Light Years Away

Just beginning the planning process. I was alarmed today to discover that almost all of Kylie's Australian Tour tickets have already been sold:

West Australian fans proved just how much they loved Kylie earlier this year when three Perth concerts sold out in a matter of hours. As a fourth show in Perth isn't possible, Kylie's management and promoter have been in talks determining whether seats could be added to the existing shows to meet the demand for more tickets. It looks like it worked, because an additional section of tickets will be released for Kylie's first Perth concert at the Burswood Dome on Sunday, June 12.

But what if I can't make that concert?

If you shouldn't be so lucky, then you should try your hand winning a Willy Wonka-style golden ticket. Festival Mushroom Records have weaved a lot of magic and have confirmed a national 'find the golden ticket' (read: peel a sticker off the cover of the single which reveals a unique code that you enter into a ninemsn database) competition where anyone who buys Giving You Up in its first week of release (from April 10-16 only) gets the chance to sit front row at one of Kylie's Australian Showgirl shows! There are five double passes hidden... so happy hunting!

That's ridiculous! I'm not going to buy every CD-single in Australia next week hoping to get lucky! Nevertheless, in response to heavy demand, new shows HAVE been squeezed into her itinerary:

True to past form, Kylie has sold out another Showgirl concert at astonishing speed. A fifth Melbourne concert went on sale this morning at 9.00am with all tickets snapped up in just two hours.

In response to the continued demand for tickets, Kylie has agreed to celebrate her birthday with her fans with one final Melbourne concert on Saturday 28 May. ...Kylie said; "I can’t think of a more appropriate way to spend my birthday than at home in Melbourne doing what I love best. I’m enjoying the Showgirl tour so much and I’d love to share this special day with my fans in Melbourne."

Promoter Michael Gudinski said; "Kylie’s Showgirl tour is already one big party from start to finish, so it seems fitting that Kylie is prepared to perform on her birthday. This will be an unforgettable night for her Melbourne fans."

The sixth Melbourne concert will absolutely be the last chance for fans to see Kylie in Melbourne on the Showgirl tour. So get your party shoes on and secure your tickets now.

So, I made a stab at the newly-announced third show in Brisbane Queensland, on Australia's fabled 'Gold Coast', north of Sydney, on Monday June 6th (which works out to June 5th on this side of the International Date Line). I secured one "Gold" ticket:

Kylie announced the European leg of her tour in 2004 and the tour exploded from the original dates to a thirty-five date run. Ticketing websites and booking agencies went into meltdown as the systems literally couldn't meet the demand for tickets.

...An enormous AUS$3 million stage will be especially shipped from the UK for the Australian tour.

And while no money will be spared in the production of the tour (staging of Show Girl will exceed the AUS$10 million cost of the Fever tour), Kylie is adamant the costs won't subsequently hit the wallets of her fans.

After a number of discussions with promoter Michael Gudinski, it was decided to keep ticket prices exactly the same as her 2002 Fever tour.

Michael Gudinski said the decision is illustrative of Kylie's long term dedication to her fans.

"Kylie wanted to ensure that her Show Girl ticket prices were kept as reasonable as possible.

"This is an enormously spectacular show, which will cost a fortune to stage, but Kylie's decision from day one was to keep the prices as they were on her last tour."

The Brisbane Entertainment Centre (BEC), built in 1986, sounds like a nice place: smaller than ARCO Arena's 17,317 seats.

The Brisbane Entertainment Centre is Queensland’s premier entertainment and meeting facility and was purpose built to accommodate the most complex events, from an intimate setting of 500 people up to a maximum of 13,500 for the grandest extravaganzas and international conferences.

Now the hard part - getting time off work and plane tickets and lodging! (Oh yeah, and unloading those silly Irish tickets!) Fun facts about the tour:

The show represents Kylie's finest moments in music, performance and style and is an homage to the showgirl, one of the most exotic, decadent and sensual icons of our times. Inspiration has come from the Moulin Rouge to the Folies Bergere, from the Doris Girls of the Paris Lido to the entertainment palaces of Las Vegas, from the underground burlesque bars of Soho to the Busby Berkeley musicals of the thirties. Kylie's show pays tribute to the showgirl in all her forms and guises. It also amalgamates the strengths of Kylie's past three major tours - the intimacy of 'Intimate and Live', the celebratory aspects of 'On A Night Like This' and the technological futurism of 'Fever'.

Kylie recently admitted that the scale of this tour came home to her when she realised the amount of trucks it would take to get the show from one city/country to the next - this show needs 15 trucks to ferry it around, including half of a truck devoted solely to feathers!

The show is so huge that it needs well over 100 people to get it on the road. The million pound, art deco inspired stage is believed to be the biggest ever built for an arena tour and features 5 hydraulic lifts within its construction. Like Kylie's 2002 Fever tour, Showgirl pushes the technological boundaries, using innovative technology in video, lighting and sound. At each venue the trucks will start unloading at 7am to have the show ready for 9pm.

Onstage with Kylie will be 7 band members and 12 dancers.

Here's a nice picture (via Bogs Doddy, from this site):

Thinking About Australia

Thinking? Thinking! I was alarmed when I saw my first Web page of plane fares, but the Australian Dollar is currently worth about 77 American cents, so the impact won't be as bad as I first thought. But are Kylie concert tickets available? Maybe I should go to Perth - what looks like the back of the outback to this naive Californian!

Looking Forward...

Interesting poetry reading next Friday night at Luna's Cafe. My literary next-door neighbor, Gil Rodriguez, has some interesting things planned, including, among other things, more Artaud, the semi-psychotic post-WWII French poet widely - and understandably - derided in his lifetime, but whose poetry functions much better as performance art.

To my unpracticed eye, having once seen Gil perform Artaud with his Und Heimlich group, it looks like Artaud the Poet missed his true calling, perhaps on Cable-TV's Comedy Central: like Lewis Black on acid. Gil has teased out what works best in Artaud's highly-conflicted mess of a legacy. Keep the date in mind: Gil's approach is excellent and intriguing!

Brrr!

Boy, that was an abrupt rain-soaked frontal passage this evening! Reminds you of what spring is supposed to be all about. April showers, May flowers, and all that. Just wish I had put away my tools!

Damaged Goods

Digby makes the point that the conservative world-view was damaged by the Schiavo matter. Once a week, I see a conservative lawyer of my acquaintance, and we chat briefly. He was livid about the Schiavo matter. The gap between FOX News and the Constitution was too great to bridge.

For instance, a conservative doctor of my acquaintance was stunned by the Schiavo matter. This man watches nothing but Fox news and could not believe the anti-intellectual religiosity of their coverage. This is a matter that he knows intimately and he could see clearly that the coverage wasn't "fair and balanced." Indeed, it wasn't true. It's as if a veil fell from his eyes.

My conservative Rush loving neighbor was heard complaining the his hero didn't know what he was talking about on the Schiavo case. That is a first. This guy is a true believer --- who also has a very sick wife.

My nurse sister-in-law (also a born again Christian and avid FOX watcher) insisted that all the news be turned off in the house because she couldn't stand the exploitation of the patient or the sideshow outside that hospice. She's very depressed about all this.

See, the right isn't like us. They think that the so called liberal media is irretrievably biased but believe what they see, read and hear on their own media. We on the left, on the other hand, have no faith in any mainstream media, really, or any alternative media either for that matter. We have developed the habit of culling from various sources and analyzing the information ourselves as best we can. Even then we are very skeptical. Nothing that the media could do would particularly shock or disappoint us. No so with the other side. A fair number of them are actually hurt and bewildered by what they saw in the Schiavo matter.

The President

Cases the joint.

An Arrest

In the Arellano case.

Good Wishes!

Courtesy of Gabe:

Killing the Goose

These combination of budget cuts and heightened secrecy will ultimately throttle economic expansion in the U.S. The scientific cutting-edge will move off-shore. If the economy's high-tech seed corn is eaten now, where else will the big boom come from that will allow retirement 'privatization'?:

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon - which has long underwritten open-ended "blue sky" research by the nation's best computer scientists - is sharply cutting such spending at universities, researchers say, in favor of financing more classified work and narrowly defined projects that promise a more immediate payoff.

Hundreds of research projects supported by the agency, known as Darpa, have paid off handsomely in recent decades, leading not only to new weapons, but to commercial technologies from the personal computer to the Internet.

The shift away from basic research is alarming many leading computer scientists and electrical engineers, who warn that there will be long-term consequences for the nation's economy. They are accusing the Pentagon of reining in an agency that has played a crucial role in fostering America's lead in computer and communications technologies.

"I'm worried and depressed," said David Patterson, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley who is president of the Association of Computing Machinery, an industry and academic trade group. "I think there will be great technologies that won't be there down the road when we need them."

...University scientists assert that the changes go even further than what Darpa has disclosed. As financing has dipped, the remaining research grants come with yet more restrictions, they say, often tightly linked to specific "deliverables" that discourage exploration and serendipitous discoveries.

..."Virtually every aspect of information technology upon which we rely today bears the stamp of federally sponsored university research," said Ed Lazowska, a computer scientist at the University of Washington and co-chairman of the advisory panel. "The federal government is walking away from this role, killing the goose that laid the golden egg."

The Politics of Churlishness

Martin Peretz at The New Republic has long disdained the American political approach to the Israeli/Palestinian debacle. Internationalist institutions like the U.N. have also utterly failed there.

