English Peace Frog

DIFFERENT RELIGIONS WEEK

2005-07-11T07:19:00.000+09:00

I like the spirit behind this idea (thanks, Progressive Ink, for posting it). I think for it to have a chance to be effective in its stated goals, it needs to be much more widely publicized.

Study the Spanish Response to Terrorism

2005-07-10T10:49:00.000+09:00

The response, according to a CNN report I just watched, to the train bombings in Spain is interesting and instructive. After "Spain's 9/11", the Spanish government, contrary to intuition (and the model of the U.S.'s response), did not launch an invasion on Morocco (or, like the U.S., on the wrong country, like, I don't know, Madagascar), relaxed immigration policies, and granted amnesty to illegal immigrants from North Africa already living in the country. It also produced and spread educational materials promoting understanding and tolerance of Muslims in Spain (including a video called "the Moroccan Experience"). According to the members of the Islamic community (people interviewed on the street), the result of the government's efforts is that radical beliefs among Spanish Muslims are becoming "increasingly rare". Much more significant, the Islamic Commission of Spain, the chief body for Spain's 1,000,000 Muslims, did no less than issue a fatwa against Osama bin Laden!

How many Muslim organizations in the U.S. have done that?

SATAN'S PLAN FOR US!

2005-07-09T08:22:00.000+09:00

There is some deep discourse happening over at this Christian Bulletin Board (Thanks, Progressive Ink, for the link). The framework for the discussion, I take it, is that the existence of extraterrestial life is not only impossible, but also a lie, born of a sinister collusion of Hollywood and Satan. This excerpt is representative. If you desire more education, there's plenty more at the link.

This will be the greatest deception of all time. Satan has been preparing us weak and gullible humans for this for sixty years. More people can relate to UFOs and aliens than they can to a personal loving God. Just as people disappeared in the movie “War of the Worlds” and were kept in cages on the alien ships, so will it be at the rapture. Afterwards, as I explained in my novel “Invasion: Israel” the world will be turned upside down by the disappearance of millions of people, especially here in Christian America.

Meanwhile, astronomers have discovered the 153rd extrasolar planet. They're finding them at something like once every two weeks now.

TERROR ATTACKS IN LONDON II

2005-07-08T21:18:00.000+09:00

In The Dark has an insightful response to the London attacks.

TERRORIST ATTACKS IN LONDON

2005-07-07T20:33:00.000+09:00

I have some questions for my visitors (I myself don't feel strongly confident about answers for any of them, but they are important--even critical--questions, I believe, if people truly want to stop terrorism). Please feel free to share your answers:

1. If the U.S. hadn't attacked Iraq, would this attack in London have been less or more likely to occur?

2. If Al Qaeda is behind these attacks (at this moment, three hours after they commenced, Tony Blair just made a statement calling them terrorist attacks, so I guess it's safe to call them that), did it commit the attacks motivated by

A) a twisted idealogy that "hates freedom" and wants to impose an Islamic regime in England or

B) vengeance

3. George Bush's popularity is at an all-time low. What do you think will happen to his approval ratings in the coming days?

4. Is it possible that this string of bombs in the country of the chief ally to the U.S. will give rise to increased and serious discussion in Washington about invading Iran and / or starting the draft again?

**updates unfolding in the comments.

Karl Rove--Only Perjury?

2005-07-06T06:53:00.000+09:00

No time to comment now, except that this article provokes the question: who do you think will serve more prison time: Karl Rove, for the perjury he's already admitted publically, or journalists connected to this case who are about to be sent to jail? Also: why isn't Robert Novak being threatened with jail? He wrote the original article. Has he betrayed his source already?

KARL ROVE LEAKED VALERIE PLAME'S NAME?

2005-07-05T12:33:00.000+09:00

I'm not sure where this is going, but it appears the records released by Time Magazine regarding the leaking of Valerie Plame's name contained information indicating that Karl Rove, Bush's advisor, was one of the people who "outed" her. This is, if I remember correctly, in the opinion of George H.W. Bush, a crime on the order of treason.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/07/03/news/notes.php

Slight update: seems Rove claims he circulated Plame's name after she was outed by R. Novak, but did so explicitly as a part of a strategy to discredit Wilson; he did this to retaliate against Wilson's having the audacity to spread truth about Bush's bullshit intelligence re: Iraq's nuclear program. What a reptile.

HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY?

2005-07-05T08:13:00.000+09:00

To our brave young troops, especially those fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq:

Happy Independence Day.

I hope you come back safe and in one piece. I hope you don't end up homeless like so many Other Vets did. I hope your government keeps you properly equipped for the dangerous job it sent you to do. I hope that the government and the free media don't lie about why you are daily risking life and limb--it's the very least they owe you. I hope it supports you and your families, with benefits appropriate for the perils you face for our country, and for your incredible bravery.

Come home soon.

THINGS TO AVOID WHEN TAKING AN EXAM FOR YOUR SISTER BECAUSE SHE NEGLECTED HER STUDIES

2005-07-05T07:59:00.000+09:00

Was Caught When Testers Noticed Breasts Too Big

Man substitutes for his sister at an exam and gets caught. You would think that he would have taken care to be less conspicuous. Maybe he wanted to be caught. Maybe we all do.

Planet number 147 and the Stupid Brats of the Universe

2005-07-03T09:53:00.000+09:00

We are the brats of the universe. We are the naughty, greasy haired Little Rascals, befreckled and be-cowlicked, snickering and snarfing at the pulling of little girls' pigtails, and the pilfering of pies cooling on old ladies' windowsills. We are the cute but wicked Nellie Oleson's, the mischievous Tom Sawyer's, the outlaw Huck Finn's. It would all be adorable and fairly harmless, except that we use car-bombs instead of sling-
shots, and depleted uranium munitions instead of snowballs.

We are children who should have our filthy toys yanked from our grimy fingers. We're snot-nosed, with yellow spots on our clothing. What we need are some beings wiser and kinder than us to give us a good spanking!

The Day of Judgment is getting closer all the time! Extrasolar planet number 147 has been discovered!

HAPPY CANADA DAY!!

2005-07-01T23:09:00.000+09:00

Slightly belated.

I'm not Canadian, but these days, I wish I were. Without being overly simplistic or romantic about this (because Canada of course has its share of fools, losers, and perverts, just like everywhere), I doubt that anyone can reasonably argue against this idea: Canada, as a society, embraces principles that are guided more by compassion and egalitarianism than is the United States of America. It's a damn shame, too, because America could have guided the world into a 21st Century much more shining than it's turned out to be.

EVERYBODY SING!

O Canada!
Our home and native land!
True patriot love in all thy sons command.
With glowing hearts we see thee rise,
The True North strong and free!
From far and wide,
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
God keep our land glorious and free!
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

O Canada!
Terre de nos aïeux,
Ton front est ceint de fleurons glorieux!
Car ton bras sait porter l'épée,
Il sait porter la croix!
Ton histoire est une épopée
Des plus brillants exploits.
Et ta valeur, de foi trempée,
Protégera nos foyers et nos droits.
Protégera nos foyers et nos droits.

STUPID HEADLINE

2005-07-01T06:33:00.000+09:00

Stupid headline.

IMPEACH GEORGE W. BUSH

2005-06-29T14:56:00.000+09:00

We went to war because we were attacked.
-George W. Bush, June 28 speech

Fact: We were attacked by followers of an extremist group called Al Qaeda, whose leader, for religious and other reasons, was an enemy of Saddam Hussein. No serious evidence has ever surfaced that connected 9/11 with the Iraqi government. To say we went to war with Iraq because of 9/11 is a lie.

Number of Americans dead because of attacks by Iraq prior to the invasion: 0

Number of Americans dead after being placed in harm's way during the invasion and occupation: 1,700 and counting.

Impeach George W. Bush.

CLINICAL DESCRIPTIONS OF WRONGFUL DEATHS

2005-06-28T20:47:00.000+09:00

She wasn't responding to strangling, so I used a knife to complete the project.

2005-06-28T20:46:00.000+09:00

There were a number of civilian casualties, of course.

IRAN 2006?

2005-06-26T07:42:00.000+09:00

2006: Mission Accomplished II?

This has been a thrilling week on the international front. Iran's presidential election brought a landslide victory to hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, arousing the irritation of self-appointed American Middle-East landlords, who denounced the election as fraudulent and "out of the step with the rest of the region," meaning, of course, American-controlled Iraq. It appears that Washington is frothy with rage over the shrieking twist away from democracy, and doesn't perceive the slightest irony in the fact that the so-called democratic "step" that Iran is "out of" in the region was established not by people in the region but by people on the other side of the world who were drooling for open access to oil there. These "regional" trends toward democracy also were not accomplished democratically but by acts of horrific violence, in the course of an invasion of a sovereign nation, another joke the new American landlords don't get. Actually, glorious banners on boats notwithstanding, they have not been accomplished at all.

Meanwhile, organizations are gearing up for a return to the draft. Of course, President Bush is adamantly opposed to a draft, and swears he will never support the return of such an institution in the democratic United States. We all are familiar with Bush's spotless track record of honesty. The guy is like some kind of crazy saint. A soothing pearly light radiates from his eyes. If we can't believe him, who can we believe? Not believing the words of our president would be a little like not having faith in other of history's honored paragons of moral purity. Mother Theresa. Gandhi. Rasputin.

However, even Bush's antiseptic hand couldn't stay the fury of Congress and the American Public if there were another big terrorist attack, which, despite the ruthless and ballsy War on Terrorism, is regarded as inevitable by just about everyone. Draft counselor Dan McFadden points out, "We are probably one terrorist attack--one 9/11--away from a draft."

ha

P.S. for information on a related topic, see Editor Mom's June 23 post on the creepy backdoor draft database being compiled on your kids.

see also Mission Accomplished II

Scientology Tom Cruise John Travolta Mass Murder Trivia Fact!

2005-06-25T07:30:00.000+09:00

Charles Manson was also a Scientologist.

Women's Brains Shut Off During Orgasm

2005-06-21T15:58:00.000+09:00

Not that this is really a stunning discovery. What struck me most about this is the logistics of the research. How were the volunteers compensated? What kinds of people were they? Under what conditions did the study occur? In a warehouse at the edge of town? Was it recorded on film? If so, how were experimental conditions prepared so as to simulate privacy and thereby, presumably, reduce anxiety that might interfere with the results? More importantly, can we see some of the footage?

The mind spins; the eyes widen; the blood flows to the extremities.

MOIST TOM CRUISE

2005-06-20T20:30:00.000+09:00

Throw these monsters into Guantanamo and start pulling out their fingernails, I say! Waterboard them!!
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8285915/

MY STUPID NEIGHBORS ARE SNEEZING

2005-06-19T08:13:00.000+09:00

8:11a.m. Sunday morning. I open the balcony window to let in some fresh, cool air. My neighbor, the father, begins sneezing thunderously. Four, five, six times. A heavy smoker, his first ritual of the day is to sneeze on the balcony and wake everyone up.

His wife screams at him. He gets angry at what she screams, and bellows back at her. I can't understand what their words. They sound like this:

Wife: (voice breaking through the soprano edge of the register) Sono BEEEE Ka na rouuu??!!
Husband: (outraged) Brrr graaawww BAAA DA NZ AA NA YO!!

ha

MY STUPID NEIGHBORS ARE DOOMED

2005-06-18T21:11:00.000+09:00

Well, they're at it again, and I'm ready to rip all my hair from my skull and eat it raw. It took them longer tonight--it's nearly 9:00--but the activity is the same. My stupid neighbors are fighting again.

The father and the mother, in dispute over their lazy son, shatter the evening tranquility by flinging hateful words at each other with a belligerence normally unheard of in Japan. It penetrates the few moments of peace we have after work like jabs of an ice pick into our brains.

Phallic Ad Awards

2005-06-17T20:18:00.000+09:00

Phalluses embedded in advertising images. I could comment, but what would it add?

Michael Jackson: Dummy's Inferno

2005-06-14T10:34:00.000+09:00

Last words on the Michael Jackson trial, since I'd previously soiled my fingers by trying to build a case for his innocence (and was soundly trounced by Dayna afterwards, when she dismantled assiduously each of my points the way a wheat thresher dismantles wheat):

I was impressed (and surprised) that the jury actually did what it was supposed to do, that is, weigh the merits of this case based on the evidence, and determine the guilt or innocence of the defendant based on the criteria of "beyond a reasonable doubt". I thought they would disregard this and go by their gut emotional responses to the decidedly freakish Mr. Jackson, and to past cases. Although Jackson could well be guilty of past incidents of child molestation, the present case was more than a little dubious, and that was the case the jury was supposed to decide. They could have concluded that Jackson had escaped justice in the past, and they could find him guilty retroactively. There are good reasons for not doing this, which are the underpinnings of our very good legal justice system.

I don't buy that he was found innocent because of his celebrity status (something many have been jabbering on TV for the past hour). It's an insult to the jurors.

I think Jackson, guilty or innocent, is the luckiest man on Earth. He brought much of this on himself, and he could have been sent to prison. If he possesses even a particulate of sense, he'll arrange payments of his massive debt by a bank loan, hold on tight to his Beatles's song rights, and live the rest of his life in Howard Hughes seclusion.

EVERY one of the participants (the witnesses, the journalists, etc.) in the trial, except perhaps the judge, jurors and Macaulay Culkin, should be arrested and put in jail. I don't care about what they are charged with. My saying this has nothing to do with M. Jackson, about whom I really don't care at all. They should be imprisoned because they are annoying. Maybe Guantanamo.

The Michael Jackson case has shoved our level of cultural focus much lower than it had ever been. Thousands of journalists from every corner of the globe gathered at that little courtroom to pant and slaver after ever lurid, stained tidbit and blast it in our ears, in "real time." Like rats being tugged through a maze by the ripe bouquet of rotting cheese, we bought right into it, slobbering for more. We've worked together to construct our own media Inferno, and we have no remorse. We've happily descended to the furious center circle, where the worst of the worst sinners are chewed eternally in the mouth of Satan. We groan and squeal, chew harder, baby!

WHO IS THIS?

2005-06-11T07:53:00.000+09:00

"Very unreliable," the Navy noted. "He has been fired from every job he had except newspaper reporter."

Power of Nightmares and a New Name for Global Warming

2005-06-08T06:36:00.000+09:00

A couple of lightning-quick observations:

I saw Adam Curtis's "The Power of Nightmares" on Japanese public television the other night. This BBC documentary has been winning awards at Cannes and deservedly so. It seamlessly illustrates the rise in the late 1940's and continuation through today of two systems of political / religious philosophy: those of the "neo-cons" and of radical Islamic extremists. "Power of Nightmares" shows, using interviews with participants on both sides, well-supported and meticulous narrative, and plenty of fascinating vintage footage, how these two radical groups created and sustained each other and continue to do so to this day, and how alike they are in their disdain of liberalism and democracy. Among the debris left in the wake of the tension between them is a number of assassinations, a lot of scorched-Earth bombings and a couple of airplanes flown into famous buildings. Sounds boring, right? Wrong! It's only my little review that's boring. The documentary will be riveting to everyone, from metal-heads to Ph.D.'s. See it, if you can.

Here's a review.

It's being shown all around the world, with one dramatic exception: in the United States, where no distributor will pick it up.

Organic Eddie

2005-06-01T16:15:00.000+09:00

Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor

I was startled to come across this article about the recently late Eddie Albert, of Green Acres fame (see previous post). It turns out Eddie was a pretty fierce environmentalist, as well as a fan of organic gardening. He lambasted Eva Gabor (quote below) on her stupid bird outfit because of its insensitivity to the plight of rare fowl.

I wish I'd met him. Sounds like he was cooler than he looked. Again, props and RIP, brother Eddie! Fist up from the grave, peace dog!

Not even the glamorous Eva Gabor-Green Acres costar-was spared Albert's admonitions over environmental transgressions. During a break on the set of Green Acres, Eva Gabor said to Albert just back from one of his many university lectures, "Every time you hear of a sick fish you make a speech. And what do you talk about?" Albert mentioned the plight of the birds and their nemesis, DDT. "And if you wouldn't mind," he said to Gabor, "I'd appreciate your not wearing that thing you have on in front of the camera." Gabor, in an extravagant feather outfit with a $5,000 price tag, appeared surprised. "Oh, but it's so beautiful, so chic," she replied. Said Albert, "Yes, but it caused a lot of birds to die."

The Astounding Eddie Albert Coincidence

2005-05-29T17:32:00.000+09:00

The other day, I was moved by a mysterious dynamism to rise from my chair, drift to the computer, and search for Green Acres fansites.

My reason was as simple as it was indefensible: I wanted to hear the theme song again. This was a television program of incalculable worth for me as a child. I saw it only as a daytime rerun, and only on days when I stayed home from school because I was sick. Therefore, I ordinarily watched it with a fever, sometimes high*. Green Acres, when viewed in a healthy condition, might not be the paragon of television sitcom excellence, but viewing it while trembling and convulsing under a soggy blanket, with influenza, the mumps or some other incurable retrovirus, was damned comforting to a sensitive child like little Hokkaidoabbey. I gradually came to associate the show, and especially the theme song, with comfort, warmth and good health.

That was a long time ago, though. I'd put aside childish things decades ago, and hadn't thought about Green Acres since I was a teenager, probably. Then, like a raw shard of lightning thrust through my forehead, the impulse came to search the internet for the show and the theme song. I found them, listened to the song, discovered that, in my middle-age, I was unmoved by the honking jalopy tune. I've grown cold and barren, like a chunk of dead coral fingering out of Iceland. I continued on to another activity.

THE VERY NEXT DAY, when I turned on the computer, the first thing that caught my eye on the Yahoo news page was this headline:

Eddie Albert, star of television's popular Green Acres, dead at 99

Is that a shocking coincidence or isn't it?!

Did I somehow accidentally kill Eddie Albert? Or was Eddie sending me a signal from his deathbed?

*the fever was high, not me.

The Persian Strawberry

2005-05-28T19:14:00.000+09:00

This week, extra-Earthly planet number 146 was discovered (!!), the Michael Jackson trial came to the brink of the end (prediction: a mistrial), my face erupted with a pimple the size and shape of a Persian strawberry and I had a massive dizzy spell in the midst of a class, because I'd scarcely slept for three days, George Bush gave a speech that attempted to guilt-trip Americans into joining the military by suggesting they were wasting their lives if they didn't, to be continued, because dinner is ready.

The Sith Family Singers II

2005-05-25T15:23:00.000+09:00

This article is a follow-up of the previous entry on torture.--ha

From 'gook' to 'raghead'Bob Herbert The New York Times
TUESDAY, MAY 3, 2005
NEW YORK

I spent some time recently with Aidan Delgado, 23, a religion major at New College of Florida, a small, highly selective school in Sarasota. On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, before hearing anything about the terror attacks that would change the direction of American history, Delgado enlisted as a private in the army reserve. Suddenly, in ways he had never anticipated, the military took over his life. He was trained as a mechanic and assigned to the 320th Military PoliceCompany in St. Petersburg, Florida. By the spring of 2003, he was in Iraq. Eventually he would be stationed at the prison compound in Abu Ghraib.Delgado's background is unusual. He is an American citizen, but because his father was in the diplomatic corps, he grew up overseas. He spent eight years in Egypt, speaks Arabic and knows a great deal about the various cultures of the Middle East. He wasn't happy when, even before his unit left the States, a top officer made wisecracks about the soldiers heading off to Iraq to kill some ragheads and burnsome turbans.

"He laughed," Delgado said, "and everybody in the unit laughed with him."The officer's comment was a harbinger of the gratuitous violence that, according to Delgado, is routinely inflicted by American soldiers on ordinary Iraqis. He said: "Guys in my unit, particularly the younger guys, would drive by in their Humvee and shatter bottles over the heads of Iraqi civilians passing by. They'd keep a bunch of empty Coke bottles in the Humvee to break over people's heads." He said he had confronted guys who were his friends about this practice. "I said to them: 'What the hell are you doing? Like, what does this accomplish?' And they responded just completely openly. They said: 'Look, I hate being in Iraq. I hate being stuck here. AndI hate being surrounded by hajis."' "Haji" is the troops' term of choice for Iraqis. It's used the way "gook" or "Charlie" was used in Vietnam. Delgado said he had witnessed incidents in which an army sergeant lashed a group of children with a steel Humvee antenna, and a Marine corporal planted a vicious kick in the chest of a kid about 6 years old. There were many occasions, he said, when soldiers or marines would yell and curse and point their guns at Iraqis who had done nothing wrong.He said he believes that the absence of any real understanding of Arab or Muslim culture by most GIs, combined with a lack of proper training and the unrelieved tension of life in a war zone, contributes to levels of fear and rage that lead to frequent instances of unnecessary violence. Delgado, an extremely thoughtful and serious young man, balked at the entire scene. "It drove me into a moral quagmire," he said. "I walked up to my commander and gave him my weapon. I said: 'I'm not going to fight. I'm not going to kill anyone. This war is wrong. I'll stay. I'll finish my job as a mechanic. But I'm not going to hurt anyone. And I want to be processed as a conscientious objector."'He stayed with his unit and endured a fair amount of ostracism."People would say I was a traitor or a coward," he said. "The stuffyou would expect."In November 2003, after several months in Nasiriya in southern Iraq,the 320th was redeployed to Abu Ghraib. The violence there was sickening, Delgado said. Some inmates were beaten nearly to death.The GIs at Abu Ghraib lived in cells while most of the detainees werehoused in large overcrowded tents set up in outdoor compounds thatwere vulnerable to mortars fired by insurgents. The army acknowledgesthat at least 32 Abu Ghraib detainees were killed by mortar fire.Delgado, who eventually got conscientious objector status and washonorably discharged last January, recalled a disturbance thatoccurred while he was working in the Abu Ghraib motor pool. Detaineeswho had been demonstrating over a variety of grievances beganthrowing rocks at the guards. As the disturbance grew, the armyauthorized lethal force. Four detainees were shot to death.Delgado confronted a sergeant who, he said, had fired on thedetainees. "I asked him," said Delgado, "if he was proud that he hadshot unarmed men behind barbed wire for throwing stones. He didn'tget mad at all. He was, like, 'Well, I saw them bloody my buddy's nose, so I knelt down. I said a prayer. I stood up, and I shot them down.'

Newsweek, the Koran, Torture, The Sith Family Singers

2005-05-22T08:33:00.000+09:00

What does the American public make of all the evidence piling up about widespread torture committed by the government it elected?

Among people who've kept their eyes open about the U.S.'s new romance with torture, all the jabbering and fist-shaking about the recent Newsweek report about Koran-abuse, and the magazine's subsequent retraction of the story, was farcical.

The story, in its essence, was true, and has been reported plenty before. Newsweek was forced to back off the story only because its source, for occult reasons of his own, backed away from it too. But the Koran defilement has been known for some time now to be one of a litany of terroristic techniques used in America's "war on terror".

If reports from CNN are any indication, most Americans are buying the Bush adminstration's panting and offended response to the Newsweek story hook, line and sinker. Also reported reliably have been plenty of other incidents of torture (including rape), occurring in far more venues than Abu Ghraib, and committed by far more people than smirking grunts like little Charlie Graner and his porcine ex-girlfriend.

If measured by public expressions of outrage, most Americans don't appear to give a rat's ass about that either. Or maybe they just don't know, because they've got they've more important things on their minds.

I keep returning to this theme in my blog because it's hard for me to understand how the intelligent, generous and kind people I know as fellow Americans could allow their government to continue doing this kind of thing. Why aren't millions of people out on the streets in front of the White House, shrieking furiously for a stop of torture done in their name? Is it because they don't believe it's happening? Is it because they don't care?

I'm curious to know how Americans out there respond to this Molly Ivins article. Write in and tell us.

Buddhist Riddle

2005-05-18T16:28:00.000+09:00

What thing is not attained when painstakingly sought?
What thing comes of itself without being sought?
What thing does not break under the blow of an iron hammer?
What thing closes by night and opens by day?

--Chih-Men

OCELOT SUNDAY

2005-05-16T20:47:00.000+09:00

Get that Camera Out of My Face

Welcome to Ocelot Sunday, a regular feature here at English Peace Frog. Look at this cool fellow. He looks like he might just jump right through the computer screen and eat your face right off your skull, doesn't he?

Good Painting! Cheap!

2005-05-15T11:15:00.000+09:00

Isn't this a beautiful painting? If you want to buy it, just send me ten bucks!

Oh my God! Someone stole Dick's painting!

UGLY CHILDREN

2005-05-09T22:54:00.000+09:00

This article is troubling. The results of a study by Canadian researchers indicate that parents of unattractive children pay less attention to them, and are less protective of them than they are to more attractive children. I don't doubt that it's true, and I understand the chilly evolutionary reasons for something like this coming about. I wonder if a study that reveals something like this really has any potential to change anything. I also wonder how they determined which kids were "attractive" and which were not.

I believe in democracy, and I intend to bring it into my life as a father, if I ever become one. If I have one ugly kid (giant head, knob-nosed with vast nostrils, earlobes dangling grotesquely like a punk Buddha, brillo-haired with fat black eyebrows, hairs sprouting also in strange places, the left eye larger than the right, with the pupil twisted permanently toward the south, where Satan lives) and one cute kid (sparkling eyes, dimples that break your heart, angelic smile, button nose, skin perfectly smooth and soft, except for a tiny birthmark, just under her right ear, shaped like a cross), I'm going to give the ugly one twice as much love, plus a dollar a day allowance extra. When the cute kid whines about how she can't get a dollar too, I'll snap at her, "quit your snivelling and get a job as a model, you cute pig."

ha

Ocelot Sunday

2005-05-08T07:20:00.000+09:00

The Bluest Eyes on Earth

It's Ocelot Sunday, a regular feature at English Peace Frog. This attentive blue-eyed cutie is absorbed in something crucially important and utterly invisible.

Charles Graner III: I Heart Lynndie XOXOXO

2005-05-05T18:38:00.000+09:00

"To Free the Iraqi People"

see also Charles Graner I
and Charles Graner II

I don't want to be joyous over another's misery, but I have to admit I laughed out loud when I heard that Lynndie England's ploy didn't succeed. After partying merrily in front of cameras while torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, then becoming as well known a monster worldwide as the most infamous ones in horror-fiction (who do you think is scarier--Hannibal Lector or Lynndie England?), England managed to plea-bargain her way down to a reported two-year sentence. I thought it likely that the judge would accept it because the U.S. government wants the case to vanish as fast as possible.

The memories of Americans are small. Were this attempt at a plea-bargain tried a year ago, there would have been demonstrations erupting out everywhere, probably as much from the war-supporters as from those against. Porcine cardboard images of Ms. England would be doused with (very expensive) gasoline, ignited, and maddened throngs of drunken veterans would be marching up the hill, jabbing and hurling thousands of blazing torches over the walls and through the windows of whatever army camp she was living in, tearing open the sky with their howls for revenge.

Not now, apparently. Time has passed. Lynndie is old news. She's boring. We're now in the middle of the Michael Jackson trial and there was this really cool public quarrel between Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie, so who cares? The new Star Wars movie is coming out! Don't bore me with a real one! Just let this chick off light. They were just a bunch of Iraq Arabs (pronounced EYE-rack AAY-rabs), right? Sheeeit. They had it coming anyway, because of 9/11.

The chick, however, has not gotten off so light, and the chick furthermore has been thwarted in her odious maneuver to get off so. Tonight, Lynndie England must be gnashing her teeth in commiseration with her mother, whose face, by the way, looks like she herself has been gnashing her own teeth for the last fifty years. Poor Lynndie might actually have to do a little more time for her crimes than Martha Stewart.

ha

P.S. Focussing on the England / Graner finger of these crimes shouldn't be misconstrued as my believing there wasn't an gnarled and bloody hand connected to it, made up of a number of policy-makers and others in a chain-of-command, the leaders of which include Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Gonzalez, and George W. Bush. These three and others are connected to the crimes at Abu Ghraib with at least as much documentary evidence as that which pressured Richard Nixon out of office before he could be put on trial. They should be in prison themselves.

P.P.S. It shouldn't matter, because even criminals shouldn't be subject to torture, but most of the prisoners there at the time of the notorious incidents were guilty of nothing; they had been rounded up indiscriminately in the early days of the U.S. invasion; it still isn't clear if those tormented by England, Graner and others were "terrorists" or not or just innocent people in the wrong place at the wrong time.

A Stupendous Experience

2005-05-04T19:24:00.000+09:00

Sex and Saucers

"She was three meters (10 feet) tall and had six fingers, but otherwise she looked completely like a human," he says of his close encounter with an alien species. "I told my wife all about it afterwards. She wasn't too angry."

I think it would be a truly stupendous experience to be alive when the announcement comes that our species at last has made contact with one from another world. Or when the discovery is made of evidence that another intelligent species exists out there. Such an announcement or discovery is, in my opinion, inevitable, given the raw number of planets on which life as, or more, intelligent than our own would probably arise. Such an announcement might also be a long time in coming. It will ultimately be a matter of detecting signals from artificially produced broadcasts, probably, like our TV and radio shows. But I don't believe that we've been visited (yet) by space aliens, for many practical reasons.

What do you think?

The Real Deal

2005-05-03T10:46:00.000+09:00

"I thought it was candy because they put candy in your ice cream ... to make it a treat. So I said, 'OK, well, I'll just put it in my mouth and get the ice cream off of it and see what it is.'"

FODDER

2005-05-01T12:43:00.000+09:00

Veterans of World War II, Korea and Vietnam who had seen combat were 60 percent more likely to be heavy drinkers than those who had not. And they were four times more likely to be heavy drinkers than men who never served in the armed forces, according to the study.

Can't really add anything to this except the observation that we are a forgetful species. Also, governments do their utmost to conceal how emotionally difficult it is for the troops in combat. The suicide rate of soldiers in Iraq, for example, has been known to be very high, but specific information has been distorted or hidden, or claimed to not exist, by the Bush administration. In twenty years, what condition will all these Iraqi vets, now scarcely out of childhood, be in?

SUDDEN DEATH

2005-04-30T18:54:00.000+09:00

Brutish

A few days ago, a train crashed near where we live. More than seventy people were killed.

From all available evidence, it appears the train hit a curve going too fast, derailed, snapped a massive signal beam in two like a toothpick, exploded into an apartment building. The front car wrapped around the side of the building and was instantly crushed flat by the impact so that the rectangular compartment, which must have weighed a hundred tons, looked much like it was a fragile box made from foil, and pushed artistically by a playful finger from the sky into a decorative silver and orange lining for the edifice.

There were about a hundred people inside.

The impact was so powerful that the second car blasted into the first and melded with it, in a splash of dozens of ripped shards of razor-sharp metal that sewed itself with the blasted shreds of the first so inextricably that in order to search for survivors, the scrambling and brave (they are always scrambling and brave) rescue workers needed to carve all the way through the second car's walls and floors and ceilings in order to start carving and drilling through the walls of the first to try to find survivors.

There weren't many. One interviewed on TV was heavily bandaged, with glazed eyes that kept watering up during the interview, and with lips that trembled to tell of the nightmare. On a map, he showed that he was sitting near the front, where the driver was, but his battered body was discovered under a scrap-pile of tattered steel at the back of the car, some fifty feet away. He was one of only a handful of living in a packed charnel house of exploded corpses.

It took them forty-eight hours to take out all the bodies.

Two students from the universities where I teach were killed.

A friend of my family was killed.

The TV broadcasts are continuous in their display of the wreckage and incidents peripheral to it, and have shown mini-documentaries of the lives of many of the victims. Parents shrieking in despair. A mother, clutching a huge photo of her dead daughter, sobbing in front of a battery of cameras, prevented from collapsing by her other daughter, who can barely stand or think herself. Disraught friends of the deceased bowing before a small mountain of flowers. Children without parents, and parents now abruptly without their children.

Hobbes was right, I reckon. Life is nasty, brutish and short. At least that's how I've been feeling the last couple of days. I'll feel better soon, and be upbeat until the next, inevitable crash.

ha

A HEARTBEAT FROM NUCLEAR WAR

2005-04-26T10:35:00.000+09:00

Recently revealed information shows that the Cuban Missile Crisis was even more dangerous than commonly believed. We seriously came a heartbeat from nuclear war.

At the worst moment of the crisis, while under attack by US destroyers, a Soviet submarine officer, Vasili Arkhipov, blocked an order to fire a nuclear-armed torpedo in retaliation. If he had not done so, the US certainly would have responded in kind, leading to a nuclear war. In short, one little Soviet submarine guy saved the world.

The reason we came a hair's breadth from nuclear war is because of a flaw in the philosophy underpinning nearly all militaristic behavior.

We square off with and threaten adversaries, yet maintain our safety, the thinking goes, by relying on the law of retaliation--you attack me, I attack you. If you attack me, you'd better attack me bad enough to destroy me completely. Otherwise, I'll come back at you with all I've got. All my children and grandchildren will too, when they grow up. Since no one wants that, we all remain safe, right?

The philosophy would work fine, and we'd all live in eternal peace, if another quality of human beings didn't shape the outcome of such standoffs: the ability to self-deceive.

A different, more radical, version of this philosophy has been policized by the administration of George W. Bush. This doctrine advocates preventive warfare, and holds that attacking one's weak adversaries ensures one's safety from development of dangers in the unspecified future, and further ensures one's access to one's adversaries' material resources. This is thought by many to be both a treacherous and perilous policy, for reasons of morality and common sense.

I love Noam Chomsky’s comments below on the “criminal lunacy” of the Soviets during the Cuban Crisis, the frightful hypocrisy of the U.S. then and now, and the logical fallacies of attacking those whose most dire warnings against irresponsible militarism do not come to pass. Notice how pertinent this all is to Iraq. Are we as a species a kind of collective super-crack-addict, in the grips of a fatal flaw, with no hope of recovery? Are we genetically incapable of learning from our worst mistakes?

Whatever one’s judgment about the actions of Khrushchev and Kennedy, there should be universal agreement that Khrushchev’s decision to dispatch the missiles to Cuba was an act of criminal lunacy, in the light of the possible consequences. It would pass beyond lunacy to condemn those who warned of the dangers and criticized Khrushchev bitterly for proceeding despite the risks. It is the merest truism that choices are assessed in terms of the range of likely consequences. We understand the truism very well when considering the actions of official enemies but find it hard to apply to ourselves. There are many illustrations, including recent US military exercises. Aid agencies, scholars, and others who properly warned of the risks in Afghanistan and Iraq were ridiculed when the worst (i.e. when peace-activists argued against the war by saying that hidden caches of biological or chemical agents, or nuclear weapons--claimed to exist by the U.S. government as justification for the invasion—might be deployed against the U.S., Israel, or other countries, to great calamity-HA) fortunately, did not come to pass. At the same level of moral imbecility, one would rush into the streets every October to sing praises to the Kremlin, while ridiculing those who warned of the dangers of placing missiles in Cuba and persist in condemning the criminal lunacy of the act.
Noam Chomsky Hegemony or Survival

stories

2005-04-26T06:09:00.000+09:00

For the possible interest of some of my favorite sojourners to little English Peace Frog, here are a couple of stories I have splattered on the "World Wide Web".

Peace,
ha

I'M STARTING TO SEE THE LIGHT II

2005-04-24T12:44:00.000+09:00

Q: Why did Beethoven kill all his chickens?
A: Because they kept going, Bach, Bach, Bach.

I'M STARTING TO SEE THE LIGHT

2005-04-24T11:45:00.000+09:00

Some may have seen dollar signs, the chance to convert secret knowledge into a pile of cash. And, of course, they didn't want to lose their jobs. But I'd like to think that even in today's economy, most people would draw the line at countenancing child molestation.

Lock all of them up, but save the "punishment" cellblock -- dank, windowless chambers and snarling guards who whip out the baton if you don't call them Mister Bubba -- for the parents who gave their children to an exceedingly strange middle-aged man who wanted nothing more than to get young boys into his bed.

This article speaks for itself. Along with the gauntlet of greedheads it mentions, this week has also brought us a woman who tried to rip off Wendy's by sneaking a human finger into some chili, and hordes of the devout flocking to see an image of the Virgin Mary emblazoned in a wall stain of a highway underpass. George Bush's reelection is starting to make sense.

Three Men and a Penis

2005-04-24T09:21:00.000+09:00

My wife nearly cudgeled me at dinner last night with a loaf of French bread after I informed her, sheepishly, that I'd blogged about her dream of a man with three penises. She wasn't angry that I'd blogged about it, before, as it were, the whole planet, but because I'd gotten the details so wrong. She demanded (seriously, demanded) that I correct my errors. Now. Here they are:

1. It wasn't a man with three penises. It was three men, with one penis.

2. It didn't occur in the midst of a religious (papal?) procession, and the man (men) were not standing at the side of the road or the parade or whatever. It didn't occur anywhere. There was no context at all, my wife says. It was just three naked men in a void, who, to put it in her words, "were lined up together just like that (silohuetted) guy in pedestrian-crossing signs. Except that there were three of them instead of one, in a row, and they had penises hanging down."

That is to say, these three naked men my wife dreamed about were lined up with both arms and legs bent at right angles, arranged symetrically to one another to form a kind of spidery, swastika-esque cross, assuming the postures of those festooned, hieroglyphed and bebeaked princes on the walls of Egyptian Pyramids.

It all still seems vaguely evil to me. No matter. I'm officially absolved. Dominy, Dominy.

P.S. the Blogger spell-checker doesn't contain the word "blogged".

The Man with Three Penises

2005-04-22T06:09:00.000+09:00

An Evil Omen?

Last night my wife dreamed she saw a man with three penises. She was wending her way through some vast and tumultuous procession. There, on the side of the road, was the man. He was utterly naked. He had three willies. My wife tried to turn back to confirm that she had, in fact, really seen what she thought she had seen, but was already swept away by the force of the crowd.

What can it mean?

I WANT TO BE A CUCUMBER

2005-04-17T09:02:00.000+09:00

Happy Cucumber

This week, I wish I had been born a cucumber. Cucumbers are happy. They are paragons of contentment. They do not accumulate resentments; neither do they toil excessively. In fact, they hardly toil at all. They just lie there. All day. In the fresh air. Luxuriating under the big, warm, yellow sun.

Lucky bastards. Must be rough. They don't need to do a damned thing. No exertion. No sweat, stress, or seizures. No bosses. The only requirement for being a successful cucumber is to stretch out, photosynthesize, and grooooow. And maybe avoid insane gardeners like Gav.

They don't need to pay taxes, avoid the smelly NHK man or the grousy Jehovah's Witness lady at the door, or fucking teach 318 new university students this week.

In the manner of the racing wall of white-hot mud growling down the face of Vesuvius and pulverizing the good merchants, splendid artisans, happy whores and hilarious lepers of Pompeii, hard work in the past seven days has pulverized me. I feel ashen, with decrepit, creaking bones. I look in the mirror. I expect to see a man. Instead I see a seahorse, with gaping nostrils.

Thanks Dayna! I missed (miss) you too!
Thanks, Dick! I hope you and I can meet someday. I think we would have a good talk--about hats, Clinton, Nebraskan geography, and life.
Adriana! You rock! Or at least pebble. An enterprising soul with only half your spirit could write a whole book on micropenises! So get to it! Hup! Hup!

ha

P.S. Remember: Cucumbers could watch TV. They choose not to.

KISS ME, DOC!

2005-04-11T17:00:00.000+09:00

Beyond Hope?

Read here for another tremendous advance in medicine.

PUNCHLINE: Now can they do the same thing with Bush's brain?

Slime and Punishment

2005-04-06T20:29:00.000+09:00

When I was five, an evil girl lived next door named Patricia Sue Irons. One summer, during a heat wave, Patricia Sue inveigled the other kids in the neighborhood to torture a snail by forcing it to crawl through a raw egg they were cooking on the asphalt.

In an act of stunning bravery, considering my fragile age and the subsequent wrath of Patricia Sue and her gang when they found out, I single-handedly rescued the defenseless shelled creature from a ghastly death.

Her little brother, Kevin, was my friend, and a nice guy, although later he became a big-shouldered, leather-jacketed homicidal maniac in the United States Marines. The Irons family came from tough Dutch stock. Mr. Irons, who was a fishing friend of my dad's, was a grizzly, squinting boulder of a man who could shuck an ear of corn in 4 seconds flat and whose fingers were never completely free of fish blood. No one in our town hadn't heard how Mr. Irons, when in his twenties, had been rototilling a plot of land and broke open a hornet's nest. The hornets came pouring out by the thousands, blasting into the air so thickly they seemed like a single mass of clotted, furious matter that splattered on him from every direction. He was covered with so many stings that, during the first of the three months he was in the hospital, his face was too swollen for him to speak.

Mrs. Irons, Kevin and Patricia Sue's mother, was heavy and mobile, a woman made from layers of strawberried calico, pancake batter, and two gargantuan breasts for suffocating her uncountable brood. She was all love, and she cared for her family with every substantial ounce of her grand, maternal body. She was constantly preparing pancakes. When she wasn't making pancakes, she was cooking waffles.

The Irons lived in the biggest, best-smelling house on Earth. Although I was friends with Kevin, and was tormented for years by Patricia Sue, I never did get a grasp of how big that family, with its Appallacian sexual practices and pullulating swarms of children scuttling underfoot, was.

This was in the town of Mudpuppy, Nebraska. My hometown relaxed on a scattering of acres criss-crossed by dozens of lovely streams and cut in two by a single gigantic river, the Platte. The water in both the streams and The River was the purest blue, cleaner than the water in heaven, and magnificently frigid, even in summer. The streams ran fast, into small, frothy rapids, even though the land of Mudpuppy was utterly flat, with not the slightest hint of hill or dale.

In Mudpuppy, there was one chain grocery store, Hinky Dinky, with two outlets, north and west, and a tiny, two-room food and hardware store called Sam's Stop, run by Chinese immigrants who sold whole cow's heads and never used electricity. There was one high school, one elementary school, one fire station, two police cars, seven Elks Lodges, and eighty-four Baptist churches.

Mudpuppy. A great town, unless you're a snail. Or a snail-lover.

The Past is Prologue

2005-04-05T11:04:00.000+09:00

My First Girlfriend

JESUS BORN AGAIN! And PLASTIC BABY STOLEN!

2005-04-01T16:30:00.000+09:00

Plastic Baby Stolen

JESUS BORN AGAIN!
in the Ukraine, and he's "almost healthy".

About time. Our species sure needs Someone to descend from the sky and take care of us. The last couple of days have brought us some of the most catastrophically portentious news of recent memory:

1. In the most comprehensive study of such phenomena to date, scientists announce that we've sucked up most of the resources of our beautiful blue-green home, and the time is nigh to pay the piper. It's all pretty funny, because it's so preventable. Humans are a lot like a guy with ingrown toenails. All he needs to do is spend five minutes trimming the things, and he'd avoid the embarrassment at the doctor's office (sniggering nurses, a physician who shakes his head with amazement, muttering, never in my whole career have I seen such a stupid...), as well as the holes in the socks. Of course, we're dealing with slightly higher stakes than excessively long toenails and destroyed socks. We're talking about not being careful with the raw stuff that permits our species to continue living, and, conceivably, a destroyed world.

Come on! Even if you don't believe in all this scientific, wimpy, flower-kissing enviro-babble, at least get on your bicycle a couple times a week and ride to work instead of drive. Even if it turns out to be too late for the planet, it will still do your body some good. You'll live a few years longer, and maybe get to hug your grandkids. Tell them about the old days when there were still trees left.

2. In Los Angeles, police are searching for two women who they believe made off with a preserved 13-week-old fetus from one of those plasticized dead human exhibits (see photo above). I don't know what it means, but it has disasterous overtones, and somehow relates metaphysically (I think) to the birth of Jesus II. What do you think they're doing with it?

Don't worry, be happy, recycle.

2005-03-30T18:07:00.000+09:00

Eyes Twisting with Rage

My Wife Sneezed

2005-03-30T17:52:00.000+09:00

I dreamt last night I was being pursued down Kamiyoshida-dori (near our apartment) by a vast walrus. It kept going harmp! harmp! harmp! and clapping its flippers together. Its bloody eyes were twisting with rage. The flippers were so big that they were smashing windows and ripping divots in the tall buildings on either side.

It was night. My breath came out in white clouds. I sprinted into a parking lot, where four teenaged guys, about sixteen years old, were hanging out.

They began to pursue me instead of the walrus. One produced a piece of wood with a string attached to it, and from the end of the string twinkled flagella covered with bits of broken glass and metal. It was a bit like the whip used in the film "The Passion of the Christ".

I woke up when my wife sneezed.

Infidelity

2005-03-28T15:21:00.000+09:00

A question posed solely out of curiosity:

1. If your boyfriend, girlfriend, husband or wife cheated on you, what would you do?

Terri Schiavo III: Right-to-Lifers, KILL KILL!!

2005-03-26T12:55:00.001+09:00

Forgive the lurid headline. I'm crazed and forlorn today, because of a throbbing tooth in my head. I'm having fevered oozing visions of strange movies I saw long ago, like Russ Meyer's violent post-pre-meta-feminist masterpiece, Faster Pussycat KILL KILL!!

Although I wolfed down all of my wife's menstrual medicine (we were out of aspirin and bufferin), the pain just keeps burning. Soft chunks of white-hot magma are pumping up from inside my skull and bubbling out of a small, catastrophic hole in my upper right molar.

I'm sad.

On top of that, my head is doing somersaults on my palpitating neck at the news today. I'm reading stories of Terri Schiavo "supporters" who, motivated by a passionate belief in the sanctity of life, are eager to kill, kill!!

Am I alone in perceiving this as a bit hypocritical? Is it my tooth talking?

Some examples from MSNBC (the first two) and the Associated Press:

A Rockford, Ill., man was arrested in Seminole after trying to steal a weapon from a gun shop. Michael W. Mitchell, 20, told deputies he wanted to “take some action and rescue Terri Schiavo.”

...the FBI said a man was arrested Friday in Fairview, N.C., on charges of sending an e-mail threat, allegedly for offering a $250,000 bounty for Michael Schiavo’s death and $50,000 for that of a judge in the case. The FBI did not immediately identify the judge.

Death threats have been made against Judge George Greer (who happens to be a Republican and a conservative Christian himself) for allowing Michael Schiavo to remove the feeding tube that has kept his 41-year-old wife alive for the past 15 years, and the Southern Baptist church that Greer belonged to for years has asked him to leave the congregation.

An Alternative Way to Remember your Pet

2005-03-26T07:17:00.000+09:00

If freezing, cloning, mummifying or burying your departed poodle doesn't work for you, try this.

Terri Schiavo, etc. II

2005-03-24T11:56:00.000+09:00

Pat Boone just hinted strongly on CNN that Terri Schiavo's condition was actually the result of a murder attempt fifteen years ago by her husband. He continued by saying that we all ought to gather in frantic hordes to contact President Bush and demand that he issue "an emergency stay of execution" for Schiavo.

ha

small update: It was great to hear that George Bush's shock and awe tactic of federal interference in the Schiavo case came roaring back to bite him. His approval ratings have plummeted seven points in a matter of days. The anti-enlightenment crowd has become undoubtably become stronger since 9/11, but they don't control the country.

2005-03-24T09:42:00.000+09:00

My Uncle's New Ears

NEW EARS IV: Revenge of the Nephew

2005-03-23T16:25:00.000+09:00

(Change of voice here from my Uncle Albert, whose narrative I've recorded in the past three "ear" entries, to my own. Hokkaidoabbey is back in control! Ha ha ha!)

Well, everyone, my Uncle Albert called me the other day attempting to stay at my little abode for a month "or two" and I just cracked. Let me tell you a few things about my Uncle Albert:

1. He's floridly British.
2. He owns seventeen poodles.
3. He's dainty and annoying, and eats crumpets off silver every day at 2:00.
4. He abuses his maids terribly, then claims he fired them when in fact they quit.
5. Same thing with his four ex-wives.
6. He became wealthy by inheriting a fortune from his late grandfather, Wilfred Pemmington Pickering, VI. A soulless and Satanic oil magnate with a stringy neck, black eyes and a perpetual tumbler of gin in his hand, wicked Old Pickering would chase the maids about the house and try to run them over with his wheelchair. In his younger days, he used to hunt, for pleasure only, baby seals. On the walls of the old creature's room are eight or nine gleaming white trophy heads of seals not young enough to crawl two meters from their mothers, whom my Uncle Albert's grandfather had already dispatched, cackling, with an iron hook.
7. Uncle Albert was raised by his grandfather.
8. Uncle Albert smokes constantly.
9. He is eerily (as it were!) fascinated by ears. He draws them, fashions bagel-sized clay renditions of them to display in the dining room, and has jabbered for a decade about having more surgically implanted. He says it will improve his hearing. At least one of his divorces was caused by this unwholesome obsession.
10. I will not let him stay with me in Sapporo, to visit this Mimimoto-sensei.（耳本先生--みみもとせんせい--mimi moto sensei: the kanji for "mimi" here means "ear", and "moto" means "origin", so his name translates in English into Dr. Origin-of-the-Ear.
11. My Uncle Albert is a lunatic.
12. After my cruel rejection, and my informing him directly of my hatred for him, I added, with joy throbbing in my heart, an extra insult to his injuries: I mailed him a new set of ears (see above).

ha

Terri Schiavo, Red Lake High School Shootings, and the Iraq Death Count

2005-03-22T09:25:00.000+09:00

Today: in Red Lake Minnesota (story still unfolding) a high school student shot a bunch of people. Eight killed? Fourteen injured? They're still counting.

(update: The death count turned out to be ten. The killer was attracted to neo-nazi and goth ideas and other emblems of rage and disenfranchisement).

Elsewhere in the news, the House of Reps stayed up until midnight arguing over very special legislation that would permit a federal judge to intervene on the decision about the continued mechanical life-support of Terri Schiavo, a poor woman who has been, if one associates life with consciousness, dead for the past fifteen years.

George Bush, on vacation, was awakened from a sound sleep and flew back immediately to the White House on an emergency jet to sign the urgent noctural law. He explained,

"In cases like this one, where there are serious questions and substantial doubts, our society, our laws and our courts should have a presumption in favor of life."

Meanwhile, the civilian body count in Iraq is on the verge of passing 20,000, and the number of Americans killed there recently passed 1,600.

HA

EARTHQUAKE

2005-03-20T11:18:00.000+09:00

A massive earthquake slammed Kyushu about ten minutes ago. The TV is filling with tsunami warnings, and images of rattling rooms, ceilings exhaling clouds of white dust, jangled traffic, people crouching and peering up fearfully, fountains of brown water bubbling up through a huge crack in the asphalt. About a dozen bricks from an otherwise unharmed sidewalk stand in a strange bouquet, as though pushed out from below by a giant finger.

This was nearly as strong as the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995, which killed 5,000 people, and it also hit close to a large city (Fukuoka). I'm sitting here doing something like praying that this wasn't another big disaster.

My wife is walking back and forth in front of the TV, while she gathers her tea and her toast, telling me we shouldn't live here anymore because of all the earthquakes.

NEW EARS III: I Hate You

2005-03-20T10:14:00.000+09:00

LIKELY WAS it that the impetus for my resolution to have an auxiliary supply of ears intercoursed surgically with my nervous system was conceived in my profound sympathy for the treasured Dr. Mimimoto after his being cheated out of a Nobel Prize by nose-experts. Also, more ears, I conjectured, would look sexy.

So it transpired that I arranged for a lengthy stay in Japan, near the hospital where Dr. Mimimoto has his fabled ear clinic. I telephoned my nephew Johnny, who these days insists, for orphic reasons of his own (the boy has always been a puzzle to me) to be called “Abbey” (a homo name, if you want to know my opinion) or sometimes “Hokkaido Abbey”.

Abbey lives in Sapporo, quite close to Dr. Mimimoto’s clinic, so it struck me as natural to tell him I would stay with him for a couple of months while I underwent the surgery.

Below is the transcript of our conversation (I of course record all of my conversations, for posterity).

“Oh, uh, hi, Uncle Albert.”

“Hello, my boy! How is my sister’s runaway little rutabaga?” That’s our family’s nutty nickname for the boy: Little Rutabaga.

“Uh, yes. Fine, fine. Pretty busy, actually. Um. How are things in Britain?”

“It’s perfectly awful, as usual. Another homosexual dressed up as Batman and climbed the wall of the palace, to protest some homosexual thing. The world’s coming to an end. And I had to fire another maid.”

“Why?”

“For some homosexual thing, I said. Didn’t I just say that?” This is a perennial problem with my nephew. He never listens.

“You fired the maid for being homosexual?”

“What? No, that was the Queen. At the palace. This...person..., lord help us all, was dangling by a rope outside the Queen’s window, with a big sign around his neck. I wish it had been the rope instead, around that leftie's neck, I can tell you. The maid was fired for insubordination.” I held the receiver between my ear and shoulder. I removed a Golden Virginia from my silver case, lit the end, the lighter trembling slightly in my fingers. I took a profound drag and exhaled into my nephew’s ear. “They’re all insubordinate,” I continued, sniffing. “Every last one.”

There was a lengthy silence at the other end, then my nephew said, “So, why are you calling, Uncle?”

“I’m calling to inform you of my visit tomorrow. I’ll be staying at your apartment for a month.” I took another drag and blew it out. “Or two. I must have several new ears sewn onto my head.”

“Oh!” Abbey cried out, in the manner of one just punched in the stomach. “Oh, god, Uncle Albert, um, um, er, um, I’m not sure that’s a good idea. Actually, that’s not a good idea at all. It's a bad idea. My place is so small. It’s hardly big enough for me.” My nephew made muffled gurgling and choking sounds. “Uncle, even my wife moved into the neighbor's house because the place was too small. You know, even the rats, they decided to live in the snow because it’s too crowded in here, ha ha.”

“Are you saying no to your beloved uncle? Are you rejecting the sole brother of the only mother you ever had, the one that coddled and fed you as a child and gave you peppermints? And a steady supply of those rutabagas you loved so dearly?” I filled my voice with what I hoped was avuncular sweetness.

“No, no, no, no,” he answered, his voice trilling into a falsetto. “Of course not. I just don’t want my, um, favorite uncle to be uncomfortable.”

“The uncle your mother commissioned on her deathbed to care for her little boy, Johnny, oooops! Sorry, Abbey, financially, every month, to the tune of several hundred pounds? Sterling?” I let this sink into the ingratitude-bloated brat’s brainpan for several seconds, to sweat the invitation out of him. It always worked in the past. When money and proclamations of love don't get the goat to bend over, saith the sage, guilt will. This time, though, a vile god reached down his dark hand from Olympus and squashed me.

"No, Uncle Albert,” my only nephew said softly, “I will not let you stay in my apartment.”

Dropping all tactical considerations, I asked him, my voice breaking, “But nephew, why?”

“Because I hate you.”

NEW EARS II: Day of Infamy

2005-03-18T09:27:00.000+09:00

Some background on Dr. Taro Mimimoto, the gleaming physician who inspired my hunger for having extra ears surgically installed on my body:

I remember the day I read the news that he’d been cheated out of the Nobel Prize. Over the course of many months, I’d been following, as had every other Responsible and Educated Gentleman in the Brookingsforth Region, the story of the good doctor’s miraculous experiments, in whose course he’d managed to sew hundreds of functioning mouse ears onto the head of a cat. I was breakfasting on the third floor of my summer home in Rochester, in the breakfast nook, fairly twitching to see the announcement in my newspaper of the Nobel Prize winners for 2004. My chums at the Brookingforth Natural Aural Science Club were planning a great festivity that evening, complete with fireworks, a turbaned Burmese snake-charmer and bikiki-garbed and spangled ladies popping from an enormous frosted ear, to celebrate our favorite doctor’s Nobel win. I torn open the paper to the science section. The headline blared:

AXEL AND BUCK WIN NOBEL PRIZE FOR MEDICINE!
Committee deems pair’s work on odorant receptors and olfactory system organization “Christlike”

I dropped the newspaper onto my breakfast and stared straight ahead. I felt my head filling with boiling red foam. I began to tremble, then to shake. Great dollops of sweat, like fresh lava, began pouring off my head.

“Is everything alright, sir?” The voice of Annie, our newest maid, poked its way into my fervid consciousness like a finger pushing into a roasted chicken. With a single, impressive sweep of my arm, I flung everything—the silver tea platter, the marmelade and toast, the pork-fingers, the Wedgewood teacups and saucers with those fucking pink filigreed angels my ex-wife was always nittering on about like a caffeinated gerbil, all of it—across the room. The table too. “How can I have my breakfast?” I screamed at the girl, choking on the frothing blood in my neck, “with all these interruptions!?”

The explosive sounds of crashing dishes and silverware, plus the roar of my voice, must have seemed abruptly loud for the girl (I was in such a state of passion that I was immune to the effects of the noise I made, and in fact could not later recall even hearing any sounds at all), for panic flashed in her eyes. Then the rude girl ran from the room without a single consoling word for my grief.

Oh, the torment of it all! The humiliation! The nose-quacks had taken the prize! Our wondrous Mimimoto—woe!—lay crumpled on the pavement, an angel struck by a hit-and-run jet.

History will record that as a breakfast of great turbulence, a day that will live on in infamy.
To make things worse, Annie, the newest in a long line of maids, quit her job that very day.

You can't find good help these days.

NEW EARS

2005-03-17T09:43:00.000+09:00

Last month, I decided to get extra ears.

I knew there was only one doctor on the entire planet I would choose to install my additional ears—in truth, it might have been my thunderous adulation for this Mozart of Medicine, this Dostoevsky of Doctors, this Ossetra Caviar of Clinical Care, that inspired me to have the surgery performed. His name is Taro Mimimoto.

Genius! Virtuoso! Star! Wizard! None of these words come close to capturing the godlike mastery possessed by this fabled physician of the aural apparatus, and only insult the man with their inadequacy. OH GOD, my heart is set a’trill at the very inkling of Dr. Mimimoto sewing extra ears onto my skull!

ZLAD!

2005-03-14T18:03:00.000+09:00

Here is some background information on the creator of that masterpiece on my previous posting, and here's a link to its lyrics.

It's all very fun and clever, but please note that it is also fake.

Bizarre Shorts

2005-03-14T14:34:00.001+09:00

Look at Saije's blog and see the collection of bizarre shorts she discovered! I fell off my chair laughing and exploded my heart, so be careful.

Here's one example:

I is your new dektaaatorr.

2005-03-13T11:48:00.000+09:00

Vegetation? Pornography?

Michael Jackson and Matt Hale II: JACKO IS INNOCENT!

2005-03-13T11:45:00.000+09:00

Erasmus

Well, maybe he’s innocent. Maybe he’s not. I can’t really say either way, despite the fiery and confident declaration of my last entry, whose passion I attribute to incipient fever. I’m pretty sick now, my nostrils overflowing with yellow bile, as though the sieves of hell have been opened. My hands shake. My boils are oozing. My carbuncles are sprouting buboes. I think I caught the bronchitis that’s spreading like wildfire all over Japan right now, which a bunch of my co-workers are also stricken with. I am addled with cold medicine, and can scarcely spell my name, but I’ll try to make this brief and not too incoherent.

Lots of reasons are popping up to give doubt about Jackson’s guilt. So far the case against him is riddled with more holes than Sonny Corleone. At this stage of the trial, it’s looking like the only wrong you could objectively pin on Michael Jackson is that he’s a foolish freak. Being foolish is perhaps a flaw of character (although a single reading of Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly might kill that notion), and freaks smash all our comfortable middle-class notions of appropriate behavior to smithereens. Being a fool and a freak, however, is not illegal.

That’s probably the only reason I’m spending time writing about this. I don’t care much either way about Michael Jackson. I don’t like his music. If he is a child molester, I believe he should be locked away from children, so he can’t prey on them. It could well be that later details will emerge that show he’s guilty. Who knows?

But I believe that one of the nastiest and most shameful of human tendencies is to heap all sorts of blame on certain innocent people simply because they are freaks. If our species ever does manage to pull itself up out of its present state of shock-and-awe, fast-food, reality-television, genocidal savagery, and to a higher plane of peaceful enlightenment, we’ve got to stop stoning lepers for being spawns of the devil, stop blaming Jews for the Black Plague (and everything else), stop rounding up Japanese-Americans because they look different than us, stop believing everyone with tattooes and tongue-pierces is a crazed heroin-addict. We’ve got to develop sufficient critical thinking skills and love for our species to give up believing that every biker is a thug, every young Mexican is a member of a gang, every homosexual is a child-molester, every black man is a rapist, and every Muslim is a terrorist. We’ve got to stop killing Jesus all the time.

Some observations:

1. Both the brother and the sister of the alleged victim admitted during cross-examination that they lied in previous testimony in the Jackson case and in other legal entanglements. The brother came a hair’s breadth from saying outright that he lied to support his mother’s (likely false) claim against a department store for physically abusing her after her sons shoplifted from the store (he said he “doesn’t remember” if he lied or not). The family made a lot of money from that incident.

2. Other celebrities are clamoring on the sidelines (Jay Leno is a salient example) to report that they sensed the accuser’s family were conning celebrity-barnacles, seemingly on the make for an easy, wealthy target.

3. The brother claims that he witnessed Jackson sexually abusing his brother two or three times—he can’t remember for sure. When I was this kid’s age, if I had come across an adult male, or anyone else of any age or gender, having sexual contact with my brother, I would have no problem remembering if it was two or three times. Would you?

4. The brother claims that he witnessed the two—or three?—incidents in Michael Jackson’s bedroom, and that as he approached the bedroom, he set off an alarm, one installed explicitly to warn Michael Jackson of intruders approaching his bedroom. Would Michael Jackson continue to molest this kid if an alarm went off outside his bedroom, signaling that someone was going to enter the room? Would he continue even after someone did enter? The brother, incidentally, claimed to have stood and observed these incidents (two or three) for “about a minute” in the grand jury testimony, but on the stand, said he watched for only a couple of seconds.

5. There were several other serious inconsistencies in the brother’s testimony, including changes between the information he gave to the grand jury and testimony he provided at the trial. There’s an article at the Smoking Gun about this.

6. When the Martin Bashir documentary was shown, chaos erupted at Neverland. The whole Jackson Empire guard went into emergency mode, frantically circling the wagons, sending battalions of image-doctors out to repair the damage. The Jackson people were jerked into a frenzy of self-protective behavior to hold the Empire together, probably because a lot of money could be lost if the impression that Jackson was a molester were substantiated. The Bashir documentary had already made him mighty suspicious, and there were hordes of powerful people very interested in making certain that the suspicions didn’t become verified by real, measurable incidents, with a trail of evidence. YET, the alleged abuse was said to have occurred AFTER the Bashir documentary was shown, right in the midst of this time of panic. How likely is it that Jackson would wait to commit genuine child molestation at exactly the moment when he and his handlers were panicking that the public was perceiving him as a child molester?

One might write all this off to Michael Jackson’s freakishness, and the dubious testimony of the siblings to the faulty memory of both kids, especially the younger brother, who was shocked by horrible things he was seeing, but the very large number of inconsistencies plus both siblings’ admissions that they lied during an unconnected legal proceeding (this family has had quite a few of them, it seems), is probably making the jury wonder why they aren't at home in front of their TV's enjoying different atrocities.

Bottom line: the kids in the accuser’s family almost certainly lied in the past against wealthy people, probably at the encouragement of their mother, to squeeze money from them, and the timing of the alleged abuse is, on its face, preposterous.

Jackson's probably innocent.

Michael Jackson and Matthew Hale

2005-03-11T07:15:00.000+09:00

Okay, a deep breath and here goes, a couple of observations about these two grimy, depressing news stories, although I feel queasy about even spending five minutes dipping my brain into the methane-and-bloodworm bog where they reside:

A man, Bart Ross, committed suicide in his van yesterday in Chicago. The Polish immigrant left a note claiming responsibility for the murders of Judge Joan Lefkow's husband and mother. Judge Lefkow had ruled against Mr. Ross in a civil suit, an action to which Ross attributed the loss of many important things in his life. Many fingers of blame were jabbed initially in a different direction, at the white supremicist followers of Matthew Hale, who is about to face sentencing for okaying the murder of Judge Lefkow (Hale was said to be peeved at Lefkow for her decision, in a copyright suit, forbidding him to use the name "World Church of the Creator" for his neo-nazi "church"--another group had claimed the name first). The permission for the murder was granted to a racist minion of Hale's who turned out to be an FBI agent.

OBSERVATION: It's peculiar that the murders of Judge Lefkow's family were committed on the last day of February, the same day as the FBI assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. This raid has notorious connections to the extremist, racist fringe folks in the U.S. Timothy McVeigh committed the Oklahoma City bombings under the inspiration of the book The Turner Diaries, a genocidal racist novel written by a leader (now dead) of one of the four or five biggest neo-nazi groups in the country, and a pal of Matthew Hale. He also did it, he said, to get revenge against the government for the FBI attack in Waco.

Extremists at times pull off attacks on certain dates, to not so subtly index them to specific perpetrators or specific motivations. An example is the train bombings in Spain. Although the Spanish government claimed initially that the bombers were from ETA, the Basque separatist movement, it was probably striking to some that the bombings occurred on March 11, exactly six months after (and before) September 11 (the attacks were finally attributed to Al Queda sympathizers). Bart Ross might well be the person responsible for the Lefkow murders. There is, according to reports this morning, physical evidence linking him to the crime scene. The date of the crime, and its symbolic importance to racist groups like Hale's, however, imply something else is going on. Perhaps Ross chose the date out of his own (as yet unreported) anti-government paranoia, or as a way to elude suspicion by making it look like one of the racists did it.

Whatever, the date of the crime is probably not a coincidence.

Post-script: evidence is now emerging in this case showing that Bart Ross like did have some strong, paranoid feelings about the government, and might well have chosen that particular date as a symbolically appropriate time to kill the judge he felt had done him so much harm. We'll probably never know for sure.
No more wallowing in mud today. Tomorrow: JACKO IS INNOCENT!..and I'll tell you why.

Mortal Bridges

2005-03-09T17:41:00.000+09:00

I can't explain why, precisely, but I've been juxtaposing these two incidents in my mind lately. They're distressing and thought-provoking in their own right, but when put together, they appear to speak of something more (thanks to Saije for posting the first story at contentbased, where I found it), but I can't quite put it into words.

1. Dogs committing suicide by leaping from bridge.
2. Man commits suicide after throwing his daughter, then himself, off a bridge.

ha

2005-03-09T14:05:00.000+09:00

Don't eat hoopoes

The Other Commandments

2005-03-09T13:29:00.000+09:00

Earlier, in an exchange about the controversy over displays of the 10 Commandments, I wrote that I thought they were actually more than 300 Commandments (see comments in Homeland Canada II). I checked, and it turns out there are actually more than 600.

Here are a few of them (culled from the Book of Leviticus):

Don't eat creatures from the seas or rivers that don't have fins and scales.

Don't eat eagles, buzzards, or vultures.

Don't eat ostriches, hawks, seagulls, or white owls.

Don't eat little owls, screech owls, or fisher owls.

Don't eat storks, herons, hoopoes or bats.

Don't eat geckoes or salamanders.

Don't eat insects that creep on four legs, EXCEPT those with jointed legs above their feet which leap upon the Earth; therefore, you are permitted to eat these: locusts, crickets and grasshoppers. All other varieties of four-legged insects will make you unclean when touched or consumed; therefore, you are forbidden from eating them.

Chip Oil for the Future!

2005-03-07T16:11:00.000+09:00

Thanks to The Practical Hippie for spreading this news about a start-up enterprise of Willie Nelson's new Biodiesel company. Biodiesel should be getting much more exposure than it has been, considering the mountains of bodies presently mouldering in Iraq. If you are a trucker, or you know a trucker, or you know someone who knows a trucker, spread the word: Use clean, domestic biodiesel. It could save lives.

Bloodright

2005-03-05T23:38:00.000+09:00

This is true:

My next-door neighbors in the early 1970's were the Danfelds.

The two boys in the family (the older one, who was my age, was named Chris; I've forgotten the younger one's name) owned two dogs. The tiny, bloated dog with spots was named Gilligan. The big, mangy one was named Fonzie.

Gilligan and Fonzie were victims of the sitcom erotics of the age. They grew filthy in their rectangular yard of caliche soil and yellow grass, where they lay for endless hours, tongues lolling in the desert heat, amidst broken toys, the decaying remains of an engineless Dodge Dart and a motorcycle with no seat.

Chris Danfeld was playing in the backyard one day with his father's fishing rod. I could see him through the chain-link fence between our yard and his. He was practicing his casting. Rather than using a rubber dummy sinker, the ordinary way one practices casting on dry land, he was using a real, metal one, tied to the end of a line set up for actual fishing, with a bouquet of ferocious silver hooks.

He was tilting the rod over his right shoulder, behind his back, then bringing it forward, moving it farther back, then farther forward, accumulating energy, and animating the sinker and dangling hooks more and more, making them flash in the sun. The dogs, fascinated by the procedure, ran around him, and clawed at his legs for a better look.

When Chris Danfeld hooked Fonzie, the dog let out a howl that raised pity in the hearts of everyone on the block, and horror too, because the sound was so loud and ragged with pain that it might well have been the voice of a real ghost.

It took twenty minutes for them to remove the hook from Fonzie's tongue. It took two men--Mr. Danfeld, and the silent, scary fat man, Mr. Prebble, from across the street whose children were all felons--to hold the hound still, while Mrs. Danfeld used a pair of needle-nose pliers to extricate the fragment of slick, barbed steel. She kept losing her hold on the hook, and the dog kept screaming.

Mr. Danfeld owned a bullwhip. It was made from interwoven strips of rigid hide, and was eight deadly feet long. Every child within a mile of the house was in awe of the thing. Few had ever seen it. I had. The most tormenting of nightmares of my life were birthed in this period, and many of them involved that whip.

Mr. Danfeld was a thin man with a bony face and thinning hair of the shade of blonde that suggested its owner had never been fully alive. He spent most of his time on a yellowed sofa, a can of Budweiser in his hand, watching football games. He only talked about football games, or fishing, or his bullwhip. He was a man turning to sandstone under a cloud of cigarette smoke.

Mr. Danfeld would sometimes take the bullwhip from its hiding place. He'd carry it out to the middle of the street in front of our houses. All the neighborhood children would gather, transfixed, horrified, excited. Mr. Danfeld would grip the bony, black handle and bring the full length of the great whip behind his back, then forward over his right shoulder, swinging it slowly in a counter-clockwise movement across the swathe of asphalt in front, over his left side, above his head, again, and again, accumulating momentum while the dozens of children stood with eyes and mouths gaping at the rising hiss of the leather slicing the air, around and around until, when the whine of the lash was about burst the windows of every house, he'd pull it down and yank the circle into one dreadful spot. The explosion was so loud it rattled my teeth. Small children ran for cover, or burst into tears.
Bigger boys laughed and called out "again! again!"

At every whip demonstration, Chris and his little brother (whose name I forgot) stood on the curb, arms folded, noses tilted high, bursting with pride at their father, the formidable reputation he had among the other children, which they inherited as a bloodright.

These were my neighbors when I was ten years old.

Homeland Canada II

2005-03-02T08:31:00.000+09:00

I could rip to shreds about ten points made in this annoying article claiming the "U.S. is better than Canada", but I'm curious to know what you think of it (especially you Canadians).

ha

The End of the Galaxy

2005-03-01T21:01:00.000+09:00

I really dreamt this three nights ago:

My wife and I bought a dolphin- colored car. It was a long, steel-blue vehicle, a Satellite, or an Asteroid, of 50's manufacture, with sleek and shameless fins tapering to points on both sides. The windows were big. The doors were heavy. The plastic knob on the radio sent a red vertical line gliding across a planetary system of numbers on the AM scale. Human voices, bathed in static, came to life and vanished in a fraction of a second.

I had doubts about buying such a rare car. It was absurdly expensive, and spewed out enough carcinogenic smoke to raise the average temperature of my beloved planet by seven degrees. Also: spare parts would be impossible to find.

I parked our new whale in a parking garage of a vast, spired building, I think to go grocery shopping inside (this segment of the dream was erased upon awakening--don't worry, you probably aren't missing much). When I came out of the elevator in the parking garage, I screamed. I dropped the bag of groceries. My big bag of rice exploded and globular onions went rolling everywhere. There, parked in front of me, were about four thousand cars, all of them exactly like mine!

Me

2005-02-28T10:20:00.000+09:00

Hokkaidoabbey, at 12

Since I'm having fun playing with the photo thing, I figured I would publish a picture of myself. I doubt my students would recognize me.

Androids IV

2005-02-28T10:14:00.000+09:00

"Valerie"

If you don't want to raise the "creepy" android kid yourself (as Denise asserted vehemently), you can also bring to your home an Android Mom!

Instant family!

Androids III

2005-02-28T10:03:00.000+09:00

Infantoid

Here's another one. See how alive its eyes look? It's excited to be alive!

What do you think it's saying?

What a WASTE!!

2005-02-27T11:04:00.000+09:00

Look at these breathtaking pictures of Mars.

Can you believe we've let all this empty space go to waste? We could open several ski-resorts, lay down some multi-lane asphalt highways, get some tourism happening. We could fit in at least 6 MacDonald's in just one of those riverbeds.

What are we waiting for?

Androids II

2005-02-26T15:36:00.000+09:00

Cuddly Baby Android Boy

He's almost like a real kid, isn't he? Don't you just want to tickle him on the belly and go coochie coochie coochie?

Androids I

2005-02-26T15:32:00.000+09:00

Baby Android Girl

Thanks to a posting and lengthy discussion going on at Dayna's blog, concerning the relative desirability of having one's arm partially consumed by a snake, as compared to spending half an hour in a pit of "billions" of tarantulas, I got to thinking about the fusion of animal and human, via cybernetics. I conjectured (and continue to conjecture) that it will be possible one day to fuse the nervous systems of "lower" life forms (such as snakes) with "higher" life forms (such as humans...well, some humans) and make combination creatures (I think the official word for these is "Chimera"). I made a specific claim of my desire--for purely practical reasons--to attach a living snake's head onto the stump of one of my arms.

Probably the preliminary step to this technological contrivance would be to master, mechanically, the nuances of the physical systems of creatures, higher and lower. I checked around for websites about this, did some serious research, and found some interesting things. For example, the "android" babies above.

There is also this robot snake. It is pretty darned adorable, if you want my opinion.

Peace Frog

2005-02-25T19:20:00.000+09:00

The Perfect Form of Life

The Japanese Broken Comb Conspiracy

2005-02-24T22:34:00.000+09:00

This is true:

IT IS NOT A CRIME to have a broken comb in Japan, but it's mighty close. More exactly, the broken comb is the locus of deep, superstitious dread. Using a broken comb is thought to bring on the worst sort of luck; running through one's hair a comb bereft of a few teeth, or bent slightly from its manufactured rectilinearity, is like inviting the Grim Reaper to your home for supper.

So, naturally, during the busiest week of the past six months, my comb starts falling apart.

It started with one, innocuous tooth. It dropped out, for no reason. A second one followed the next day. A few more then fell out on the third day. On the fourth day, about seven more tore free from their moorings and scattered inside my pocket.

There was an interesting pattern to the defections--a tooth disappeared only when its immediate neighbor vanished first. It was as though such a tooth perceived itself as blood kin to the other teeth, all of the teeth being members of a specific comb-family, and felt specially close emotional bonds to the tooth immediately to its right, or to its left, perhaps like how you'd feel to the brother or sister closest to your own age. Maybe not. So, upon spying a sibling crack away and plummet into the icy black void of comb-tooth demise (from which no tooth shall ever return, by the way), the sibling is stricken with remorse...it ponders the pointlessness of it all, then, heaving a small plastic sigh, commits suicide. The tooth next in line follows the same course, and next thing I know, I've got Jonestown in my pants.

I digress. What happened was, the other day, I pulled out the comb from my pocket to comb my hair before work, and half the teeth scattered on the floor. My wife let out a howl of distress. She leapt to her feet. With one finger jabbing the air, she hollered だめ！だめ!
北海道アッビーさん！日本人は壊した櫛を使うことは悪い運だと思います*！　(forbidden! forbidden! Hokkaidoabbey-san! Japanese people believe that using broken combs is bad luck!).

"Ha, ha," I responded. "People in the U.S. believe a lot of crazy things too. It's a good thing we're above all that, right, baby? Ha, ha."

Within a minute, she'd managed, using a cacophony of high-pitched shrieks and curses, to wrest from me the promise I would buy a new comb before I returned to the apartment that evening. Her tone was so strident, and the blaze in her eyes so determined, I was certain if I didn't find a new comb, I'd face divorce.

It was an awful, busy day, crammed with classes filled with whining, bored students. At the end, I endured my way home inside the loathsome string of trains clogged with glaring office-workers who were embittered and moist from the pelt of freezing rain outside. It was already dark. There were no stores along the route to buy a stupid new comb. My head hurt and my eyes burned. A papercut I'd received on my finger that morning throbbed in time with the heavy clack of the train wheels. I didn't have the energy to go out of my way to find a comb. I didn't care. Nothing mattered. I would go home, and face the music, be it an argument, be it an evening without dinner, be it nothing at all.

NEXT: Hokkaidoabbey's Divorce Papers!

*quote not verbatim

Plastic Bags Suck

2005-02-24T21:10:00.000+09:00

In addition to exacerbating the mosquito problem, plastic bags block gutters and drains, choke farm animals and marine wildlife, pollute the soil, can ruin Kenya's dramatic natural vistas and can take 20 to 1,000 years to decompose.
In Europe, Ireland introduced a similar bid to cut down the use of plastic bags in March 2002, then dubbed a "plastax". By August that year, shoppers had already cut the use of plastic bags by 90 percent, the environment ministry announced.

Plastic bags suck.

HST, RIP II: Chat with Bill Murray about the Future of Golf in America

2005-02-23T07:22:00.000+09:00

Here's a link to Hunter S. Thompson's final article.

Hunter S. Thompson, R.I.P.

2005-02-21T16:00:00.000+09:00

Hunter S. Thompson, writer, journalist, poet, inimitable alkaloid-and-explosions-freak, was one of the most fiery and independent spirits of this century. Thompson has given me so many moments of pleasure and inspiration that my heart surged, and tears actually jumped to my eyes, when I saw the headline of his suicide today.

A friend said, "he wasn't going to age gracefully. He was tormented."

A moment of silence for the original, four-thumbed Gonz.

The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. --HST

Alternative Energy and the NHK Guy, IV

2005-02-19T13:30:00.000+09:00

Everyone hates NHK guys. Monthly, they come by your home, in search of hard cash. If you try to refuse to pay, they will tell you, with enough Yakuza-aesthetics (a flash of cold, direct eye contact, an ominous hunching of the shoulders under the cheap blue suit, a visible tightening of the fingers around the little rectangular gizmo they all carry to type in numbers and print out receipts, a touch of growl in the voice), It's the law.

I've tried to figure out whether or not it is really "the law", that is, if people are truly required to pay twenty-seven bucks a month to support national public television (in the U.S., the funds for public TV are voluntary contributions), and the best I could determine is that it is, yes, mandated by law that people pay, but there is no enforcement of the law. Many thousands of people, according to a recent report on TV (probably it was on NHK. Har!), get away with not paying by slamming the door in the faces of the NHK men. Or refusing to answer in the first place.

Successful collection of that money is entirely contingent upon the abilities of the NHK guys--to trick, wheedle, coerce, or threaten the money out of your pocket and into theirs. A friend of mine, another American, tried to tell one thuggish NHK guy that she wouldn't pay because she didn't own a TV set, which sent off a veritable NHK guy firestorm of rage; in moments (after the guy made some quick, barking calls on his NHK cell phone) a phalanx of three NHK guys converged on her apartment. All young, powerfully built, with glistening, punch-perm haircuts. They actually demanded to see the interior of her apartment, to prove she didn't have a TV. Shivering with terror, she complied. When they saw she was telling the truth, they let her off the NHK payment hook, and to their credit, were polite enough not to remove any of her fingernails.

The NHK guy who came to our squalid apartment under the freeway was different. It was clear he was in the wrong profession. He should have become something else, a certified public accountant maybe, or a gravedigger. Some productive sinecure that requires no people skills, no strength, and no hygiene. With his timid manners, his morose eyes like oysters in splashes of weak tapioca, and his oblong, embarrassed head, he was the runt of the NHK litter. He was like a three-toed sloth I saw on TV once, baffled, languorous, teetering on collapse. He was the kind of person that makes you want to hug him out of pity, then jump away for fear your clothing might become dirty.

Whenever he came to the door, he would look up to me and say, in a voice whiny with regret, "NHK nan desu" (It's NHK).

I felt so sorry for him. He was probably in charge of a hundred homes, working from early morning until late at night, and maybe everyone slammed the door in his face. I always paid up quickly and in full, although I probably could have stepped on the guy and squashed him like a bug. No would even notice he was gone, probably.

When we moved, I was happy about everything. Our new apartment was bigger, brighter, newer, cleaner and quieter than the old one, with two big tatami rooms, an enormous kitchen, and on the tenth floor! We had a view from our big balcony all the way to the ocean! By U.S. standards (and Canadian, if Dayna's--Dayna lives somewhere Below Station Street--is representative), our present apartment is tiny and oppressively urban, with enormous buildings being constructed or torn down on all sides of us, jack hammers ripping and dust churning out of the earth all the time, but moving here was nonetheless a step up.

But I was sad about leaving the NHK guy behind. For the first two months we were here, I wondered every week what had become of the poor little feller.

One day, there was a ring of the doorbell. I answered the door, and, low and behold! There he was! My NHK guy!! I let out a huge scream, right in his face. I slapped him hard on the shoulder. I said (in Japanese), "Hey, long time, no see! It's great to see you! How've you been?"

He peered up at me with great, frightened eyes. He took two steps back.

"NHK nan desu." He whispered through a throat constricted with anxiety.

"Hey, don't you remember me? I'm the white guy from under the freeway!" I clamored into my shoes, and pushed the door wider, because he was still backing away.

"NHK nan desu," he squeaked.

In the end, I couldn't engage in any more friendly words than that. I paid him, and he fled into the night.

That was about five months ago. The little NHK guy hasn't returned. I guess I scared him away. But his fright had an unexpected payoff, because no other NHK guy has come around either. I suspect I've been written off as one of those weird foreigners who doesn't own a TV.

Alternative Energy and the NHK Guy III

2005-02-17T08:47:00.000+09:00

AS I WAS SAYING, we found this new apartment. Finding apartments in Japan isn't as easy as in the states. Ordinarily, one needs to go through a rental agent, and pay a large fee to do it. In addition, and much more onerous, you must pay the landlord a cash gift (referred to conventionally in English as "key money"). You ordinarily get none of this money back, and it might be separate from other additional deposits for cleaning, maintenance, etc. Key money is expensive. The average amount for a 2LDK apartment (sort of like a two-bedroom apartment in the states) is about 700,000 yen, or 7,000 dollars.

I repeat, you don't get any of it back. It's just a present to the landlord, to acquire the privilege of living in the place. It was to avoid this horrible expense, and the agent fee, that I discovered our cancerous, earthquake- damaged shack under the freeway. It was being rented out of the loop and off the grid, with very low key money (only 100,000 yen) and no agent intermediary (I found it advertised in a weekly, English-language flier catering to transient foreigners).

The building was therefore inhabited by society's peripherals, which explains the butterscotch candy / milk n' onion lady next door and the banshee lady upstairs. There was also the gentleman on the second floor who regularly threw away huge bags of empty pizza boxes, cigarette butts and soiled porn magazines for the crows and cats to strew about at our front door.

Along with the interesting neighbors was the NHK guy. This employee of the Japanese Public Television Company (日本放送協会, にっぽんほうそうきょうかい、Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai or NHK) was a dour, harassed man, very short (maybe five feet, two inches tall), with long, greasy hair combed to one side and balding into an oval patch of flesh at the top, and spotted copiously with nuggets of dandruff, and the saddest eyes I've ever seen on any human being.

I have to wake my betrothed and do errands! TO BE CONTINUED!

Witches V: The Inuit Fight Back

2005-02-16T17:52:00.000+09:00

The Inuits are charging the United States with human rights violations, related to the climate-related devastation of their culture. They are petitioning a group associated with the Organization of American States to make a finding against the U.S., and to recommend the U.S. make repairs and reparations.

I wish this kind of thing could actually be enforced.

Alternative Energy and the Greasy NHK Man

2005-02-14T20:49:00.000+09:00

This looks pretty cool. A company in Scotland succeeded in powering a community of 500 using tidal movement.

http://www.oceanpd.com/

On a completely different topic, the NHK guy came to our new apartment recently.

We moved recently to a better place. We used to live in this grimy hovel literally under the freeway (we could step out our front door, look up, and see the massive, girdered, concrete and steel interchange rising forty feet above us--this is the same interchange that collapsed, killing lots of people, during the big earthquake a few years back--with carcinogenic air and odd, mole-like neighbors with goggling eyes and mouths constantly hanging open. On the face of the three-story building, there were long, ominous cracks left from that catastrophe. Every time a truck trundled by overhead (about every three minutes), our whole apartment would groan.

TO BE CONTINUED, because Ari Mai Rabu (Ali MacBeal) is beginning. I'm not a big fan, but I need the English.

赤ちゃんを作ろうと思って。。。

2005-02-12T16:49:00.000+09:00

今から赤ちゃんを作りますか。作りませんか。まだ分からないですが、このごるよく考えます、私達は。

Witches IV

2005-02-11T18:00:00.000+09:00

This article is from David Ignatius, in the Washington Post (excerpt below).

Next week will mark an unlikely milestone in modern history: The Kyoto Protocol on global climate change will take effect a week from today, without U.S. participation. A global policy train will be leaving the station, in other words, without the United States even being on board, let alone serving as conductor...

Even though the U.S. is the biggest cause of increasing greenhouse gasses, maybe it's best it stayed out of the Kyoto Protocol. If the U.S. had agreed to join the protocol, the more than 140 other signers (including all 25 of those in the European Union) would then be saddled with the U.S.'s near-certain intransigence, and inevitable attempts to tinker with the treaty and make it weaker, when it requires the opposite. This way, a large family of nations will be able to strengthen the flawed treaty without interference from the Americans. Perhaps later, when world pressure isolates the U.S. more and more in this area, or maybe after Bush leaves office, the chief contributor to the global warming problem can finally grow up and join the rest of the world in working to stop it.

HA

P.S. NASA says 2005 might be the hottest year yet.

Whale in the Basement

2005-02-08T09:36:00.000+09:00

My dream from a few nights ago:

Hanako and I were living in this enormous house. We must have been in the U.S., or at least not in Japan, because the house was too big. It had five floors, each a labrynth of rooms of various sizes. In the basement was a huge, auditorium-style room, with a large panel on one side covered with a black curtain. Pulling on a rope, I drew back the curtain and found a vast aquarium on the other side. Inside the tank was a whale.

While I'm standing there, gawking at this whale (which, in the context of the dream, I didn't realize existed, even though it was my house), it tries to ram the aquarium wall with its "nose" (or head, or whatever). The thick plastic withstands the first couple of rams, but on the third or fourth one, the whale bursts through. The auditorium is a chaos of gushing water, giant shards of shattered plastic, and this enraged whale that wants to eat me. And it can move! I run up the stairs to the first floor, then the second, then the third, and right behind me, this whale is crawling up the stairs like a kind of titanic sea-slug. My wife is on the fifth floor, asleep, and I'm rushing up, screaming "Hanako, wake up! The whale is loose!"

I fly into the bedroom. It's empty. Hanako is supposed to be on the bed, but there's no one there. The whale is right behind me. I can hear its heavy body slushing and groaning along the hallway. Then, just as the whale explodes into the room, Hanako steps in also, from the other side, looking curiously around, tweaking her ear with a bathtowel. She was taking a shower. "What's wrong?" she asks.

I woke up.

Naked Statues

2005-02-07T08:10:00.000+09:00

Seriously moved by a posting on Dayna's blog about a nude statue of a baggage handler whose phallus was absconded with, I spent about four hours doing hefty research on the topic of Naked Statues. I found nothing.

But there was this thing about this dead guy in Seattle who's leaving the city a million dollars, but only on the condition that they erect a statue of a nude male, in "classical style".

This kind of stuff hardly ever happens in Japan. I'm so bored!

Mission Accomplished! II

2005-02-05T12:59:00.000+09:00

U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote :
by Peter Grose, Special to the New York Times (9/4/1967)

WASHINGTON, Sept. 3-- United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting.

According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong.
The size of the popular vote and the inability of the Vietcong to destroy the election machinery were the two salient facts in a preliminary assessment of the nation election based on the incomplete returns reaching here.

Pending more detailed reports, neither the State Department nor the White House would comment on the balloting or the victory of the military candidates, Lieut. Gen. Nguyen Van Thieu, who was running for president, and Premier Nguyen Cao Ky, the candidate for vice president.

A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson's policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam. The election was the culmination of a constitutional development that began in January, 1966, to which President Johnson gave his personal commitment when he met Premier Ky and General Thieu, the chief of state, in Honolulu in February.

The purpose of the voting was to give legitimacy to the Saigon Government, which has been founded only on coups and power plays since November, 1963, when President Ngo Dinh Deim was overthrown by a military junta.
Few members of that junta are still around, most having been ousted or exiled in subsequent shifts of power.

The fact that the backing of the electorate has gone to the generals who have been ruling South Vietnam for the last two years does not, in the Administration's view, diminish the significance of the constitutional step that has been taken.

The hope here is that the new government will be able to maneuver with a confidence and legitimacy long lacking in South Vietnamese politics. That hope could have been dashed either by a small turnout, indicating widespread scorn or a lack of interest in constitutional development, or by the Vietcong's disruption of the balloting.

American officials had hoped for an 80 per cent turnout. That was the figure in the election in September for the Constituent Assembly. Seventy-eight per cent of the registered voters went to the polls in elections for local officials last spring.

Before the results of the presidential election started to come in, the American officials warned that the turnout might be less than 80 per cent because the polling place would be open for two or three hours less than in the election a year ago. The turnout of 83 per cent was a welcome surprise. The turnout in the 1964 United States Presidential election was 62 per cent.

from dailykos

Peace.

Queer Cartoons V: Smithers!

2005-02-05T09:14:00.000+09:00

The Simpsons has a real homosexual:

Although The Simpsons does not promote the homosexual lifestyle, it nonetheless has a favourably tolerant attitude towards homosexual persons and their lifestyle; it also humourously mocks the unjustified homophobia displayed by some of the heterosexual characters. Also, Simpsons consumers should note the homosexual character, Waylon Smithers, a rather noble man who devoutly admires his boss, multi-billionaire nuclear-power-plant owner Montgomery Burns, almost to the point of worship; indeed, Smithers is quite faithful to his boss, for whom he both lusts and holds love. Sure, Smithers can occasionally be a malicious character, but is so basically only when his relationship with Burns, in some manner or another, is being threatened.

It appears that "humanized" forms of gay cartoon characters like this are more palatable than those queer or proto-queer humanoids like the Teletubbies' Tinky-Winky, Spongebob, Ernie and Bert, etc., that have sparked fulminations, gnashing of teeth, righteous renting of garments, and probably hysterical and noisome soiling of undergarments, from the religious right. This probably has something to do with the Simpsons' not being perceived as a "children's" or "family" program, even though kids watch it, I hear, as much as adults.

Anyway, hurray for Smithers! When Smithers is allowed to make a guest appearance on Spongebob, we'll know our species has evolved a step.

Witches III

2005-02-04T20:42:00.000+09:00

This NASA / National Science Foundation project is worth keeping track of, for people seriously interested in understanding better if rapid global warming is happening. It seeks to discover the reasons why parts of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet are melting. Worth reading also is this article.

Witches II

2005-02-04T11:19:00.000+09:00

Some General Points about Climate Change:

1. There’s no temperature the Earth “should” be, aside from a balance of input (from the sun) and output (from the Earth) of heat, as modified by the atmosphere.

2. There is now more carbon dioxide in the planet’s atmosphere than at any point since the appearance of homo sapiens.

3. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, if it continues to increase at the present rate, will double by the end of this century.

4. Local cooling doesn’t mean global warming isn’t occurring. Global warming, whether “natural” or hastened by human activities, doesn’t spread evenly (as Michael Crichton has one of his characters claiming).

5. Tiny changes in global mean temperature can have substantial consequences, at least from the perspective of living creatures. Interglacial intervals (the space of time between ice-ages—we are in one now) differ from ice ages in temperature by only 5 to 11 degrees Fahrenheit.

But! Is the warming of the Earth really accelerating? Michael Crichton and some of my favorite radical right-wing Christians say it’s all just an evil eco-terrorist conspiracy.

Scientists try to figure out if, and to what degree, the climate is changing in part by using computer simulations. Simulations of these kinds are carried out by analysis of past atmospheric conditions (using, among other things, physical evidence such as ice cores drawn from the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps), and factoring in qualities that influence climate and temperature (volcanic eruptions, wind-blown mineral dust, the persistence of forests, sun-cycles, etc.) in conjunction with other observations (atmosphere, ocean, satellite). Climate is too complicated to predict exactly what the temperature will be on a particular day in a particular place in the future—and no credible person has said it isn't.

It is almost certainly not, however, too complicated to predict general trends, particularly if the same trends are predicted by many different scientists around the world. If numerous scientists came up with wildly different predictions, this would indicate a phenomenon beyond even slightly accurate prediction. If there is agreement, on the other hand, in the data from many different sources, this would go far to fortify the reliability of the conclusions of that data.

As mentioned above, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, if it continues to increase at the present rate, will be double what it is now by the end of the twenty-first century. Computer models to predict global temperatures if such an increase occurs were run by the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration at Princeton, the Goddard Institute of Space Studies at NASA of New York, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Observatory in California, Oregon State University, the Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research in the United Kingdom, and the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. They all predicted that the average temperature of the Earth will increase by about 2 to 8 degrees Fahrenheit.

Sources:
http://www.cmdl.noaa.gov/
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/
http://www.ncar.ucar.edu/
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/asr03/collaborators.html
http://www.met-office.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre/
http://www.mpimet.mpg.de/en/web/
http://www.mlo.noaa.gov/
Carl Sagan's excellent Billions & Billions.

In addition, if the topic of global warming is mysterious to you, and you are interested in learning more about it, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (not exactly a bastion of leftist Michael Moore-heads, whose scientists certainly are not feeling much heat under this administration to claim global warming is a real danger) has a good, unbiased website on the topic:

http://yosemite.epa.gov/oar/globalwarming.nsf/content/climate.html

People who persist in aggressively discounting as “a hoax”, “stupid” or “a (left-wing) conspiracy” the voluminous evidence for humankind’s role in a rapid warming of the Earth, and the likely dangerous consequences of it, seem to view the universe from a non-rational, anti-rational or irrational framework of thinking. Like those Puritans in Salem who burned witches.

Either that, or they actually do believe in the evidence, but don’t care.

HA

知ってる知ってる、もっと日本語で書かなければならないもんだ。でも最近とても忙しかったので。。。学生の宿題の叱正とか。。じゃ、後で。

P.S. Thank you, Denise, for your nice comment. I like your blog too.

Salem Witches

2005-02-03T21:38:00.000+09:00

This article (excerpt below) from Real Climate does an extensive, professional job of debunking the selective arguments against Global Warming's existence contained in science fiction writer Michael Crichton's best-selling thriller State of Fear. For a less clinical summary of it, see this Grist article. What else can I say? It's frustrating that anything at all needs to be said. It's like having to explicate all the reasons why witches aren't running amock in Salem.

In a departure from normal practice on this site, this post is a commentary on a piece of out-and-out fiction (unlike most of the other posts which deal with a more subtle kind). Michael Crichton's new novel "State of Fear" is about a self-important NGO hyping the science of the global warming to further the ends of evil eco-terrorists. The inevitable conclusion of the book is that global warming is a non-problem. A lesson for our times maybe? Unfortunately, I think not.