok. Perhaps others should, too. It's easy when you stop paying attention to the news. Or reading other people's blogs.

WATCHMEN: LIKE A DREAM

2009-03-07T00:20:00.000-08:00

"Seems like only yesterday" is, indeed, a cliche. I read Watchmen when they were only available as monthly issues in a 12-issue series, and that doesn't feel like 23 years ago. Perhaps the reason Watchmen feels so recent is that it remains a rich and entertaining literary epic, its themes so painfully appropriate, its unflinching wit intact and improved with age.

Tonight, as I was watching Watchmen, I was keenly aware of how absorbed I was. I can't say honestly if that is because Watchmen has been in my life for more than half of it, or because Zack Snyder did such a lovely job of inviting me into his adaptation and being generous to me for saying yes

This movie is an act of love. The Zack Snyder of Dawn of the Dead and 300 is very much present, but it's become clear, after three fantastic films, that the man knows how to let the gravity of his material seduce him. I listened to him at last weekend's Wondercon; his admiration for Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's gigantic moral chiaroscuro was evident. So was his understanding of the difficulties in adapting such a dense exploration of the things that make us glorious and mad, sometimes at the same time.

I had my doubts going in. How was Billy Crudup going to carry off Dr. Manhattan, a naked blue god trapped between his fleeting humanity and complete detachment from it? How could an actress make either of the Silk Specters seem like real women while wearing ridiculously skimpy outfits? How would Snyder's highly stylized hand mesh happily with Dave Gibbons' highly stylized panel art, or, more importantly, with Alan Moore's deadpan humor and remorseless attack on human ugliness?

That all of these questions were answered satisfactorily is just icing for the cake that lay beneath. As a whole, Watchmen is a thought-provoking and mesmerizing movie. Nearly every scene, even the quiet ones, is packed with small details and earnest moments. The actors seem very comfortable in their superheroic skins, and each of Moore's characters feels weighty and realistic, even when saying unrealistic things.

Snyder handles the complicated machinery of Moore's flashback-heavy tale with the ease Francis Coppola exhibited in The Godfather II. That's not an accidental comparison, for I came out of the screening tonight feeling like I had just watched an intensely violent, intensely thick commentary on human and personal struggles, not unlike those Mario Puzo and Coppola gave us in the 70s. Rorschach's delicious and wounded persona, brought to exciting life by the "kid" who gave Walter Matthau headaches in The Bad News Bear, was the most fulfilled recipient of this approach. Patrick Wilson and Malin Akerman as Nite Owl and Silk Spectre II were real surprises, turning what could have been melodramatic performances into tender and restrained acts of selflessness. As in the comic, their ordinary passions kept us anchored to an identifiable emotional landscape, an important resisting force against the violent psychological extremes of the Comedian and Rorschach and the ethereal superiority of Dr. Manhattan and Ozymandias.

Watchmen is a cerebral movie, steeped in a reverence for its subjects, and rarely succumbs to the Hollywood impulse to push moron buttons. If Zack Snyder and his writers can adapt the presumably unadaptable, then when, I wonder, will we see a film version of Gravity's Rainbow?

OH MY GOD, WE'RE PUSSIES

2009-01-06T18:49:00.000-08:00

The New York Times (sigh) has posted a much-blogged, much-read article about something called -- don't laugh -- thirdhand smoke.

In short, smokers who aren't actually smoking at the moment carry molecules of nasty toxins like hydrogen cyanide and arsenic. Oh, my god, arsenic, it's so famously poisonous, don't you know? These molecules can transfer to elevator buttons or couches or anything else these horrid lepers touch -- including their babies!

The article points out the worst sort of science -- pop science. The "reporter," if she can be called such, cites one study (one, because there have been no others), which is lamentable in and of itself. Where the irrelevance of this article becomes clear is in its astonishing inability to correlate toxicity with quantity.

Any high school student (not necessarily American ones) can tell you that a molecule of this or that means nothing in the context of human health. You encounter more toxins walking down a street with moderate automobile traffic than you will ever encounter from a smoker who isn't even smoking a cigarette when you meet him. We are well equipped by evolution to resist or efficiently process trace amounts of toxins. Not all of them, but so many of them that I'm shocked we're even having this conversation.

