Off to Zürich in a few hours. Posting will be sparse, although I may try to post from the plane before we fly out of cell range. Won't that be exciting? Gosh.
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June 01, 2004
Off to Zürich in a few hours. Posting will be sparse, although I may try to post from the plane before we fly out of cell range. Won't that be exciting? Gosh.
Ahh. Now this is stylin: free Internet access in the Business Class lounge at JFK. So I am not yet getting my wireless gadgetry groove on. It is a bit odd, though: the computer keyboard is (naturlich) a Swiss keyboard, QWERTZ instead of QWERTY, an abundance of ö, ä and ü-style letters, and I cant for the life of me locate the friggin apostrophe. Which is odd. I know the Swiss use them. Perhaps they are each issued their own apostrophe, for personal use, and those who dont have one are out of luck. But still: access is free, and it came with a nice bit of lamb, some salad, and Basmati rice. Business Class is a good thing, and its even better when youre not paying for it. Youd think, though, that along with the food and Internet they could have comped me an apostrophe. My flight departs at 6:30, about 2 hours from now, so Im going to hang out here, scarf some Oreos, and watch the big big planes yoom up and down.
Gosh...this just keeps getting better...the stewards just came 'round with champagne, which I thought was a sure indication that we'd have a delayed takeoff. But no! It was just because we needed champagne. Because we're Passengers, dammit! At least, that's what we are here in Business and First. God knows what they are back in steerage.
June 03, 2004
Right now, I'm munching on 400g of Birchermüesli. It's full of Weizen and Haferflocken and fruit and yogurt and other good things. We like Birchermüesli. We don't like, so much, the jetlag. I actually went through a 4-hour workshop at what was, for me, 2 in the morning. No one in the room knew how close I was to leaping onto the table and doing a brief, stumbling jig before collapsing into unconsciousness and crushing the LCD projector. But I got through it. Afterwards I staggered over to Palavrion and had myself some Kalbknackwurst, which is, essentially, a giant hot dog. A really good giant hot dog. With onion sauce--no, mit Zweibelsosse. Zweibel is my most favorite of all German words, say it with me: zveebel. How can you not like saying that? Second favorite is Kartoffel, meaning potato, and my good giant hot dog came with some of those, too, shredded and fried up a treat. Add to that a couple of decilitres of the good Swiss white wine--they sell it by the dl, rather than the fat American quantity that we call a glass, and 1dl is clearly marked on the glass so you know you're getting what you pay for--and you've got yourself a fine meal for the semi-conscious. And, of course, I had to get some of the famous Mövenpick ice cream, even though I really, really needed to collapse: a scoop of pistachio and a scoop of Crème Brûlée, a really fine flavor. Then it was off, through the rain, back to my small hotel room to feel sorry for myself and alone. But it was, I think, the exhaustion. This morning I feel much more adventurous. That, and full of the good Swiss coffee they've got at the office...so superior to the watery horror that is Flavia. First impressions: they have graffiti in Switzerland. I had assumed that the Swiss were all about ultra-clean hyperefficiency, with none of that sort of nonsense. Ever. I expected there to be a squad of fully trained and licensed graffito-wäschers who would spring into action the moment paint touched concrete, insuring that it would mar the clean wall for mere moments. But there it was, familiar and urban as my taxi crept along in Zurich traffic. There's construction going on everywhere around the office, further blurring the line between here and New York...downtown Manhattan has had its streets torn up for three years, now. The difference is, here they'll get everything they need to do completed the first time around and won't disturb the asphalt for another decade. In New York, they'll do the job, repave, and then tear it up again in a year to do something else that they should've done while they were mucking about the first time around. Friendly and helpful people who speak English abound. I'm a bit reticent to use my rusty German, but I spend time listening to the television (note to self: regale readers with descriptions of Weird Swiss Cartoons) and to other people, so I can better shape my ümläüts and such. Further bulletins as events and dining warrant... June 05, 2004
