Which Cup Is the Old Bean Under?
Last night I heard a front man for McCain bring out a pitch that’s making the rounds: Sure, McCain has had to court the extreme right in order to firm up his base, but maybe when he gets in, the old moderate McCain will reappear. This having-it-both-ways argument suggests an amazing basis for deciding one’s vote: Let’s hope that a man will betray his supporters, once he gets what he wants, and will then turn out to be on our side–and presumably won’t betray us. This probably doesn’t seem odd to Republicans, because their “faith” (all of it) is generated and sustained by public relations concerns. Their goal makes hucksters of them, and they long ago lost the ability to feel shame or a sense of accountability. Hence the ease with which they can argue: “My party screwed everything up over the last eight years…and that’s why we are the ones who can and should be given the chance to make repairs” and “I’m a Washington outsider who has worked in Washington for twenty-six years–but I’m ready, now, to jump in there and pull the rug out from under all those people I have worked with.”
At every turn, McCain demonstrates the ways in which democracy may be destroyed from within. And once this process is set in motion, simple honesty, by itself, is at best an experimental chemotherapy.
Lovely Moth
I saw this creature out back today. Haven’t looked it up yet to see what it’s called.
Beauty Question
I keep hearing people say that Sarah Palin is good looking. Do they mean now? And compared to what–John McCain? Jesus, maybe I need new lenses, but she doesn’t do it for me. I just can’t get past thoughts of dog sleds I guess. And here’s another question: how much of the way a person is (voice, laugh, intellect, and so on) tends to interfere in a serious way with what your eyes are telling you about a person’s beauty? I have to say that sort of thing comes into play for me big time. I have a really hard time thinking, for instance, that anybody who decided to be a Republican could be beautiful. When I think of Laura Bush, for instance, I think of those standing signs with a slot that one rests one’s chin in for the purposes of picture taking….
Coming Out the Nose
I just saw a TV ad for Flomax that noted possible side effects of “runny nose and a decrease in semen.”
What Cindy Just Called Her
Alaskan King Cunt
Privacy Anywhere
In the car dealership’s crowded service waiting room today, a woman’s phone rang loudly. She was seated right next to a sign that asked people to please step out of the room to accept phone calls. But, she answered her phone loudly, and began to speak loudly:
“Oh hi it was me called Bob’s got a tumor behind his eye! … No they’re not going to take it out they say you do that it’s everywhere. … The shoes? Oh I got the beige ones if I had known about this I would’a got the blue….”
This went on for quite some time, and included lunch plans and much talk of other recent purchases. I considered writing a note to slip to her, asking her if the tumor was shaped, perhaps, like a cell phone.
Thinking Ahead
While watching the Olympics I noticed many ads featuring big winners of races–which of course had to have been made, along with others, far ahead of time. So I have decided to make some posts up ahead of time for possible outcomes of the presidential election. Here’s one I’ll run if McCain wins:
Fool me once: shame on you.
Fool me twice: shame on me.
Fool me three times: fuck me with a pile driver and tell me how useful I was.
Dear Clusterflock
Who is your favorite film villain?
Separate Ways
Do you ever see odd patterns of human behavior being repeated through the course of a day? Yesterday we emerged from a restaurant and saw two extended families milling about in front, taking leave of each other. Several of their kids were bouncing around in one of those roofless, open-sided jeeps, “driving” ferociously and standing to bounce in the seats. Then the families parted ways, and some of the kids left the jeep and went one way, some the other. Only then did we realize that–that wasn’t their jeep the kids had been playing in, it was just a big toy they had found in the parking lot. // Later, stopped at a red light, we saw a man and woman on bicycles stopped in the intersection, arguing. She got off, turned her bike around and headed back the way they had come, while he went on. But he looked back, so she won. // Close to home, by the liquor store we saw two attractive young women arguing vociferously at the mouth of an alley. One of them was wearing a cow costume, and the other was dressed in a more typical fashion. They, too, parted ways–the cow on the phone, apparently calling a cab. // Day two–the start of something new? This morning, at the cafe, I heard a man say: “I want what I always have and I don’t know what the hell it is.”