Scrubbed your toilet with bleach lately? Way toxic every time you breathed. Stood around the garage while your mechanic rang you up? Perhaps you should evaluate all the molecules that float in the air, cling to his walls, adhere to the pen you use to sign your credit card slip. And don't get me started on that log fire you stoked in the fireplace of your living room, where you've got couches. And babies!

Which leads me to those ridiculous wipes you now see at certain supermarkets. You know the ones. They're like baby-butt wipes in a cylinder near the carts and hand baskets. God knows that decades of cart-pushing by hundreds of millions of humans has plagued us with catastrophic disease and...oh, wait. We're all fine when we don't, like pussies, wipe our hands before pushing a cart around? Are you sure about that? I know there's a study somewhere that shows statistically significant decreases in the chance that I will get a cold if only I wipe my hands with a baby-butt wipe at the grocery store. And before I handle dollar bills to pay for the food that was touched by potentially dozens of people before I pulled it off the shelf. Or, if out of cash, handled the digital pen in that annoying PIN device at checkout.

The world is full of toxins, so stop holding your breath. But whatever you do, don't touch a smoker or let him touch your babies!

MICHAEL RENNIE 1, KEANU REEVES 0

2008-12-29T01:41:00.000-08:00

Good editorial, all too brief.

MERRY CHRISTMAS, MY SWEET VICTIMS

2008-12-25T18:49:00.000-08:00

Awesome.

NURSE CHAPEL IS DEAD

2008-12-22T18:59:00.000-08:00

Over the last few weeks, I've really enjoyed watching the digitally remastered three seasons of the original Star Trek Series. If you're a fan and haven't experienced the cleaned, effects-enhanced episodes, I recommend them. For die-hards, just go ahead and buy the seasons; for everyone else, rent or stream them from Netflix.

One of the joys of revisiting that wonderful old world is being re-introduced to some of the pillars of the Star Trek universe. Majel Barrett originally played a human version of the Spock character in a discarded pilot of Star Trek. When Gene Roddenberry and NBC re-jiggered their concept, Barrett's character disappeared, to be replaced by the now timeless character of Spock. But Barrett, being Roddenberry's paramour, took on a new role as Dr. McCoy's hopelessly romantic assistant, Nurse Chapel. She was long-legged, a little New England, blue-eyed and blond, too practical to be sexy, too pretty to be ignored. Chapel's unrequited passion for Spock was both ironic and legendary: the expression on her face in Amok Time when Spock asks her to bring him some soup is a beautiful pop-culture moment.

Barrett became even cooler to us fans when she became the de facto voice for Star Trek computers and then, in a casting coup, the mother of Deanna Troi on Next Generation. She even appeared as a character on Babylon 5, the show where secondary and tertiary Star Trek characters went to give their last sci-fi performances.

For Trek fans, she was a huge part of the universe, lending her gentle femininity and, later, her sardonic wit to a mythos that generally rewards interesting characters and long-legged icons. I'm sad to see her go.

WHAT IS CHRISTMAS?

2008-12-20T00:47:00.000-08:00

Christmas is taking pleasure in the idea of giving a gift to someone you don't like.

Christmas is reveling in the glee others get in receiving from you something that you made. Creating gifts is an act of love, buying them is an act of commerce.

Christmas is the intellectual challenge of making someone happy on one specific day that is no better or worse than any other day.

Christmas is bows, ribbons, wrapping paper, and tissue. It's lights, warmth, comfort food, firs, wreaths, ornament hooks, and scotch tape.

Christmas, by virtue of its convenient date, is something you can spend the whole year planning for.

Christmas is reconnecting with people you've let slip through cracks in time.

Christmas is suddenly realizing that you forgot someone you adore, and correcting that lapse.

A GROWN MAN'S CHRISTMAS

2008-12-03T18:19:00.000-08:00

THE SECULAR ARGUMENT AGAINST GAY MARRIAGE

2008-11-15T15:45:00.000-08:00

I've already written about the wrongheadedness of gay-marriage activism (here, here, and especially here) and of its morally inconsequential and ideologically indefensible hollowness. I've even suggested that a much larger battle could be won -- the removal of government from the characterization and enforcement of marriage -- if only those who are so near-sighted and temporal in their understanding of government would step back from the visceral lure of gay marriage and entertain the appeal of a less intrusive government.

That liberal America leans on government to give what it is not entitled to give is reprehensible on its face, just as it is insupportable for social conservatives to demand that government take away or normalize what it is not entitled to take away or normalize. This doesn't stop the ridiculous "hope for dreams" contingent from using emotion rather than reason to steer them through history.

