Santa's Forces v. The Dreidel of Doom

Over at Fafblog, our correspondent Fafnir checks in with news from the long, jolly slog that is the War on Christmas:

"I hear they got Rudolph today," says me.

"No!" says Giblets. "Not Rudolph! With his unmatched dogfighting skills and his nose so bright he was invincible!"

"It's true," says me. "Zombie Judah Maccabee shot im down over the Island of Misfit Toys with his dreidel of doom."

"Damn you Hannukah!" says Giblets. "Will your eight days of madness never end!"

Me, I'll be back here at home decorating my Secularmas tree. Whoville really did change everything. Go read the rest.

PZ Myers is brilliant

The good professor offers an almost entirely plausible theory, which is his, regarding a possible link between reindeer, daylight deficiency, and late-December artifact delivery.

If his hypothesis and its associated predictions can be corroborated by means of the experimental tests he proposes, it would be a great big poke in the eye (or a "ha-ha-nanny-boo," if you prefer) to those heathen unbelievers who deny the existence of a North Pole-based artifact production facility.

Dr. Myers' theory posits the existence of an entity or intelligence, a so-called "Arctic Artificer" who exploits the midwinter disruption in the circadian activity cycles of polar animals -- in this case reindeer -- to facilitate a worldwide artifact distribution program that peaks in late December.

Or something. Go to Pharyngula to read more about science and other good stuff.

Not exactly random twelve

Here's the playlist for the disc I just burned for the fabulous people at the coffee cart downstairs from my office:

1. "Dancing with Joey Ramone" Amy Rigby (Little Fugitive)
2. "Dance This Mess Around" The B-52s (The B-52s)
3. "House of the Rising Sun" The Be Good Tanyas (Chinatown)
4. "Blinded by the Light" Bruce Springsteen (The Essential)
5. "Dearest" Buddy Holly (2005 Oxford American Sampler)
6. "Sweet" The Cash Brothers (A Brand New Night)
7. "I Fought the Law" The Clash (The Essential Clash)
8. "I Won't Be Your Yoko Ono" Dar Williams (The Green World)
9. "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" Elvis Costello (King of America)
10. "Time in Babylon" Emmylou Harris (Stumble Into Grace)
11. "Mr. Lacey" Fairport Convention (What We Did On Our Holidays)
12. "So Sad" Francoise Hardy (Clair Obscur)

We're on to you, "Lyle Zapota"

I guess I haven't done my homework. I should have known something like this was going on. I'm glad my old friend Magpie brought this important study to my attention. How could I have missed it? It may be the most significant thing to come out of MIT's labs ever.

I hope it's not too late.

See, I've always taken great care to at least try to avoid or subvert the mind control and data collection efforts that more or less surround us nowadays. I don't have a television set in the house. I mean, who would? Haven't they read Orwell? Didn't they read 'Farenheit 451?' It took quite a lot to convince me that it would be OK to get a driving license and a social security number. I never complete warranty cards or send in any surveys. I shred everything. I still haven't decided whether things would be better or worse if I put my name on the 'do not call' list.

But sometimes I am too credulous for my own good. I've played right into their hands! I am such an idiot! I was so excited when I found out there was an effective, low-cost way to protect myself from mind controlling electromagnetic psychotronic carriers. Of course I have an aluminum foil deflector beanie! I even made AFDBs for my friends!

Imagine my dismay when I discovered that there is a high likelihood that one of my main information sources, one "Lyle Zapota," is a government agent. I bet that's not even his name. See, it turns out that not only do these AFDBs fail to protect the wearer, they fucking AMPLIFY the very frequency bands that are allocated to the US government, supposedly for radio location and other communication with satellites.

Read the study. Seriously.

Thank god I found out about this before I gave one to everybody on my Xmas list.

The AFDB I'm wearing in the picture at left is one of my favorites ever. I made it last year for a friend but there were some problems with the way it fit, so I took it back here for modifications. Now I don't even want it in my house!

My only solace is that there is one way in which my design differs from that bastard Zapota's: the multi-colored band around the edge, as well as most of the round dots decorating the top and sides, are made out of the foil coverings from the tops of wine bottles -- the old fashioned kind which are much heavier than even the heavy-duty Reynolds Wrap that I used for the rest of the unit. I think that they may even contain lead, which Zapota's site basically says not to bother with.

Yeah, right. That should have been my first clue.

The MIT study only examined tin-foil hats made out of 100% Reynolds Wrap, though. Maybe mine offers enough distortion to make a difference? I really can't say for sure. I'm certainly never putting it on my head again. Indeed, I noticed that in the time it took me to take the picture, the foil got noticably warmer. And not one of the 30-plus photos I took was in focus*. Not one!!! Not only that, my computer froze up THREE TIMES while I was writing this post!

Coincidence? You tell me.

[Added the next day: *Plus I got an email earlier from an old friend I haven't seen in a while wanting to know was that picture really me? It looks more or less like me, as far as I can tell, except the colors are all distorted now that I look at it on the big monitor at work. I didn't notice there was a problem on that crappy old thinkpad at home. So I tweaked the colors on the photo and re-posted it. You'd still never know that the wall behind me is sort of robin's egg blue and that my hair is pretty grey.]

[But wait, there's more -- my buddy Prolix responds to the above post here.]

Bobcats

I love the Dharma Bums. They posted some pictures of a bobcat here. What a beautiful animal, eh? They've been posting some really fabulous photos. Take some time and look, if you like that sort of thing.

Are you on the bus, or off the bus?

I've been taking the bus to work these past few weeks, and I keep meaning to post more about it here. I have to admit I got a little weepy the other day when we pulled into the central bus facility downtown and the driver asked us all to stay in our seats and offer a moment of silent meditation and prayer for Mrs. Parks.

I'll say 'amen' to that. This is the actual bus she rode that day. Click on the photo to learn more about its restoration from the Montgomery Area Transit System's website. Or here to learn more about the Montgomery bus boycott.

I've always loved taking the bus, but I've lived in this town for nearly ten years and before this month I don't think I've ridden it more than a handful of times.

When I came to town to find us a place to live, I checked to make sure that there were bus stop signs near the house I rented, and confirmed that the signs were all over town and near likely places of employment. I saw a couple of those nice little pockety racks full of schedules in convenient-seeming places. As an experienced bus commuter, I thought it looked good. It never occurred to me to pick up one of those schedules and look at it.

I might not have moved here if I had.

Accustomed as I was to taking a bus pretty much wherever and whenever I wanted to go, I was shocked when I found out after I moved here, carless, that the buses run every hour (30 minutes on the "busy" routes) between about 6:30 am and 6:30 p.m. There are a few evening routes, but not in most neighborhoods.

And every time I found one of those little kiosks, it seemed to be mostly out of the schedules I thought would be most useful. But it was hard to tell, as there was no system map posted anywhere. I finally got through on the phone to the transit folks, who were very nice, and told me that they were printing more maps. They'd been very popular, the nice lady told me. They'd run out everywhere within a few weeks.

Duh.

I finally found most of the route schedules and set about drawing my own transit map. It seemed comprehensive enough, though I didn't really have a clue where anything was.

Bus map in front of me on the table, I set about trying to find a job. A couple of HR goons at some of the bigger firms outside of downtown told me quite disapprovingly that they weren't anywhere near the bus line and one of them admitted she didn't even know there was one.

When I called a couple of the bigger temp agencies and asked about locations and bus routes, I got an exceedingly chilly response; one of them, knowing I was new in town, said flat out that they wouldn't send people out on temp assignments without a car, or at least a reliable ride. Few of their regular clients, they said, were located near bus lines. And they'd had too many complaints about people being late, or having to leave early, on account of the bus schedule.

So I stopped asking about it, but as it turned out, I had to turn down almost every temp assignment I was offered at first on account of I couldn't get there without a car.

Job interviews on the bus? Forget about it. I ended up renting a car every time I could schedule an interview.

Eventually I landed a series of temp assignments that led to an actual permanent job at the place where I still work. It was about a ten-minute walk from our house, but there was also a bus that took about three and a half minutes. It only ran every half-hour, so I usually just walked. Over the summer, though, I had an assignment that required suits & panty hose & all that professional office lady shit, and I hadn't yet discovered the on-site gym where I could shower and change.

It's really too hot here to walk around outside dressed like that, so I decided to give the bus a try.

The first morning, I stood at the bus stop, directly under the sign, in my crisp linen suit (plus hideously uncomfortable pumps), holding my briefcase and watched as the bus approached, failed to slow down, and passed me by.

"Wow," I thought as I set off down the hill on foot. That was sure strange, I mean, is this really a bus stop? The sign had the bus logo and the words BUS STOP on it. Didn't seem too ambiguous. I tried again the next day and this time I waved as the bus approached. The driver didn't even look my way. I was baffled, but tried again the next day -- in comfortable shoes in case I had to walk. It was my lucky day! The bus stopped to let someone out, and I hopped on.

The driver -- a youngish white guy with curly red hair and very friendly blue eyes -- looked at me in surprise and said, "I'm sorry ma'am, have you been waiting to catch the bus the last couple of mornings?" A bit taken aback, I nodded, sort of gesturing to the suit & the briefcase and said "I'm on my way to work. This is the right place to wait, isn't it?" He said yes, and added again that he was very sorry, but it just didn't occur to him that I was waiting for the bus.

Um, how on earth to respond to that? is what I'm thinking. "Do I need to make an appointment?" I asked him.

He thought I looked like I was waiting for a taxi, he said, or a friend to pick me up. I must have looked kind of cross with him, because he finally laughed and said, "You must be new in town, hon. I didn't think you were waiting for the bus because you're white. White people don't take the bus here."

I looked up. It was true! Everybody was staring at me, and every face was black or brown. And every person was listening and waiting to hear what I was going to say to that.

Not one to waste an opportunity for a cheap laugh, I paid my fare and said, "Well, I guess I'd better sit in the back, then," and I did. And they laughed & everybody was friendly and wanted to know where I was from. As I walked back there, I noticed the much more interesting fact that I was the only person in a suit. It's not entirely about skin color, though racism is obviously a huge factor.

But that is a subject for another post, and anyway, the point of this story is that -- nearly ten years after that incident -- I finally figured out how to catch the bus from my current neighborhood and get to work. I can get home from work too, but only if I leave my desk by 6 pm, which I rarely do. But maybe I could get used to it. It takes about 25 minutes by bus, compared to the 20 minutes it takes to ride my bike (plus I don't have to shower when I get there). If I miss the bus, though, it's still actually faster to walk the entire way, because the bus only runs every hour and it's only about a 45-minute walk.

It took me a little time to figure out which buses I needed to take and when, but once I put all the times into my own spreadsheet (and I finally got the system map) I was able to see the logic to it all. It's really quite an elegant little system, and does its work really well on way too small a budget.

I'm a big fan.

And this is really cool: all the buses in town -- every bus, on every route -- has both a bicycle rack and a wheelchair lift. And the fare is only a dollar, with no confusing Rush Hour or Zone Surcharges. And they even have a few Park & Ride locations for folks who don't live close to a bus line (i.e. most everybody).

So: Yay, buses.

And thank you, Mrs. Parks.

"the only tired I was, was tired of giving in"

Rosa Parks died last night at her home in Detroit. This piece in the Washington Post quotes from her 1992 autobiography "My Story:"

"People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in."

Bless her heart.

Via Suburban Guerrilla. And Magpie.

How to wake up in the morning without really trying

Flaco Jimenez. In the CD player on the table next to my bed. The CD starts playing and I start dreaming that I'm dancing. And then I wake up all dreamy and happy and all I want to do is dance. How can I possibly have a bad day? How can anything suck? Accordions are playing! People are happy! Life is good!

I've tried so many different CDs to wake up to, and I keep coming back to this one. I'm sensitive, I guess, and I believe I've mentioned that I'm kind of tired of hearing the damn news right away in the morning. But the wake-up music has to be just right, or your whole day can be set askew. I don't, for example, want to start off the day with Tom Waits doing that completely demented version of the Dwarves' Marching Song "Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho, It's Off to Work We Go," even though it's highly excellent and perfect for the bus ride to work.

Anyway, I think this CD is just called "Flaco Jimenez." Some of the songs are in English and some are in Spanish and a few are in kind of spangly Spanglish. All are very danceable. I'm sure I'll get tired of this one eventually and have to pick something else.

When entomology meets etymology

I'm having some trouble sitting still. You'll see why if you keep reading. Stop reading now if you're squeamish about bugs, or you maybe don't want too much information about my, um, mental health. But it's a funny story -- funny in the regular ha-ha way and also in that "isn't this a weird little planet we're on?" kind of way.

Part of the problem is that this time of year, at least where I live, bugs like to come inside. If they're spiders or other interesting bugs I mostly just let them stay, or take them gently outside if necessary. Their lives are pretty short and they generally go away on their own. Bugs that eat the house or infest my food are rather less welcome, even if they're really interesting. Termites, for example, or those moths that eat your sweaters and get into the pancake mix. Roaches are neither interesting nor welcome. They are the size of fucking basset hounds here, so they're pretty easy to track down & chase out of the house.

It's a little embarrassing that ants freak me out so much, but they do. Part of it has to do with the way they move all swarmy all over everything. I find it horrifying. And also that collective mind thing, that's scary too. Although it bothers me less when bees do it, for some reason. Bees don't bother me at all, or wasps. Bees and wasps and even hornets are interesting.

But ants, they've bothered me since I was a little kid, partly because I associated them with a phenomenon I used to call "itchul bugs," although I've since found there is a much better name for it, which I'll get to in a minute, because it does have to do with ants. My mother tells me that I was about four or five when I first complained about feeling like bugs were crawling on me even when I knew they weren't there. I said it felt like they were under my skin and had to admit that yes, I knew that wasn't possible. She told me that scratching would make it worse, and it turned out she was right. She was pretty sure I was imagining it, or that it was somehow from playing in the dirt all day. And it was my grandmother who first told me I could make the feeling stop if I looked really hard right at the itchy place and repeated to myself, "see, there aren't any bugs there." Bless her for teaching me that. Self-hypnosis is a really useful skill.

Anyway, the imaginary bug phenomenon has reappeared intermittently, but I hadn't been bothered much at all by it for years. It most often occurs when I get migraines or haven't slept in a long time. Then last spring I had a seriously unpleasant allergic response to some medication, and it's been annoying me pretty steadily since then. There's no skin irritation or anything. I've investigated a number of possible causes and have talked to a couple of doctors; there doesn't seem to be a lot I can do that works any better than doing what my grandmother suggested, but it would be good if I could stop doing whatver it is that sets it off. It's most likely part of the constellation of sensory weirdnesses that goes along with migraines, which I get a lot of. [update: Or maybe allergies. Duh. Seems like there's maybe something to this theory.]

I'll tell you what though, it got way way worse last week when the ants started showing up on my kitchen counter. I don't like to put out poison, but I did, and it didn't really help right away. I couldn't even go in there to eat or wash the dishes because it was absolutely and utterly terrifying. I made myself go in there for five minutes at a time until I had finally washed all the dishes and washed every surface with bleach. And of course then I found a large tin on the counter that had some dog food in it in case I have canine company. I got rid of that the other day and washed the tin and put it outside just in case there was some still in there and they came back for it. These ants seemed enthusiastic, I guess you could say, about the dog food. Finally, in the last few days they've started to slack off some, whether on account of the poison or the removal of the dog food. Or maybe the increasingly cold weather.

So I was looking up something in a reference book a little while ago, and (as I so often do) I got kind of distracted. And I have a lot of reference books. And once I started pulling on this thread, I couldn't think about anything other than the ants that are not crawling around under my skin. It's called formication, by the way. Isn't that a great word? And it has to do with ants! I mean, like, etymologically speaking. So anyway, here's what I found:

ant - Any of various social insects of the family Formicidae, characteristically having wings only in the males and fertile females and living in colonies that have a complex social organization. [Kingdom: Animalia, Phylum: Arthropoda, Class: Insecta, Order: Hymenoptera, Suborder: Apocrita Superfamily: Vespoidea, Family: Formicidae]

Formica is a genus of ants commonly known as wood ants. They typically secrete formic acid.

formic acid. - A colorless caustic fuming liquid, CH₂O₂, used in dyeing and finishing textiles and paper and in the manufacture of fumigants, insecticides, and refrigerants. So named on account of it was originally isolated by distilling ants (Latin formica).

Formica®, on the other hand, was invented in 1912 as an electrical insulator to serve as a substitute "for mica," hence the name. Duh. I was kind of hoping that it was called that on account of the irresistibility of countertops to ants. Or something like that.

formication. - A form of paresthesia or tactile hallucination; a sensation as if small insects are creeping under the skin. From the Latin formica, ant.

Eeeuw. Yes. That's it exactly.

Friday Random Ten: Chicks writing songs edition

Seven of the songs on this list are written or in one case co-written by gals, so it's not, strictly speaking, a chicks-only playlist, but I've never been one to favor segregated events. Plus this is supposed to be random, no?

1. "Hammer and A Nail" Indigo Girls (Nomads Indians Saints) - OK, I know I've said I don't have anything in my iTunes database that would embarrass me to be caught listening to, but if there's an exception this is it. I do kind of secretly like them, though. Whenever she heard these gals, my lovely ex-wife used to start this goofy rant about how pretentious and literary and hip they were, and claimed that she could just throw a bunch of quotes from dead feminist martyrs, a couple characters from Shakespeare, and a few stale metaphors into a hat and pull them out randomly and it would be an Indigo Girls song. I'm not sure she's wrong.
2. "Oh, Fait Pitie d'Amour" Buddy Miller (Midnight and Lonesome) - I absolutely love Buddy & Julie Miller. She is certainly high on my list of top ten songwriters ever. This is a kind of cajun two-step flavored tune that's just about irresistible: "you're gonna wreck up my lonely life/ with love and happiness and laughter/ take up my time making you my wife/ living happily ever after..." I can't stop dancing!
3. "Talk to Me of Mendocino" Kate & Anna McGarrigle (The McGarrigle Hour) - And speaking of great songwriting, these girls are pretty luminous. Kate wrote this old favorite, and I think this performance includes her son Rufus Wainwright in among the backing vocals, especially in this stretch: "and it's on to South Bend, Indiana/ flat out on the western plains/ rise up over the rockies down on into California/ out to where all the rocks were made.*"

   *This is my transcription, but I wasn't quite sure I had it right, so I looked it up and it's supposed to be something else that I don't like as much: "out to where but the rocks remain," which doesn't really make much sense to me.

4. "Overjoyed" The Bourbon Tabernacle Choir (Shy Folk) - I know I've gone on & on about this (alas, no longer performing together) Toronto-based combo, but if you can find a copy of any of their CDs it'll sure be worth your time to give it a listen: "We can live/ overjoyed/ we can give/ overjoyed/ when the crisis comes/ we'll find peace on the solid ground and say: we're overjoyed."
5. "Strange Lover" Julie Miller (Broken Things) - She's singing here with Steve Earle; Buddy is somewhere in the vocal mix, I think, and playing guitars, etc. I totally love that one line: "blood is red/and money's green/ sugar's sweet/ and you are mean." And the chorus: "well the cows lay down when it's going to rain/ when you come around it's a hurricane /you say it's bad luck baby but I know/ that it's cocaine" Oh and then somebody starts playing that Hammond B-3. Doesn't get much better. I don't even care that maybe the cows should lie down.
6. "The Married Men" The Roches (The Roches) - I've always liked these gals quite a lot too, and their songs are reliably funny and smart. And didn't one of them also used to be married to Loudon Wainwright? I forget which one. [Susie reminds me in the comments that she had his baby but was never married to him] This is one of their older recordings, just them and three big boomy Martin dreadnought guitars. Oh and a littly bit of accordion and some kind of shaker-y thing towards the end: "...one says he'll come after me/ another one'll drop me a line / one of 'em says all my agony is in my mind/ they know what is wrong with me/ none of 'em wants my hand/ soloing in my traveling wedding band" and "I know these girls they don't like me/ but I am just like them/ picking a crazy apple off a stem/ and givin' it to the married men/ the married men/ alla that time in hell to spend/ for kissing the married men..."
7. "Pithecanthropus Erectus" Robert Quine, Greg Cohen, Art Baron, Don Alias, Michael Blair, Francis Thumm, Bill Frisell, & Hal Wilner (Weird Nightmare: Meditations on Mingus) - No lyrics to quote on this one. Seriously cool shit though. Hal Wilner produced a couple of these high-concept compilations (there's a Kurt Weil project "Lost in the Stars" and a Disney one "Stay Awake" that I really dig). Robert Quine's guitar work on this piece is worth the price of admission. The rest of it's pretty high-quality as well.
8. "The Envoy" Warren Zevon (The Envoy) - Those of us of a certain age can recall reading the news or hearing about the President's envoy being sent all over the place. I always loved the sound of that title, Presidential Envoy, and wondered what exactly it meant: "whenever there's a crisis/ the President sends his envoy in/ guns in Damascus/ or Jerusalem..." I kind of wanted to be one when I grew up, but now I'm thinking I wouldn't like it all that much.
9. "Have a Nice Day" The Ramones (¡Adios, Amigos!) - Oh, I do love these boys. "I heard from the landlord/ when he kicked me out/ I heard it from the spirits/ as they possessed my house: have a nice day/ that's all I hear every day/ Have a nice day I don't believe a word you say."
10. "Right in Time" Lucinda Williams (Car Wheels on a Gravel Road) - Anyone who says women don't write great music just isn't paying attention. Plus I think this one's got both accordion and Hammond B-3. And what's she singing about? "I take off my watch & my earrings/ my bracelets & everything/ lie on my back and moan at the ceiling/ ohh baby/ I think about you and that long ride/ I bite my nails, I get weak inside/ reach over and turn off the light/ ohhhh baby." Oh yes.

I'm a liberal and I drink

I went to my first Drinking Liberally event last night. I went by accident, if you wanna know the truth. I'm not much of a joiner, but I might have gone on purpose if I'd known it was more or less in the neighborhood.

Stella and I stopped, as we usually do, at our neighborhood pub for a beer and maybe some peanuts while we were on our walk last night, and there were a few familiar faces on the deck, and quite a few people I didn't know. It felt almost like they were expecting me, even the ones I didn't know, but I couldn't quite say why. It took a while for me to notice that it was an official Drinking Liberally event, but I caught on after a while. Nobody asked me for the password or a secret handshake or anything. Maybe I'll get to that part next time.

There were several groups of people there to drink liberally, it turned out, and Stella liked them all, especially the ones who were eating peanuts. There were multiple conversations to choose from, with topics ranging from local politics to obscure rock bands to Flying Spaghetti Monsterism.

I will note that there was, as far as I could tell, only one other chick there. There might have been one other in that group inside the bar. What's up with that? And what could it possibly mean that we both studied Linguistics, back in the day?

More fun than counting to ten when you're mad

I took this picture several years ago at the May Day Parade in Minneapolis, which is a wonderful and life-affirming and commercial-free phenomenon that I absolutely love. It's the only parade that I've ever really liked. These words were scrawled on the sidewalk with a lot of other goofy stuff, and every time I walked by it I giggled. I've had this photo above my work space for a while, but I had to move it the other day and it's now the first thing I see when I walk in the door of my house. Right above the pic of my sister the mailman standing next to Al Franken at some kind of fund-raiser type event. She's blushing like a teenager. He's hotter than you'd think, she tells me. I'll take her word for it.

Anyway, I think it helps: "I will not freak unless froken to." Go ahead and try it if you need to.

Why do they hate our freedom?

I don't even know where to start on this one.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush said Tuesday that the possibility of an avian flu pandemic is among the reasons he wants Congress to give him the power to use the nation's military in law enforcement roles in the United States. [emphasis mine]

Nor do I know quite what to make of the fact that, as of 2:48 a.m. (Eastern US time) Wednesday, October 5, CNN.com's QuickVote Reader Poll indicates that just over half (54%) of the 35,309 respondents answered "yes" to the question: Should there be a U.S. law enforcement role for the military during domestic emergencies? The disclaimer at the bottom -- about how the "QuickVote is not scientific and reflects the opinions of only those Internet users who have chosen to participate" and doesn't represent the opinion of the public at large -- just doesn't reassure me overmuch.

Are 19,009 people just nuts?

What he's talking about here is doing away with, or at least ripping to shreds, a highly excellent federal law enacted in 1878 to limit the US government's ability to use its military for law enforcement types of actions -- to prevent it from imposing a so-called "police state." It's called the Posse Comitatus Act, and it already grants the President the ability to waive the law during certain emergencies and exceptional circumstances. The military is already allowed to provide support and assistance in certain circumstances. Our president is not talking here about utilizing one of the several useful and appropriate exceptions to the law; he's talking about asking Congress to give him the power, essentially, to declare martial law.

And maybe it's just me, but I don't think that he's talking about bringing in the Marines to instruct us about proper handwashing techniques to prevent transmission of disease, or to somehow support the ailing Public Health infrastructure. They're not going to be bringing us chicken soup and ginger ale or fluffing our pillows.

But it's not just me: the CNN article quotes Mr. Gene Healy, a senior editor at the Cato Institute [more about the Cato Institute], and he seems concerned too. In an article posted Sept. 27, Healy notes that in his Sept. 15 post-Katrina TV address (which I guess I must've missed), our President gave the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as a reason to make provisions for "greater federal authority and a broader role for the armed forces". And then you get the chair of the Armed Services Committee, Sen. John Warner (R-Va) explicitly suggesting the weakening of restrictions on the government's ability to use the military as a police force, and then Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita calling Posse Comitatus "very archaic" and saying it somehow undermines the president's ability to respond to a crisis. "Not so," says Healy:

"The Posse Comitatus Act is no barrier to federal troops providing logistical support during natural disasters. Nor does it prohibit the president from using the army to restore order in extraordinary circumstances--even over the objection of a state governor.

What it does is set a high bar for the use of federal troops in a policing role. That reflects America’s traditional distrust of using standing armies to enforce order at home, a distrust that’s well-justified."

Yep.

[PS: I guess I should have read some more stuff before I posted: Magpie is already all over this one, as are the good folks at Effect Measure and I think Susie over at Suburban Guerilla mentioned it earlier, too.

Pandemic Flu Awareness Week

Hey everybody, it's Pandemic Flu Awareness Week! So why not take a few minutes to look at the Flu Wiki, or to read a few posts or follow some of the links over at Effect Measure? Yeah, it's depressing, I know -- but this really is pretty likely to become a big deal.

What kind of big deal? you may be wondering. The kind of big deal that, like, shuts down the global economy, kills a lot of people, and throws the remaining population into chaos as the already-fragile infrastructure collapses around them. That kind of thing. It's basically a doomsday scenario, but it's not yet a done deal.

This really toasts my tits

I mean it this time. My brain really did pop. My head is completely empty now. Total obstreperal lobe meltdown. I stopped by I Blame the Patriarchy earlier and was appalled and utterly disheartened to learn that Twisty's tits may in fact and literally get toasted any day now. Or worse. Yeah, I know that breast cancer isn't nearly as lethal as it used to be, what with all the new treatments & so on, but it's gotta be unpleasant as hell -- the treatment, I mean.

I've never met Twisty in person, but she is after all a fellow spinster aunt and she's certainly, as I believe I've mentioned about a million times, a writer and patriarchy-blamer I admire deeply. And a hell of a cook, apparently.

I almost sort of wish I could stand outside her room & listen when some unsuspecting representative of the survivor's support group brings her a basket of fuzzy, be-ribboned pink crap. I'd want to be well out of the way, though, when she started hurling fluffy projectiles out the door.

I totally blame the goddamn fucking patriarchy. The fuckers.

Urban wildlife

Stella & I missed all the excitement at the neighborhood pub the other day. A friend of mine was there with his camera, though, & sent these photos of the box turtle he found in the parking lot. A beautiful specimen and apparently on some kind of mission, traveling obliviously across lawns and pavement and a gravel parking lot. A death-defying mission, you could say. After posing for these photos, the turtle submitted to the relocation efforts of kind-hearted pub patrons.

I've been thinking a lot about this turtle, and all the other turtles I've known. I'm afraid I've become a little bit numb with my rage at all the senseless death going on everywhere, and it did my heart good to know that somebody had bothered to try to keep this turtle off the road. Their beautiful and durable shells give them a perfect refuge from all but the most wily and persistent predators, but they are no match for cars. Plus they don't move very fast.

Looking at these pictures reminds me of a box turtle I once knew by the name of Fred; when I last saw Fred about ten or twelve years ago, he had been living for almost 30 years with this guy in my revolutionary knitting group. I think my friend felt a little bad about keeping him captive, but he was worried that Fred would end up dead on the pavement.

So Fred had his own aquarium with the kind of light he needed to keep his shell in shape and keep warm. There was a pool in it, and some plants and pretty rocks, and on one side there was a whole gallery of turtle-themed art taped to the outside of the glass for him to enjoy. He ate mostly cat kibble, with occasional bugs & stuff. He spent a few hours each day in the aquarium but was otherwise given free run of the house, much to the amusement of the cats. They loved to follow him around, but when they got too curious, he'd of course just pull inside his shell and freak the cats out.

I went over there one day to see the litter of kittens that a stray cat had showed up to deliver. They were all in a cardboard box being cute in that helpless newborn mammal kind of way. Several of us were standing around staring at them when someone said, "Hey, look at Fred!" He was moving pretty briskly, for a turtle, circumambulating the box (there's just no other word to describe what he was doing), stopping every now and again, craning his neck to try to see into the box. He seemed agitated. Worried? How to tell? My friend sat down on the floor and held Fred so he could see inside. He stared for quite a long time at the kittens. Finally he looked up at my friend, who put him down. Fred sat calmly near the box for quite a long time after that.

Obstreperitis & patriarchy blaming

Poor dear Aunt Twisty of I Blame the Patriarchy has had some serious problems of late. Not only did her freaking brain pop on September 13, her patriarchy-blaming vim has been seriously diminished. I gotta say I'm not surprised to learn that her obstreperal lobe has gone into acute failure & she's got nothing at all coming out her wazzoo at the moment. Will she ever blame the patriarchy again? Is she OK? What will happen if and when she comes back from St. Louis? How are the dogs?

See, here's why I'm so disturbed: Twisty is a goddamn canary in this fucking coal mine we're all trapped in. If her brain has popped already, just exactly how long do the rest of us have?

You may have noticed, if you are one of my eleven or so regular readers, that my posts lately have been infrequent and that I from time to time offer truly lame excuses about my absences, both here on the blog and to those of you who've so kindly emailed me about it: no computer at home, no time for blogging, I'm freaking out over all the bad news, too much work, I'm working on a goddamn site redesign (how fucking lame is that?), or I'm having carpal fucking tunnel problems for godssakes -- yeah, they're all true enough, but who ever said blogging would be easy?

The truth is I'm having some obstreperal lobe problems of my own. Inflammatory-type problems. Chronic ones. I think my fears that my own brain is about to pop are perfectly reasonable.

As a spinster aunt myself, I know all too well that there is a strong connection between chronic inflammation of the obstreperal lobe and the habits and responsibilities of the typical spinster aunt. Think about it: we don't have to suck up to the patriarchy every minute just to survive, and/or we're on our own a lot & have plenty of quiet time to think clearly. And thinking clearly nowadays is a hazard.

This obstreperal inflammation (commonly called obstreperitis, if you want to know), is frequently dismissed as mere crankiness, or it is thought (mistakenly, it turns out) to be causally related to certain sexual tendencies. I think you know which ones I mean. But at any rate -- as with any chronic inflammatory problems, it matters whether the inflammation is caused by infection or repeated insult (i.e., injury). I'm hoping that my problems, and Twisty's, are the result of the latter, in which case a temporary withdrawal from the irritation will bring some relief.

PS: In an effort to cheer Twisty up, I guess, and to raise money for Blame Aid 2005 ["All proceeds from this event will go to the Cooperativa de Las Muchachas Para Culpar el Patriarcado (Young Girls' Patriarchy-Blaming Cooperative)..."], Chris Clarke of Creek Running North, bless his heart, wrote The Corrido of Twisty Faster's Brain, which Twisty quite hilariously called "the world's first and finest patrinarco-corrido." I can't stop laughing at that for some reason.

A watched pot hardly ever melts

I woke up really early this morning. Like, five a.m. early. There was this funny smell in the house, and all the lights were on and I was fully dressed, including my shoes and my work ID tag, even. I wasn't even in bed, technically, just lying there on top of the quilt, glasses on, my face resting on the book I'd been reading. Front door wide open (screen door locked, like that'll help) and all the windows wide open. Porch light on.

It wasn't light yet, of course, but what was that fucking smell? On the way to the kitchen I remember ohmygodthechickenstock! In the pressure cooker! Bloody hell! I could've burned the fucking house down! I dash out there and shut the burner off. Part of the smell is melted plastic, part of it is deeply caramelized chicken and celery and onions and carrots. I put the oven mitts on and place the pressure cooker carefully in the sink and run cold water on it to release the pressure. There's a lot of steam on account of the pan is so hot, but surprisingly there is not any pressure to release. Trepidation is what I felt while opening the lid.

I very nearly gagged at the smell, and at the sight of the wretchedly overcooked carcass in the pan, resting on a bed of gummy, nearly black vegetables. I put the lid back on and realized there was melty plastic on the stove. Thank god that at least I'd left the ceiling fan on.

What had happened was this: I got home last night and had a chat on the front porch with my lovely ex-wife about tonight's "Gumbo Aid*" event that she'd planned. She had already made two gallons of chicken stock (which was in my fridge on account of hers was stuffed full of the components of gumbo for 50 people) and needed two more. There was one more chicken left, and just enough vegetables. I'd said that I'd make another gallon tonight, and I'd use the pressure cooker so it would be concentrated enough that we could add another gallon of water when we needed to. Ordinarily I would probably have used the existing broth and cooked another chicken in it, but I chose to use fresh water. Glad I did, or I would have had to make even more this morning.

But anyway, I have a gas stove, and so I used a heat diffuser under the pressure cooker so that it wouldn't scorch (a danger with pressure cookers on gas burners. It was taking forever to come up to full pressure. "A watched pot never boils" I kept telling myself, so I went out on the porch and read for a while, and then since I don't have a sofa and my bike was in the middle of the living room blocking my chair I thought it would be fine to just lie down on the bed. I knew that I'd hear the pressure cooker when it got pressurized on account of it makes so much noise. Obviously I'm an idiot. Either I didn't hear it or it never did reach the point where it makes noise. Lucky for me that these newfangled pressure cookers have this safety feature (apparently) that melts and releases the pressure if it stays too hot for too long. Bad luck that it also allowed all the water to escape.

So, I had some breakfast and took a quick bath & went to the store as soon as it opened to get another chicken, more vegetables, etc., but this time I couldn't use the pressure cooker & I had to use my only large pot to cook the chicken stock. It turned out really well, I'm happy to report, but since my actual assigned task for this event was to cook some red beans & rice for the vegetarians in the crowd, I had to immediately wash the pan (and all the strainers & auxiliary pans I'd used while combining the new stock with what I already had in the fridge) in scalding hot water and bleach lest the organic chicken taint the vegetarian beans. As one who was a vegetarian for most of twenty years, I take this sort of thing seriously.

And then I set about making the red beans, using a spice mixture that my lovely ex-wife had prepared but which turned out to be way too spicy. The beans were in the big pot, and I'd sauteed some onions and celery and green pepper in my wok & added far too much of the spice mix, so added more vegetables, etc. Still when I mixed it a little of it with some beans it was too spicy, so I drained off the bean cooking liquid and diluted the spice mixture, straining off the excess liquid several times, and added more vegetables, and got every goddamn fucking pan and bowl in the house involved in the process.

The good news is the red beans are fabulous and so is the gumbo. There are three beautiful cakes, a case of wine, more beer than you can shake a stick at, the guests are to arrive shortly, and it's time for me to go walk the dog.

If you want to find me later, I'll be in the kitchen washing dishes and mourning the loss of my pressure cooker, which I adore not only because of its usefulness and beauty, but also because it was an x-mas gift from my lovely ex-wife.

*[Copy this idea: Invite everybody you know to come over for a gumbo party and then hit them up for donations to your favorite disaster-relief organization. Warn them that you're going to ask for money -- we got several donations already from folks who won't be able to attend.]

Friday Random Ten: Contra apocalypse edition

I can't say this is truly random as it's a selection from a playlist that includes a subset of 317 songs I've been listening to a lot lately as I try not to freak out. It's got all the songs I could find that for one reason or another soothed the screaming & apocalyptic fantods gripping me of late. Some of them are kind of scary and ominous, others are funny & sweet; some are about New Orleans or Mississippi (or anyplace affected by Katrina), some are about anarchy & chaos -- you get the idea.

As you might imagine, the playlist is heavy on Alex Chilton (not, alas, represented below - but I did read somewhere the other day that he's been heard from after disappearing in New Orleans for a few days), plus a lot of my regulars like Lucinda Williams, Tom Waits, Warren Zevon, and Leonard Cohen. "The Great Event," which happened to be #11 in this particular sequence, is what my alarm clock is playing these days. Much better than the news.

1. "Lakes of Pontchartrain" Be Good Tanyas Blue Horse

   Classic folk music story of rich stranger/ traveler obtaining shelter & hospitality from beautiful local girl of modest means - he proposes marriage but alas her heart is pledged to another and she refuses him. He vows to remember her forever. Nice arrangement here from the BGTs. "... and I fell in love with a Creole girl/ on the lakes of Pontchartrain..."

2. "She Steers By Lightning" Richard Thompson You? Me? Us? (voltage enhanced)

   Quite possibly one of my all-time favorite songs. Certainly in the top 700. Very ominous. Might also explain why I drive the way I do. "My Maggie, she's got a loose one/ she uses Milton as a road map/ My Maggie, she is a bright thing/ She talks in couplets/ she steers by lightning."

3. "John the Gun " Sandy Denny Who Knows Where the Time Goes? (box set)

   This particular version originally appears on the 1974 Fairport Live recorded in Sydney. Jerry Donahue is playing lead guitar (not RT), but Dave Mattacks is on drums, Dave Pegg on bass, and Dave Swarbrick contributes some scary-ass violin solos: "Ideals of peace are gold which fools/ have found upon the plains of war/ I shall destroy them all..."

4. "Crescent City " Lucinda Williams Lucinda Williams

   "This town has said what it has to say/ now I'm after that back highway/ and that longest bridge that I ever crossed/ over Pontchartrain..." That's how far I get before I start to cry.

5. "Living in Babylon" Heartbeats Rhythm Quartet Spinning World

   I guess this one is the only song on the list that you could actually contradance to if you wanted to. Plus I like the lyrics: "... with every step you wonder who you are/ who is this frightened boy alone in his car/ listening to the music coming out of its dash/ taking his tired brain to a place in the past..."