Odd Leads in the Paper this Morning
- Self-deportation didn’t work well
- In Nebraska, parents can desert teens
- Teenager with bullet in head cleared in assault
- Emotions high at summit
- Bigfoot’s a bust
- Mr. Sensitivity wears a badge
Cindy, on the Lam?
When I read that “two self-styled vigilantes against typos” had been repairing public signs, I had to give Cindy a hard look. Especially in view of the fact that they had “used a marker to cover an erroneous apostrophe, put the apostrophe in its proper place with white-out and added a comma.”
See the whole story here.
Skepticism Begins
Today Mia (she’s seven now) was looking at a Where’s Waldo book. When I told her that Waldo moves around inside the book when she closes it, she looked up at me, astonished at first–but then raised an eyebrow.
Next: Language
To combat a dearth of engineering students at the university level, the staff of Southern Methodist University’s Infinity Project sought to capture young minds early to engage them in a love of science and math.
I noticed this in today’s Dallas Morning News. And the title of the article? “To Infinity and Beyond.” I think SMU is ready for the Bush library.
Let’s See–How Many Houses?
In the news: “McCain not sure how many houses he and his wife own.”
So now, when he stumbles into the wrong one in the middle of the night, he’ll have a ready excuse.
Waste–a Novel by Eugene Marten–Is One You Need to Read
Many Flockers will know Eugene Marten’s work already, having seen it at elimae and elsewhere–or perhaps having had the great pleasure of reading his remarkable novel In the Blind ( Turtle Point Press, 2003). This short novel, Waste, which was the first of his longer works I read, is now available from ellipsis press. I hope you will follow the link and read all of the praise this book has received. I just received two copies today and will soon be buying more to hand out all around.
Another Reason to Reconsider Living in Dallas
This has been much discussed in the Dallas Morning News recently:
Dallas public school students who flunk tests, blow off homework and miss assignment deadlines can make up the work without penalty, under new rules that have angered many teachers.
The new rules will be distributed when teachers return to their campuses next week. But many who have already seen the regulations say they are too lenient on slackers, and will come at the expense of kids who work hard.
For example, the new rules require teachers to accept late work and prevent them from penalizing students for missed deadlines. Homework grades that would drag down a student’s overall average will be thrown out.
I have taught at a university level for a number of years, and I have always tried to design courses and class policies that give students many ways to recover from poor efforts. The extra chances, though, still require that the work–and learning–actually gets done. But surely every teacher knows that you can’t tell students ahead of time that they will have many chances to do the work, since they will then simply not do it and blame their failings on a lack of structure and guidance. If students begin at the first grade level with such approaches in place, there will often be a good result. But suddenly dropping it all into a a middle and high school situation is just silly, in my view. And many people might be surprised to hear that a 50 is the lowest grade a student may receive in the DISD. So let’s all start the 100 meter sprint on the 50 meter line and then rewrite the world records. I often see the results of a failed education system when students appear in classes with a new-found desire to learn–and a shocked realization that it will be a struggle to complete the work. A complaint I have heard from some students, for instance, is that memorization is being required–when what they are actually speaking of is simple reading comprehension. If one reads a short story and then can’t remember who the characters are and what events caused them to act in significant ways, there is little chance that analysis and discussion will be useful. What is missing in the early education of many students is the understanding that there is no painless learning–unless one defines learning as a process of simply confirming what one already knows.
Dear Clusterflock
What super power would you choose for yourself? (And I don’t mean a nation.)
Comments on Commercials
- The TV ads in which a Chevy at a gas station is sabotaged by the pump hose were made by people who are much better at what they do than GM is.
- Every time I see the ExxonMobil commercial, in which a man with a short gray beard is suddenly buying mosquito nets for everybody in Africa (which is a good cause), I think of the mob giving money to the Catholic Church.