Thomas Paine, in the opening paragraph of his Common Sense, writes that "a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom."

Because government's long-standing meddling in marriage, which is wrong, is not contested ideologically by mainstream Americans, the consensus is that government's proclamations and involvement in such is right.

Liberal activists enshrine this rightness not by contesting the wrongness, but by fighting to be included in the wrongness. Spectacularly, they require the government to honor the 14th Amendment by excusing the government's assumption of an authority that is not granted to it in the first place, except in the quiescence of those who have elected to be government's subjects rather than its authors! In other words, the government has never had any authority to involve itself in marriage, but because it is involved in marriage, all the queer left wants is redress rooted very deeply in affairs that are none of government's business. This position commands no respect. In fact, it should invite derision.

Demanding that government envelope queers in the gravity well of its untenable position on social contracts is mind boggling (you can pontificate all you want about the "sanctitity" of marriage, but then you invite only the scorn of individuals who see through the toxicity of religion's influence on the instruments of government). I often have to cogitate on this inconsistency in liberal social politics just to prevent myself from being wooed by its venial charms.

Rightness (to pursue Paine's point) grants a cause the privilege of throwing the burden of proving its wrongness on those who are in the protesting minority. The minority, in the case of gay marriage, is the Left. Excellent arguments exist for the government's involvement in the eradication of inequal rights between blacks and whites at a time when the majority of Americans felt that segregation was just fine. I accept that an injustice of the majority can deprive a group of native and incontestable rights, and that the judicial system, in concert with evolving legislature eventually remedies its widespread application.

But what is native and incontestable about marriage? Marriage is of importance only for the following reasons:

It affords legal protections to those who are legally permitted to practice it.
It confounds ordinary social contracts with religio-political artifice.

I addressed legal protections when I talked about the wrongness of government meddling in marriage contracts. Queers simply want the wrongness applied to them as well. We (queers) used to just fight for equality based on basics. Marriage is not basic. It is the contract two emotional, sometimes irrational people enjoy to celebrate their union. Pretty straightforward. That ceremony, even among the non-religious, is often studded with spiritual importance and court frippery, all of which prove some sort of "traditionalist" case for institutional sanctity and empty-headed protections.

Two people can and often do enjoy fully loving, legally protected lives together without any conformance to government specifications. Social contracts are at the heart of civil society and, as such, deserve revolutionary defense against the political pathogens that lead to such a ridiculous waste of time and energy as gay marriage and all its electoral ephemera.

If the fight is about equal protection under the law, then gay rights' nemeses (or a Court that finds decisively against them) will have to be convinced, which they have proven staunchly that they won't be. Under our current system, this will require courts, then legislators, then citizens -- yet again -- to wrangle over the issue. Californians are free to rewrite their Constitution long after they've run out of toilet paper, which suggests that the fight in California will not resolve soon. I will watch with interest as the courts figure out how California's new constitutional amendment shakes hands with the fed's presumably stronger 14th amendment. Perhaps I'm just stupid, and the left has been plotting all along to force the U.S. Supreme Court to yield the legal seed that grows into the weed that chokes the life out of the Marriage State.

If the fight involves secularizing traditional marriage so that, counter-intuitively, marriage includes unions that are anathema to religious traditionalists, then queers who care about this are guilty of shoving their norms onto a group that already has its immutable own. That fight will be long, ugly, and inconclusive. The idea of queers telling others how they should define their ridiculous affairs disgusts me.

Gay marriage. The oxymoron that does not admirably comport itself. Irony and embarrassment abound, especially when even the lowly San Francisco Chronicle acknowledges just how cocky and lazy gay-marriage activists were: "The national round of rallies and marches show a fervor and enthusiasm that was missing during much of the Prop. 8 campaign, when overconfident opponents of the same-sex marriage ban were shocked by their defeat."

SPOCK 2.0

2008-11-12T22:40:00.000-08:00

One of my childhood idols is back...and hotter than ever. Let the foaming of the mouths begin.

BANJO JESUS

2008-11-05T15:35:00.000-08:00

Today was my last day in Branson, MO (trust me, 2 days is enough). As my previous post tries to demonstrate, it was, if nothing else, a superior sociological quickie.

Grandma sent me off in style. After a visit to Wal-Mart, she took me to lunch at Shoney's, where she splurged for the $7.99 lunch buffet, replete with fried everything, loads of grease, and iceberg lettuce, diced ham, and Lucerne grated cheese on the salad bar. Oh, I forgot the runny pudding, strange pink custard matter, slouching strawberries, and pears in syrup. Right out of a Del Monte can.

As we ate, I noted the sea of white-haired heads all around us. Not only patrons, but wait staff. The 70-year-old woman shoving one of those powerless vacuums around, the kind that picks up precisely 20% of what it tries to pick up. The clearly inbred couple and their strange Damien child (this sounds like hyperbole, so let me rephrase: The couple with close-set eyes, slightly unnatural bodies, slurred speech, and more than a bit of mouth-breathing and their child, with skin like paraffin, hair like fine seaweed, and, well, eyes like Damien, the scion of Satan). More cholesterol-ridden, cellulite-paneled fat than Richard Simmons' entire client list.

You get the picture. It is not retouched.

Suddenly, there came to my ears the sound of a string instrument: the twang of a guitar, something of a banjo, was that a violin in there, too? I turned to see a group of performers (remember, we are at Shoney's, the poor man's Denny's) standing in the aisle between tables packed with old people.

At first, I recoiled, but then I looked at their faces. Beatific, smiling faces ranging from a young boy, maybe 13, to a middle-aged man, maybe 55. Between them were several other children, all teenagers, about three boys from 15 to 18, and a couple of girls. They all held instruments, but what was astonishing about them, aside from their extraordinary beauty, was their physical similarity to each other. You could have separated any one of them from the rest and identified the whole lot from one specimen. Like Osmonds. Or Jacksons. Baldwins, even, but without all the manly hair.

And then they played. I expected the worst, but slowly lowered my fork as this angelic choir launched into a harmonious mix of vocals and strings, all rooted in soft bluegrass. My meal forgotten, my grandmother forgotten, I became lost, if only for moments, in the gorgeousness of their song.

I'm pretty sure it is the confluence of their familial similarity, their skill with strings, their voices, and their inarguable beauty that struck me so hard. Here, at Shoney's, the Von Trapps themselves, but with banjos!

After telling my grandmother that I hated country music (this genetic stanza before me was vaguely country music) and that I hated the harsh, bang-y twang of the banjo, I added that I loved what I was hearing. How calming, how soothing, how tonally perfect. Why were they in Branson? Why had no one ever heard of them? Were they Osmonds for the 21st C.?

Perhaps I shouldn't have asked. I quickly learned that they are the Wissmann Family. They hail from Nebraska. Mr. and Mrs. W have 13 children ages 2 - 26. All told, they play 15 instruments, including harp, piano, and steel guitar. The children are home schooled (which, for a moment, made me love them more).

But nature demonstrates over and over again that the lure of beauty is often a mask for poison. Here is a quote from the Wissman flyer: "Their tight vocal harmonies and bluegrass instruments provide a powerful showcase for their close family relationships and love for Jesus Christ."

I wish there was a written analog for the sound of gross disappointment.

To Grandma, I said, "Oh, so they're into Jesus."

She smiled that strangely discomfiting smile of hers and replied, "That's how you make it in Branson."

View their beauty (and virtue, and theme bible passages, and provincial aspirations) here.

NOTES FROM BRANSON

2008-11-04T20:25:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting in my grandmother's living room in Branson, MO, trying to stay awake during my usual mid-afternoon nap slump. Grandma is napping in stereo; she's directing people to do her bidding, something to do with shoes, I'm trying not to listen lest I hear something scandalous from her 85 years of memories.

I'm on the old-lady couch, she's in the old-lady La-Z-Boy. A fan whirs in the background. Her 50-year-old clocks ticks across the room. On the enamel white TV in front of us is the Oprah show, her pre-election special. Oprah, as Oprah does, is touting the virtues and power of ordinary humans, in this case Americans; a 109-year-old black woman who turned 21 when voting rights were extended to women, but who sat on the sidelines 45 years, waiting for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 so that she could finally participate in the democratic process; an Iranian woman, a Rwandan woman, a Russian woman, and others who just became citizens and who are voting for the first time.

Typically of Oprah, it's all very emotional, with lots of cheering and tears and theme t-shirts on which you'll find statements like vote for change, vote for dreams, vote for peace, vote for happiness. There's no mention of candidates, which is refreshing. No, Oprah is celebrating the power of the voter and has no patience for those who choose to ignore that critical right ("Turn off your TV right now," she commands, "and go vote!"). I'm not sure what voting for dreams has to do with anything, but that's just typical of the strange fantasy land into which America has slid.

Voting for dreams is one step less practical than voting for jobs. How, exactly, one votes for jobs is unknown and just as irrational as voting for dreams, but the latter at least makes us feel good about ourselves. We may not be able to grasp the labyrinthine plumbing of federal government, but boy, dreams, now that's something everyone understands.

Earlier today, as Grandma and I were running errands, we passed numerous McCain supporters. They were typical of the kinds of small-town conservatives in their ridiculous attire: pins, flags, buttons, clown hats, and badly drawn placards such as "I am Joe the Plumber" and "God is watching, vote McCain." They were old, these supporters, and were often stationed near churches, which in Branson outnumber gas stations, fast-food joints, and country-western palaces.

On the telly, they just ran an ad for "Hitched and Happy; relationship tools for good old boys." It's a marriage and relationship education site for, well, you get the picture.

Am I in hell? Not really. Although this is an epicenter for God and Guns, where the incidence of military conscription is high because economic opportunity and diversity are low, the people all smile and wave or say hello, particularly the old ones, who were raised to be courteous. It reminds me of the friendliness of New Zealanders, to give Branson credit, and reminds me once again how surly and rude San Franciscans are. Your city has a problem when it can't even compete with a conservative Christian town of 6,000 for basic human decency.

Grandma and I have had some lively conversations about politics. She is, of course, a church-going conservative Republican who dislikes John McCain, but who voted for him because she has to (and is constitutionally incapable of voting for a liberal). She picked up the book I brought with me: What it Means to be a Libertarian, by Charles Murray. I've read it before, but wanted to read it again to celebrate my abandonment of the American Janus Party.

She asked me to articulate what libertarians stand for, which I happily proceeded to do. During our discussion, I began to realize how ignorant my grandmother is about issues I take for granted. She believes in the separation of church and state (to be exact, she agreed vociferously when I said it's unconstitutional and inappropriate for religious organizations to take tax dollars to further their causes), but she had no idea that Bush used his executive-order power to establish an office of faith-based initiatives. She didn't even know what a faith-based initiative is until I explained it to her. Neither did she know or understand that Bush violated the Constitution when he waged war against Iraq without Congressional approval.

Despite her white-trash upbringing, I don't think there's anything unusual about my grandmother. She's not a recluse and she's certainly not stupid. Incurious, yes, but far from stupid (she was the first woman in her family to read classic literature: Steinbeck and Faulkner, for instance). The gravity of egregious federal activities just don't seem to trickle down to her through the filter of TV news, the intellectual low to which, in torpid retirement, she has sunk. She has exposure only to other people who have approximately the same level of interest in and knowledge of American government. In this, she must, I believe, be relatively typical of the non-urban, working-class individual with nominal education and a largely unreasoning impulse to participate in democracy as she understands it.

Grandma is talking in her sleep again: "I told him I thought he was an undertaker, but he said, 'No, my mom is an undertaker.'"

[interlude]

Grandma and I just got back from the house of her friend Violet. I did not want to go, but it wasn't worth the resistance. Vi is a very nice woman, but being surrounded by her, Grandma, and Vi's niece Betty was like smothering in old lady thighs. Talk, talk, talk, nosiness beyond belief, more details about doctors, healthcare systems, broken bones, wrinkles. My patience for politically and culturally myopic old people is nearing its end.

I kept my composure when Betty, who is from Fairbanks, AK, leaned forward in her chair during our talk of the election and, eyes narrowed while she forced a smile, crowed, "What are you, a Democrat?"

"No, I'm a Libertarian."

"A what?"

"A Libertarian."

"Oh, yeah, who was their candidate? Ron Barr?"

"Bob Barr is their candidate. But it doesn't matter. I voted for Ron Paul."

"Oh, he's big in Texas."

Sigh.

Branson. I hate this place. Despite its courteous people, I loathe everything it stands for. God delusions, small-mindedness, antique propriety, and, most loathsome, ignorance. Willful ignorance.

Grandma just turned to me and said, "Another thing we voted for [in Missouri] is language. What the language gets to be. Some people, those people, they want, um, another language, but we have an official language, or should have an official language." Perfectly timed beat. "If we went to France, we wouldn't get to force English on 'em."

