THE SAGA CONTINUES . . .

OH, BLOGSHIT: January 2nd: Last Thoughts for the New Year; Time to Start a New File

Happy New Year. In Iraq, the "Insurgents" are threatening to kill anyone who votes in the new election. Meanwhile, the estimates of the required American troop strength by the eve of the elections-- and bear with me here, I'm dealing with estimates created by bullshit artists-- is 300,000.

During the ramp-up and subsequent commitment to this fucking war, I recall having had the self-same discussion with inumerable people: we didn't support the war, we didn't buy the rationale for it, but we felt it was incumbent on us to support our troops. A big part of this, and several of the conversants agreed herein, was easily accomplished: don't spit on our boys when they come back from service. This had to do with the shameful conduct of the "protesters" who took it upon themselves to show up at airports and heap invective upon the poor beleaguered bastards coming back from Vietnam. Now, hindsight being what it is, we now know that the soldiers are not to be blamed for the war, for they merely serve. Of course, that's a goddamned lie, but it's America's goddamned lie, and no one can take it away from us. And furthermore, given this particular war, you really do have to have some sympathy for our lads in camo: it is a stupid war, it is being stupidly waged against a tough, determined enemy who also happens to be largely insane and more than occasionally susicidal, and it is being waged in an environment that is both inhospitible and disappointingly unprofitable for the corporate entities that would have the most to gain from any positive outcome of the war. (This, I'm guessing, is a large part of why the "Insurgents" are so hostile: no pie, no slice. Grrrrr!)

So now the answer to all ills in Iraq is more American boys for the "Insurgents" to shoot at. To the tune of 300,000. Now, anyone used to my rhetoricalk style at this point might (MIGHT) guess that I'm about to say I no longer suppoirt our troops. Wrong. I fully and completely support our troops. I support our troops like crazy. No way would I not support our troops. I support our troops getting the fuck out of there. Listen: 150,000 troops stationed, outcome: they are attacked by "Insurgents" who then fade away into the shadows of the desert. 300,000 troops stationed, outcome: THEY WILL BE ATTACKED BY INSURGENTS WHO WILL THEN FADE INTO THE SHADOWS OF THE FUCKING DESERT. There is not now, nor has there ever been, any demonstrable fortune to this war. All there has been is the expenditure of blood and money. And I'm sorry, but you will have to do alot of arguing to convince me other than that it's time for us to get out of there. That way the "Insurgents" will have to behead their own people, instead of picking on foreign nationals or people that worked with the US occupational forces.

Oh. You might be curious as to why I'm referring to the Iraqi "Insurgents" in quotes like that. It's because, frankly, I'm confused as to why the Administration, military and media keep referring to them as "Insurgents." In the rest of the world, if I'm not mistaken, we usually just call them assholes.

On a lighter note, the file has again grown unweildy, so I will be practicing the standard online voodoo of archiving the entries for 2004 and creating a new fille for the entries for 2005. I feel rather good, not to say slightly giddy, for having waited until 2005 ticked by before doing this. So much time and attention is put into the cordoning off of the old year from the new that folks lose sight of what is actually important. I was gonna qualify that, but to hell with it; it's good a enough blanket statement, as these things go. Happy New Year!

THE GOOD, THE BLOG, & THE UGLY: Janvier 1: Happy Christmas, Merry New Year

You had to know that title gag was coming back eventually.

I just wanted to add the following program notes to the events of the year:

--after Christmas I went out and bought the Takamine 12 string I had been periodically tunbing and playing on dropping in at the Music & Arts store out at the U. After a number of variations, she has been officially named "Gracie The Spruce Goose whom Cayla Calls Takamine Taco." If that makes any senser to you at all, please seek professional help.

--The Wifey's Mini continues to be the bitchinest car on God's green earth. Depending on how employment prospects shake out next week-- the help desk gig ran out, so I'll shake down my consultantcy gurus for a new assignment-- I might roder one of my own. I'm down to thinking about whether I want a convertible or a standard.

Merry Chrtistmas and Happy New Year to all. You have everything you need. Send something to Thailand or India or Somalia. Doctors Without Borders is a good and safe bet.

BLOGGIFIED SANDWICH THEORY: December 30th: Adventures in Sandwichmaking

In trying to eat a monster sandwich I got at the Jason's Deli-- a chain, by the way, but it's hard to make deli sound honest, about which more in a moment--called the New York Yankee, which was corned beef and pastrami piled about four inches high between slices of rye bread, I began thinking about what might transpire if I tried to build the same kind of combo myself at home. There were 3 basic missteps in the making of the beast at Jason's (file these under Unified Sandwich Theory): 1. Meatball (the cold cuts were piled together in amass that was so dense it defeated the purpose of the rye bread, eg. to hold the thing together), 2. the cheese, which was a mild swiss, was cut in too large chunks (again defeating the rye), and 3. Uberstacking, producing a sandwich that is more difficult to consume than it is worth consuming (which I need to come up with some guidelines for, incidentally). The first half fell apart in the course of three ambitious bites, and when I too El Wiferino's advice and removed some layers of meat in an attempt to make the thing manageable, faults 1 & 2 came into play. I managed to consume about 80% of the sandwich before being left with mustardy crust, which wasn't bad in itself. We picked over the discarded meat on the plate until we were stated, and, of course, the Dr. Brown's Cream Soda came in a can.

The componentry, though, was intriguing: rye bread, mustard, cheese, corned beef & pastrami. So last weekend, on the usual grocery jaunt, I procured a quarter pound of the corned, same of pastrami, rye bread, and provalone. Given the weather (we've been in the midst of a cold snap), the only real option was to grill; I also got a head of Boston lettuce and a tomato, which ended up making a salad on the side (with pepper and Celtic sea salt, which YUM!), and once I had trimmed those out of the equation I ended up with this: two slices corned, two slices pastrami, two slices of prov (once on each side, between the meat and the bread, Grey Poupon on rye. The result was a very solid, substantial grilled sandwich; the absence of a veg was mitigated by the crispiness of the grilled rye. Another tack might be to add sauerkraut, which would probably require the addition of Russky dressing or some such, but the resulting vehicle didn't miss the kraut anyways.

The Jason's Deli we went to is a huge retail strip joint dolled up to look very much like the inside of a standard issue NYC delicatessen circa 1960-1974, only about two and a half times the size with supermarket-height ceilings. The place was mobbed; the tables were small, the line was set up assembly-style, and backups were handled via a sign-and-runner system; aside from the size and the ceilings, it was all pretty authentic. So the key would be the quality of food, right? Wrong. That's one of the things about deli: it's strictly a supply-side animal, and as long as you're getting good cold cuts and decent bread, the soup may as well come out of a #10 can. The next part of the equation is nothing but assembly: can they put together a good sandwich? Cursory exam leads me to think that the answer where Jason's is concerned is no. They subscribe to the practice of meat-balling, and although I thought I saw a couple of sandwiches there that were layered, I saw more that were meatballed, and so to Hell with them. Never mind that there is no Jason, or could be Jason but why the hell should I care, or whether they pay their people well or stock Dr. Brown's. They subscribe to meatballing, which, I'm told is all the rage in NYC, where stupid things are often all the rage,* and so to hell with them.

*Don't get me wrong: I love New York. I'm wearing the T shirt right now.

IT WAS IN HIS BLOG AND HIS BONES: December 27th: Of Poesy and Commerce

The shared experiences and world view notwithstanding, it is fairly common for me to use this space to respond to Doc Nagel's blogs. There's a very good reason for that: very often I read the Doc's blog on the way to updating my own.

Why? Some sort of sycophantic relationship? Some sort of bizarre heirarchy? Some sort of paid endorsement or other consideration? None of the above. It just happens that we tend to think about the same things alot.

Like shopping.

When we were in college together, I managed to slide into a Major Fig in Phil (have you met Phil?) class, more or less at the then-to-be-Doc's suggestion. The Maj Fig that year, it so happened, was Marx, and the professor teaching the course-- or, actually, they called it "leading," I think, because it wasn't a course, it was a "seminar," which had to do partly with the way I was allowed in as I wasn't a Phil major (how is Phil, anyways?) and I didn't even remotely have a pre-reqs-- was Bill Gay. Now, given my own tendency to conflate for the sake of intellectual exploration, and Bill's tendency-- and I know he'd disagree with this-- to conflate for the sake of argumentation, things got very interesting very fast. The major conclusion I reached was that Marx was right about a great deal, and that it was because he was so right about so much that he eventually was made to be wrong about a great deal. The dawn of the Industrial Age, coming as it did on the heels of the Age of Imperialism, was rife with cruelty, people were treated as machinery, not to say cattle, and if life continued to suck the way it was sucking, it wasn't out of the realm of possibility that the peasants might revolt against their oppressors-- or perhaps even should revolt, as a moral imperative in reaction to their inhumane living conditions. Fortunately, this was pretty widely recognized, and through a combination of social activism and social evolution things got better over time, so by the time Marx started to get applied to ideology in a widespread manner, Marx was wrong. Or that was my take on it anyways.

In the years interveneing, the Doc and I have taken to what we call Social Critiquing, which is a high falutin' way of saying we go smart-assing about whenever we get the opportunity. One trip we made while he was out visiting, for example, started at the Lost Target of Roi Rama, where we examined products of their non-design-design line, then proceeded to Pottery Barn, which in addition to giving us exposure to the moveable obscenity that is South Park Mall,* gave us an opportunity to compare the knock-offs to the knock-offs of the knock-offs, as well as to engage in a running gag that consinues to this day, which is to hold up a flower vase in an appreciatively evaluatory manner and declare "Now THAT's a beer glass." What, precisely, that has to do with having taken a course in Marx, I am honestly not sure.

This self-same impulse lead us to a discussion of how the environment inside a grocery store leads people to act differently, which lead us to a discussion of retail environs in general, which lead, eventually, to the proposal for and then writing of a piece on the phenomenology of retail shopping which was published by the online Journal of Mundane Behavior. Which was fun. And now, as it turns out, the self-same impulse has lead my erstwhile pal to rain on my parade, trod on my tootsies, and otherwise piss in my grits, although dauntless he didn't mean to.

Some years ago I did a one-off poem entitled At a Mall in Scranton, PA. On one level, as the "What It's About" entry claims, it was a reaction to the place itself, all in good fun. (And really, how often do you get a chance to refer to Ferlinghetti as a Wop? And really, how often is often enough?) But on another level I meant it to be kind of a metaphoric description of the whole retail shopping environment, and in it's way it has served as an unofficial ramp-up to a project I had begun thinking about the previous year, during a shopping venture with my wife's family at the height of the Christmas shopping season. It was to be called "Stopping by Wal-Mart on a Snowy Evening."

And now, this.

*South Park Mall has been a consant in my life, as it is for many Charlotteans, pretty much my whole life. It's the Mall of the Rich in my town; it has never had fully adequate parking, the traffic surrounding it has always been terrible, and you can buy ordinary things at extraordinary prices. At the time of the Doc's visit documented here, the thing had gone into stasis, but now it's been expanded again, so now it's really ridiculously crowded and overpriced!

YOU CAN LEAD A HORSE TO BLOGGER: December 23rd: Please Forgive My Lingering Absence

Not that anyone's complained. But with the ongoing rigors of the help desk gig, they Wifey's recent purchase of a Mini Cooper (yellow with black trim, thusly named Frau Hummel), and the frantic juggling that is an integral part of the holiday season in America, I really haven't had alot to say. Except that we recently borrowed, then purchased, and serially watched the entirety of Joss Wheedon't Firefly series, with the result that I am now convinced, forever and irrevocably, that all television executives must first undergo procedure for labotomy. They shouldn't have fiddled with it, the shouldn't have cut it anywhere, and they sure as hell shouldn't have cancelled the series. What a fun bunch of stuff.

BLOG DAY AFTERNOON: December 4th: Consternations, Uproar!

In my youth, specifically in my teens, while I was attending a summeritme debate camp at UNC, I heard an unkindness spoke that shocked me to my core. A debate guru, annoyed by an extention string attached to a pull-down map of the world, announced "I'm gonna fuck up some short little professor," then flicked the extension up over the top of the map's frame. Now, granted, this was in my pre-college days, before I learned some of the more universal truths of academia, eg. sometimes short little professors deserve a little fucking up, and the more arbitrary the better, but at the time I thought it was just mean. Most of the rest of the debators assembled laughed, and I didn't say anything, but I just imagined that poor short professor, needing to describe the Huns' progress across Northern Spain, staring up at the curlicued cheat-string and debating whether to ask the basketball player in the second row for a little assistance.

Why this comes up this morning is a bit of a mystery to me. It comes in concordance with a local controversy: County Commissioner and self-appointed Asshole-In-Chief Bill James earlier this week unleashed fury in the form of a missive declaring that our local school system is responsible for the sad state of urban black because it keeps them in, in his words, a moral sewer.

Never mind that the sewer has nothing to do with morality, nor that the sewer is maintained by the city's Housing Authority, not the school system, and never mind that the city itself takes up the rent from the sewer, and never mind that the city has three times-- just recently-- sold the sewer off to the highest bidder, only to have the winner refuse delivery, and never mind that the city maintains, by the very nature of it's heirarchy and bureaucracy, the illusion that such a sewer is an absolute natural necessity, a thing of actual physical necessity, as if affluence, like water, sought its own level and sumps were necessary to preserve the purity of the potable portions, and even though, for the price of his own election campaign, James easily could have renovated, even eliminated, the sewer itself, and never mind that sewer is not to blame for being a sewer, and never mind that the people who live in the sewer are not the people who made it a sewer, and never mind that the people who claim the sewer stinks are the people who never EVER go anywhere near the sewer. Never mind any of that.

The hard truth I learned in college was that sometimes the short little professor runs out of truth and starts distributing bullshit, and that sometimes the bullshit proves to be so popular that the short little professor stops distributing truth altogether in favor of spewing bullshit. Bill James was elected to office by people who wanted his particular brand of bullshit spewed, people who need the scales forcibly ripped from their eyes. Please, people: somebody, anybody; this short little professor needs to be fucked up.

BLOGS OF YESTERYEAR: December 3rd: Cripes

The Merriam-Webster Online people have declared that the most looked-up word for 2004 is the word "blog." That little factoid was on the ticker on CNN as I rounded the corner into the Ops area earlier today, and I blurted out "Oh, no way!"

Rich, the Ops-Chieftan-Guy, asked what I was reacting to. The item had dropped off the ticker, so I explained: the M-W people claim the most looked up word this year was "blog." "I don't believe it," I said. "That has to be rigged." Rich thought that was funny as hell. But I was in earnest. Some twerp out there thought it would boost M-W's reputation and street cred if they declared that a cool, hip new term like "blog" was the most referenced word of the year. What with the election and all, you know. Like many such marketing-oriented ventures, the necessity of creating and maintaining "buzz" supercedes the delivery of any real substance or value; therefore any information, however specious or misleading, is good in of the fact that it might generate "buzz."

Ironically, the net effect of this kind of practice is to denigrate the perception of the reliability of the actual product, and by extension the perception of the reliability of similar products, eg. all web dictionaries are unreliable. Brought to you by the fine folks at Merriam-Webster!(TM)

ONCE AROUND THE BLOG: November 30th: Observation, Rehabing the House

Dan Rather is a cut-rate Hunter S. Thompson. Or at least he tried to be.

Plenty of times, things work out badly because people try too hard. The above may be one example, but I really don't want to talk about it.In the first place, enough gets said about Dan's bizarre behavior and syntactic predilictions as it is now. And second, I'm already on record about the man. Res ipsa loquitur, as it were. But what I do feel like discussing, though, is the recent film "Christmas with the Kranks."

Now, I'm not going to pretend that the flick is not getting enough of a drubbing in the press, because it is, and I'm not going to suggest that all of the critical responses are fair, because some of them aren't. But what seems perfectly obvious to me is one thing that the critics seem to be missing. Now, I haven't read the book-- Skipping Christmas by John Grisham-- and I haven't seen the movie, but very clearly some folks tried waaaaaaay too hard to make this thing funny. I sincerely doubt that Grisham had bo-tox gags or tanning bed hijinks in his book; just doesn't seem like his sort of thing. And he probably didn't have Dan Akroyd doing his full-on manic bit in mind as one of the characters (make that ANY of the characters*). On the other hand, again, not having read the book, I imagine that the plot as Grisham seems to have imagined it would have made an interesting film. A couple has sent their only daughter off for a stint in the Peace Corps, and they figure that since she won't be around, they're better off saving money and skipping Christmas (thus the title). Unfortunately for them, they had celebrated Christmas ornately and with gusto in years previous, and the neighborhood pressure turns the whole thing into a kind of low-level war of attrition. It's an amusing enough concept, if, like most Grisham works, operating at at least one remove from reality, and it could have made an amusing movie. But the folks in Hollywood figured they had to turn it into a blockbuster, so they upped the wattage and turned the thing into a mean-spirited and schizophrenic farce.

*Don't get me wrong; I love Mad Danny, and I will, and have, watched damned near anything he's in.

YOU DON'T NEED A WEATHERMAN TO SEE WHICH WAY THE WIND BLOGS: November 21st: Specious Observations, Lunch

I am trying to remain optimistic, but it's difficult. Although I was able to helpfully point out that the elections results, with the highest voter turnout in history leading to a 51% to 49% victory for Dick Cheney, proves only that roughly half of our concerned citizens are assholes, I had a slightly harder time this past week, as the Admin traded players in the standard pre-second-term shake-up. On the one hand, it is standard practice: the people you hire on for the first term are there, mostly, to make sure your admin is in good running shape for a second term.* But this time, there were bits that were a shade too forboding to shrug off. The most obvious is Colin Powell stepping down and Condescension Rice being elevated to his place. I hope that sounds sexist to you, because it's about to get a whole lot nastier.

While the nation breathed a helpful sigh of "Oh, good, it's a black woman" relief when Bush appointed her as Chief Ass Sniffer at the beginning of his first term of illness, others among us, who were actually paying attention at the time, felt an acute sense of dissociation accompanied by a chill in the bowels. This lying bitch was clearly up to no good. Fortunately, she was in a position where all she could do was tell lies, something she does badly, or at least as badly as a relatively stupid eighth grader. But last time she was mainly lying to the people who run the weekend news shows, and they are mainly too dumb to know they are being lied to (except Tim Russert~) or too timid to give even the merest hint they know they are being lied to (except Tim Russert~). This time she is being put in a position where it will be incumbent upon her to lie to, variously, the UN, France, Germany, and Saudi Arabia. Now, the UN, as a collective, may be indifferent to liars, but France and Germany have made it a point to keep in reserve Amrica's lies for use as international leverage. And the Saudis, well, they are considered pros, and they take offense to bad lying, which is probably why we got clobbered by a bunch of their ex-pat tools three years ago (unless you believe all the Al-Queda bullshit, in which case you believe that liars are right about what the lying liars are saying about the bullshit artists, and if you're that dumb you probably think Dan Rather is a commie tool). (Of course, there are people out there who insist Osama bin Laden is still on the CIA payroll. Nothing to do with FEEBLE.)

Which is not to predict that she is about to get our country in a bunch of shit. It's just to admit that it's just so goddamned embarassing. I'd hate to think that anybody in the world might think that that rotten bitch represents my country in any way. At least when Dick Cheney lies he sounds as if he's convinced himself, at least. But, alas, he was checked into the hospital again last week, again with the heart problems, once again putting W naught but a slight heartbeat away from the Presidency.+

Anyways, I'm not going to let it bother me today. We have a glorious Fall day out there, and my plan is to roam about the countryside tra-la. I have a few chores to look after in advance of our Thanksgiving trip to Florida, which promises to be thankless for reasons I don't wish to go into as of even date, and in the mix somewhere there is the promise fo a lunch out. And this time, being as I stayed in convalescing yesterday eveing while my wife went out to dinner with her parents-- I was doging a cold, which I seem to have eluded-- I will likely have my pick of the joint, which equals even more roaming about the countryside tra-la. Go ahead, Condescension Rice. Try and stop me!

*Although it never is, but that has nothing to do with the Admin winning a second term. Oddly.

~I was gonna say Jon Stewart, but he's obviously exempted-- his show runs on weeknights.

+I was gonna make a remark about having enough pianists in the White House, but it seemed both too easy and not as funny as when it involved Miles Davis' bandmates. (Miles was obviously abusing his pianist on several recordings.)

ONCE MORE INTO THE BLOG, DEAR FRIENDS: November 4th: The Election

"America is trapped in an abusive relationship." --Doc Nagel
"Americans are being spoon fed homogenised popular culture." --my erstwhile* internet pal Meryn Beattie (*at least until after she gets my last reply)

Meryn wasn't actually talking about the election, but she might as well have been. In the days ramping up to the election, alot of Americans traded concerns about the aftermath, chiefly that we dreaded a repeat of 2000. Not that Bush would be elected, or even "elected," but that we would once again be treated to the succulent view of the seamy underbelly of the American political machine, eg. those who count the votes. The last time that happened, the few of us who didn't sink into an unshakable state of denial came to the sinking conclusion that the people who are responsible for counting the votes that determine the fate of the most powerful country on the face of the earth are stoooooooooooopid.

I can't speak for the rest, but what I really dreaded was the hand-wringing and commiserating and bullshit that was undoubtedly going to follow Bush's marginal victory. He won by a stinking sliver, and everyone is certain that it brands America as a nation of assholes and the hoodwinked. Kerry conceded, and a few of us have concluded that it was the right thing for him to do, because it precluded some possible histrionics. But, as I pointed out, a concession is not a vote count, and could easily be retracted if the final vote count came down in Kerry's favor. That was a neat little piece of self-deception in itself. As was the observation, widely voiced, that this year's election produced a massive turnout, and that was a GOOD thing. (Both sides made up thier various specious reasons as to why a big turnout was good. I made up my own as well.) In the end, it turns out that a divisive campaign is a divisive campaign: record turnout, Bush won 51% to 49%.

And the hand-wringing and commiseration may now commence. But please, don't show us the vote counters.

But my point here is that this election, no matter what anybody says, is no more or less moral or ethical than any other presidential election in the history of America, and it isn't the first time we've elected an idiot to the post (remember Reagan?). The closest thing to a fair election we've ever had, as far as I know, is when Carter beat Ford. That election was alot like watching the fight routine between Harpo and Chico Marx in "Duck Soup." At least it was a fair match.

The Presidency has always been for sale, has always been more about influence than power. And there isn't any way Bush the Second is our most criminal president. That, again, would be Reagan, but that credits his cabinet, really. Next to him there's Nixon, and I'm not even talking about Watergate. (This was the president that campaigned on the promise of ending the war in Viet Nam, and then bombed Cambodia. Smart guy. Got impeached. Go figure.) Bush may be the biggest dumbass ever to hold the office of President of the United States of America, but I don't wish to consider myself tarred with the same brush. The same way I wouldn't want to be necessarily held accountable for Kerry's actions had he won-- and let's face it, politicians are politicians, he was bound to make a bone-head move once elected. Most of the world will go on it's merry way. If we really want things changed, we need to bark about what matters: not the election, the goddamned war. Welcome back, Mr. President, now get us the hell out of Iraq. What else? Let those guys out of Guanomo,* and send Castro some flowers while you're at it. And about those tax breaks: Thanks, Mr. President, but you've broken enough things already. We don't think the economy will bounce any more if you slam it against the pavement again.

Most things will be fine. I really don't think he can muscle us into attacking Syria. Or Iran. Not so soon, anyways. Of course, crude oil prices shot up to $58 dollars a barrel after Kerry concession speech, so before long we'll be paying French prices for gas. Serves us right.

*The real Marine nickname for the Guantanamo Bay facility, before the brass cooked up this "Gitmo" bullshit. "Guanomo" parses out to "more shit."

YO, HO, BLOG THE MAN DOWN: October 31nd: Specious Observations, Breakfast

I'm not going to write about the election. Everybody else is writing about the election. I'm not going to write about the election.

What I am going to write about is breakfast. While in California we were guaranteed breakfast pretty much every morning. While in Frisco, we were blowing so much cash anyways that it made no sense to skimp on breakfast. While in Turlock, well, we were with Chris and Lauren, so breakfast was a given. What was given mainly was bread, mostly home-made, until that ran out, after which there was rye, and whatever else we felt like cramming into our faces. On the first full day there I insisted on buying eggs and sausage during the obligitory provisioning at O'Brians, and I felt like something of a stiff doing so, as Doc Nagel doesn't eat eggs. I mean, he'll cook with him, he'll clean with them, he'll work his fingers to the bo . . . Oh, wait; wrong speech. It's just that the idea of cooking an egg, putting it on a plate, and eating it is just something that he finds beyond the pale, madness, crazy talk. So the next morning, Lauren, I think out of sheer sympathy with my self-aprobation-- no, don't ask when I'm due in court-- asked for eggs, so I made them scrambled, perfect, fluffy and moist and just tight enough, with bagels and sausage. Rachelle had hers soft boiled, which I confess I timed a little too liberally, so that the yolk was just semi-soft, which, as it turns out, is the only way she'd ever had eggs soft boiled, so that was OK. (My granddad, Pop, had a soft boiled egg every morning of his life-- until the docs made him quit-- and he could tell by smelling 'em when they were done just right, so that the yolk was runny and the white was tight; I've always had to time mine, three minutes twenty seconds after the water reaches a full running boil.)* At one point, shortly into the meal, the good Doc was suddenly a bit freaked about suddenly being surrounded by eggs.

Lauren and I stopped dead still, mid chew; Rachelle seemed to think the reaction was less of a problem, but then she was actually sitting a good foot or two farther away, clearly out of reach in the event of any mayhem. "Is this a problem?" I asked, almost immediately offering to remove myself and the offending substance from his purview (not to say his pay-pur-view). (We're way past-tense now; we're living in bungalows.)

The Doc, after spending a wide-eyed moment of near-panic, pulled himself together and answered my question. "No, no," he said, visibly calming himself. At that, we all rejoined our morning fare and went on with our day.

It was a reaction I thought I understood pretty well, a sense of discomfort that, once confronted, was easily if temporarily quelled. But I didn't really understand it until this morning, when I went to my favorite Gitmo for breakfast, and there, after being presented with a prefect bacon-and-cheese omlette and crunchy home fries, I chose to busy my eyes, for reasons passing understanding, with the op-ed section of the local paper. Suddenly, there I was, surrounded! Everywhere I looked, nothing but quips and gripes about this goddamned election! O FOR THE LOVE OF GOD! Can't we just get this thing over with? O Florida, my Florida, don't screw this one up!

I feel much better now.

*I suspect that "a running boil" is not something one expects to find withing a description of things one might want to eat.

WHERE I'M BLOGGING FROM: October 30: Happy Returns

So two weeks later, having gone on vacation to California, where we exhausted my pal Doc Nagel and his new paramore Lauren, who for the record is a good scout and a real trouper, I finally have the wherewithal to blog again. I had meant to do some blogging in Cali, but, long story short, I was too busy reveling. We have all, collectively, vowed that the next time we do this we will plan better and include more provisions for down time, which, it seems, is necessarly for all of our number aside from me.*

The upside of the agreement, in my view, is that it implies we will be doing this again. I have, I think, induced at least in Lauren the notion that a visit to Charlotte, and therein the Soggy Bottom Navel Observatory and Proving Grounds,+ is an undertaking that should provide pleasures untold. The downside is that we apparently left the poor dears dented and dinged and in need of the attentions of a tinker. And when I say we, I mean I. Rachelle made it very clear on our treki home that she had about had it with my nonsense, and would be greately plased if I were to just leave her the hell alone and let her try to get some rest on the way home. (With which order, of course, I complied.)

Which meant that I didn't read as much of Harpo Speaks! on the flight back as I might have wished. With something over an hour left on the flight time, the Wifey put the kybosh on my Marxing by turning out the reading lamp while I was in the throes of an unplanned catnap. I managed to squeeze a few more pages in this morning, but suffice to say that the days are destined to become packed again shortly. I'll get back to the book soon though. It's the kind of trench-eye-view of the last days of Vaudeville that I love, and it already gave me two or three flashes of inspiration that I have used to kick-start the poem I'm writing about Frisco that is still in too rough a shape to expose anybody other than the Wifey and, perhaps, Doc Nagel to.

*I have fashioned, beginning at the conclusion of my Spring 2000 visit to California, a finely tuned and meticulously planned revovery program for my trips out to visit Chris. Having taken the red-eye back to Charlotte, upon arriving at my lovely abode, I collapse in a heap for a period of 24 hours, emerging no less than three times to consume a large meal before returning to the crumple. By this method I can over-exhaust my resources and still emerge at least vaguely life-like afterwards.

+This is the final version of the gag name for our abode that I have been honing since before we even bought the place. The first gag in the title refers to the fact that our yard, being at the bottom of the hill, is prone to near perpetual sogginess during wet spells, and has actually remained in a lake-like status for up to a week at a time in extreme conditions. You can work the rest of it out yourself.

BLOGBERRY: October 15th: Personnel Communications

My pal Doc Nagel likes to rag on ads, especially those for communications devices. His view, and it is not an uncommon one, is that communications devices are, at least, a distraction, that they are unecessary, that they are the devil-spawn, the anti-Christ, a sure sign and harbinger of the apocolypse. (Perhaps I exaggerate.) And, to be fair, in observing cell phone use over the years, 95% to 99% of the cell phone use I have witnessed has been inessential, although some times they do seem to help stupid people to figure out where they are,* and the bare fraction of communications that were otherwise, excluding ordering pizza delivery, were work related.

But there has been a frightening trend of late. One of the ads that ol' Doc picked on implied that communications devices-- in this case the two-way Star Trek-style communicators-- were vital businessplace tools. Now, it didn't do it very well, and, in fact, I have always found all cell phone marketing odd, in that it completely ignored the products' actual core market,~ and then an unusual phenomenon came to my attention: the rise of the Blackberries.

I recently read an interview with Jon Stewart in Time magazine, in which it was clear that the interviewer simply didn't get it. He asked Jon if he was amazed how influential the show had become, and Jon replied, basically, that he didn't want to be influential, because then he'd have to get a Blackberry. These devices have all kinds of capabilities: phone, text messaging, e-mail, reminders, alarms, and as far as I know they might even be used to cook pizza. In the workplace where I can't tell you what I'm doing-- OK, I'm working in an office, and that's as much as you'll get out of me-- the devices are openly referred to as "Crackberries." Those who like them can't go anywhere without them. Those who do not carry them like albatrosses. My immediate supervisor spoke of a policy requiring the ubiquitous devices be abandoned and left behind for a training session thusly: "That's a good thing." In Douglas Adams' universe(s), they would come in a case bearing the legend PANIC.

*I have used a mobile phone to get directions at least once, but at the time it was Doc Nagel's phone and Doc Nagel was driving. The stupid people of which I speak are the ones who are running up on curbs and making u-turns up one way streets while trying to get verbal instructions as to where in the Hell they just turned wrong.

~For many years, this consisted almost entirely of drug dealers.

"Simply substitute Merkin Muffley for Bush, Dr Strangelove for Hans Blix and Group Captain Mandrake for Blair and you have the rudiments of what�s probably going on in the UN Security Council as we speak."

If this entry was really about things that I used to do, the typo in the title block would suffice: Doc Nagel and I have had, in the past, a running gag about fortuitous typos. I kept the "ANF" (supposed to be (AND, obviously) because I think it's funny. If I'm wrong about that, I'm wrong. But there are worse things to be wrong about.

Like the author of the quote above, whose name and publication I am not referencing as a courtesy-- don't know the guy, never met him, but I am about to write somethings he would probably strongly disagree with. Because, see, he's wrong. He's wrong about alot of things, but worst of all, he's wrong about why we ought to appreciate "Dr. Strangelove." He's also wrong about what George Michael songs we ought to like, but the less said about that the better.

My own love affair with said film is a complicated story, though not a long one. The first time I watched the film, I didn't quite like it. It was one of those things where I saw why it should be funny, but I didn't think it was actually funny. Initially, I racked it up as yet another case of cruelty humor, but that really didn't compute. Peter Sellers, the perverted genius, had that unique gift of playing his mooks so they didn't come off as completely worthless and hopeless. They all meant well, to a degree that made their clumsy ineptitude loveable. And I suppose it was infectious; I think it infected Kubrick. I know it infected George C. Scott, who played his General like a tough-loving football coach, and it brought out a steely sarcasm in Keenan Wynn that, if you watch closely in his many straight roles, was always there under the surface. So it was too much fun to be cruel.

Later on it got to me, probably during a late-night viewing: the real reason Stangelove is funny is because of the sheer absurdity of it, the implausible possibility of it. All my life I have been hearing that the reason this film is funny is because it could have happened. Bushwa. The reason this film is funny is that it strains credulity. The cold war mentality, sure. People were talking about Ruskies creeping across the backyard fence in the dead of night, sure. But nobody really believed it. That was mainly all just talk.*

I know this because I am a great student of the cold war. Alot of the cold war was just talk, especially on our side. I mean, not that we didn't have armed forces and heavy weapons stationed in Germany, not that they weren't ready on a moment's notice in case of invasion, not that we didn't have thousands of missles with megatons of nuclear might aimed at The Enemy, and not that we weren't, theoretically, ready to use them. But talk was what fueled the cold war. Talk about the danger that lead to a readiness that translated into danger-- weapons we needed to have in case the enemy had them, and once they had them we had to have bigger weapons and more weapons, and when we had those they got 'em, and so forth and so on. It was largely self-generating, and largely a self-fullfilled prophecy on the part of the superpowers that be'd. To hear the players talk, they seemed to really believe that they were performing a public service to the world, pointing out this grand farce so that the world would know what danger it really was in. But looking back on it, the cold war wasn't a war at all. It was a spending spree on behalf of the Military Industrial Complex, and on behalf of all those fascist countries who, in the final analysis, really didn't know what they were doing or what was best for the people after all. In a way, it was kind of hard to satirize, because on the one hand, when it took itself seriously, it was self-satirizing, and on the other hand, when it took itself seriously there was nothing at all funny about it.

And it bears no resemblance to the current situation. Things nowadays are nowhere near that bleak. And if things were that bleak, there would be nothing at all funny about it. It'd be scary as Hell. To liken the happenings of Dr. Strangelove to the current situation is, at best, to misunderstand the current situation. If things were that bleak, there would be nothing at all funny about it. We'd all be dead.

*To argue this point is to engage in matters of degree. For example: Cuban Missle Crisis, all talk; Bay of Pigs, action. Discuss.

IS IT BLOG IN HERE, OR IS IT ME: October 7th: There Are Some Things Mice Just Won't Do

"By the middle Moore has resorted to showing us stuff that The Daily Show covers all the time." -- Fred Topel, DVD review, about.com

On of the things I enjoy doing in my spare time is reading movie reviews, particularly ones of movies that I'm nevver gonna see. That might sound like arrogance, but it's not. Years ago I tried writing a script, which I found I simply am not geared to do, and after that I tried writing a screenplay, just to see if I could do that any better. No dice. Something about the drudgery of spelling out set designs and stage directions, not to mention camera angles, just kills the flow of the writing, and as of even date I simply don't have the patience for it. So I have something of a heightened awareness of why films are the way they are, or at least I think I do, and I get something of a kick out of the way various critics will misinterpret films based on the way the screenwriter stacked his/her deck. I have taken, recently, to reading spoilers, which are usually rather badly written recollections from people who have just seen the film. (Badly written, I think, because the process of spewing out the contents of the film after a first viewing necessitates a slap-dash style of composition. Perhaps "badly" is the wrong word.) Given my heightened awareness of the nature of script writing, I don't have a big problem knowing the ending of movie before I see them, for the most part. I can usually guess the ending before it comes, as I did with "The Usual Suspects" and "The Sixth Sense." (The bigger the twist, usually, the clearer I see it coming.)

One of my favorite internet sites for this activity is The Movie Spoiler (want the address?). Recently, they posted a spoiler for Michael Moore's "Farenheit 9/11." I didn't read it. It took some time for me to really realize why.

I didn't see "Roger & Me," because I simply didn't want to. Sure, Flint is a tough place to live, and sure, unemployment sucks, and sure, poverty is rotten, but the fact of the matter is that Moore's film didn't change all that. It reeked, to me, of exploitation. Again, I never saw it, so I could very well be wrong. I watched part of his television show once, and what I saw simply wasn't funny. "Bowling for Columbine" took me by suprise. I liked it, and not for the reasons I would have thought. Iy seems to me, and this is prhaps the redeeming quality to "Roger & Me" as well, was the juxtoposition of concepts and landscapes that gave the cultural examination a real swell of scope and meaning. Not in the silly ponderances of what it might be that makes Americans so damned violent-- which, in addition to not answering any questions, were meaninglessly couched-- nor in the dumbass stunt of trying to get the Columbine victims to return their bullets to K-Mart, nor in the crass attempt to claim that a scheduled product rollback was the dirty corporations admission of culpability in homocide. Not even in the celebrity attack on Charleton Heston, which I thought I would really enjoy. Heston came to my town and claimed, in one breath, that Al Gore was the source of all gun control. Now, I was never a Gore man, thought he was rather silly and inconsequential as a candidate, but for cripes sake! He's not freaking Stalin! But the Heston ambush was just an ambush, and it was rather a pathetic one at that. I've seen funnier things on Punk'd.

When "F-9/11" first came out, I thought it was going to be a ham-handed indictment of the administration. After I started seeing trailers, I thought it might be a sort of indictment of the GOP. But after the reviews started coming out, it became clear that it was going to be a shabbily constructed rumor mill, and as it turns out it hasn't churned out very good rumors. Like the product of the Ford plant in Flint, what wasn't recalled broke down.

Today, out of curiosity, I clicked on the Rotten Tomatoes website's review page for the film, which was prominently displayed due to the recent release of the film on DVD. Fred Topel's review, on about.com, brought to light the real reason I have my doubts about this outing. Although his zeal in attacking the subject is laudable, his project is undoubtedly a failure. Even the positive reviews I have seen make this observation. He doesn't make his argument, his accusations are nothing special, and the clowning is just silly.

BLOG IN THE PLACE WHERE YOU LIVE: October 6th: What It Was, Was Football

A while back my pal Bryan purchased a PSL and season tickets for the local football team. A PSL, for those of you who have never heard of one, is a Personal Seat Liscence, which used to be a sort of investment tool for start-up sports teams to help finance operations before profits start rolling in, and now is just one of those things you have to buy if you want to get season tickets. (I could be wrong about this. The details have always sounded a bit fuzzy to me) On learning this, or rather some time after, I mentioned that I might not mind attending a game, and last week he invited me to accompany him to an upcoming game. I accepted, on the grounds that I ought to be able to say I've seen a pro ball game at least once.

I saw the Hornets play before they lost Mugsy Bogues, which was long before the team left town. In those days, the game plan was pretty basic: give the ball to Mugsy, Mugsy runs it down court making every other player drop his jock in the process, and hands off to the nearest scorer (which he usually did as soon as he hit the paint), who makes a basket. Mugsy was something ridiculous like five-foot-nothin' but he had speed to spare and energy to burn. We had what were, theoretically, pretty rotten seats, down low and behind the goal post at one end of the court, but it was pretty astounding to watch nonetheless. Mugsy got traded a year or two before we lost the team to New Orleans for refusing to build them a bigger stadium. The Hornets weren't any fun to watch at that point anyways.

As a kid, while we lived in Texas, my Dad took us to see the Texas Rangers play, one of the few really great memories I have of Texas. The fans there did what was called The Stampede. This was the pre-cursor of The Wave: the fans stomped systematically to give the impression of a heard of cattle circling the park at a full gallop. This wasn't just stomping; this was crowd creativity, a massive and coordinated example of group-think. Supposedly it scared the bejesus out of the opposing team. They actually didn't seem to notice.

In later years, I was guest to a vendor of my old company at an Atlanta Braves game, in the Good Year (during Chipper Jones' reign, prior to that jerk Rocker shooting his mouth off and making ball players look like arrogant bigots who don't get New York) at Turner Field, possibly the only park whose corporate sponsorship has soul. The parking sucked and the pretzel I had was sub-standard and the scalpers were working over-time, but the experience itself was pretty nice. The view from our nosebleed-section seats was excellent, the fans were exhuberant and good natured, the game was fast and competetive, and we left before it was actually over, thus beating the crowds (so we thought). The one question-mark was the giant coke bottle sculpture that adorned the stadium's West wall. I couldn't decide if it was a crass commercial logodevice, an affectionate tribute to the coporate local heroes, a work of post-modern art, or somehow a combination of all three. (Contemplating this actually added a zest the the whole experience.)

So, as I imagine you may have concluded, I have attended an example of all the major sports* except football. I didn't reach this conclusion until we were walking up the concourse inside the stadium to Bryan's upper-level seats. "Oh," Bryan said between huffing breaths, "It's pretty interesting."

There are many unspoken advantages to attending just such an event, the first most apparent of which is climbing to your seat. We were on the 5th tier, at the top of the stadium, requiring a long walk up the inclined concrete walkways, and in the 27th row, requiring an Everest-like ascent before shimmying to our seats along the half-foot ledge spared when the fans seated before us rose to let us pass. Now, Bryan isn't in what you'd call hard condition, but I climb mountains, and the hike did sort of make me catch my breath. The second thing was the view. The view from the top tier was vertiginous, but not uncomfortably so; while on the one hand the steepness of the tiers gives you the sense of being very high up, which we were, the solidity of the edifice and the stability of the platform removes any real or possible fear of heights.

This is part and parcel of the third thing, which I really can't claim as one of those "Nobody every notices . . . " category, because it has been noticed, but it still bears discussion: the staggering enormity of stadia.

Some years back, when I was still engaged as a construction reporter, I had multiple opportunities to examine this phenomenon. Through the examination of plans, discussions with architects and contractors, and discussions of the organizatinal structures of such stadia design firms as HOK Sport and stadia construction corporations as Turner Construction Management and Bovis, I became familiar with the sheer insanity of scale associated with sporting events. The scale itself is impressive, but the next time you find yourself in a sporting venue, try thinking of the place in terms of sheer tonnage. It is a dizzying task. The heart and soul of most stadia is, simply, concrete. Yards and tons of it. Poured in place slabs and pillars, pre-cast, pre-stressed panels and sills and cantilevered pre-cast beams. Any modern office tower pales by comparison, regardless of height. The heart and soul of an office tower is structural steel; any concrete involved is mostly going to be cladding, and there is often little or none of that involved at that. I tried to draw some conclusion from that, that there is more weight to our sport than our business in this day and age, but, as any seven year old could probably tell you, sports is big business in this day and age. Or maybe that the designers of stadia feel compelled to make these arenas strong with the weight of the common people, but I know far better than that. Convention drives design. If it were otherwise, every stadium in the world would have adequate restroom facilities. You'd never have to stand in line to pee.

I had been told, before the game, that Atlanta fans-- our team was playing the Falcons-- were extremely loud when their team was winning, and dead silent if they lost. The Atlanta fans we saw before the game were very loud, in fact, and usually obnoxious, taunting the Panthers fans as if inviting hand-to-hand combat. In fact, the guy I stood in line behind in the men's room before the game, a large black man adorned in a red-and-black jersey, assailed one and all with great volume and gusto on the subject of how easily and badly his team was going to beat ours, delighting in it as if it were a personal victory to have chosen the right team, and then fell silent when his turn came to pee.

Our fans impressed me greatly. This was largely due to low expectations. Our fans have gotten a reputation as being surly and fickle, for hurling expletives and booing players whose peformance does not meet expectations. It is a reputation I ought to have distrusted, it's having been established, as it was, largely by the Charlotte Observer. Not to say our fans were as rabid as Bears or Cowboys fans, or as visibly stalwart as Steelers or Green Bay fans. But they were passionate. Behind me I had The Obnoxious Fan, who second-guessed the refs, predicted plays as if to assert that he had some sort of sports pre-cognition, and bithed bitterly and nasally when things didn't go our way. But he almost grew on me towards the end of the game. The refs made a series of questionable calls through the early part of the game, resulting in numerous penalties, resulting in diminished field position for our guys. Not that Atlanta didn't suffer the same number of calls and reduction of yardage; they did, but those calls were greeted by the Carolina fans with great, raucous cheers. (The Atlanta fans may have been equally vocal, but once within the walls of the fortress, their numbers were dilutted. Here and there were blocks of red, but they represented, at best, a gathering of a few dozen fans.) By the third quarter, every flag that landed on the field was automatically booed, as our fans assumed that the refs had it in for us. When the call turned out to be against Atlanta, the response was less a cheer than a sigh of relief. I got the feeling that those who attend the games care deeply, passionately about the fortunes of the players, to the point where any unfairness or slight provokes a deep spiritual pain, a soul-wrenching angst. Then again, once you've dished out $4000 for a PSL, not to mention the cost of tickets, I guess you'd probably better feel that way.

The paper the next day proclaimed that the Cats lost it, folded in the fourth. That's not what happened. Our guys played a strong, competent game, and they met Atlanta's guys play for play. They caught some breaks, we caught some breaks, and in the end they caught a few more breaks than we did. To paraphrase one of my favorite sports writers, Dan Jenkins, in the end, it came down to one thing: one team scored more points than the other.

*Of course, hockey IS a sport, and I wouldn't claim otherwise. Although I have to admit I still don't get it, at least not on the level that rabid, hard-core hockey fans do, I do appreciate that it is a sport. It's a kind of combination of street-fighting and ballet on ice. If it weren't an organized sport, it'd be a felony. But it isn't a major sport the way football and basketball and baseball are, although some day I will go see a major league hockey game, as soon as the opportunity presents itself.

A GOY AND HIS BLOG, PART TWO: THE SPAWNING: October 2nd: Poesy, Lies & Videotape; What I'd Have To Kill You If I Told You

So, groggily, after week which has found me not only returning to office life, but taking a real shock to the system in the form of early rising after nearly a year of almost uniform sleeping in,* I begin in earnest a re-assessment of my life.

Unlike anything the self-help gurus tell you, most people re-assess thier lives on a regular basis. Most don't do it as exhaustively as I do-- or so I'm told, by what I can conclude, statistically, is most of the people I have spoken with on the subject-- but, I have concluded, after many years of observation, that even the dimmest and bluntest amongst us continually re-assess themselves and the lives they're leading and the way they are leading them. They may continue to be shallow and disingenuous, but at the very least they'll buy a new shirt or two, maybe get a hair-cut, trade in the car.

My own most recent revelation requires no coifuring. Nor does it really require any confessional. It's just this: I hate office work.

Not in the sense that I can't or won't do it, nor in the sense that I really think it sucks the life out of people. Most of the people who claim that the office is sucking the life out of them, in my experience, haven't had any luck extracting joy out of life outside the office to begin with, as sad a commentary as that might be. But in a more abstract sense, in an aesthetic sense, I think it's true for all of us.

IN the architectural world there has circulated a phrase that was supposed to put the practice of architecture in a philosophical light-- actually to press it into a philosophical light by use of main force-- by implying that architecture was an organic part of everyday life: the Built Environment. Aside from being a goddamned lie, the phrase also would have the convenience of excusing the travesty that is institutional design.~ Offices, by and large, are cheap contrivances filled with modular furniture that is designed to fit everyone and, thus, fits no one, is made to be durable and, thus, falls apart, is meant to be versatile and, thus, is inflexible. I have seen some beautiful and well appointed offices in my time-- mainly for lawyers and architects-- but what passes for innovative design results in hallways that zig-zag only to lead to the same blank boxes they would have lead to anyways. In other words, instead of merely being boxes for experimental rats, they become mazes.

But this last week I have really enjoyed. I have been surrounded by vibrant, intelligent people engaged in helpful tasks, I have revelled in the surreal atmosphere of a pre-dawn commute, I have wallowed in the soggy satisfaction of the fatigue at the end of a nine-hour workday. And although I cannot, contractually, reveal who I am working for, much less what I am doing for them, any of you paying any real attention to what I've written here so far has probably concluded that I am working at the help desk. In few other capacities is it possible to ignore the brutality of institutional architecture.

That said, the weekend is here. We intend to drive out into a misty morning, thence into the Piedmont, in what promises to be partly cloudy weather, for a leisurely drive to Winston-Salem. We will partly be doing the tourist thing, but our main task there is to test-drive a MINI Cooper. My wife is thinking of buying one, but before ordering one-- a brand new, bright yellow Cooper with black trim and a double-paned sunroof-- we've decided that we both must test-drive an example of the beast, to ensure that it will be a comfortable driving machine for the both of us.

I already got a haircut.

My point here-- and if you thought I'd already made it, I don't blame you-- is that life is good. Life is beautiful. And although some of the worst crap has been made out of such poetic pronouncements-- especially the standard "beauty is truth, and truth, beauty" and "Whatever is, is right"-- I feel compelled to say it. Besides, there's a fair amount of truth in the latter saying: things are as they are, and the vast, VAST majority of it you either can't or won't bother to change. But that doesn't mean we should go to war, nor that the right people are rich for the right reasons, or that advertising awards mean more than a cheap handjob from the lobby call girl. And I suppose there is some truth in beauty, and some beauty in truth, but that doesn't mean you should ever, EVER believe anything Nichole Kidman has to say.+ The majority of people I have caught using the whole truth/beauty ratio were trying to justify some sort of extraneous madness that had nothing to do with anything being true in any fashion whatsoever. But maybe that's just my experience.

*For those of you just joining the monologue, I quit my day job some three years ago, not to pursue my artistic goals or to give myself more time for writing, but because I had put all my effort into being the best at my chosen profession only to find that the big awards were going to liars and cheats. No, I wasn't a lawyer. No, I wasn't in advertising. I was a construction reporter. Go figure.

~In the early days of college I ran across that distiction, used to describe the class of catering for college cafeterias, and I have always thought of it as a dual distiction: those places that can be described as "institutional" have an asylum-like quality to them. The inmates are managed by a combination of aquiesence and distraction, and the will is something to be supressed.

+Just by way of example. My apologies to Ms. Kidman, but I can't help but think everything she has ever said is at least partly a goddamned lie.

A GOY AND HIS BLOG: September 25th: I Really Ought to Save That One For A Special Occasion

So after a strange morning full of troubled dreams, I rose with the unmistakable conviction that my wife was angry with me. Which she wasn't, and isn't, but for whatever reason I couldn't shake the notion that I had done something to terribly offend her. So I made my coffee and ensconsed myself in the office, and, handily, the weekly News of the Weird Pro Edition was in my in box in but an instant.

Chuck Shepard has been doing the NOTW for God knows how long-- actually, he provides quite a nice chronology on his website-- and at various times I have had a local paper that subscribed to his service, only to change horses later on and subscribe to one of the copy-cat services, providing ample illustration that Chuck is the best at what he does, and not only that, he is highly scrupulous about it. When the local paper here-- the ubiquitous, not to say monopolistic, Observer-- dropped NOTW and replaced it with somebody's knockoff version, I found myself dropping in on Chuck's site more and more. Then one day I decided to look into the Pro Edition.

And, man, am I ever glad I did, for all kinds of reasons, some of which I won't go into here because they involve Chuck's ever-expanding set of services provided to Pro Weirdos, some of which he might not want to be announcing outside the fold just yet. But the chief thing, the main thing about Chuck's service versus any of the others is that Chuck is smart. Not to say politican smart, not to say rocket scientist smart, but smart in that observant, yet self-aware sort of way that tends to be a common trait of those who I call friend. It gives hi, among other things, an ability to understand that he is smarter than the average bear without being smug or arrogant about it. Which is also why I don't like the knock-off sites. Very often they seem to be run and populated by smug, arrogant jackasses who seem to think that just because they go around repeating stories about dogs fetching lit sticks of dynamite or strapping jet engines onto the tops of their cars, they are somehow proving their own above average intelligence.

Which they are not. They are proving only that they can be crappy-minded jerks who think it's funny when people die grousome deaths. I can live my life evry well indeed without them.

This all lead, somehow, to my again changing my mind about Stanley Kubrick, for perhaps the millionth time in my life. A cursory re-playing of "Full Metal Jacket" in my mind while showering this morning (near noon) lead me to conclude that Kubrick was a master of shorthand and had the unique ability to convey socio-political commentary in subtext. Of course, I love "2001." I have always loved "2001." I have no idea what it means, really, but still. I find it fascinating on levels both visual and inetellectual, and very often both in the same stroke. I'll change my mind next week. Or the next time I find myself sitting through "Barry Lyndon." I mean, I see what he was after, and I get the whole silence thing, and they are some beautiful tableaux, but still. There comes a time to stop.

CAUGHT BETWEEN A BLOG AND A HARD PLACE: September 23rd: Writing

"Somehow, as a writer, you tend to use words to paper over structural cracks."

--Stephen Fry, Lucky Son-of-a-Bitch

It would be disingenous to say that I have been wondering about it lately, since I have been wondering about it most of my life, at least since the age of 12: what is a writer?

Does being a writer mean I'm one of those people who uses words to paper over structural cracks? Does being a writer mean that I am incomplete?* Does being a writer mean that I see a poverty in everyday life?~ Does being a writer mean that I am commited to righting social wrongs, justifying the plight of the disenfranchised, agrandizing the ungrand?+ Does being a writer mean I have to hold the mirror up so society can see itself?^ And, damn, that must be one big, heavy mirror.

Does being a writer mean I have to go to meetings? Belong to the Network? Win awards? And who says so? Why can't I say so?

Do I hafta join the club? Do I gotta go through the intiation? Is it like that Farside cartoon, with the dog running across the highway? "Yay! Rusty's in the club!"

Screw it. Screw 'em. I'm a writer. I'm a writer because I say so. I'm a writer because I can write. Not because I know how to, not because I took classes, not because I have a degree or an MFA or press credentials. Because I'm a writer. Because I write. Because I know the joy of it. I don't use words to hide cracks, I don't weave tales to complete myself or excuse myself, and I know better than to wear myself hefting that goddamned stupid mirror when people are just going to look to Rush Limbaugh or Jesse Jackson or Al Franken and figure they're well enough reflected.# When I'm confused I ponder, when I'm incomplete I reach out to my wife or my friends, and when I feel disenfranchised I remind myself that I'm an American, and disenfranchisement means nothing too terribly bad for me. When I'm sad and weary I get drunk and mope, and sometimes I write afterwards as an act of penance, but it doesn't mean I'm papering over cracks, and it doesn't necessarily mean I have a need to uncover cracks.

I'm a writer. I write. And it means whatever I decide it means, whatever the occasion calls for. Who's gonna tell me otherwise?

*Jim Wayne Miller.

~Mario Puzo.

+Ishamael Reed, Abbie Hoffman, Leroi Jones, Amiri Baraka, Larry Ferlinghetti, that fag Kerouak, et al.

^Whomever.

#Not to say Jon Stewart. I like Jon Stewart.

NONE FOR ME, THANKS; I HAD A BLOG FOR LUNCH: September 22nd: A Brief Meditation on Karma and the Internet

Karma is probably the wrong concept here. Irony perhaps.

Anyways, our subject here is spam. A while back, the good Doc made thre observation that the majority of the spam he was getting (and, I'm sure still gets) wanted him to either re-finance his house or enlarge his member. My reaction was muted, mainly because I never had a real big problem with spam, mainly because I never got too much spam, and I just deleted it when I saw it and moved on.

Later on I found out my wife has a bulk mail box, strictly for the purpose of intercepting spam, and it seems to work pretty well. Which is good, because she works in internet technology, and thus signs up for stuff on the internet, and gets a ton of spam, I'm talking sometimes 300 or 400 a day. She never sees any of it; she empties the bulk box sight unseen every time.

Which is an instinct I, perhaps, should hone myself. A short time back, Yahoo gave all it's box-holders upgrades. At the time, I was getting a bit more spam than usual, four or five pieces a day; after Yahoo upgraded my box, I started getting more, more than twice as much, between a dozen and twenty or more a day. Which is still not alot, but still. It prompted me to start using my spaminator. I hadn't used it before, hadn't thought of it. But after the last increase, it occurred to me: maybe I'd start getting yet more spam, maybe I should take some measures. So I started using it.

Thing is, it doesn't really seem to work. I mean, I know; there's probably subtle variations in coding and stuff, but I seem to keep getting the same stuff over and over again from the same fictional people. There's one particular porn merchant named Greg-- about whom more later-- who seems to be particulalry enthusiastic, fictional though he may be. He keeps offering me porn featuring teenagers and college girls, and generous though it may be, I simply don't want it. The spammers don't want me to re-finance my house as much, but they are concerned with penis size, and they want me to make a million by auctioning things on E-Bay. (In which case I'd think they'd want me to buy a bigger house, since this place wouldn't hold enough merchandise to auction in order to make a million on E-Bay. Maybe I don't know as much as I might about E-Bay . . . )

So, I guess my point, assuming I have one, is that sooner or later I will have to reconcile with spam. Forgive and forget, even those ones that teasingly sound like they might actually be messages from people I don't know-- and hey, I run a poetry page, it does happen, it's a bear I must cross-- which I open only to read "WE HVAE RECIEVED YOR RE-MRTGAGE APPLIC4TION . . . " Heartbreaking though they might be. At least I have Greg, whose missives I never open, but whose spirit of generosity is an endearing and inspiring thing. This last one was particuarly cheering: "SEXUALLY EXPLICIT: Sluts for Everyone!" How charming! What a guy! This calls for a celebration! Sluts for everyone!

YES! YES! WE ARE ALL INDIVIDUALS! September 21, Later: What Was The Title of That Last Blog?

I knew that the outcry over the latest campaign scandle would precipitate some backlash against Da Newz,* and in fact there had some already been some fallout before I tuned in to Le Show this morning, but nothing had quite prepatred me for, perhaps nothing could have prepared me for, the mindless vitriol of Rathergate.

Now, I remember the bullshit that got kicked up when Rather took over the CBS Evening News anchor spot, and I remember being very suprised by the nature of it. I expected there to be alot of resentment, since Rather wasn't Kronkite and Kronkite had been widely admired, not to say loved, for his mix of sentimental patriotism and cynical intellectuality, which I always found a bit bizarre. But this was different. This was in the early days of the myth of the Liberal Media, a myth which quickly became self-fullfilling, as alot of people became "liberal" in order to break into media, but was never anything substantial aside from being good, dependable GOP propaganda come election time. Before he said one word on the air, before he set one foot in the studio, before he put a single butt cheek in the announcer's chair, people were bithcing and whining about Rather's Liberal Bias.

"I can't stand that man," my Mom proclaimed, and later confessed it was him manner, not his actual politics, that bugged her. I watched, and all I saw was the standard issue bullshit Newz: when there was genuinely something important happening, matters of interest out in the world, Da Newz was worth watching. But most of the time it was the same old standard issue bullshit. I looked for some evidence of some kind of liberal spin or bias from Dan, but aside from that lousy, fakey bragadaccio of his, that crappy, self-indulgent War Correspondent swagger,* I couldn't find anything really wrong with the man.

I couldn't find anything really right with him, either. I can't recall a single situation where CBS got a major scoop, or whether it mattered much in the long run-- everybody reports the same shit these days, and nobody really cares who gets there first because it doesn't make one whit of difference-- nor any instance when Dan appeared to show superior insight or judgement on any issue. Eventually I started watching Brokaw on NBC~ because he is occasionally more amusing than the others, and besides, it's fun to make sport of his strange elocution, when he seems to insert W's under R's and Z's inside the ch and sh's. And Dan's swagger occasionally bothered me, but it wasn't enough, really, to make me tune out per se.

So, that's all by way of saying I should have seen this coming.

The vitriol displayed there is not unexpected, though, as always, it's unconvincing. These aren't people whose minds are engaged. They are only interested insofar as they can demonize the man and call for his resignation, further their socio-political+ agendas, or team with other people on the grounds of crappy thinking and undisguised bile. They're like those fucking lizards, puffing up their chests to make it look like they're bigger than they are.+ It makes no real difference; anyone who knows them well at all probably knows the truth.+

But, still. The same way eeeeeverybody knew, just KNEW, that HE was gonna PUT a LIBERAL SPIN on EVERY SINGLE STORY, before he even said a word on air, I just shoulda known that, the second the twerp's credibility was even slightly questioned, the bastards would come crawling out from under their rocks like slugs. The part that bothers me is that I, then, have to hear them whine for a week to ten days before they crawl back into their slimy hiding places again. To quote my pal Doc Nagel: "Really, now, was this necessary?"

*Not that there wasn't danger involved in reporting on the Vietnam war, but everyone knew that the Pentagon was using the Newz as a willing tool, trading access for propaganda value, and the Newz, as a whole, took the deal with a crooked grin. It backfired on them, by the way, and that's one of the reasons the Vietnam war was so unpopular and is still so widely misunderstood today. Besides that, it was no secret that the war correspondents, by and large, were kept out of harm's way, since dead journalists make for bad PR, and Vietnam was largely a PR war. So I'm not real impressed with Rather's War Correspondent creds.

~Insofar as I watch Da Newz at all.

+It is my contention that the people who engage in this sort of discourse, on either side, have either small dicks or unrequited bondage fantasies. Or both.

YES! YES! WE ARE ALL INDIVIDUALS! September 21, Earlier: The Art of Falling for the Ponzy Scam

I have so far resisted abandoning the running gag of using "blog" in the title of every entry. But this just seemed funnier.

This weekend we attended a cultural festival, hereafter to be referred to as the cult fest, celebrating the Chinese population in the area. Now, the Wife and I have been collecting Oriental style stuff since I brought home a Buddha statuette from Frisco's Chinatown back in 98. I had nabbed the piece because it bore a dead-on resemblence to her Dad, but it transpired that she likes Oriental style decoratives, as do I. But it just hadn't been something that we had pursued. Now the place is lousy with the stuff, to the point that we have concluded we have about chotchkied out, hit saturation levels. (Not that we have only Oriental stuff; we have an O'Keefe print, some of my Granny's paintings and woodcuts, other stuff.) And, true to our natures, we feel vaguely guilty that we don't know the precise meaning of each and every symbol on each and every decorative object in our house, but that's something we get over pretty quickly.

So our attendence to the cult fest was partly, at least for me, a labor of guilt. Which is fine as far as those things go, except that when such a thing backfires, it presents quite the whammy. As when one wanders past a booth for the Chinese language immersion school and realizes that there are people in this world who know how to speak two of the most complex langauges on the face of the earth. No slouch myself, I remember most of my high school French, and I made a hard slash at learning Russian in college and remember a good deal of what I learned there, including the make-up of the Cyrilic alphabet,* but still, occasionally I think I should be doing more.

On the other hand, occasionally I get reminded of why I don't get involved in such activities.

The cult fest presented myriad examples of this, including the incredibly cute children in Chinese dress singing traditional Chinese folk songs. Some years back I ran across a translation of one such song, which was essentially "When we catch the red bird, we cut off his head and tail." It turns out that the folk song was one handed down to villagers by one of the late dynastic rulers to indicate that any local official who refused to pay tribute or obey commands (the "red bird") would be subjected to the traditional Chinese version of being drawn and quartered. Since then, I cannot hear children singing traditional folk songs in a foreign langauge while wearing traditional dress without thinking that they're singing something very bloody minded and remotely political.

The next example was what passed for a "Traditional Fashion Show," which was a standard issue "catwalk" type revue of very pretty young Chinese-American women wearing what was essentially the same satin dress in different colors and with different patterns. For twenty minutes. While they played the same contemporary Chinese pop song over and over and over again. On the one hand, it was a pretty good pop song. On the other hand, the only thing traditional about it, let alone Chinese, is the tendency to mistake classic form for cultural significance. Or, if one were to be completely cynical about it, the tendency for the Chinese to adopt facets of other cultures and claim them as uniquely thier own by tradition.~

Then there was the Chinese Opera presentation, an excerpt from "The Monkey King." Chinese Opera is more or less in the style of Kubuki, and the costumes and makeup are astounding, the choreography is gorgeous, the sets are elaborate and minimalistic at the same time, and the show is . . .

Boring.

I lost track of how long the excerpt lasted, despite looking at my watch seventy or eighty times. A couple of magic tricks, some impressive mugging, a stylized running battle between the Monkey King and the King King (really, I lost track of the details), and lots and lots and lots of running and jumping and posing and running and jumping and posing. I guess the best way to describe it is "impressively boring."

My wife suggested we stay through something called the Fairy Dance, strictly on the basis that she thought the girls prancing about in the fancy satin costumes and the ring-braided hair might be the stars of said show. This had the result that we got to hear the performance by the violin school students, which turned out to be a double treat: first we got to discuss and debate the merits of the violin instructor's outfit, and second we got to hear the recital. The instructor, clearly a Prima Donna and Artistic Type, was wearing a dress that was both too short and too loud, and rushing about with an air of breathless self-importance that was amusing to watch in and of itself. At something like 5'2" she had maybe an inch or two on her tallest student. Add to that the fact that she was playing The Invisible Violin-- one of those electronic things that has a violin's neck and head-stock attached to a frame made to resemble the outline of a violin. it was plugged in and amped up, and as she initiated her student's tuning excercise-- they all played the standard A, confirming that their instruments were in fact in perfect tune-- it occurred to me that her instrument was just a hair louder than what could be expected to come out of any of her student's instruments.

Now, if that sounds like arrogance on her part, think again. As a veteran of violin recitals, I immediately identified her amplification as a wickedly smart tactic. With her slightly over-amped instrument, she could not only lead by example-- and she made sure she was in full view of every student in the bunch without standing between any of them and the audience-- she could also discreetly cover missed notes and bowing flaws. The result was a very nice little recital indeed.

The Fairy Dance was cool too. The girls in the neat costumes were, in fact, the dancers, and their presentation was both brief and beautiful, with three matched sets of dancers in red, white and turquoise costumes with flowing sleeves and bared midriffs. We were glad we stayed, but we couldn't put up with the prospect of staying for the rest of the program. They had started ten minutes late, and it was pretty clear that between delays in collecting acts and then getting them onstage and acts running longer than anticipated, the show would last loooooooong into the night. It was nearing eight, and we were hungry, so we adjourned and walked five or six blocks downtown to The Graduate, a locally owned and operated bar-and-grill chain, where we had chili cheese fries. Chili cheese fries, in my estimation, qualify as having cultural significance.

*I would have taken the third year of French in high school, but at the end of Junior year the teacher said something about third year being only for those who were committed to becoming conversant in the lingo. Since I wasn't given an indication otherwise, I naturally assumed I wasn't in that group. when I learned, via a third party the following year, that the French teacher had expressed not only suprise but a degree of dismay on not seeing my face in the crowd in the third year classroom, I had the only reaction I was likely to have in those days: "Oh." After taking the first semester course of Russian, our profressor was slated to go abroad, and to those of us who were interested in taking the second semester course, he implied that it wasn't in our best interests to study under the man who would be assuming his duties. "Wait a year," was his advice. Long story short, I never got back to it.

~Not uniquely a Chinese trait. Lots of other cultures, probably most other cultures do the same thing. One of the few strange, not to say bizarre, exceptions is/has been Korea, which spent the majority of it's history claiming that it was the natural heir to alternately the Chinese and the Japanese cultures, and either aping those cultures or taking Korean traditions and either adapting Chinese or Japanese facets to them or just wholesale claiming that those traditions came down from the ancient Japanese or Chinese cultural tradition. This became harder to plot after the occupation/partitioning/war between the Koreas after WWII, which was one of the stupidest set of occurrences in the history of the goddamned world, and don't get me started.

SENTENCED TO BE BLOGGED WITH A WET NOODLE: September 15th: The Simpsons

During my ongoing period of semi-employment, I have fallen into a few habits. These are ways to fill the long hours of the day when eloquence escapes me and I run out of things to do. One of the biggies has to do with television viewing.

During a philosophical discussion with Doc Nagel, precursing (sic) a paper he wanted to write involving the phenomenology of media, specifically in how we view media, I argued that I was a discerning viewer, in that I do not simply let the content flow over me or absorb it sponge-like into my pores. Rather I critique; I evaluate, I judge, and in this process I sharpen my intellectual skills. Or you could just say I sort out the worthwhile stuff from the rest of the bullshit, which, as many people have observed of late, is a meager distinction these days as the vast majority of what's on these days is bullshit.*

This has lead to some unfortunate results. One of them was an attempt, not too long ago, to create a moral/ethical analysis of the TV show M*A*S*H. The project, working titled "The Metaphysics of M*A*S*H," never really got off the ground for various reasons, and suceeded only driving me nuts for about a year and a half. Another has been a sort of intolerance that, ocassionally, if I'm not careful, turns into a kind of low-level self-loathing, as if it were my own fault this crap is on TV. Then, of course, there are cooking shows, specifically Emeril Live! and The Iron Chef, which I watch solely to reach that point where someone does something wholly inexplicable to a dish that, up to that moment, made pretty good sense. The Wifey has her own version of this, unofficially titled "He's Gonna Put Celery in That." (She hates celery.)

What might or might not be an unfortunate result is that I can no longer watch The Simpsons.

As Harry Shearer has noted, The Simpsons persists,~ which is to say that it still airs faithfully every Sunday night at eight. Not too many years ago, in conversing with one of my CMD colleagues on the Left Coast, there are three key components in relocating: find out where the grocery stores are, find out where the restaurants are, and find out what time The Simpsons is on. For as many years as I can remember, the re-runs have been ubiquitous in local markets. Rarely have I found a locality when the Simpsons wasn't re-run somewhere between the hours of 6 and 8. And-- here's the point-- up to a certain point the episodes were pretty much guaranteed to be oldies, and that was a very good thing indeed. Because at some point in the last three or four years, the show went from being fresh, funny, satiric, dangerous, and, God forgive me for saying so, edgy, to being dull, stupid, moronic, preditcable, stale, as dangerous as a mouse and as edgy as a bowling ball. For a while there, I was going from watching The Simpsons re-runs on the weekdays to watching the new shows on Sundays, and after a while we weren't watching all the way through the Sunday episodes, finding compelling reason to believe that this episode would be no better than the last within five or ten minutes and switching over to watch Emeril butcher a cassarole.

After a while, we weren't watching at all.

Even now I say it, and I wonder why . . .

The show airs at 5 on our independent station here in Charlotte, same time the M*A*S*H re-runs start, and currently my habit is to tune into The Simpsons, watch long enough to determine how old the show is, and, based on that, decide which show to watch. Today's episode was "Bart the General," from the first season. So I watched, of course. I remembered liking it, but Egad! I had truly forgotten how subversive and funny this episode was. In the process of telling a story about a plot to humiliate and thereby defeat the neighborhood bully, they went through allusions to wartime activities, tactics, paraphrases and quotes from Second World War leaders, and lots of ugly truths about the nature of self-defense, self preservation, and the incompetence of parents and authority figures. It was infused with that particular Matt Groenig sensibility that has always made his stuff unique and worth while.

And that's what makes the last few years' episodes so galling. It's not that the new shows are really all that bad. It's not even really that the old shows were all that good. It's that at precisely the time at which the show started slipping and turning from the funniest thing on TV into yet another half-assed show, the Republicans picked up on the notion that The Simpsons was consistently the funniest show on TV. These guys MUST send out a news letter.

And sure as hell: as soon as the GOPs appropriated the show to try and give themselves a veneer of cool, the thing went to seed. It just figues. Everything those bastards touch turns to shit.

*Not that that's anything new. What happens is that every once in a while there are shows on that aren't complete bullshit, then those shows deteriorate or go away, and suddenly it seems like the state of the art is doomed. It's not. But it's important to remember that the state of the art, even when it seemed good, was still pretty crappy overall.

This is how Harry's web site parses it: "Fox 'hits' come and go, but The Simpsons persists. I used to maintain that its existence was the one reason not to revoke 'citizen' Rupert's right to plunder this country as his own. Now I'm not so sure. See what you think." I know what I think he means by that. You can make your own decision.

HOW TO FIGHT THOSE MONDAY MORNING BLOGS: Septemeber 14th: I waited until Tuesday to write a blog

I don't expect much out of journalism these days, but the cover of the latest Newsweek to befoul our mailbox strikes a new and ironic low.

"THE SLIME CAMPAIGN: How Both Sides Are Using The 527 Loophole to Throw Mud And Turn Out The Vote"

Where in the fuck have these guys been?

NEW KID ON THE BLOG: September 12th: The Testimonials Continue

September 11th passes with remarkably little fanfare, and we were able to accentuate the situation by avoiding NPR and the network news and other irritants, although I did run across a couple of tribute films, both "indie" documentaries that could have been interchanged scene for scene with no discernable impact.* Also, the editorial page editor of our local paper wrote a largely ineffectual column about how much has changed since September 11th. Most of his obeservations-- prepare thysel;f for heavy irony here, as the local paper is "The Observer-- were not so much observations as asserttions, and most of the assertions were either easily appropriated assumptions about human life ion our century or out-and-out falsehoods. After reading said column over a large omlette and some pleasantly grill flavored and crispy home fries with a large dose of Heinz ketchup, I returned hom to send the following missive under the heading "Regarding your latest column:"

Dear Ed,

Bullshit.

Yrs,

Jim

I am not actually on a first name basis with the man, but what's the point in living if you can't take a liberty now and then? But, at any rate, the editor seems to be working from home these days, as the reply address listed in the paper is a cable internet provider address and not an official Observer address, and the message bounced back with an "illegal alias" error, which probably means that hius computer has some sort of security software missinstalled. So he didn't get the message. Just as well, I suppose.

Just as well. He didn't really need to hear that, and he certainly didn't need to hear it from me, and had he heard it his reaction would have been that I am completely wrong, that all is changed, changed utterly, and there's not a damned thing that I can do about it. Media, y'know. Once they get an idea into their heads . . .

Too, that would have been something of an inauthentic act in it's own way. I mean, that kind of flame is the sort of thing that has got me riled in the past, and it's not like Ed-- Ed Williams, no relation-- was using the tragedy for any real personal gain, or appropriating bloodshed for profit, as has so far and widely been done since then. Too, I am claiming a small victory of my own in the paucity of third-anniversary testimonials, in that I said it then and knew it true: this thing will fade. Both shoes dropped, and the culprits are dead, and say what you will that's, in fact, that. We still don't have any real clue why it was done, to what supposed end, or who really planned it. Senseless. Absolutely senseless.

So the day, for us, consisted largely of eating. We had previously accepted a mission from Rachelle's sister Danielle, taking Cayla to a softball game while she awaited delivery of new furniture to her house. I made my soujourn to the Gitmo for the aforementioned omlette,~ then made aritual visit to a local music store and the ubiquitous Record Exchange, where I quickly forgot what I was looking for, thence back to the house, where Rachelle was almost ready to go. After dropping the dog off at the folks'+ place, we stopped in at the Red Bowl Asian Bistro, where Rachelle tried out the mixed veg and I had the tried and true poststickers and saytay chicken. The sauce for the latter had been inexplicably creamed, and so was neither saytay nor anything I wanted to dip the chicken in, so I either dipped it in the sauce that comes with the potstickers, a kind of diabolical hoisan based stuff, or hit it head on.

After this, a quick trip tot he grocery store adjacent, our favorite Harris Teeter, where we bought bottled water and killed time, thence to the Dameron household, where after some greeting and admirations of household improvements we bundled Cayla into the car and traipsed back over to the folks' place because that's where her sports equipment had last been seen. Cayla went in to confer with the folks while I went in to relieve myself, asking my wife to check Cayla's equipment bag to make sure it had all of the required and little or no surplus. Requirements fulfilled, we drove out to the Mallard Creek Recreation Center ballpark complex, watched Cayla's team get creamed by an impressively well prepared and stylistic team of girls-- it was an honorable defeat. Towards the end of the game, the sharpness of hunger struck her, and Cayla requested Bojangles. So I staved off my hunger with a bag of Cheetos, and after the game we fled to the Mountain Island Lake area again, to dine at the nearest example of the species. For the first time in recent memory, they got my sandwich order right, but the Cajun Filet I bit in to was very clearly processed and a bit on the cold side. Cayla had better luck with a two piece with seasoned fries and a biscuit. The Wifey, not as stung as La Cayla and myself, subsisted on a buttered biscuit. On the way out we picked up a sandwich for Josh, as ordered by his mother during a cell-phone update of activities and ETA's whiole we were ordering the food, which, when we got it back to the folk's place, was not the grilled chicken I had ordered, but the filet, which, being breaded and fried, was not something Danielle wanted eating.

After all this, we wended our way home, wherer Rachelle fell asleep on the couch while I watched an old movie until I was ready to go to bed.

It was a fitting tribute.

*As those of you just joining this broawdcast may not be aware, I am dead set against all the hoopla and falderol that has been thrown up around the events of September 11th, 2001. For proof and explanation of this, see The original entries.

~The Gitmo is the Eat Well Family Restaurant, a locally owned joint near our house that churns out standard Charlotte diner fare, slightly odd and Greek flavored, for more than decent prices. I started calling it the Gitmo a while back, for purely alitertaive reasons that defy explanation.

+For purposes of discussion, some basics: "the folks" are Rachelle parents, "the folks place" is their house in the Oakdale area, "Mountain Island Lake" is the surrounding area where the retail, fast food, and several restaurant outlets are located. Other assumptions will be made from time to time, so I might add them to this list at a later date.