Peretz grants the Bush Administration much credit for its policies towards Israel/Palestine. I must agree, sticking with Ariel Sharon and his centrist vision is by far the best approach anyone has yet conceived. It's Bush's biggest international success. I loathe Bush and his administration, though, and I'm not willing to concede as much credit to Bush as Peretz does: the victory belongs instead to Sharon. Peretz seems to think Bush is out to democratize the Middle East, and is essentially sincere in his goals, but I suspect Bush is instead trying to maintain the flow of oil with a projection of U.S. military power and keep the "ruling Arabs happy." Bush disdains his father's approach as being inadequate to our national security, so he's come up with a new-fangled but still dishonest new approach. Democratization is a slogan Bush employs. Like his father with the Hitler/Saddam analogy, Bush's desire to liberate the Middle East is phony. Peretz states:

The traditional Republican mentality that was so perfectly and meanly represented by Bush père and Baker precluded the United States from pressing the Arabs about reform--about anything--for decades. Not Iraq about its tyranny and its record of genocide, not Syria about its military occupation of Lebanon and its own brutal Baathist dictatorship, not Egypt about loosening the crippling bonds of a statist economy and an authoritarian political system, not Saudi Arabia about its championing of the Wahhabi extremism that made its own country so desiccated and the world so dangerous, and certainly not the Palestinians about the fantasy that they had won all the wars that they had actually lost and were therefore entitled to the full rewards due them from their victories.

Not much has really changed in that respect, despite the invasion of Iraq. The ruling circles of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Egypt have little to fear from Bush's initiatives. Peretz is nevertheless right about Clinton's reluctance to respond effectively to bin Laden. But once again, Peretz gives Bush too much credit for statesmanship:

What the Bush administration gradually came to realize was that fighting the Muslim terrorist international could not be done in a vacuum. If the Islamic and Arab orbits were to continue to revolve around sanguinary tyrannies, there would be no popular basis in civil society to rob the cult of suicidal murder of its prestige. So, rather than being a distraction from the struggle against the armed rage suffusing these at once taut and eruptive polities, confronting their governments was actually intrinsic to that struggle. The Bush administration recognized that removing the effect means removing the cause.

No, Bush just wanted the oil and the glory. And to kick Saddam's ass. These plans predated 9/11. How effective are Bush's attacks against Muslim extremism, really? Great skepticism is warranted.

Whatever the proper historical and cultural analysis of the past, however, the fact is that democracy did not begin even to breathe until the small coalition of Western nations led by the United States destroyed the most ruthless dictatorship in the area.

And does democracy yet breathe? Looks like it's still on life support to me! (sorry, I'm being churlish).

After a year and a half of nearly daily Sunni bloodletting among them, the Shia have not wreaked the vengeance they surely could and, equally as surely, some of them long to take. The U.S. liberation-occupation has now tried to cobble together these diverging Iraqis into the beginnings of a democratic regime. Wonder of wonders, these estranged cousins have shown some talent in the art of compromise; and trying to make this polity work is hardly an effort undertaken without courage.

That's Ayatollah Sisatni's work there (churlish me):

In any case, this churlish orthodoxy tells us that the Sunnis need to be enticed into the political game lest it be deemed illegitimate. In this scenario, it is the murderers who withhold or bestow moral authority.

Not the moral authority - they have guns! They must be dealt with in some constructive way!

Suddenly, the elections in Iraq, Bush's main achievement there, exhilarating and inspiring, sprung loose the psychological impediments that shackled the Lebanese to Syria. Even if the outcomes will not be exactly the same, this was Prague and Berlin at the end of the long subjugation to their neighbor to the east.

Not quite. As Juan Cole churlishly notes, Bush didn't even want these sort of elections. They were forced upon him by Sistani. Hamas and Hezbollah hold far too much sway to be pollyannish yet about the future of Lebanon. Peretz continues:

It is simply stupid, empirically and philosophically, to deny that all or any of this would have happened without the deeply unpopular but historically grand initiative of Bush.

The glory of Bush! But couldn't Bush at least be honest in his rhetoric, actions, and motivations? His thuggery enrages people all around the world. People like me!

Have Democrats begun to wonder how it came to pass that this noble cause became the work of Republicans? They should wonder if they care to regain power. They should recall that Clinton (and the sanctimonious Jimmy Carter even more so) had absolutely no interest in trying to modify the harsh political character of the Arab world. What they aspired to do was to mollify the dictators--to prefer the furthering of the peace process to the furthering of the conditions that make peace possible. The Democrats were the ones who were always elevating Arafat. He was at the very center of their road map. After he stalked out of a meeting room in Paris during cease-fire talks in late 2000, Albright actually ran in breathless pursuit to lure him back. It was the Democrats who perpetuated Arafat's demonic sway over the Palestinians, and it was the Democrats who sustained him among the other Arabs. And so the cause of Arab democracy was left for the Republicans to pursue. After September 11, the cause became a matteralso of U.S. national security.

True enough, to the discredit of the Democrats. Thuggery isn't the answer, though. Too many lives are at stake!

Now that there is some real hope among both Israelis and Palestinians about the future, let us examine the reasons for it. The first is that Bush made no gestures to the hyperbolic fantasies of Palestinian politics. He gave them one dose of reality after another. The second is that he gave Israel the confidence that he would not trade its security for anything--which means that Israel is now willing to cede much on its own. (Israeli dovishness for American hawkishness: This was always the only way.) The third is that Bush is holding Sharon to his commitments, and everyone who is at all rational on these issues now sees the Israeli prime minister as a man of his word and a man of history. After all, Sharon has broken with much of his own political party.

Bush HAS been effective this way!

It has been heartening, in recent months, to watch some Democratic senators searching for ways out of the politics of churlishness. Some liberals appear to have understood that history is moving swiftly and in a good direction, and that history has no time for their old and mistaken suspicion of American power in the service of American values. One does not have to admire a lot about George W. Bush to admire what he has so far wrought. One need only be a thoughtful American with an interest in proliferating liberalism around the world. And, if liberals are unwilling to proliferate liberalism, then conservatives will. Rarely has there been a sweeter irony.

I hope Peretz isn't talking about that Social Security traitor Joe Lieberman, but he probably is.

Look, Democrats can adopt Bush's approach in Israel/Palestine, and I hope they would. But Martin Peretz/Peter Beinart have shown a keener interest instead in exiling Moveon.org and Michael Moore from the Democratic party. Also, by working so closely with Lieberman, Peretz/Beinart are betraying the New Deal, with Bush's misguided Social Security 'reform'. Peretz is shooting himself in the foot as long as he maintains this course. There are better ways. Michael Moore is a gifted propagandist and should be put to work, not thrown into the cold. Moveon.org is the future of the Democratic party. Lieberman's star is fading fast. Democrats can always steal Bush's approach, but backstabbing is unwarranted!

"Alarm Bell in the Night"

To add to Dr. Teresa Whitehurst's article I blogged about earlier this week, wondering if a kristallknacht was nigh, here's another article at TNR by Rochelle Gurstein, wondering if the Terri Schiavo incident in the Culture Wars is another step towards a 21st-Century Civil War. Perhaps the 'Culture Wars' are going to get more interesting than they've been heretofore. Was the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing just an early harbinger?:

I couldn't get out of my mind a diagram from a history textbook that listed the causes of the Civil War next to a thermometer with the temperature rising until it reached the boiling point, from the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Nullification Crisis of 1832 to the ominous decade of the 1850s--the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Law; the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act and the years of violence known as "Bleeding Kansas"; the 1857 Dred Scott Supreme Court decision; John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859; and finally, Lincoln's election in 1860. At every point, the people living through these conflicts did not recognize them as the fateful events that would lead them headlong into civil war. Will some true believer presently unknown to us violently take matters into his or her own hands so that he or she will one day occupy a similar place in history as John Brown? History, of course, never repeats itself, but I couldn't help wondering, are we now living through what, from the perspective of future generations, will turn out to have been another such fateful time?

Fun Facts From 'Science News'

• African elephants can imitate the sounds of Asian elephants, and distant heavy traffic;
• Vampire bats have the ability to run;
• Ant larvae ask for food by swaying;
• Certain red feathers of parrots contain pigments unique to parrots: polyenal lipochromes, unlike the carotenoid pigments other birds obtain from their diet.

Good for Senator Lautenberg!

If federal judges can be threatened, people like Tom DeLay can certainly be threatened too. What is wrong with DeLay for making these threats? Has he lost his cool? Doesn't he realize the possible consequences, to himself as well as his allies? DeLay has certainly disgraced his office.

Report by the President's Commission on Intelligence Gathering

What a sorry exercise in blaming the intelligence agencies for deliberate lies and egregious faults among the policymakers! The editorial writers at the New York Times timidly call this report "A Profile in Timidity":

Sadly, there is nothing about the central issue - how the Bush administration handled the intelligence reports on Iraq's weapons programs and presented them to the public to win support for the invasion of Iraq. All we get is an excuse: the panel was "not authorized" to look at this question, so it didn't bother. The report says the panel "interviewed a host of current and former policy makers" about the intelligence on Iraq, but did not "review how policy makers subsequently used that information."

...The panel said timidly that "it is hard to deny the conclusion that intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom." But it utterly ignored the way President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his team, and Condoleezza Rice, as national security adviser, created that environment by deciding what the facts were and saying so, repeatedly.

It does not say that these powerful people knew or should have known that there was no new intelligence on Iraq, and that as the intelligence reports were sanitized for the public, the caveats were stripped out. Instead, it loyally maintains the fiction that Mr. Bush was just given bum information by incompetent intelligence agents.
The way the administration hyped the intelligence on Iraq is not just a matter of intellectual curiosity. It is vital that the public know the answers because Americans are now being asked to accept a new set of claims about nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea.

Maureen Dowd gets closer to the center of corruption:

As necessity is the mother of invention, political pressure was the father of conveniently botched intelligence.

Dick Cheney and the neocons at the Pentagon started with the conclusion they wanted, then massaged and manipulated the intelligence to back up their wishful thinking.

As The New Republic reported, Mr. Cheney lurked at the C.I.A. in the summer of 2002, an intimidating presence for young analysts. And Douglas Feith set up the Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon as a shadow intelligence agency to manufacture propaganda bolstering the administration's case.

The Office of Special Plans turned to the con man Ahmad Chalabi to come up with the evidence they needed. The Iraqi National Congress obliged with information that has now been debunked as exaggerated or fabricated. One gem was the hard-drinking relative of a Chalabi aide, a secret source code-named Curveball, who claimed to verify the mobile weapons labs.

Mr. Cheney and his "Gestapo office," as Colin Powell called it, then shoehorned all their meshugas about Saddam's aluminum tubes, weapons labs, drones and Al Qaeda links into Mr. Powell's U.N. speech.

The former secretary of state spent four days and three nights at the C.I.A. before making the presentation, trying to vet the material, because he knew that Mr. Cheney, who had an idée fixe about Saddam, was trying to tap into his credibility and use him as a battering ram.

He told Germany's Stern magazine that he was "furious and angry" that he had been given bum information about Iraq's arsenal: "Some of the information was wrong. I did not know this at the time."

The vice president and the neocons were in a fever to bypass the C.I.A. and conjure up a case to attack Saddam, even though George Tenet was panting to be of service. When Mr. Tenet put out the new National Intelligence Estimate on Oct. 2, 2002, nine days before the Senate vote on the war resolution and after our troops and aircraft carriers were getting into position for battle, there was one key change: suddenly the agency agreed with Mr. Cheney that Iraq was pursuing the atomic bomb.

...It is laughable that the report offers its most scorching criticism of the C.I.A. when the C.I.A. was simply doing what the White House and Pentagon wanted. Isn't that why Mr. Tenet was given the Medal of Freedom? (Freedom from facts.)

The hawks don't want to learn any lessons here. If they had to do it again, they'd do it the same way. The imaginary weapons and Osama link were just a marketing tool and shiny distraction, something to keep the public from crying while they went to war for reasons unrelated to any nuclear threat.

The 9/11 attacks gave the neocons an opening for their dreams of remaking the Middle East, and they drove the Third Infantry Division through it.

Even Dowd doesn't hit the nail on the head, though. The Bush Administration is criminally irreponsible for starting a war on false pretenses. What a disgrace! Historians will have a fine time with this maggot-filled mess!

Abrupt Speech Changes in Canada

Interesting. Being born in New Mexico, and living in California, I was unaware of anyone pronouncing avenue as aven-you. But being from NM, I certainly understand having local ways being trampled by outsiders. And if the outsiders control the media, heaven help us!

I was at my limit. I heard yet another one of my friends replace ‘avenyou’ with ‘avenoo.’ It wasn’t that there was anything necessarily wrong with pronouncing avenue without the ‘you’ (or what is called a y-continuant in linguistic circles), it’s just that the y-continuant wasn’t missing from the word before I left for a European summer vacation only 3 months before!

It seemed as if everyone I knew had adopted the new avenoo, and it was driving me nuts. Maybe, I thought, they were conspiring to test my sanity. The nagging question actually drove me to consult the University of Winnipeg’s voice and diction coach, who also noticed the trend. She said that it was an American speech pattern, heard commonly in the media on American television programs. But, she said, it seems that the pronunciation has finally spread like wildfire north of the 49th parallel – our old pattern has been all but dropped entirely in Canadian television and radio, and now, among the general public.

RIP, Terri Schiavo

We never knew you, except at the eye of the hurricane. And soon, the reckoning will start.

Best of B3ta QOTW

Woo-hoo! My story was chosen to be among the 'best' ones on B3ta's Question of the Week (QOTW)! I've been having a hard time breaking through to the 'best' page, because the Website caters to fairly-juvenile British humor, for which I'm not particularly well-suited by background or temperament. B3ta tends to prefer stories about nasty, humilating, permanent traumas. I succeeded only once before, with "My Knife," in response to QOTW "What have you lost lately?" But even though I start with a disadvantage compared to young, careless, impulsive, heavy-drinking, accident-prone Britons, a good story is a good story, and that makes the competition fun.

This week's QOTW was:

There you are innocently going about your day when suddenly a particular song transports you back to a specific time and place. For me, Animotion's Obssession instantly brings back the fear and nerves of school exams. And you? Tell us all about it.

My response was:

Clocks
I was playing Coldplay's "Clocks" while driving into a California sunset in September 2002, when I saw a strange contrail rapidly heading west into the sunset. First time I ever saw such a thing: a Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile heading from Vandenburg Air Force Base to Kwajalein Atoll, many thousands of miles away in the Pacific.

The missile was many hundreds of miles away, but with good visibility in the gloaming, it was possible to see the rocket stage. The contrail changed from dense smoke into a translucent glimmering perfect cone, as the upper stages of the missile ripped into the mesosphere. It was gorgeous and scary at the same time.

When I hear "Clocks", I sense nuclear annihilation is near and my time on this Earth is over.

Mobs Rush In....

Death Valley?:

Record rains have remade Death Valley this spring into a showplace of desert golds, brown-eyed evening primroses, gravel ghosts and desert stars.

It is also a place where fistfights have broken out among customers waiting in long lines at gas pumps. Heavy traffic along a 50-mile stretch of two-lane road at the southern end of the park has left gaping potholes and crumbling pavement.

..."We're being hammered; we can't catch our breath," said Terry Baldino, the park's assistant chief of interpretation. "I'm encouraging our staff to get away from it all on weekends," he said, adding that some "are going to Las Vegas, others are hiding at home."

Normally, Baldino said, there might be 4,000 visitors roaming the park's stark geological wonders this time of year. "Last Saturday," he said, "we had 14,000 people come through the front door of the park's central headquarters." Even that figure accounts for only a fraction of the influx since not all park visitors go to the headquarters.

"There's so many people here right now, I dread going to get the mail," said Death Valley resident Ruth Shandor. "Makes you think we need street lights."

...In a scene wavering between tense and surreal, the line at the women's restroom in the park's main visitor center was 15-deep Tuesday.

The center itself was packed tight with people jostling to buy field guides to wildflowers, or to ask rangers for directions to "flower hot spots." Some just wanted to express their frustration with the crowds and even the flowers at their feet.

"I had one person come up and say, `I'm sick of yellow. Where can I go to see different colors?' " recalled Lori Spoelhof, one of two rangers brought in on an emergency basis from Yellowstone National Park to lead "flower walks."

...At Stove Pipe Wells, about 17 miles to the north of Furnace Creek, maintenance workers were being dispatched to keep the peace at a gas station that has run out of fuel several times in recent weeks.

...As of March 30, Death Valley had received 6.3 inches of rain since July, the most in the 94 years in which records have been kept. Rainfall averages less than two inches a year here. During some years, there is no rain at all.

This season's rains included a destructive storm in August that killed two people and washed out park roads. The latest moisture came on Sunday, when the park best known as the hottest, driest place in North America was pelted with rain and hail.

Signs abound that Death Valley's wettest season in recorded history may be nearing an end. In recent weeks, vast carpets of flowers have been battered by fierce winds and rising temperatures.

An enormous rain-filled lake that only two weeks ago was a novel gathering place for kayakers has evaporated to a depth of only a few inches.

"Eventually, the flowers will disappear, the crowds will diminish and we'll pick up the pieces," Blacker said. "Then, in the fall, we'll start watching the rain totals. If they get way up there again, I guarantee we'll be better prepared."

Science!

Mickey Kaus and others makes an excellent point regarding the Terri Schiavo case. Shouldn't liberals and Democrats be pro-feeding tube?:

What's a sounder basis for ambitious liberal affirmative government--a) an optimistic desire for often-expensive government action to preserve and extend life or b) a resigned, fatalistic willingness to delegate life-ending decisions to private citizens? If the answer is a), shouldn't left-wingers be pro-tubists? NPR's "bias legend" Nina Totenberg was ridiculed for saying, on Inside Washington, that:

"if we really believed in an unmitigated, uncurbed in any way culture of life, we would be having universal health care."

But it seems to me that Totenberg has pointed in exactly the direction the Democrats should have been heading on the Schiavo issue. Has their political and moral sense been so twisted by the hard dogma of "abortion rights" (and disdain for fundamentalist Christians) that they don't see this? ... "More chances at life for all citizens, whatever their status or station"--that's still more of a Democratic slogan than a Republican one.

The trouble is that Americans have learned the libertarian, live-and-let-live philosophy only too well. We are also pretty procedure-oriented too, especially with regard to the courts. Which is usually good, but not always. Few people want to intervene in the Schiavo case: it's private. We don't trust the Religious Right. And we've all been taken by surprise by the issue: we weren't prepared for it and haven't thought it through.

But mostly I think liberals just don't believe an optimistic technology-oriented approach would work in this case. Terri's cerebral cortex is mush. Would stem cells help? Doubtful. Maybe we are just too educated for our own good! Liberalism is an optimistic faith. Blithe ignorance about our chances for success may be better in this case than bitter knowledge!

Nanny Knows Best

Not often that I promote libertarian Web Sites, but this one is nice. We all love Olde England, but everyone chafes under overweening governmental restrictions. A sample:

It is reported that the Greater Manchester Police are adopting an Orwellian approach to the word “township”; they are banning it from being used in the force.

Seemingly it was adopted, around a year ago, to describe sub divisions within the Manchester police force. Quite how “township” is indicative of sub divisions I don’t know.

Notwithstanding that, Chief Inspector Jeff McMahon has issued a memo banning the word; on the grounds that, because of its associations with apartheid, it is racist.

As from now, all memos and signs with the word “township” will be replaced by the equally undescriptive word “partnership”.

The costs of removing signs, and reprinting letterheads, has not been disclosed; doubtless an enquiry as to the cost, using the new Freedom of Information Act, could be made.

Any such enquiry could of course be deemed to be a frivolous waste of Nanny’s time!I wonder if the good people of Manchester feel any safer, now that they are being policed by “partnerships” instead of “townships”?

Taken Aback

He narrowed his eyes, stared at me, and apropos of seemingly nothing said, "hasn't that brain-dead woman from Florida died yet?" Surprised, I said "that's my mother you're talking about!" Interesting exchange, just for the shock value. But it made me wonder if people nationwide are losing their patience with this entire mess, and are responding, not with sympathy, not with anger, but with utter disdain.

The 2005/06 DMTC Season - Take Two!

Cabaret
Into the Woods
Joseph...
Titanic
Wizard of Oz
Oklahoma!

Vindicating Michael Moore

These flights go beyond what Michael Moore alleged in Fahrenheit 9/11. What else don't we know that someday we'll be told?

The F.B.I. records show, for instance, that prominent Saudi citizens left the United States on several flights that had not been previously disclosed in public accounts, including a chartered flight from Providence, R.I., on Sept. 14, 2001, that included at least one member of the Saudi royal family, and three flights from Las Vegas between Sept. 19 and Sept. 24, also carrying members of the Saudi royal family. The government began reopening airspace on Sept. 13, but many flights remained grounded for days afterward.

The three Las Vegas flights, with a total of more than 100 passengers, ferried members of the Saudi royal family and staff members who had been staying at Caesar's Palace and the Four Seasons hotels. The group had tried unsuccessfully to charter flights back to Saudi Arabia between Sept. 13 and Sept. 17 because they said they feared for their safety as a result of the Sept. 11 attacks, the F.B.I. documents say.
....

The documents also show that F.B.I. officials were clearly riled by public speculation stirred by news media accounts of the Saudi flights. They were particularly bothered by a lengthy article in the October 2003 issue of Vanity Fair, which included charges that the bureau considered unfair and led to an internal F.B.I. investigation that the agency named "Vanitybom." Internal F.B.I. correspondence during the review was addressed to "fellow Vanitybom victims."

When All You've Got Is a Hammer....

The Penitentes are now most active on the farthest frontiers of what used to be the Spanish Empire (Philippines; New Mexico; rural Mexico). These areas tend to have the most conservative and observant Catholics. The practice used to be widespread, but no more. Today, the Shiites have all these guys beat for such bloody displays of religiosity.

Pop Music Lyrics

Lyrics so stupid I choked with laughter (Lil Flip's 'Sunshine'):

I need a lady in the streets but a freak in the sheets
That know how to cook cause a nigga like to eat
Spaghetti, shrimp and steak and I'll adore you
I'll treat you like milk, I'll do nothing but spoil you

Awesome lyrics: (from Kylie's 'Crying Game'):

One day soon I’m gonna tell the moon
About the crying game
And if he knows, maybe he’ll explain
Why there are heartaches, why there are tears
And what to do to stop feeling blue
When love disappears

Michael Boskin, Conservative Economist and Giant Brain

Today's Wall Street Journal features a column by Michael Boskin, conservative Stanford economist and senior fellow at the *(giant sucking sound)* Hoover Institution. Mr. Boskin has decided to throw his giant brain into the Social Security melee.

Nothing works like icons to stir the emotions! Boskin wouldn't be such a giant brain if he wasn't aware of the importance of atmosphere. Boskin equates President Bush's and Clinton's proposals (even though they had diametrically different approaches - Clinton is still alive, and I'm sure he wouldn't like getting dragged into the argument this way). Boskin quotes JFK. He has a nice picture of a thoughtful Daniel Patrick Moynihan. 'Where, oh where, is today's Patrick Moynihan?', Boskin wails. It's time to 'modernize' Social Security and every year we wait, the harder it gets. If we don't start now, when, oh when, will we get our private accounts? (Note to Boskin: why not a picture of FDR?)

Well, if Boskin really wants a private account, he could always open an IRA. Anyone can. We already have suitable 'add-on' accounts. But, I forget, this is all about 'carve-out', isn't it. It's about gutting Social Security and getting people to surrender their guaranteed benefits for a cheap whirl on the Wall Street merry-go-round.

Boskin idolizes the young. He states:

Many younger workers say they expect the system to be bankrupt and gone by the time they retire.

Boskin knows these young people are right. Young people are his god - he sees them every day at Stanford, and he knows how smart they are. But young people make mistakes. Many young people think they won't live to be 40, boring statistics to the contrary be damned. Why should these feckless young people be right on Social Security's prospects?

Boskin uses the straw man of reactionary Democrats who want to extend the current benefit formula indefinitely into the future. Most Democrats are willing to tinker with the formula if it helps long-term solvency, however. People like Boskin are not interested in long-term solvency, because they plan to destroy Social Security in the short-term. To Boskin, tinkering with formulas is like sweeping the floor of a cottage perched on top of Mt. St. Helens: boring and pointless.

Boskin likes everything and anything, except shoring up Social Security. Boskin likes Robert C. Pozen's ratchet idea. Boskin also likes borrowing. Boskin contrasts good borrowing (automatically equated to private sector needs) and bad borrowing (automatically equated to government needs, which he likens to a party), failing to notice that these distinctions are not borne out in practice - borrowing is borrowing, and can be good or bad, depending on context:

Many critics of individual accounts denounce the idea of borrowing to finance them. While I share concerns about large deficits in prosperous peacetime, there is a fundamental difference between borrowing to finance individual accounts and borrowing to fund government current consumption. The individual accounts acquire real assets. So, while there is borrowing by the government on the one hand, it finances investment in real assets on the other, like borrowing to buy a home, not to throw a party. Is there really such an aversion to private capital that only government spending counts?

No aversion to private capital, Mr. Big Brain, as long as the interest gets paid on all that borrowed money! Plus, a lot of government spending serves as an investment in society's future. Don't you just love all his evasions? Plus, Boskin is off-message: it's not prosperous peacetime, we are war with the terrorists! Aren't we?

One trouble with privatization is that the new system has to work on $1+ trillion of borrowed money in order to avoid cutting current benefits. That scale of borrowing might damage the economy, and the money has to be repaid - with interest. It's no panacea! In comparison, pay-as-you-go Social Security is cheap.

Boskin reverts to scare tactics: act now, or you get benefit cuts, tax increases, social dislocations, high interest rates, hives, herpes, locusts, pestilence, obesity, and gas. Sorry, Michael Medulla, none of this works for Americans. We are not scared of the future. We are an optimistic folk. Even if the baby boom generation retires, a few, hardy young people will be left behind in the ruins of our empty cities from which to repopulate the country again (maybe add a few hard-working immigrants as well).

Boskin refers to the Bush plan as if everyone knows what it is, but clever guy that Bush is, he has yet to reveal it, in the form of proposed legislation. It's like poker! Bush now wants Democrats to reveal their plan, but the Democratic plan has been in plain sight for decades: preserve Social Security much as it is. It's not like poker, it's more like a game of 'pull my finger.' Democrats should walk away from this game on the midway of democracy, and involve themselves elsewhere. Leave the sad freak from Texas alone with his finger outstretched.

Poor George Bush - he's misjudged this game's odds! Wasting away all that precious political capital from the 2004 election - for nothing! Like the blackjack dealers at Cache Creek Indian Bingo and Casino say about other dealers who play blackjack: "they work for free!"

Preserve Social Security, ever-so lofty and cerebral Michael Boskin, and everything else will fall into place. Social Security is not a bad program. Social insurance preserves social stability, and makes possible the crazy-ass markets that brains like you idolize so much. Turn your attention to health care costs instead, which are truly running wild, rather than Social Security, which is probably the best-run part of the entire Rube-Goldberg Republican-dominated federal government.

Easter Malice

This is the other Lota-Burger than the one I visited in Gallup, NM over last New Year's holiday. Still, really ugly. Not a homeless guy either....

GALLUP — A trail of blood that stains the pavement along Dairy Drive serves as an eerie reminder of Sunday's dragging of a Gallup man for more than a mile.

Fausto Arellano, 32, was bound by the ankles, strapped to a pick-up truck and dragged for at least a mile before he was abandoned in the Lot-A-Burger east parking lot at about 4 a.m. Easter morning.

She Can Dish It Out

But Ann Coulter has problems taking it:

"Could 10 of the largest College Republicans start walking up and down the aisles and start removing anyone shouting?" Coulter asked. "Otherwise, this lecture is over."

Burglar

George Bush hasn't given up on Social Security just yet. It's been hard to miss the Wall Street Journal's Golden Boy, Robert C. Pozen, and his 'Progressive' solution to Social Security's problems, appearing on NPR's 'All Things Considered,' and even getting a solid boost from George W. Bush himself.

Pozen's irreversible ratchet mechanism for forcing the rich and their money out of the Social Security system would not only weaken the system directly, but also indirectly, by converting Social Security into a welfare program and therefore into a big fat juicy target for future race-and-class-based Republican attacks. Bush will try all sorts of subterfuges to break Democratic resistance.

If the front door is locked, try the side window!

Oops!

Guess DMTC can't do 'Little Shop of Horrors' after all! (maybe 'Cabaret' instead...)

Physics Songs

This site was featured in the Wall Street Journal last week. Takes me right back to high school!

The Hooke and Newton Song:

Optional
Intro:
Doo Doo, Dooo Doo, Doo Doodle-oo Dooo Doo
Doo Doo, Dooo Doo, Doo Doodle-oo Doo

Chorus:
Hooke on the left, Newton on the right
Gives you an equation that’s really outta sight!
Short and sweet, full of hidden delight
And the spring goes up and down, and down
And the spring goes up and down.

Hooke and Newton were rivals in their day,
But partners for eternity is how they’ll have to stay!
Minus kx equals ma,
And the spring goes up and down, and down
And the spring goes up and down.

Repeat Chorus
twice.

Words, Chords, & Intro. by Walter Smith 7-01
Tune from the PBS program “Dragontales”

Should Liberals Be Paranoid Regarding Terri Schiavo?

There is an interesting essay at Smirking Chimp by Dr. Teresa Whitehurst warning progressives of imminent doom regarding the Terry Schiavo case. In her view, the emotional, quasi-fascist framing of the standoff regarding the feeding tube is likely to provoke a Kristallknacht-like response from the Religious Right.

It's a good idea that liberals and progressives be a bit paranoid these days. Even paranoids have enemies, as the old saw goes. Is Whitehurst overreacting, as the people commenting on her essay seem to think, or is she on to something?

Whitehurst writes:

Never underestimate the power of repeated imagery. The videotape of Ms. Schiavo is becoming firmly planted in the American mind, just as the 9/11 bombings became engrained through repeated viewings of the same footage. Functioning somewhat like brainwashing, the repeated exposure to stress-provoking imagery arouses negative feelings such as fear, powerlessness, horror, anxiety, pity or anger. Such "vicarious trauma" burdens viewers, who handle it in one of two ways: numbing/avoidance/minimization or agitation/obsession/exaggeration. Those who are becoming "numbed out" to the images of Ms. Schiavo's real-time starvation-a gruesome reality-TV event for which none of us were prepared-will either avoid the news, crack jokes, or minimize the significance of her dying ("they say starvation doesn't hurt" or "people die all the time-get over it!"). But the many Americans who are growing increasingly distressed (with accompanying feelings of powerlessness) are likely to undergo a personal transformation wherein their more moderate views are discarded and they begin to identify with angry, extremist persons or groups.

In 1995, when Newt Gingrich and the House Republican leadership shut down the federal government, the Radical Right took an aggressive approach. There was one significant overreaction, though - stark damage: Timothy McVeigh and conspirator(s) destroyed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. People recoiled at the violence, however, and the Republicans lost public support. Bill Clinton prevailed over the Gingrich, and by 1999 Gingrich was forced out of the House leadership and Congress altogether.

Whitehurst continues:

Progressives have been conspicuously silent regarding the family's suffering, and most won't even consider her parents' claims that Terri might not want to be starved to death, even in her present condition. The radical right, however, is busy endearing itself to the public-all those millions of average Joes who get all their news from TV, and are watching Terri's withering little body, sad face, desperate parents and the conservative leaders lending them sympathy and support. For the viewing public, I'm afraid it's Michael Schiavo, the man who's forcing his will on Terri and her family, who's speaking for us, and for liberal/progressive values. Come election time, the masses will remember who's who. If we don't speak up and speak up now, here's the equation that millions of voters will remember at the polling booth, just as the Bush administration hopes: Sympathetic to dying woman and her family=Conservatives. Unsympathetic to dying woman and her family=Liberals.

Well, is Whitehurst right? My judgement on this issue may be impaired because I don't watch enough TV, and so I may be missing people's emotional overreaction. I took a little heart in the story on Drudge yesterday that the evangelicals may turn on Jeb Bush instead:

"If Gov. Bush wants to be the man that his brother is, he needs to step up to the plate like President Bush did when the United Nations told him not to go into Iraq," Randall Terry, a protest organizer, said of the governor. "Be a man. Put politics aside."

Michelle Cottle at TNR suggests that Democrats keep their distance from the issue, not only because the politicians are playing with fire, and it's hard to say who is going to be burned, but also because Michael Schiavo may have mixed motives. Fortunately, the national Democratic leadership is unwilling to whip their troops into line. Presenting an amorphous target to the Republicans may be the best policy. My thought is that the Religious Right has alienated a lot of people with their willingness to dispense with the Constitution. Progressives should remain paranoid though - Whitehurst may end up looking like a prophet once this is all through.

Lop-Eared

Folding a T-Shirt

Wow! Isn't the Internet great! I've never been able to figure out an efficient way to do this. It's like an experiment in topology that always goes bad. Like a chemical experiment that always explodes. I need to study this more...

Liberal Hypocrisy?

The Wall Street Journal's John Fund accuses liberals of hypocrisy in opposing federal intervention in the Schiavo case, but supporting it in the case of Elian Gonzalez:

But liberals have gotten off easy for some of the somersaulting arguments they have made on behalf of judicial independence and states' rights to justify their position that Terri Schiavo should not be saved. Many made the opposite arguments in the Elian Gonzalez case.

I'm one liberal who opposed federal intervention in both cases, so I find the accusations of hypocrisy to be annoying. In the Elian Gonzalez case, however, federal intervention was more understandable, since under our system of government, immigration matters are supposed to fall under federal jurisdiction. Nevertheless, Elian had family members here who could care for him, and the U.S. had long had a policy for allowing Cuban refugees to settle here. It seemed an aggressive federal overreach to send Elian back to live under a tyranny, even if his father wanted him back.

In the Schiavo matter, the precise hook for federal intervention remains unclear, which is probably why federal courts have refused to intervene. Where have the Florida state courts failed in their duty, exactly?

Supposed conservatives have no trouble trying to demolish our system of government in order to make petty Culture War points. Why doesn't the Wall Street Journal focus on conservative hypocrisy instead? Liberal hypocrisy seems pretty wan these days, at least when compared to the amazing antics of Frist and DeLay. When DeLay was in Michael Schiavo's place, deciding whether to continue medical care for his injured dad, DeLay decided to pull the plug. DeLay's family protests that the situations were different, that DeLay's dad had no hope for recovery. I'm sure Michael Schiavo would answer: EXACTLY!

Scientific American Snark

Scientific American takes their April Fool's jokes seriously.....

Despite my support for Evolution, I think Scientific American should be a little more humble. There has been collateral damage in their war against the Creationists.

Remember when Scientific American refused to hire Forrest Mims III as their "Amateur Scientist" columnist? The job was his, well and justly earned, until they found out that he was a Creationist. Even though his responsibilities would rarely, if ever, intrude into biology, ideological dissonance could not be tolerated.

As an agnostic liberal evolutionist, I nevertheless feel an injustice was done. It's time we liberals expressed a little of that tolerance we like to brag about.

Feets Don't Fail Me Now!

From Deborah:

RIP, James Callaghan

British Prime Minister, 1976-1979.

Old TV Ads

Dannette's birthday celebration tonight: dinner at Ruby Tuesday's in Woodland, followed by watching an amusing DVD collection of TV ads from the 50's, 60's, and early 70's. Funny stuff: new car ads, how cigarettes aren't that bad for you, and familiar breakfast cereals. Ben B. pointed out that we should be paid to watch this stuff, and instead it's us buying the DVD. Bugs Bunny making a pitch to buy savings bonds in blackface really made Ryan laugh!

Old TV ads: maybe a good premise for a song-and-dance number? (but who will own the rights?)

Regarding PVS

I was just listening to Rush Limbaugh on KFBK. Limbaugh was attacking the 'mercy killing' lobby for exploiting Terri Schiavo's agonizing starvation. He even featured a recent jail interview with Jack Kevorkian (Kevorkian hoped that the case would increase the public's awareness of these issues). One can hardly fail to notice, however, that Limbaugh was exploiting the tragedy himself. Those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw rocks.

Here's a discussion between us three college buddies regarding Persistent Vegetative State (PVS) (Walt provided the link earlier this week):

John
Hi Walt,
Thanks for forwarding the link about PVS. I found it interesting but not entirely compelling. I kept getting the nagging feeling that the author was pushing some sort of personal agenda. It seemed to me that he was quick to point out cases where people had recovered but he cited only one case and even there lacked specifics. Further, he never defined "recovered". Is a recovery in which a person regains consciousness but has greatly diminished mental and physical faculties truly a recovery? By my thinking it is not.

I am personally aware of two cases in which people in a comatose state for several days fully recovered. One is my wife who suffered a massive head injury in an automobile accident in 1967; the other was the 85-year-old mother of a former employer. In the former case the doctors went to great lengths to save her life and were completely successful. In the latter case doctors held out out little hope but she awoke and, while health issues continued to plague her for the remaining 3 years she lived, her mental faculties were undiminished. So I strongly believe that medical intervention should be used in such cases.

The Schiavo case, however seems to be completely different. By all accounts there is no possibility whatsoever that she can ever recover even a miniscule amount of her previous mental and physical abilities. This is a case that should have been settled by the family and their doctors years ago. And I feel that the highest levels of the federal government getting involved in it for apparently partisan political reasons is totally appalling.