I've managed to locate an Internet cafe (Quanta Virtual Fun Space) in the Old City, so I bought an hour of access with included apostrophes to give me something to do while I wait out the rain. I'd keep wandering around the cobblestoned streets despite it if my wind-proof ultra-compact Totes umbrella had not become a wind-smashed ultra-compact Totes piece of creap. It's been gray and drizzly in Zürich all week, but the weather is supposed to improve tomorrow, so I may take the train to Bern to see the medieval city and buy some cheese from the nearby Ementaler region. How to be willfully and persistently a foreigner in Zürich. Step one: wear a t-shirt, without anything over it. Even a colored t-shirt. While wearing my logo-less colored tees under my casual work polos makes me more sartorially European, wearing them by themselves simply isn't done here. After wandering around Bahnhofstrasse for awhile I felt like I was out in my underwear. This was mitigated by my brown shoes and dark socks, but not by much. Step two: go to Coop City--a sort of a combination Target/supermarket--and buy a large quantity of chocolate. The only other people I saw with multiple blocks of the stuff were two young women from England, who were being given chocolate advice by a native fellow who seemed quite keen on demonstrating his chocolate knowledge. Step three: while wearing the aforementioned t-shirt, wander around carrying the chocolate in a translucent plastic bag. This makes you a person in his underwear carrying an easily-observed large amount of chocolate and, therefore, Not From Around Here. So, I scuttled back to my hotel room to drop off my sweet cargo and change into a polo shirt. I felt much better after that. The Old City is the Bohemian-style portion of Zürich where, if you're inclined, you can find funky shops and strip clubs, or buy marital aids and suits made entirely of hemp (or Hanf, as they call it). This last shop drew my attention because of the large potted Hanf plants at its front door, the sort of thing that would get you arrested and your shop confiscated in America. In addition to the hookas, the fibrous wallets, shirts, hats and pants, there was a small fridge chock-full of various drink-products with added Hanfy goodness. Hanf wine, hanf beer, even a Hanf-ified version of Red Bull. I bought a Hanf beer on Friday night...damned if it didn't give me a bit of a Hanf-head. Fortunately I had snacks available. This afternoon, while wandering around the New City on the other side of the river, I ran smack into a loud, exuberant, rainbow-colored, bass-thumping Gay Pride parade--June is Pride Month, but it's been many years since I made an effort to get to New York or DC to join in the festivities, and I'd forgotten about it. Before I came to Switzerland I did a bit of reading on the culture, to avoid being too ugly, and the author mentioned that the "typical" Swiss traits of conservative orderliness are more often found in the older citizens. The Pride parade, as it passed raucously by, blocked an intersection, and right at the front of a small line of cars was a tall, white-haired man in his late sixties or early seventies, standing in front of his maroon Subaru wagon, completely flummoxed. It was all over his face: who are these people? What are they doing? He was pacing towards the parade crowd, then back to his car, chewing his lips and scratching his head with an attitude of annoyance and confusion. Eventually he accosted a group of brightly colored lesbians who rebuffed him and threw candy at him, further adding to his dismay. He never quite reached true apoplexy--that simply wouldn't do. But this crowd, with its loud, thumping music, its bare-chested, leather clad men, its boldly-pierced women, and its spraying jets of festive shaving cream, was clearly something that offended his sensibilities. Not because they were gay. Because they were blocking traffic. I saw a solitary man on the other side of the street holding a sign and taking pictures of the parade-goers as they passed by. He was facing away from me, and I thought, "Ten to one that sign's about Jesus." There was always a group or two along the Pride parade routes in the states, telling us how we were all going to hell and that God really, really hated us. After the parade passed, I saw that his sign had been printed by Amnesty International, and had something to do with the human nature of love. On a side street behind him, spraypainted on a building in two colors, were the words PISS IN BUSH. Which, given the nature of the parade and its high proportion of various fetishists who were demonstrably into various activities involving various fluids, could have meant any one of a number of things...but probably didn't. Other than something about Zürich never being "red" spraypainted in large letters on a tarp covering a scaffolding, that's the only political sentiment I've been exposed to here. And that's just fine with me. I've got about ten minutes left on the access meter, here, so I'm going to proofread this a bit, post it, and head back out onto the cobbles. The rain's let up, and hopefully it will stay that way until I meander back to my hotel, across the river. June 08, 2004
And now I depart. The Swiss Biz Class Lounge, like the one in NY, has handy free Internet access. After a week here, I have located the apostrophe--look, I'll use one right now. See? Clever boy. I'll be chased by the sun, heading back...I'm leaving at 12:30PM, and after a nine hour flight, I will arrive less than three hours after I left, at 3:10PM local time. That should be interesting...perhaps I will try to pull of some kind of high stakes robbery en route, when no one can account for all of those time-warped hours. But I'm sure they've already thought of that. Clever people, the Swiss. I've been told that the jetlaggishness is much less noticeable heading West than it is heading East; we'll see about that. They've got LCD displays at every seat on articulated swing arms, and Return of the King is playing...that'll take care of three hours or so. And I suppose I'll figure out something to do with the other six, eventually. More when I get back. Plus photos. The Swiss don't use CDMA technology, so my cell phone/PDA/camera/fondue set was useful for keeping appointments, taking pictures, and eating melted cheese, but I couldn't send photos anywhere or make phone calls. Even though I was seven thousand miles away from his ranch, I knew that Ronald Reagan had died within, literally, ten minutes of the event. Was it my psychic Gipper bond? No...that faded as the Alzheimer's progressed. The last thought I received from Ron was five years ago: Mammy! Put down that warhead! No, the knowledge was gained via my psychic Wolf Blitzer link. CNN: shrinking the world as much as humanly possible, and offering loud, puddle-deep commentary to accompany the deed. Now: I'm off to score some complimentary snacks. June 09, 2004
I have returned! And within hours of my arrival in the US, I was mercilessly assaulted by the thuggish snot-villain that is pleased to call itself my immune system. It's just pollen, you know...I don't need the interior of my nose to swell up to the size and consistency of a cantaloup stuffed into a film cannister to defend myself from a tree's reproductive excess. Similarly, Bob the Cat--irked by the scents wafting through open windows--welcomed me home by expressing her need to defend us from All Other Creatures by pissing on the dining room floor. Home again. Joy. June 15, 2004
[nip] Drat. Nothing but Lactaid and juice dregs. Room temperature seltzer and a big glass of ice will have to do. Sunday morning, I decided I needed a bit of a pick-me-up (what with me international-style travel weariness and all), so I went out and bought a mandolin. The Ovation MCS-148, lovingly fashioned in Korea from scrap mahogany, spruce, and melted car tires. It's the sort of instrument that will make a purist bluegrass type give you the evil eye for bringing it to the festival and mutter, Ya'll are goin' to mando-hell. Mando-hell, I am reliably informed, consists of: eternity, you, your mandolin, and a room full of banjo players who never play anything...they just tune their instruments. But I didn't really want to spend a minimum 0f $800 for a passable archtop mandolin, and the Ovation electric mandolins sound decent enough plugged in for live play or for recording, so I bought it. It's neither an A-style or F-style. It's a dwarf-style. That is: it looks an awful lot like an Ovation steel string guitar, only smaller and with a big head. The aforementioned evil-eyed purists would also say that it sounds less like a mandolin and more like a small guitar, but all I wanted was something new with strings on it that I could noodle around on. And so there it sits in the corner, looking like I didn't read the care label and put it in the dryer after I washed it instead of hanging it up outside. I'm learning to play Led Zeppelin on it. No, really: Hey Hey What Can I Do, Going to California, The Battle of Evermore. Rock on. Plus, because it's electric, I can hook it up to my Boss GT-6 and make it sound like I'm playing it through a Marshall stack. Rock on. This is not an option. If I find that you are not rocking on, I will come to your house and play Indian Killed a Woodchuck at you until your nose bleeds. So, yeah, I bought a mandolin. I got the idea of acquiring a new stringed instrument early last Saturday evening in Zürich, looking through the window of a closed shop that sold various odd items...assorted bouzouki-looking things, an electric sitar, some frame drums and flutes. The exchange rate--about 81 American cents to the Swiss franc--made the prices look pretty good, if I could manage to get whatever it was I impulsively bought back home on the plane instead of shipping it in an easily-crushable box. But the store was closed, so my impulse remained unfulfilled. When I got back, I thought about getting an archguitar--sort of an extended-range classical guitar with anywhere from nine to thirteen strings, that ends up sounding a bit like a lute. But a quick Googling told me that this was a bespoke intrument--if I wanted one, I would have to find a luthier to build it, or stumble across a used one. Too expensive and I'm too impatient, so my original bouzouki gaze through a Zürich shop window ended up motivating a trip to my local music store. I also bought two air conditioners and a newer, larger television last week. This is because I'm being mercilessly crushed by the Bush-driven Middle Class Squeeze. Gosh, am I miserable...and indexed! (I think that's probably the extent of my political rant for this evening, so if you're in the mood for more and better, move along). We've had summery quick-flash thundersqualls moving through all day, on their way up the valley to dump some rain on New York's sweaty asphalt. A single 90+ degree day last week was what motivated us to get the new A/C units, which promptly caused the temperature to plunge to the low 70s, but this evening we're reminded why we got the things: home offices in attic rooms. Bob the Cat--being of some distant desert-cat lineage--routinely hangs out up here, but I--being of some distant swine lineage--turn into a melted pat of butter when it gets above 85 degrees. So modern chilled air is a blessing indeed. And they came with remote controls. So if I'm simply too hot to roll my desk chair four feet to the right...I don't have to. Wondrous age, just wondrous. And now, having regaled you with Tales Of The Banal! I will go downstairs to clean out the catboxes and do the dishes. That was the deal I made with Pea so that I wouldn't have to do the food shopping this evening, because there was only Lactaid and juice dregs in the fridge. See? Full circle. June 21, 2004
--Bat Manuel
I've always been a loner, or so my mother tells me. Wait, scratch that. I know that's true. I was there. During summer camp softball games (2PM every day; they called it "Watermelon League" because the team that won the championship got--get this--a watermelon), I would hide in the barn and read. Eventually, they tracked me down--I was reading Stephen King's "Cujo" at the time. For the rest of that summer, that was my nickname. This may have been because the Camp Counselor mind--always quick to appreciate subtle irony--found amusement in naming a bookwormy kid after a demon-possessed rabid Saint Bernard. Ah, Breezy Point. Looking back on it now, my mother may have sent me to camp for reasons that went beyond simple fear for my life and the integrity of the house were I to be left to my own devices during the summer months while she was at work. Camps are full of other kids, after all, different kids than those in the neighborhood and the school. It was, perhaps, an attempt to widen my social horizons. And I did, a little. I had a couple of friends, there. Jay, who I remember primarily because he was into Star Trek and because he ran into someone trying to field a softball and bit through his tongue a bit ("like a squashed tomato," remarked ont of the Counselors); and another kid whose first name I've forgotten but whose last name was Cohen, which is appropriate because he was the first Jewish person I ever knew. I remember Vincent because of his startling resemblance to the yet-to-be-puffy Adam Ant and because of his brother, whose nickname was Igor. There was Samantha...I liked her a whole lot more than she liked me, and I remember her primarily for that and for the white bikini top she wore once without the liners in it. So, I suppose, social expansion of a sort did happen, there. The summer I hid from the camp car that came to pick me up in the morning, which required my mom to come home from work and find me in my bedroom closet, was the last summer I went to Breezy Point. I wanted to stay home in the summers, by myself, and do whatever it was that I was doing at that stage of my life. There were other attempts: Boy Scouts (yes, I was a Boy Scout; Life rank, if you must know), a Big Brother, D&D games with fellow Scouts. But...I was always apart, in some way. For Dungeons & Dragons I created a new character class: Interior Decorator, whose weapon of choice was a flail composed of fabric sample books on short lengths of chain. My Big Brother's fellow students at Princeton, where he studied Law, found me to be a strange and nervous boy...entirely appropriate, I think, because I was, and am. I don't know whether it's due to ephemeral psychology or the hardwired structure of my neuronal soup kitchen, but I find Other People, in both the specific and the abstract, are a source of never-ending tension. These days, it's a fascinating combination of the two: the specific involves the high reaches of corporate bureaucracy to which I have recently made myself known; the abstract involves the collective human stupidity I see in wretched abundance every single time I glance at online news or get stuck on CNN for a few moments while my dying cable remote stalls out. It's probably already been remarked on by someone much deader and wiser than I: individually, humans are capable of great intelligence and nobility; collectively, we're often nit-ridden monkeys throwing feces and masturbating in trees. What would Saddam Hussein have been without his Tikrit cohorts, his sycophants, and his tongue-hacking, daughter-raping goon squads? Just another mustache. What would the machete-wielding Hutus have been without all their machete-wielding Hutu neighbors and the encouragement of government-sponsored radio broadcasts? Mass barbarity requires a mass of perpetrators before there can be a mass of victims, all reinforcing each others' behavior and, somehow, flipping on its head the moral code that's been in development for as long as we've had writing. Similarly, it took a group of our soldiers, acting together and supporting each other, to do whatever it is, exactly, that they did to Iraqi prisoners at Abu Gharib. (I say "whatever" because although I've seen some photos, the only thing I'm certain of is that I've seen some photos. Right now there's no clear context, no real attribution, and no reliable interpretation; as such, these images don't represent knowledge. They are a phenomenon of media.) Before I get any e-mails: my point is not to compare the savagery of the Hussein goons and the Rwandan genocide with the misconduct of our own soldiers, whatever it turns out to be. The point is that our soldiers, and whoever else up the chain of command was involved, displayed unmitigated stupidity. That's the defining characteristic of Humans In Groups. It doesn't matter that a pile of naked Iraqi men being mocked by a woman barely registers on the "Evil" scale when compared with routine tongue amputations, the live dissection of hands, and the melting of ears with hot iron. What matters is that while our individual soldiers have many chances to demonstrate their quality to individual Iraqis, collectively they had one chance--one chance--to avoid screwing up royally on the propaganda front. War being war, there will always be a certain amount of fodder for anti-American propaganda: civilian casualties, targeted Mosques/armories, etc. Those who swallow that sort of story whole wouldn't be reached by anything decent that we did, anyway. But a group of our soldiers, acting together, decided that although it was a good idea to subject the prisoners in their charge to all sorts of indignities, it was an even better idea to take hundreds of photographs of the deeds. Then--to publicly demonstrate that as a nation, Americans value integrity, commitment, and responsibility--Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who commanded the 800th Military Police Brigade and was in charge of administering Abu Gharib, whined to the BBC that she is a "convenient scapegoat," and pointed the finger at her successor. "Yeah, but look what he said!" Brilliant. How much better would this have sounded: "Although the interrogations were conducted under the authority of a separate military intelligence unit, they took place in a facility that was under my command, and it was my duty to be aware of what occurred there." That's what it means to be in command of something other than your own career. So, in one glorious incident, a group of American humans has handed our enemies a fantastic propaganda victory, with ample documentation, and one of our Generals demonstrated to the world that you can rise within the ranks of the American Army while lacking the sense needed to avoid being a weasel in public. Thanks a bunch, folks. That sort of thing just makes me nuts, and I think it always has. After I was born, I slept for three days straight. I'm not kidding--they couldn't wake me up for 72 hours. I think I knew, even then. I was born by Caesarean. They cut me out, lifted me up, and I took one wet look around then screamed "PEEEEEOPLE!!!" and passed out. So, my strategy, apparently, has been to minimize exposure, except for a few individuals here and there. Fortunately, there's the Internet, so such a strategy doesn't automatically result in shack-dwelling and the mailing of intricately handmade bombs to select members of the intelligentsia. (For more on this, see my paper "Internet-redirected Antisocial Tendencies" in the Fall/Winter '97 issue of Bearded Misfit Quarterly.) It does, however, result in an acute observance of the trivial. For example: a 10" licensed rubber ball with a picture of Spiderman's head or Shrek's head or the Cat in the Hat on it costs as much as a 15" non-licensed rubber ball made of standard marbled rubber. That means that, per ball, Spiderman's face is worth the 392 square inches of rubber that you don't get with a licensed ball. You pay an extra .64 cents per square inch to get Your Favorite Character on a ball to bounce around. And that's why I put that picture there. June 22, 2004
For the past week I have had "(I've Got A) Golden Ticket" from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory playing my head. Especially the bit where Jack Albertson and Peter Ostrum sing it's a gooolden daaay as they're dancing around and Peter's voice is wretchedly off-key. They said they were going to redo that in post-production, you know, but they never did. Bastards. The other song I've had running through my head is from a cartoon I saw in Switzerland. It was also related to chocolate, and had an endlessly repeating chorus that included the basso-repetition of the phrase choco-choco in the background. The cartoon showed a black kid and a white kid in school-uniformish attire--blue suits, white shirts and red striped ties. They were on a beach, jumping around and encouraging all the beach goers to go choco-choco along with them. It looked to me like the suited duo were trying to sell some new chocolate confection that they had invented, but that was because I thought that this was an actual cartoon, with a bit of plot. But it wasn't. The quick acquisition of some Google knowledge has revealed that what looked like a badly-animated Saturday morning cartoon incident was actually a video, for these guys: Soul Control. They're from Germany, which explains why the song involves counting in Spanish. The music that I found so repetitive and juvenile that I couldn't change the channel comes on a Maxi-CD with a Single Version, an Extended Version, a "Soul Control having fun with Ersin & Börek" version, a Sexy Dance Mix version, and a Fiesta version. And yes, there is a dance that goes with it too, which, I now understand, is what the suited cartoon kids were doing as they jumped frenetically around the cartoon beach: hip swing, clap clap jump jump, hitch hiker, slap slap, rolly polly, holly molly...I'm not kidding. There are 13 separate moves. This is one thing that really is America's fault. The Mindless Summer Dance Hit With Accompanying Choreography is our cultural demon-child. If you're one of those unfortunate souls who has Real Player, you can see a video for yourself, and have this irritating, mindless song stuck in your head, too. No .MPG or .MP3, I'm afraid...Germany is the land of Real Player and .RAM files, which is strangely appropriate. As is, I suppose, the fact that I've had two songs about chocolate looping in my head since I got back from Zurich. I brought back over a kilogram of the stuff in assorted styles and bar sizes, which we've whittled away to a few random squares of various chocolately hues over the past week. My eyes are brown now. Between that and the kilogram of cheese I smuggled back (500 grams each of Gruyère and Emmenthaler...the good stuff, man, this will get you off), I'm fairly sure that I've added a full millimeter of tasty fat to the inner walls of all my critical blood vessels. Mmm...tasty fat... June 23, 2004
Recently, the NYT ran an article ['Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Those Old Protest Tactics Have to Go', June 13] about the new and exciting methods that politically active leftward-leaning folks have devised to enact real, lasting, social and political change in our country. Some examples: [Christian] Herold has ordered hundreds of one-inch, gold-plated bells - the kind that could easily adorn a Christmas tree - that he plans to distribute to any takers. He will call participants in his Ring Out project to surround ground zero - as close as they can - and raise a cacophony to "ring out the Republicans" shortly before the convention opens on Aug. 30... Founding Axis of Eve member and underwear-protestor Zazel Loven offers her rationale: "We wanted to think of some unique, creative way to engage people in a different way, to reach out to people who weren't politically engaged. I had been to marches but I wanted to go beyond that." Ms. Loven likes to be called "Eve Angel," a fact I note only because every single person I have ever known who has dropped their given name for some New Age-ish Monikor like Tree or Willow or Your Spiritual Superior has been, for lack of a better