We? I wasn't sure whether she meant Grandma and Andrew "we" or U.S. armed forces "we."

10:20 PM Central Time

I'll close this post by saying only that my grandmother is sitting beside me as John McCain concedes. She is in utter silence. It was as a foregone conclusion to her, she knew it was coming. She has nothing to say, and that makes me feel free, if only for a moment, from the intellectual and ideological assault of her dinosaur ways.

PS: In reading the above, I realize that I am hard on my grandmother. She deserves it. She's two-faced, gossipy, judgmental, and sneaky. However, to give her her due, she is a fighter and survivor and deserves my respect for having lived through decades serving the masters of misfortune. She's a lonely, distrustful woman and can be given slack for all the icky character traits this produces. If I can learn anything from her, it is that you stick to your guns (!) and never compromise your morals...even if they are eminently distasteful. Oh, and being incredibly cheap means that you will never run out of money.

THE APOSTLE LESTAT?

2008-10-31T17:44:00.000-07:00

I always knew Anne Rice's fiction was florid overrated nonsense, but I never, in my wildest dreams, suspected the author herself was a fool.

What's next, J.K. Rowling for Islam? Torah readings by Stephen King?

AT LAST, ELECTION PEACE

2008-10-29T17:01:00.000-07:00

Anybody reading this blog knows I'm a left-leaning libertarian and that, despite my contributions to and primary-election support for Barack Obama, I've now abandoned him because of his post-primary decisions to support FISA and conditionally embrace Bush's faith-based initiatives. And because -- as much as I like and admire him -- he is a textbook tax-and-spend liberal.

Because I'll be traveling on election day, I went the mail-in route for the first time. Nearly two weeks ago, I filled out all but the presidential slot on the ballots. I had been waiting for the local elections office to post so-called authorized write-in candidates for the presidential post.

Although Bob Barr is running on the Libertarian Party ticket, I couldn't vote for him because of this. McCain and his monumentally dysfunctional GOP are a non-starter.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered here that Ron Paul was recognized in California as a presidential candidate. Ron Paul, although on paper a Republican, has been one of the most consistent advocates of smaller government, the elimination of government waste, and hewing to core Constitutional definitions for governance.

I am thrilled that this long and distasteful presidential campaign has ended in a triumph of personal ideology for me. I didn't have to hold my nose to cast that vote. I didn't have to agonize over personalities, my disgust with both major parties, or social calculus related to the opportunities or damage either candidate could wreak in the coming administration.

I don't believe in voting for the lesser of two evils. I don't believe in wasting my precious right to vote on people who don't meet the simplest ideological litmus test for responsible and limited government. And I certainly don't believe in reinforcing America's bland, homogeneous 2-party system.

So, Ron Paul, congratulations. And thanks, by your involvement, for giving me election peace at last.

PAUL KRUGMAN IS A BIG FAT LIBERAL

2008-10-18T18:13:00.000-07:00

I guess that winning the Nobel for Economics means you get to idiotically offer economic advice that is rooted in ideology rather than fiscal responsibility.

In his latest tedious op-ed, Mr. Nobel says to hell with deficits and spending freezes. Being responsible about the future, anticipating the threat a constant flow of increasing national debt poses, and cinching the U.S.'s completely unbuckled belt are of no interest to Krugman, who, in the face of common sense, feels that investing in notoriously protracted public works is part of a many-part plan to help the nonfinancial economy, his inelegant code, I think, for stuff that doesn't involves money, but that he nonetheless is qualified to talk about.

If you have an interest in economics and take the measure of Krugman's expertise based solely on his NY Times blatherings, you quickly realize that he can't describe an economic position without poisoning it with federal intervention. This is because he is a big fat liberal and big fat liberals long ago lost their credibility when it comes to separating economic problems from the government policies and machinations that, like oxygen to fire, fuel them. Instead, like a big fat liberal, he simply wants to spend more money. He's even bold enough to say the U.S. should do this even though it can't afford it, essentially dismissing any concern you might have about government's abysmal track record of fixing anything, let alone something as complex as the economy. Particularly when given the big, broad crayons Krugman apparently likes to play with.

His adoration of the Swedish model becomes clearer and clearer every time he talks about our problem. Krugman's unfortunate and widely celebrated world view, like those of so many big fat liberals, is a brick in the road to, if not socialism, then certainly auto-nationalism. Auto-nationalism I'll define as deference to the idea that government is the first and wisest actor in a play about triumph over adversity. Auto-nationalism would not be the same as the U.S. taking control of the railroad system -- that was a well-laid plan, so to speak. No, auto-nationalism is the idea that no greater power exists than the federal government and that it has unlimited authority and capacity for solving anything...so why shouldn't it?

I may have only a Webelos activity badge to represent my intimidating fluency with economics, but I'll take that over Krugman's Nobel any day if it means keeping my wits about me.

SORRY, WARREN BUFFET...

2008-10-18T17:29:00.000-07:00

...but I beat you to it. And you're supposed to be so wicked smaht.

Oh, nice way to "interview" with Americans for the job of Treasury Secretary, especially all that 100% USA investment nonsense. The smart investor is looking at Chinese markets, too. You're dishonest not to talk about that.

TASMANIAN DEVILRY

2008-10-16T15:44:00.000-07:00

I learned many months ago about devil facial tumor disease, or DFTD, a infectious cancer that is wiping out the Tasmanian Devil population so rampantly and dramatically that in only 12 years, the devil population has shrunk anywhere from 62% to 95%. That's roughly 170,000 scrappy little devils in the early 1990s to anywhere from 40,000-70,000 today. The infectious cancer is thought to be so virulent that devils could be extinct in little more than a decade.

As sexy evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson points out in her NY Times science column, there is room for concern (not of the shrill apocalyptic sort, but of the "wow, there's so much we don't understand" sort).

Devils are a homogeneous species, having evolved on remote Tasmania after the sea claimed the land bridge that connected it to Australia. While it shared that island for a (modern) time with the Tasmanian Tiger (Thylacine), it survived while the Tiger went extinct, probably in the first half of the 20th century (none of these gorgeous Tigers -- marsupials, actually -- has been spotted since the 1930s).

Judson is concerned primarily with the reasons for and implications of transmissible cancers, at both the devil, human, and entire biological levels. As she points out, devils transmit their cancer to each other in a way that is not possible in humans (with the rare exceptions of in utero transmission or instances of sexually transmitted human papilloma virus). She uses the alarming example of kissing a person with throat cancer and then getting throat cancer.

What interests me, however, is the micro-evolutionary adjustment devils seem to be making to counteract the cataclysmic plunge in their survival rates. Of course, they don't make this adjustment consciously, nor can the behavior I'm about to describe technically be called evolution since evolution, by definition, occurs at glacial paces across mostly unfathomable spans of time.

In a nutshell, devil females breed at ages 3-4. Since many infected females aren't living that long, thanks to the cancer, they are now starting to breed at 1 year of age. Natural selection favors adaptation. As Richard Dawkins points out in The Blind Watchmaker, the cheetah who evolves to run faster meets the antelope who evolves to more quickly escape him. Antelopes that do not increase their speed over time perish and their slow genes do not survive the selection process.

The question is, are we witnessing a sped-up version of adaptation in Tasmanian devils? In only 12 years, they have modified their reproductive behaviors to account for their retarded life spans. Twelve years! In evolutionary time, that's an angstrom-wide appointment on a mile-wide calendar.

Whether this is evolution in accelerated action or not, the more interesting question is whether it will work. More species have gone extinct in Earth's history than all the combined extant species multiplied by a large number. We don't have a lot of modern empirical data to clue us into what's happening to the devils -- many of the species we watch disappear do so related to changes or reductions in their physical environment. To watch a species expire because of an infectious disease apparently is rare.

Is it possible that certain homogeneous animals, gripped by a fatal mutation, experience accelerated evolution as a sort of death throe? How many times has this happened before? And if it's happened before, did the radical changes to reproductive behavior ever succeed? Could the devils save themselves simply by breeding more quickly and in greater numbers in the same way we "chicken-soup" ourselves through a devastating cold? Although there's science behind it, can you really explain why you feel better, when sick, after a hot bowl of chicken soup? You are acculturated to accept it on instinct that chicken soup helps get you past the misery.

Extrapolate this out to the devils and wonder if a confluence of devil disposition, immunological reaction, and genetic imperatives for survival are making a mad dash to cross the finish line before the death rate trumps the statistical likelihood that the Tasmanian devil can avoid extinction.