In the past this sort of case was handled quietly and with dignity. (personal information removed) A few years ago Jack Kevorkian tried to bring such practices into the open but for a variety of reasons he did not succeed. And that is unfortunate because by incarcerating him the state is effectively telling us all that metabolic activity must always be maintained regardless of the quality of life.

The thing that I find most disturbing about this whole affair is that the state is now willing to allow starvation to end a hopeless life. We go to tremendous lengths to execute the most heinous and monstrous criminals in a painless manner but we are now preparing to allow starvation of the terminally ill. Jack Kevorkian is certainly eccentric--perhaps even insane--but his methods are more appropriate and certainly more humane. Eventually society will have to give them more consideration.

And then there is the financial cost to society--mostly borne by taxpayers--of maintaining metabolism of people suffering from terminal illnesses. It may sound harsh but society does not have a vested interest in maintaining such lives. Further, in many cases the people being kept alive artificially, would never choose that existence if they had any say in the matter. Religion and news stories about miraculous recoveries have caused many people in America to expect miracles. Spending tens of billions of dollars a year on the chance that a miracle might occur is a foolish price to pay. It's time we started taking amore realistic views of things.

Walt

[Walt's contribution subsequently redacted at his request]

Marc

It's a hard case, that's for sure. If it wasn't, it wouldn't have risen so high in national attention.

I'm sure Michael Schiavo would respond to O'Reilley that he is a decent guy, and he's made up his mind that the decent thing to do is to pull the plug.

In my opinion, continued care is called for in this case. Michael Schiavo disagrees, however, and I'm willing to defer to his judgement, as I almost always do for family members.

I thought Congress' intervention was grotesque:

1.) Bill Frist compromising his medical training and offering a medical diagnosis on the floor of the Senate based on a videotape examination. Frist's concern was puzzling, since he is generally dismissive of the rights of the dying; e.g., he is favor of harvesting the organs of ancephalic babies.

2.) Tom DeLay equating a desire to stop life support for Terry Schiavo to criticism of Tom DeLay and the conservative movement.

3.) A brazen interference in the workings of the court system. There is no indication that the courts have been careless here (11 years, 39 judges: nothing hasty or ill-considered here.) Now, Congressmen are going around condemning liberal activist judges in this case, when most of the judges involved are conservatives hewing carefully and meticulously to the law. Reality and ideology are so far apart!

4.) Numerous Congressmen condemning Michael Schiavo's marriage in public debate, when they could barely pronounce his name, and certainly don't know him at all.

5.) Congressmen stating over and over that this case does not serve as a precedent, when clearly it is a precedent. Some 35,000 people are in PVS right now, and even if only a tiny fraction of their cases make it to the floor of the Senate, the Senate will still be able to do nothing else but consider these cases.

There are an awful lot of cold-hearted politicos involved now who will try to make Terry Schiavo a martyr for their various causes. Sad.

And the whole case is sad, of course....

New Helvetia

Met a Swiss doctor today, on a cross-California trip, and just arrived with his family from playing in the snow on Mt. Shasta: Philip Kutumba. Checking out Sacramento! Hope he likes New Helvetia!

Bush Administration - Dangerous, Inveterate Liars

I saw this story in last Sunday's paper (originally from the Washington Post), and could hardly believe the Bush Administration could be so stupid:

In an effort to increase pressure on North Korea, the Bush administration told its Asian allies in briefings earlier this year that Pyongyang had exported nuclear material to Libya. That was a significant new charge, the first allegation that North Korea was helping to create a new nuclear weapons state.

But that is not what U.S. intelligence reported, according to two officials with detailed knowledge of the transaction. North Korea, according to the intelligence, had supplied uranium hexafluoride -- which can be enriched to weapons-grade uranium -- to Pakistan. It was Pakistan, a key U.S. ally with its own nuclear arsenal, that sold the material to Libya. The U.S. government had no evidence, the officials said, that North Korea knew of the second transaction.

Pakistan's role as both the buyer and the seller was concealed to cover up the part played by Washington's partner in the hunt for al Qaeda leaders, according to the officials, who discussed the issue on the condition of anonymity. In addition, a North Korea-Pakistan transfer would not have been news to the U.S. allies, which have known of such transfers for years and viewed them as a business matter between sovereign states.

The Bush administration's approach, intended to isolate North Korea, instead left allies increasingly doubtful as they began to learn that the briefings omitted essential details about the transaction, U.S. officials and foreign diplomats said in interviews. North Korea responded to public reports last month about the briefings by withdrawing from talks with its neighbors and the United States.

It's bad enough to lie to the public, but when you lie to allies and cooperative governments, real consequences follow. The U.S. had almost no credibility left on these matters, and now it has none. What did the Bush Administration think it was doing? Spinning unpleasant facts? Our allies, and the Chinese government, aren't fools. They don't watch FOX News. They know total bullshit when they hear it and they are not amused.

Continuing with the Post's damage assessment.....

Two years ago, U.S. officials told allies that North Korea was trying to assemble an enrichment facility that would turn uranium hexafluoride into bomb-grade material.

But China and South Korea, in particular, have been skeptical of those assertions and are becoming increasingly wary of pressuring North Korea.

The National Security Council briefings in late January and early February, by senior NSC officials Michael J. Green and William Tobey, were intended to do just that by keeping the spotlight solely on North Korea.

Pakistan was mentioned only once in the briefing paper, and in a context that emphasized Pyongyang's guilt. "Pakistani press reports have said the uranium came from North Korea," according to the briefing paper, which was read to The Post.

After initial press reports about the briefing appeared last month, Pyongyang announced that it possessed nuclear weapons and would not return to the six-party talks.

Pritchard said North Korea's reaction was "absolutely linked" to the Green-Tobey trip.

So much for cobbling a joint defense on North Korea. Ain't gonna happen. Not now. Bilateral talks, here we come! Crafty Kim Jong-Il wins a round! Makes Bush look SO STOOPID!

Call Me An Idiot

It's intolerable that Kylie lives and yet I can't see her. So I decided to initiate a course of action. I looked up her concert schedule and noticed a very strange "Showgirl" schedule: single shows one month apart (08/04/05, 09/04/05, etc.) in Dublin. I chose the 11/04/05 show, thinking I'd have until November to prepare for a European visit, and charged 125 euros for two standing-room admissions to my VISA card.

Turns out, European date convention (DD/MM/YY) is not quite the same as the American convention (MM/DD/YY). The show schedule is actually quite logical - successive nights - and 11/04 is just a few weeks away. I've never travelled abroad, and so have no idea if my passport has expired or not, or whether I can get time off work, or plane reservations, or whether I can cancel the tickets at this late date, or anything! (Sigh!)

More Adventures of the 50-Foot Woman

You see, that's what happens when you stop paying attention! Kylie goes and makes more albums. And living in the United States, I'm at the tail end of the information stream (Sigh!)

Apparently "Giving You Up" is on the "Ultimate Kylie" Double-CD. Over at her Web Site, I watched the video (cute, but needs dancers!) Nevertheless, this is a superb pop song. Here are the lyrics, at Let's Sing It:

Kylie Minogue - Giving You Up

Last night I lost my head
And fell right back into your love
I lay intoxicated while angels circled high above

Deep in a perfect moment
All at once it feels so right
But when I wake I see reality turn back and bite

Ah, hah-ah hah-ah
Ah, hah-ah hah-ah
Ah, hah-ah hah-ah
Ah, hah-ah hah-ah

Your heartbeats ticking
And your cool starts dripping
And your tongue tied up on the phone

Your backbones breaking
And your smooth starts shaking
Like you can't stand being alone

Your cot starts rocking
Little doubts start knocking
Like the whole worlds slipping away

Attentions killing
But the ride is thrilling
But you can't help going again

What you want is what you don't know
Turn me on and watch your ego
What you want is what you don't need
Stand up when your talking to me

Chorus:
I can't start giving you up
I'm lost without you
Can't stop tickin the tock
I can't start giving you up
I'm mad about you
Can't stop slipping it off

I can't start giving you up
I'm lost without you
Can't stop tickin the tock
I can't start giving you up
I'm mad about you
Can't stop slipping it off

A girls got to suffer for fashion
She knows what her body can do-ooh-ooh
She finds a man and she makes it her passion
I'm happy trying all the time with a boy like you

A girls got to suffer for fashion
She knows what her body can do, ooh-ooh
She finds a man and she makes it her passion
I'm happy trying all the time with a boy like you

I can't start giving you up
I'm lost without you
I can't start giving you up
I'm mad about you

Chorus:
I can't start giving you up
I'm lost without you
Can't stop tickin the tock
I can't start giving you up
I'm mad about you
Can't stop slipping it off

I can't start giving you up
I'm lost without you
Can't stop tickin the tock
I can't start giving you up
I'm mad about you
Can't stop slipping it off

Ah, hah-ah hah-ah (to fade)

Hollow House in the Land of Enchantment

Intriguing post at The Carpetbagger. Are my home-staters trying to deliver a message? And why is Heather Wilson so cagey these days?:

John McCain's appearance at Bush's Social Security pep rally yesterday in New Mexico generated plenty of attention, but there was a tidbit that shouldn't get lost in the shuffle.

Unlike most other presidential appearances, the event inside the darkly lit Kiva Auditorium was sparsely attended, with hundreds of empty seats. (emphasis added)

That's how bad things have become for Bush's Social Security pitch. The president joined the most popular Republican senator in America, along with local star Pete Domenici, and they still couldn't fill all the seats. Keep in mind, this is state Bush won last year, many of the seats were probably filled by reporters covering the event, and the tickets were free.

The local chamber of commerce says that Kiva Auditorium only holds 2,350 people, while the NYT reported there were "hundreds" of empty seats. So, while presidential visits usually generate some local excitement, Bush visited New Mexico's largest city to discuss his signature domestic policy initiative, had a rock-star quality politician by his side, gave away tickets for nothing, and still couldn't fill a small theater.

Peaceful Picture of the Day

From Mariko D.'s niece, a pretty picture of interference patterns in the waves, near Hiroshima:

Scratch IMAX

Several IMAX theaters in the South have passed on showing a science film on volcanoes because of concerns it might offend people with fundamental religious beliefs who don't believe in evolution.

OK, what about offending those of us who DO believe in evolution? Get with the science, folks! If IMAX can't present proper science in a science film, then why should I bother going at all?

Slamming Frist

From a medical point of view.

Defeat

So what happens in the Culture Wars if Terri Schiavo dies? Does Terri become a euthanasia martyr, providing the Religious Right with a needed boost of enthusiasm? Does a flurry of new bills get introduced to tighten the laws on aid to those in Persistent Vegetative State?

On the other hand, following a wave a public revulsion at Republican hard-ball tactics, would Schiavo's death be the second defeat of Bush's second term (Social Security being the first)? Might more defeats follow? Are the dominoes poised to topple?

It's dangerous for politicians to be caught on the losing end of causes. George W. Bush is usually pretty good at distinguishing winning hands from losing hands, but like LBJ in 1966, Bush is beginning to learn some hard lessons. It gets harder to avoid blame when your party controls all three branches of government.

At Slate, Jacob Weisberg figures out how Bush can pull victory from the jaws of Social Security defeat:

But if Bush is shrewd enough to euthanize carve-out accounts while shifting to make solvency his goal, he will leave his Democratic opponents in a quandary. A package of innocuous tax increases and benefit cuts could extend the life of the trust fund out to 75 years in a fairly painless way. Substantively, it would be hard for even the most partisan Democrats to oppose this kind of compromise, which serves their goal of protecting the future of Social Security. But politically, Democrats would be loath to help Bush turn his first major defeat into another political victory.

In other words, to "win", Bush would have to adopt the Democratic position. Sounds like a defeat to me! Democrats won't be loath to help Bush accept defeat....here, let me help! Need a face-saving compromise? I've got the best cosmetics in town! Need to stab allies in the back? Try my pocket knife!

Pix on the Internet are Forever

Navy SEALS living in a glass house shouldn't throw rocks. Sensitive pictures shouldn't be on a Web Site - period. Associated Press is doing its job. Are the SEALS motivated more by fear, or shame and embarrassment?

The Spirit of 2003

Drudge ran this for the supposed shock value of Howard Dean quoting scripture against Republicans, but what I found most striking was Dean's encouragement of political participation - what motivated 135 (plus some write-in) candidates to run for Governor of California in 2003! Good for him!:

Dean said he wanted the audience to focus not only on national politics but also on state and local elections.

He urged every person present to run for office.

"How many people in the audience think they can't be just as good a president as George W. Bush?" he said, prompting a wave of applause and laughter.

He encouraged those not able to run to donate "$10 or $15" to a political candidate they support or donate their time to a political campaign.

"It's not about Republicans and Democrats, but about democracy that works," he said. "I'd rather see someone go to work for a Republican campaign than sit on their butt."

Feed 'Em Rope

I'm glad the Democrats didn't try to put together a coherent position on the Terri Schiavo case. Save the ammunition. The Republicans have had free rein (or is that free reign?) to present a united front and display every disagreeable, culture-war quality guaranteed to make them unpopular with the public. It's a positive delight to see Tom (Hubris) DeLay equate criticism of himself with murder. L'etat c'est moi!

Post-Life Career as Crash-Test Dummy

No problem here, just more Drudge fear-mongering. When you will your body to science, you may find yourself as a crash-test dummy (slow-mo tests here though). My cousin willed her body to science: I hope the research, whatever it was, was fruitful.

Still, I was disturbed last year, when excess (I think it was Tulane Univ.) bodies were used in land-mine research. When I was a work-study student at TERA, in 1974/75, just west of Socorro, NM (NM Tech), they were detonating Claymore land mines next to sheet-metal barriers. I saw what those Claymores can do to sheet metal. Thinking about bodies...Ouch!

"Grapes of Warth" Watch

Upon seeing a restaurant called "The Melting Pot" in downtown Sacramento (after narrowly missing today's jury pool orientation):

That's it! That's the historical building!

"The Melting Pot" was an American motto back in the creation of North America.

Have you ever read that, in the history? In colonist times? I love the history - it was fabulous, it was adventurous, it was an extravaganza!

(Coming soon to a jury near you!)

"Giving You Up"

Kylie's new single! Superlatives fail.... The best Kylie song ever! I'm in heaven! (on rotation at Gay FM.de) The opening is superb!

The tension is killing
But the ride is thrilling
.....
I can't stop giving you up
I'm lost without you
Can't stop (tickin' the top?)

Can't stop giving you up
I'm mad about you
Can't stop slipping it off

A combined Styx "Lorelei" and Tommy James and the Shondells "Crimson and Clover" feel to the song. Her sense of pop music gets better with time. Can hardly wait till "Showgirl" comes out!

DMTC's 2005-06 Season

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
Into the Woods
Little Shop of Horrors
Titanic
Wizard of Oz
Oklahoma!

Second Avenue

Today, when I left the house to drive to work, I noticed six gray and blue balloons, tightly tied together, lying in the driveway. The bundle looked like the pi-bond electron shells for some exotic organic chemical - acetylene, or something.

Well, that's better than last week's Great Porn Crisis. Someone cut a men's magazine into innumerable strips by the garbage cans, which the wind subsequently took and plastered the driveway in alluring 976 chat line advertisements. Young vixen still appeal from every nook and cranny by the peach tree.

Peter next-door is leaving: he's purchased a house. On the other side, a bike-riding woman has moved in. It must be springtime!

The 1995 Chicago Heat Wave

Crooked Timber has an interesting review of "Heat Wave: A social autopsy of disaster in Chicago", by Eric Klinenberg. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. It's interesting to see how differences in neighborhoods and social networks can make a difference under extreme stress.

It would be interesting to see a comparison (if possible) between Chicago and Baghdad, Iraq. Temperatures and humidities make southern Iraq in the summer among the world's most climatically brutal places. Social networks really count there, but the extreme violence there these days assuredly threatens the lives of those vulnerable to the heat.

Terri Schiavo

Courtesy of Walt, here is a handy link regarding Persistent Vegetative State (PVS).

I've mostly been trying to avoid the Terri Schiavo case in the media, but it's practically inescapable. As a general rule, PVS does not seem severe enough to merit withholding of feeding (it's not precisely a 'brain-dead' state), but then there may be other considerations involved - each case may be different.

Mostly, I'm appalled that Congress and the President are inserting themselves into this case, trampling all over federalism and the U.S. Constitution in the process. Every controversial PVS case henceforth is likely to become a legislative football (Persistent Legislative State, as 'Slate' puts it). Even more ironic is that George Bush, when Governor of Texas, signed a law allowing authorities there to pull the plug whenever care becomes onerous. Life is cheaper in the West, I guess. The evangelical leaders (not the evangelical rank-and-file) must really be yanking Bush's chain pretty hard for him to interrupt his vacation to return to Washington and sign emergency legislation to reinsert Terri Schiavo's feeding tube.

It will be interesting to see what happens next, for sport, if nothing else!

"Annie," and "Beauty and the Beast," Close

Today was the last performance of "Annie" at DMTC. The last several audiences were very large. The Orphan girls were getting very confident - almost too confident - towards the end. Confidence is great, but there is always the danger of becoming complacent. Live theater is always a hazardous undertaking. According to Dianna Craig, little 'Molly' (her daughter Leona) was keenly saddened by the closing of the show. I can understand that emotion, but the antidote to closing sadness is always there: try out for another show! If not for that option, I think we would all die of broken hearts!

Today, Ray Fisher (Big Bald Blog) and Colby Salmon were in the audience. Colby now attends Azusa Pacific College in Glendora (near Pasadena), CA. Colby's voice was a little hoarse - he's apparently in "Suessical" down in the Southland. We talked about Glendora air pollution - being elevated just enough to intercept LA's semi-permanent air pollution layer, the city is among California's smoggiest (maybe the hoarseness comes from that!)

I was very glad Ray was there, but I was still a bit surprised: he's apparently played 'Daddy Warbucks' in "Annie" four times, which means the show has few surprises for him. Still, there's the aspect of seeing what new faces and voices can do with the old roles, plus Runaway Stage Productions (RSP) is doing "Annie" next year. And Colby was visiting (Colby's sister Amanda was one of the Orphans), so what's not to like? Good fellowship and a good show!

Yesterday, "Beauty and the Beast," the Young Performer's Theater (YPT) show closed. I'm glad I finally got to see this show. I now understand why Rhiannon Guevin is so popular over at Davis Comic Opera Company (DCOC) - what a fabulous voice! Colin Wallace was Beastly (which is good!) and Cody Craven did marvellously as the selfish but articulate Prince. I was intrigued watching Jocelyn Price's choreography for the song 'Fine Gifts,' featuring Rain Quinlan, Cody Craven, Elsbeth Poe and Danielle Fio. Simple movements were utilized in an intelligent and charming way (I particularly liked Greedo and Graspo's side-to-side sway: a simple, unexpected, and effective way to use second position, in plie). Anna Johnson's costumes were great, particularly the beautiful teacup costumes.