- When I see a John McCain commercial, I can’t imagine who wouldn’t think that it was a call to look for a person missing from a home.
So What Have Those Animals Done for Us Lately?
WASHINGTON - Parts of the Endangered Species Act may soon be extinct. The Bush administration wants federal agencies to decide for themselves whether highways, dams, mines and other construction projects might harm endangered animals and plants.
New regulations, which don’t require the approval of Congress, would reduce the mandatory, independent reviews government scientists have been performing for 35 years, according to a draft obtained by The Associated Press.
The draft rules also would bar federal agencies from assessing the emissions from projects that contribute to global warming and its effect on species and habitats.
Somehow it’s not surprising that those who show so little respect for human life (unless it’s unborn) would so blithely open the way for business interests to carry on with the “I’ll be dead by then” values that drive them. I suppose they feel they have now made some headway in conserving their right to lift the American economy, come Armageddon or high water. See here.
The Cover-up
Like Lena, our tabby is generous. Here I attempted to cover for him, since Cindy (who hadn’t visited the scene yet) doesn’t approve of such gifts. The colors streaming away are the remains of chalk drawings done on the front walk by Mia.
Apple Store
Went to the Apple store yesterday to get Cindy’s iPod Touch (gift certificate, generously given to her by her staff), which she wanted instead of the phone because she hates phones and the iPod, with wi-fi, lets her do everything she wants to do with such a thing. Jesus–what recession? That place was packed, like a trade show held in a one-room apartment. And everybody but me looked like they had lived in that place for so long–who wouldn’t know how it all works? It all went well though, and I got the Touch and a nice Italian leather case for it. On my way out I saw a woman with her sullen off-to-college-for-the-first-time son, and you wouldn’t believe the stuff she was piling up for him. MacAir, printer, stack of software, big monitor–and a load of all those little things mom would later have to buy again and stuff into his Christmas stocking because he lost them “outside somewhere.” I wanted to hang around to overhear the total, but it was enough to see that Mary Kay didn’t really give a shit how much it was. Strange feeling it all left me with. I like all that stuff too, but I kind of felt like I needed a shower.
Drawing of a Chicken that Is Not Growing
A work by Pinky Diablo, painted on the cover of an old book.
On John McCain’s Sucking Up to the Christian Right
I love the National Affairs articles in Rolling Stone Magazine, and Matt Taibbi’s “Without a Prayer” in the August 7th issue (1058) is splendid. Only in this magazine, it seems, do you find such fine paragraphs as this one, which describes the last administration and the very one that McCain would seek to continue:
This vision looked unstoppable for a while; there was a time in the early Bush years when this mean-spirited program of flag-waving, gun-toting biblical nationalism looked destined to become a kind of continental religion, a Church of America our missionaries would spread everywhere — and woe to those liberals and Frenchmen and other heretics who didn’t get with the program! Then we left them in office for a while, and it turned out that our would-be nationalist priests were totally stupid and completely incompetent at running anything at all, much less the world economy. And suddenly the red states stopped looking so much red as broke and fucked and responsible for a giant mess that even they didn’t pretend to know the way out of.
Big Waves
This news line just caught my attention: “Research finds deadly rogue waves can form from nothing.” Doesn’t this sound like a decidedly unscientific way to say this? A little philosophy is in order, perhaps. Also, it was not a big surprise that the issue of how this knowledge might be used to produce a weapon appears just a few lines into the article:
Deadly rogue waves 100 feet tall or higher could suddenly rise seemingly out of nowhere from the ocean, research now reveals.
Understanding how such monstrous waves form could lead to ways to predict when they might emerge or, potentially, even drive them at enemy vessels, scientists added.
Wonder who paid for that research?
Austin Handbill Culture
We are just back from two days in Austin–had a fine time. One of the many things we like about the place is the abundance of odd announcements pasted, taped, and pinned on windows, poles and message boards all over the place. There’s something about the sheer fecundity of it that speaks of life. For instance:
