6:31 AM

Other posts you may have missed if you (like me, unfortch) are not checking every tanque site daily: Clint reminds me why I'm glad my buddies are teachers, and Todd has returned to Mali, but not without posting pictures of yet another manifestation of "the world's cutest baby" (WCB, an archtype I'm convinced speaks volumes for the capacity of the human race to place value appropriately) - (Not surprisingly, said baby is also manifesting in portland, via Heidi). Carrie doesn't mention our recent lunch, (grin) but she's posting. Jimmah's a geek. Byn's not a tanquer per se, but this post reminded me of a different time. And don't miss Bill's awesome travelogue. In a just world, Bill would wear a velvet cape.

I'm not a feminist, but.... part two:

I firmly believe that the central moral challenge of this century, equivalent to the struggles against slavery in the 19th century or against totalitarianism in the 20th, will be to address sex inequality in the third world - and it's the stories of women like Ms. Mukhtaran that convince me this is so. [...]

In June 2002, the police say, members of a high-status tribe sexually abused one of Ms. Mukhtaran's brothers and then covered up their crime by falsely accusing him of having an affair with a high-status woman. The village's tribal council determined that the suitable punishment for the supposed affair was for high-status men to rape one of the boy's sisters, so the council sentenced Ms. Mukhtaran to be gang-raped. [link to NYTimes Kristol article]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Hope. "Your duty" indeed.

At the end of The Maltese Falcon Spade lays it out for Bridget O'Shaughnessy this way:

Listen... This won't do any good. You'll never understand me but I'll try once and then give it up. Listen... When a man's partner is killed, he's supposed to do something about it. It doesn't make and difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you're supposed to do something about it.

Which is what I was reminded of when you describe a kinder way to have broken things off with your Japanese friend with the sense of duty. "Listen, I doubt there's any way we can see eye to eye on this, but in the interest of fairness I'm going to try to explain why I think you're an ass." (And I've heard variations of this said to me; I like to think some of it stuck).

This morning finds me a little strung out about stuff that, in the big picture, means very little, but hey, this is the life I lead. We're discussing the new time/print management system this morning at an all staff library meeting (sure to be controverial) after which I go to the WGCL studio to record a PSA and a 10-minute interview, which I'm sure to flub. Then I'm off to an Incolsa vendor fair in Indy which I'm sure will find me acting the fish sans water. I end my afternoon by playing against the toughest member of the SLIS racquetball league. Actually, that's the light at the end of today's tunnel; while I'm sure to get my jock handed to me on a platter (as they say), I hope to learn from the experience.

Recently viewed, DVD: Safe Conduct, a film about French film-makers living under German rule during WWII. Recommended, even though I spent the first 20 minutes or so of the movie thinking two characters were the same guy. It ends abruptly as well, with a voice over describing how each of the real-life figures ended up. But I liked the depiction of average joes doing what they can in a bad situation, even as it rebuked me for bemoaning the state of US politics without doing anything substantive to address it.

Recently viewd, theater: Sky Captain and the world of Tomorrow. I wouldn't have bothered with this movie if Jimmah hadn't suggested it (I have yet to see Hero, after all), but I'm glad I saw it, even it if the script is clumsy and the film's extensive CGI imagery sometimes felt a little artificial. The retro look was pleasing eye candy even when the story bled into sillyness.

Peace.

11:57 PM When Todd and Shanti got married, i was lucky enough to make it to New York city and enjoy a few days in one of the coolest towns in the world (or so I've been told). After the wedding and after most folks had lit out of town, I hung out with Bill and spent an afternoon hanging out with his buddy Leslie, who works in the publishing business. In fact, while I was sitting around in her apartment she pulled out one of her (then) recently finished projects, a book called Speak Truth to Power. It's a collection of interviews with various folks who are doing courageous human rights work around the world. The person they interviewed from Sudan was in such danger that she could only be named "Anonymous" for fear of government persecution:

We began by raising public awareness of the negative effects of the government policy of organized mass marriages. These marriages were one of the crucial points in the political agenda. The idea was to encourage marriage to promote an image of "a good Muslim", and to discourage promiscuity and sexual dissidence. The government organizes festivals and calls people to register their names. They gather over five hundred couples at a time, by bribing them with fifteen thousand Sudanese pounds and sometimes a piece of land. Given the poor state of the economy, people are encouraged to get involved in these marriages, accepting the idea that their daughter will marry a person who has married three or four times in the past, as long as it relieves them of the responsibility of having a daughter.

So these young girls marry, become pregnant, and then after collecting the money and the land, their husbands run away. In the end the women are left alone with a child to raise. They go to the Sharia courts in the hope of gaining maintenance fees from their husbands, but this rarely works.

Mildly related, from a book i recently picked up at the library, Naomi Wolf's Promiscuities:

When I went home to talk to the girls, now women, which whom I grew up, we talked at a restaurant about how we learned to associate our emerging grown-up nakedness with shame. Pattie looked out the window, swirled the ice in her glass, and recalled: "No one has shamed my body like women have. The shaming experiences I have had, when I was just beginning to develop, were from other girls first. My best friend, Melinda, and me -- we'd get dressed up together, at about eleven. And I'd like to look at my reflection. I really started developing early, and at that age you really love looking at your reflection. And she'd say: 'You really love looking at yourself.' And I'd think: So what? It wasn't okay to like yourself. And then, a little later, I remember my same friend telling me my breasts looked like 'blups.'"

"Blups?" I asked. It was a word that was distressing and funny at once.

"Big blups," Pattie said. "It was just cruel. Now, I can say, What was going on with you that you had to put me down? But then, it was awful. By then I was twelve or so. By 'blups' she meant big and no shape or something. I didn't respond angrily to that. I just absorbed it. There was no one to help me. No one I could go to and say, Why are people making fun of my breasts? Is something wrong with me, or is it them?"

Doing my part to maintain the beauty myth, here's some pix of the Invincible Sword Goddess in a her new movie, 2046:

(pix from this site)

Jimmah, let me know what I need to do for testing that adventure concept (and congratulations!)

Hope, sounds like you've been reading some interesting stuff. As far as the phone stuff goes, I finally let my long distance service lapse. I have phone cards (M&D keep me stocked) for long distance, so why bother with a monthly bill? I'm tempted to go the cell phone route entirely, but I've never had a cell phone experience that didn't involve a mildly annoying delay, as if I was talking to someone across the globe. But I'm a fan of the answering machine (my number is apparently the same as an old fax machine number, so we get a couple of those calls daily; also, for some reason, the fraternal order of police calls me regularly to ask for donations).

5:16 PM Last night's show was a hoot.

I took off work a little early (knowing that I'd be in the next day covering for a co-worker in the library's computer lab) and skipped the darts ritual, instead choosing to get Suse Linux installed on Tanque3 (which now dual-boots between that and XP). It was about as painless as I could have hoped for, with only minor glitches with my sound card (which worked themselves out on their own). I had bought a copy of Suse soon after Novell purchased them, curious to play with their distribution and maybe install their Ximian desktop (that's up next). As of now I can play DVD's (after downloading decss), but I'm afraid my system's too old or poorly configured to handle them very well (something XP manages much better, but that might just be a setting I haven't found yet for Xine, the Linux video player).

Anyhoo, I'm glad to hear David is installing it as well, so I can bend his ear when J's not readily available to answer all my Linux questions.

Cupersmith had dropped off a CD of some of his tunes a couple weeks ago, so I was familiar with his stuff, but I was still a little nervous about playing with him and Kenny. I tend to get kinda stiff under live situations, and I was wound pretty tightly as I waited for my turn behind the kit. (Chris played a couple tunes solo, then Kenny and I joined him). We played a GBV tune (back to the lake) way faster than we'd practiced it a couple hours earlier, so I was sweating like a pig trying to keep up (no double-bass drum bounces at speed), but I had fun. And Chris is a good song-writer, so it was a treat to get to play his stuff. (Gentleman Caller played a fine set, as always, which I enjoyed even more than usual in my post-playing tension-decompression groove).

And now I'm gliding through an easy Saturday, hanging out at the library and looking forward to Jim and Dani's bonfire tonight.

More book quotes to follow.

7:31 AM There's a fundraiser tonight at Second Story for Mike Englert's campaign. The description of the show from Mike's email:

"featuring Mike's good friend Chris Kupersmith (singer-songwriter, formerly of Uvula and now with Gentleman Caller), the Kyle Quass Quintet (a band my friend Nate Johnson plays with), Gentleman Caller (alternative rock n' roll, with friends Jim Robinson & Chris Kupersmith, among others), and Sunday Night Cipher (hip hop and dj spinning, featuring my friend Smaze and other amazing hip-hop up-and-comers)."

I'll be there.

I wish I had something insightful in the way of a follow-up comment on the interesting discussion following my previous posts, but I don't. It's something I'll probably return to repeatedly, though (as I tend to repeat myself). Thanks for the feedback.

9:09 AM I'm not a feminist, but...

Another favorite: "Your facist beauty standards can go Cheney themselves".

Recent book started, never finished: Reviving Ophelia. Recommended by my close, personal friend, Janeane Garofalo.

[mental note: recall this stuff the next time I think, 'whoa, she's Hot!']

11:43 PM Meanwhile, in another world....

This is one of the creepiest/sad weblogs I've come across on the web:

It didn't bother me that a man who knew nothing about the agony of ED was telling me how my mind works, it bothered me that I was not allowed to correct him. I was not allowed to talk about pageants because it could be a trigger for the other girls. But if he didn't know that we showed up an hour early to sit in one of our "sister's" cars and trade secrets, recipes, and laxatives, then he's a fool. If he thinks any one of us will ever really recover, then he's a fool. And if he thinks I'm depressed because my ED has spiraled out of control, then he's a goddamn fucking fool. I'm not unhappy because I'm ana, I'm unhappy because I'm still fat.

7:20 PM Jimmah, how did you get to talk to Lee Hamilton? Maybe I'll see you out tonight and I'll ask you in person....

Jimmah recommended a book a while back. Here's an excerpt (wherein a university prof relates an encounter with one of his students):

We talked for some time about a number of political topics, but the conversation kept coming back to one main point: She hurt. As she was learning more about the suffering of others around the world, she felt that pain. What does one do aobut such a feeling, knowing that one's own government is either responsible for, or complicit in, so much of it? How does one stop feeling that pain, she asked.

I asked her whether she really wanted to wipe that feeling out of her life. Surely you know people, perhaps fellow students, who don't seem to feel that pain, who ignore all that suffering, I told her. Do you want to become like them? No matter how much it hurts, would you rather not feel at all? Would you rather be willfully ignorant about what is happening? I could see tears welling in her eyes and feel them in my own; it was an emotional moment for both of us. She left my office, not feeling better in any simplistic sense. But I hope she left at least with a sense that she was not alone and did not have to feel like a freak for feeling so much, so deeply.

Regarding patriotism he quotes Eugene V. Debs:

"I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world."

(found on this page, which also contains this zinger from Betrand Russel: "Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.")

And since I don't have much to add tonight, here's another quote from something else I read recently: Generation Kill by Evan Wright. Wright was embedded with the Marines, First Recon, Second Platoon, riding in a hummer with four other Marines as they drove to Bagdad last March-April.

When I talk to Saucier about this shooting later, he says he never in his life imagined he would be called on to fire on unarmed people. "Words can't describe how I feel about it," he says. "When we came over here, I expected we would do what you would read in history books. We would go through the desert and fight armies. But all we're seeing are random tactics, guys shooting at us with civilians everywhere, which makes sense from their point of view. Their guerrilla tactics don't make me feel better about or justify the civilian deaths we're causing, but these Marines are my brothers, I'll do anything to defend them. All I try to do is put this bad stuff out of my mind."

I'm off to LotusFest, blissfully detatched, as they say.

10:25 PM For starters, fyi, tanquers who have posted this month so far are: Heidi, Amos, Jimmah, Diego & Paulo (happy one-month, Paolo! Congrats on "moving up", Diego! Is Skye walking already!?), Hope and Licia - in case you don't surf around every day.

Here's hoping John is doing okay in Florida, or wherever he ended up over the weekend. I spoke to my Mom over the weekend and it sounded like they didn't expect to get hit quite as hard as the last time around, but John's more directly in the eye of the storm this time, I believe.

While I'm thinking of it, too, I wanted to mention that September is "Library Card Sign-up Month" at the MCPL, and that means that this month if you're an adult and you have an MCPL card you get free admission to Wonderlab (normally $6.50).

So anyhoo, thanks all for the nice comments on the pic of me and Diego. I love that picture. What you might not have been able to discern from the somewhat fuzzy nature of the image is that in my left hand I'm holding a cam-corder (compliments of CATS). Diego and I were working on footage for my chimerical cable cooking show. It's too bad Josh's adorable daughter Grace wasn't also captured in that pic, as she was getting a kick out of the filming as well. Truth be told, I haven't had a chance to review most of the footage from that night -- the night of the now infamous Brown Betty Reunion -- but hope to make portions of it available in one form or another before too long. Eventually some of it will end up on the first show (tentatively referred to as "the garbanzo episode"), so I guess I should have gotten some waivers signed or something....

But enough of that for now. Following up the roller coaster that was my trip to Rhode Island to see some really cool kids get hitched, Brown Betty Weekend (BBW) was a nice low-key affair wherein I was afforded much more one-on-one Bill time, which is truly a treat. Actually, the past month or so has afforded me good times with several long-time buddies of mine; I think I had the longest conversations I've ever had with Sean and Scotty, for instance. And I got to meet Pat's new friend. But I digress.... The only bummer on BBW was coming home from the show to find that we'd inadvertantly let Blue Lou and Nice Guy Eddie out (they're not normally outside kitties). Eddie was waiting to come in when I got home, but Blue was nowhere to be found. I figured the little guy would show up sooner or later, but after a couple days I was beginning to get kinda bummed out by the idea that maybe he really was gone.

A couple nights later I was checking in the crawl space (again) and caught what looked like it might be a cat's eye reflecting back the light of the flashlight. It didn't move for a long time, though, and I was ready to move on when it finally changed position slightly. "Blue?" I called (as I'd been calling for the past minute or so, as Shari and I had been calling for the past couple days, along with Pat and Bill and Jim and Jennifer when we were out and about looking for him); I heard a soft mew and the jingle of his collar. He walked over to the opening to the craw space (which is normally covered by a slab of limestone - I'd left it open since he'd disappeared, not wanting to risk closing him in). He sauntered up and put his paws in the opening on either side of his fuzzy little face, but he didn't seem too interested in coming out. Maybe he can't, I figured. I took off inside to tell Shari the good news and to open up the trap door in the closet of the Top Knot....

He disappeared for a while again, keeping hidden while Shari and I looked for him, soon joined by Jim and Jennifer and more flashlights. I climbed down and explored my crawlspace for the first time (though I didn't see anything I could easily use as ground, Jibber - not that I was looking too closely, you understand), got nice and dusty, but no luck. Too many people around for a skittish kitty? I don't know. But later, after we'd kindof given up on him for the night, I sat next to the trap door eating a can of tuna fish as a lure, and he reappeared.

I think the little stinker was having the time of his life down there and just didn't want to come out.

So I grabbed him and now he's back inside and everyone's happy again. I still let the boys out when I'm home on the weekends. Maybe one day we'll get to the point where we just let them out whenever they want (like we do with Jack and, to a lessor degree, Sammi), but for now they're back on house arrest.

Which is about all I've had the energy to focus on recently: home stuff. Spending time with friends; Approaching the end of the world and my sanity in the CoC campaign; Watching the weeds grow around my house; Anticipating the end of summer and the cooling weather; thinking about the last of the garden crop (brussel sprouts are looking good, the rest of the garden is a mess).

I watched an interesting movie over Labor Day weekend called The Anarchists. It's a Korean flick that takes place in 1920's Shanghai. Korean anarchists are rebelling against the Japanese occupation of their homeland by engaging in "terrorism" (which seems almost quaint in today's world - they're masters with guns and knives, and use small explosives mainly for distraction). Probably too sentimental for my taste (though I'm coming to expect a lot of that the more mainstream Korean films I see), but it was interesting nonetheless. And tragic. Not a martial arts movie, though there's some action in it. I own a copy if anyone's interested in checking it out. Ideally I'd like to build my catalog of Korean films, but it's hard; many of the ones that catch my eye are only available in region 3 DVD format.

Which is probably just as well, since I'm telling myself I can't buy every DVD that catches my eye. But it's getting harder to resist this one: Building Your Racquetball Dream House. I'm signed up for the Autumn season of the Blaise Cronin Memorial Racquetball League (which is SLIS thing, I'm just a hanger on), which means another game each week on top of the grueling slug-fests Jimmah and Jimmy have been giving me. Actually, I'm hoping this will keep me more focused on the game, since I've been a slug about playing for, well, forever. I play "Dirty Sanchez" tomorrow after work; Thursday I'll be up against "The Guzzler" (aka, Noriko's better half). Just so you know when you see me next and I'm complaining about how sore I am.

"Nine eternities in doom!"

2:30 PM Hangin' out before the Brown Betty show....