I was pleased to see Julia Robinson at the show - I hadn't seen her since Fall, 2003. She's attending school in Utah now. She commented on the passage of time, and how oldtimers in the YPT have moved on, and newtimers have taken their places. And so quickly too!

In many ways, the YPT has the best thing about DMTC, a marvellous display of what theater can and should be.

The young are favored in Musical Theater, in general. There is something about facile movement, quick memorization, ambitious singing, and clever characterization that the young are particularly well-equipped to handle. Of course, there is always a different way to look at youth's advantages. Here is an eccentric outlook, part of an interview with actor and playwright Wallace Shawn in the New York Times Magazine (January 11, 2004):

Q. Do you follow Broadway theater?

A. No. I don't see that many plays, and for me, musicals are rarely pleasing. I feel the actors are being put through a kind of nightmarish labor. They're like animals being forced to pull heavy carts of vegetables at incredible speeds.

Q. Can't you make an exception for "Oklahoma" or "South Pacific"?

A. I saw "South Pacific" as a child and thought it was terrifying.

Well, can't convince everyone, I guess! For myself, I like my fast cart of vegetables, and the younger you are, the speedier you like your cart of vegetables!

Deborah Goudreault in the Valley of the Sun

Deborah McMillion-Nering and friends in Ahwatukee, on the fringe of Phoenix, AZ, have recently been hosting Deborah Goudreault, occasional lead singer for the Charles Lewis Jazz Quintet. Fabulous Deborah G. lives in Boston now, but Wednesday night, March 16th, she graced the stage, in concert, at the Kerr Center with the Quintet.

In 1988/89, the two Deborahs, James Bucanek, and myself, all took ballet together at Mary Adams' School of Ballet in Tempe. Mary Adams' school (now in Mesa) is excellent, featuring RAD instruction. Mary Adams has instructed numerous important alumni (e.g., Bonnie Moore). James and Deborah M. still attend class there.

Deborah M. often used Deborah G. as a model for her paintings, including one that hangs near my bed (the one featuring a fish leaping from a fountain, while balancing a bubble on its nose).

The Ahwatukee household is the most civilized I know. Talent finds expression, and knows few limits. Their willingness to try new out new things is refreshing. Oddly enough, they were the first to introduce me to step aerobics (they sprung it as a surprise one New Year's Day at the local Joe Weider gym). They also introduced me to other oddities, chief among them, America On-line and the Weather Channel.

Few people possess James B.'s abilities in the kitchen. Here, James presents Deborah G. with a fabulous Gazpacho Salad Stack:

Perky Breasts

The Japanese way - with chewing gum.

Cows and Air Quality

From last month's Sacramento Bee (Edie Lau, Feb. 27th: no link available), a new study shows cows generate less smog-producing gases than previously estimated:

[Measurements by Frank Mitloehner, UCD animal scientist and air-quality specialist,] show a cow produces about 6.4 pounds of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) per year. VOCs are ingredients in the development of ground-level ozone, a scourge of Central Valley air.

In their estimates, California air board staff have figured that a cow produces 12.8 pounds of VOCs a year - a flawed figure that was based upon a misinterpretation of a study done in 1938.

This study reminds me of the mid-80's, when my Air Chemistry professor at University of Arizona in Tucson, George Dawson, was trying to get a sample of pure biogenic methane to do some Carbon-14 analyses. They have these cows at the University's Campbell Farms with portals leading into the cows' gut. The portals are sealed with rubber flaps. By his telling, to get pure biogenic methane, you sidle up to a cow, open the rubber flap, reach deep inside, and tank up! Continuing with the recent study, though:

...Mitloehner said the most surprising finding so far is that when the cows are removed, and their manure left behind, VOC levels drop to near background levels.

"At the time that the animals were chewing their cud, when they were belching, we saw the peaks (in gas emissions)," he said. "That indicates the gases...are released when the animal ruminates."

The rumination "is going to be very tough to mitigate," said Michael Marsh, head of the trade association Western United Dairymen.

"I don't know what kind of device you might come up with," he said with a wry laugh. "Maybe some antacids."

Over at B3ta, contributor "Kris Fucking Kristofferson" takes liberties with recent song lyrics to express sympathy for the Central Valley's cow-control air pollution dilemma. Kris' message is more poignant given the recent demise of Hunter Thompson:

We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of chloroplast, five sheets of high powered blotter granum, a saltshaker half-full of mesophyll, and a whole galaxy of carbons, fibres, vitamins, proteins... Also, a quart of chlorphyll, a quart of thylakoid, a case of oxygen, a pint of raw carbon dioxide, and two dozen stomates. The only thing that really worried me was the Oxygen. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a cow in the depths of a photosynthesis binge.

Mars and Venus

Surprisingly-large genetic differences between men and women: apparently greater than between humankind and chimpanzeekind:

"The important question becomes how men and women actually vary and how much variability there is in females," Carrel said. "We now might have new candidate genes that could explain differences between men and women."

All told, men and women may differ by as much as 2% of their entire genetic inheritance, greater than the hereditary gap between humankind and its closest relative - the chimpanzee.

Bring It On

Making friends and influencing people:

The deputy commander of the Iraqi army in western Al-Anbar province was shot dead by US troops at a checkpoint Tuesday night, a police officer said.

"The US forces opened fire at 8:00 pm on Brigadier General Ismail Swayed al-Obeid, who had left his base in Baghdadi to head home," police Captain Amin al-Hitti said.

Why Wolfowitz?

Why is our favorite neo-con going to be nominated to lead the World Bank?

"I have looked for evidence of Mr. Wolfowitz having development goals -- I have tried to find it in his speeches, and I have not been able to," says Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia University economist ....

My theory? I think it's like the case of LBJ's nomination of Richard McNamara to lead the World Bank in 1968. The World Bank is a nice, quiet place to put Wolfowitz to pasture for a decade or two. Paul can relax, learn a little French, get a tan, and decompress after his Pentagon hitch. Only one problem, really: the World Bank is an increasingly high-profile pasture, of crucial importance to the world economy. Paul may be disappointed if he expects 2-hour drinking lunches on the golf course every day.

The Europeans are vastly annoyed about the nomination, however, so maybe it will be hard to keep Wolfowitz there for long.

Private Idaho

A new species of fairy shrimp have been discovered in Idaho vernal pools. Hooray!

Of course, my favorite endangered species is the ridiculously-endangered Socorro Isopod, which used to live only in a pipe between a hot spring and a pool, just outside Socorro, NM, where I once went to school (at NM Tech). The pipe was laid in ignorance of the existence of the Isopod. It's a miracle that the species wasn't inadvertently wiped out. The water was too hot at one end of the pipe, and too cool at the other end, so the end point of millions of years of evolution was that the Socorro Isopod was basically trapped in this pipe.

In the early 80's, people became aware of the existence of the Socorro Isopod. I even had a "Save the Socorro Isopod" T-Shirt at one point, when I was attending the Univ. of AZ, in Tucson. I once met an Isopod expert while getting on an elevator there, because he saw my T-Shirt. Surprisingly, the expert hadn't yet heard of the Socorro species!

In 1988, roots blocked the hot springs, wiping the Socorro Isopod out in the wild. Fortunately, a captive breeding program saved the Isopod from annihilation. For a while, anyway.... The Socorro Isopod is apparently cannibalistic - a real problem in a captive breeding program - so just keeping the Socorro Isopod alive on this Earth is a real challenge. If accidents of nature or mankind aren't at hand, the Socorro Isopod is fully capable of generating its own brink-of-disaster drama.

Habitat for endangered species has to be maintained, and expanded, if possible. There's the recent example of the Baker's larkspur, which lives in just one place in Marin County, and which was backhoed out of existence - maybe completely - in an effort to clear a clogged drain.

Hope the Idaho fairy shrimp have an easier time propagating the species!

Wittman (and Chait) Smackdown

Love this attack, but it makes me worry. Chait is one of the "good guys" at TNR, but even he may have trouble distinguishing ideological purity from partisanship. Why? It's probably all that bad company. TNR may be more of a rotten den of evil than I realized....

ANWR To Be Pillaged

In some sense, the Senate's vote was inevitable. Modern society is addicted to petroleum, and will pull all the addict's tricks to keep a steady supply of the oily stuff going, no matter what the cost to wildlife, or to law, or to morality. I only wish they had postponed the evil deed for a few decades, when we might really need it. Right now, all the caribou will be sacrificed to keep SUVs running at 80 mph. What a waste!

Fire Above Swanberg's

As I backed out of my driveway this morning, I looked down the alley, and there were all these City of Sacramento fire trucks! It appears there was a fire in the apartment immediately above Swanberg's, at 21st Street and 2nd Avenue. I hate that! These buildings are made of wood and are susceptible to fire! I remember several years ago, when the lint in the clothes dryer exit caught fire next door, and all the fire trucks came to my vicinity. Go away! No smoking! No flames! Just go away!

Cluster Analysis of the Blog Universe

Or two galaxies collide in cyberspace. Or the Unabomber interferes with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde's science experiment. Or what I see when looking out at the Varsity Theater audience through my FDR spectacles and against Dannette's lights. It's, it's: a Rorschach test!