term, an utter flake. It's a reflection of the post-modern intelligentsia's obsession with language and the naming of things, which leads them to believe that by changing the words we use to describe a phenomenon, we can change the discourse and thus change the phenomenon. This is the same principle that is used in sympathetic magic. Its practitioners believe that they can create real change in the world by changing a representation of someone or something in the world, such as a voodoo doll, a lock of hair, or an old sock. However, changing your given name to Eve or Moonstar or Cougar will not change your essential biscuit-like nature. You will remain flaky. Not that such reckless ad hominem detracts from Ms. Loven's point. Which is: people who aren't politically engaged can be reached by a legion of women showing their panties. Joshua Spahn, a participant in the Ring Out project, opines that it is "...an exciting new way to energize people. It piques people's curiosity rather than hit them over the head with a political message." Piqued Onlooker: Why're you ringing those bells? I'm curious. Bell-ringer: Because George Bush is an evil warmongerer. Halliburton! Oil! Abu Ghraib! Mr. Spahn, I'm not sure that attracting attention to your message is the problem here. Meanwhile, Mr. Luke "self-described radical" Kuhn is, at 38, an unemployed bike messenger. He's seeking a method to conduct his New Line Cinema-inspired protest. To melt his brass ring and make the point that "Bush is a dark lord," he is thinking of maybe using a barbecue grill with coals fanned by a hair dryer. Failing that, he claims, "I can make a bellows from salvaged wood that day, if necessary. I can easily rig the grill to be an improvised 'forge,' as a blacksmith would know it, and that will easily handle the destruction." Think about that for a minute. In the midst of potentially thousands of protestors, many more thousands of convention attendees and media personnel, and tens of thousands of New Yorkers attempting to go about their business, Mr. Kuhn, by himself, maybe wearing a red bandana, panties, and ringing a small bell, is going to have a barbecue grill set up, attached to a hairdryer with a two-hundred foot extension cord or to a bellows made from some of the vast quantity of quality scrap wood that litters Manhattan, and on the Kingsford briquettes of this grill will be a brass ring about a half-inch across, with Bush Über Alles engraved on it in 12-point type. The impact of this act of political defiance cannot be overstated. Especially if he creates a big hand-lettered sign, with an arrow pointing at the grill, that reads LOOK I AM MELTING A BRASS RING ENGRAVED WITH THE WORDS BUSH ÜBER ALLES BECAUSE HE IS A DARK LORD JUST LIKE SAURON AND I WAS REALLY INSPIRED BY LORD OF THE RINGS AND HE'S LIKE HITLER TOO. The bell-ringing Mr. Spahn wonders, "How do we make the message real clear to people, to innocent bystanders?" I think you might want to try developing a coherent, rational politics from which the idea that bells, panties, and barbecue grills are essential elements of convincing political discourse does not naturally flow. That could help. It also may help to regard your intended audience as something other than "innocent bystanders," which implies that your activities have "intended victims." That conjures up other activities that have bystanders and victims...like bombings. What amuses me most about all of this is that while the stated aim of these protest activities is to reach out to the politically disengaged, their creators are designing the sorts of activities that they find appealing, which means that they'll appeal to people like them. Someone who is on the political fence, caught between Bush's faith-based conviction and resolve and Kerry's 60's-based nuance and sophistication, is not going to be swayed by a group of earnest street-theater performers in bedsheets re-enacting a Roman vomitorium (Tim Robbins, take note). And no Republican conventioneer is going to catch a glimpse of a LICK BUSH thong, smack himself on the forehead and exclaim, "By God, you're right! Kerry is the better choice!" The people who would be reached by such theater are, more than likely, already firmly in the anti-Bush camp. Like sympathetic magic, these efforts will only be effective among those who already believe. The activists are talking to themselves. Good for them! This is America. You can do that sort of thing here. However, when I pass by someone on the street doing strange things and talking to themselves, I give them a wide berth. That's what I'll be doing during the convention, too. June 24, 2004
Busybusybusy. Maybe some free soup later. Maybe not. Who knows? That's what makes this particular simulation so very, very interesting.
I see alot of that on the train. About a quarter of the American adult population is sleep deprived...getting less than seven hours of sleep a night, down from a national average of nine hours in 1910. I doubt we've evolved into Homo Sapiens insomnium over the past 95 years...we probably still need that nine hours, but alot of us don't get it. Strange fact: sleep deprivation can cause glucose metabolism to fall by up to 40%, which mimics the early stages of diabetes. It's also linked to depression, anxiety, and road rage. I've got to wonder just what the hell it is we're all doing that's so important. The world's largest GDP might have something to do with it...or maybe that's due to the paltry number of vaction days we take. Italians take 42 days a year for wine and sun. The French bugger off to someplace with fewer transit strikes for 37 days every year. Germans take 35, Brazilians 34, the British 28, Canadians 26, and South Korea and Japan tie at 25 apiece. Americans? 13 days a year. Less than two weeks. And, while we work 3.5 hours more a week than we did 20 years ago, European folks have cut back to work weeks between 32 and 36 hours. Of course, their economies are in the crapper. But I look at the traincars full of the undead that I ride with during the week, and I often think that there's something lacking in our quality of life. I certainly feel a certain lack of a certain something in my own life, even though my work week is decidedly more European in length. Often, when I stagger out of bed in the morning, I find myself looking forward to getting on the train so I can go back to sleep for a bit. That just ain't right. And now, it's off to bed, which, having written the above, is the only proper thing to do. June 25, 2004
I want to marry a lighthouse keeper I'll polish his lamp by the light of day We'll take walks along the moonlight bay I dream of living in a lighthouse baby, every single day. So if you want to make my dreams come true, --Erika Eigen
Back in March, I wrote the following about a certain building-sized mural at Ground Zero: [90 West Street] was undergoing renovation at the time of the attacks, and was hidden from view by scaffolding. For most of the past two years, its damaged facade remained hidden, wrapped in a giant Hallmark greeting card: a fabric-mesh billboard, depicting a stylized heart. The heart was "Stars n' Stripes" across its top lobes, and the bottom portion depicted a rendering of New York's buildings. "It's not the size of the act that matters," the billboard told us in letters four feet tall. "It's the size of the heart." I thought the sentiment was inane. It loomed over the site of nearly three thousand murders, and the only "act" that sprang to my mind was that of piloting airliners into buildings. Bad, small-hearted hijackers! it seemed to say. It was a shallow, rosy affirmation in the face of violent death by fire, explosion, and crushing, made even more insipid by the fact that workers were still finding human remains caught in the building's scaffolding two years after the attacks. I suppose it was intended to encourage our charity, but I was glad when it was finally removed. My description of the image wasn't quite correct, and I was wrong about the wording of the sentiment, which actually read, "The human spirit is not measured by the size of the act, but by the size of the heart." The mural was based on a painting by comedian Yakov Smirnoff, who authored the sentiment and paid $100,000 to have the thing hung up at the site. Not only did it loom over the site of 3,000 murders, the heart was "painted with 3,000 brush strokes, honoring each of the victims who died in the attack." I still think it was inane. Now I know who was responsible for it... June 29, 2004
"Is Wayne Brady gonna hafta choke a bitch?"
--Wayne Brady
June 30, 2004
I got nothin' today. Had mostly nothin' yesterday, too, but man today I got real, black hole, underside o' the bottom o' the barrel nothin'. The kind of nothin' that makes the evening news look like a nine-mile deep canyon filled to the brim with rich, nougaty insight and analysis. The utter dearth of content you find here can only be matched by the ideological collapsed star that lies at the heart of [insert favorite Person Who Does Not Think Like You]. My god, the entire Internet is in danger of being sucked into the infinitesimally vast nothin'ness that is this post. And I'm posting it wirelessly, which is such a fart's use of a technology unimaginable a scant two centuries ago that Samuel Morse would be well within his rights to rise from the grave and beat me about the testicles with a telegraph key. Plus, the cheap AAA batteries that came with my Infrared Keyboard are dying, which means I am going through an amazingly torturous start-and-stop typing process just to inflict this babble upon you all. I am a terrible, frivolous person. 
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Before I start this post, I must nip downstairs for something chilly to drink (to accompany my [fanfare] New Modern Air Chilling Device!)
"Alone is an unfortunate predicament. Lone is an aesthetic choice."
And now, we will proceed past the 
I haven't had myself a good mock in quite awhile, and I'm due.
Man, I'm beat. Just like this guy. He sat down next to me and started reading the paper...somewhere between "Moore Could KO Bush Re-election" and the comics he just faded out, his chin on his chest. 