6. "Walking in Space" Original Broadway Cast Hair

   I've been singing this one a lot lately, for some reason. " .. my body is walking in space/ my soul is in orbit with god face to face/ floating flipping flying tripping/ tripping from potsville to mainline/ tripping from mainline to this/ on a rocket to the fourth dimension/ total self awareness/ the intention/ my mind is as clear as country air/ I feel my flesh/ all colors mesh..."

7. "Black Sky " Sam Phillips Martinis & Bikinis

   Very nice ominous drums: "The trees are listening/ each time a missile's made/ they hide three mystics/ the earth sends from her grave/ to tell us the future/ has been stolen away/ by diggers, drillers and sellers/ we won't stop/ 'till we're underneath a black sky."

8. "Desperadoes Under the Eaves " Warren Zevon Warren Zevon

   "...all the salty margaritas in Los Angeles/ I'm gonna drink em up/ and if California slides into the ocean/ like the mystics and statistics say it will/ I predict this motel will be standing/ until I pay my bill..." I can't really add much to that.

9. "Alabama Song " Marianne Faithfull 20th Century Blues

   Marianne Faithfull can make anything sound vaguely apocalyptic of course, but Kurt Weill gives one a particularly good opportunity, I think. She released another recording of it on The Seven Deadly Sins which is a little smoother and there's a band behind her, but I prefer this live recording with just her and Paul Trueblood on piano. You know this song: "Oh show me the way to the next whiskey bar/ oh don't ask why/ oh don't ask why/ for we must find the next whiskey bar/ for if we don't find the next whiskey bar/ I tell you we must die..."

10. "Can't Feel at Home" Mud Boy & the Neutrons They Walk Among Us

    An only slightly demented version of this gospel standard (sometimes called "This World is Not My Home" or "I Can't Feel at Home in This World Any More") from Memphis luminaries Lee Baker, Jimmy Crosthwait, Jim Dickinson, and Sid Selvidge. ..."This world is not my home/ I"m only passin by/ my troubles & my hopes are all stored up on high/ all of my kindred have gone on before & I can't feel at home in this world any more..."

11. "The Great Event" Leonard Cohen More Best Of

    A seriously weird little piece; the liner notes credit the vocals to LC and Victoria, which happens to be the name of one of the synthesized voices (on my erstwhile Mac, anyway) you can set certain Instant Message programs to use to read the incoming messages out loud for you. I'm pretty sure it's her, um, singing (or whatever you call it): "It's going to happen very soon: The great event which will end the horror, which will end the sorrow. Next Tuesday, when the sun goes down, I will play the Moonlight Sonata backwards. This will reverse the effects of the world's mad plunge into suffering for the last two hundred million years. What a lovely night that will be. What a sigh of relief, as the senile robins become bright red again and the retired nightingales pick up their dusty tails and assert the majesty of creation."

Too much

I just can't get my mind around the news from the hurricane. I'm glad I don't have a TV in the house; I can't listen to the radio for more than a few minutes. I keep checking online, but I can't take any more in. There's a ton of great information out there. I'm too overwhelmed by it right now to think of anything useful to say. I might post some specific links later, but I think that Magpie is doing a great job, as is Shakespeare's Sister. Also Making Light.

Imagine my dismay

I've been without a computer at home since July 1, or thereabouts. Last Friday afternoon my boss says to me, "Hey, I've got this laptop you can take home, let me just clean it off and it's yours." I say "Great," and I mean it. I don't even mind that it's an old cruddy Thinkpad running Windows 2000. It works, and I can have it. Yay for me, I'm thinking. Never mind my now departed but zippy little PowerBook, and the new Tiger OS I have sitting here in a box. This is something, and it's free.

So I was busy Friday night & then I took a lot of naps on Saturday, as is my custom. Saturday night I ended up not exactly babysitting but my friends have this teenage daughter and they needed to go away overnight and I said "yeah sure I'll stay at your house tonight." Not to babysit, per se, but just to make sure that there was no excessive alcohol consumption on the premises. And to walk the dog. Plus they let me drive the new Infiniti F/x with that GPS map thingy that shows you exactly where you are but makes me kind of nervous so I had to turn it off. And I got to do my laundry, which kind of needed doing, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, there I was, out in fancy-land, enjoying the quiet house and the nice dark night. I finished reading some stuff I needed to read and then got out the laptop to write up a summary. Problem is, the damn thing thought it was still connected to the network and wouldn't let me in without an administrative password. Or maybe it would have let me in with my network password, but I wasn't connected to the network, and it doesn't have a wireless card, or something. I got tired of messing with it after a while.

Fuckity fuck fuck fuck.

Regular blogging should resume shortly, in any case. Monday I will have someone figure all this out and explain it to me. I'll let you know how it goes.

Support our troops

I finally got a chance to talk to my friend K. alone the other day. He's normally very cheerful & calm, but he's seemed tense lately. I mean, really tense. About to fucking snap. Loses patience over nothing at all. Sort of stands on the outskirts of everything, on his tiptoes, like he might blast off any second.

I asked him what was up & he did not let me see him cry. His mom had just had a heart attack. It was on account of him, he said, because the night before she had the heart attack he was robbed at gunpoint at a drive-thru food place in his old neighborhood.

I know he knows that she's had heart troubles for years, and that he didn't actually cause her heart attack, but it took a few days' worth of chance meetings in the hallways to sort out the whole story. I just kept listening.

After the guys who robbed him took off on their scooters, K. got a handgun (legal, registered, etc.) out of his glove compartment. He was freaked. They'd had a gun right in his face. He fired his gun, even though there was no one there. He called the cops. He told the cops that he had fired his gun, and they confiscated it. Told him to settle down or they'd file a charge against him for illegally discharging a weapon within the city limits.

It's a good thing that they took that weapon from him, because he went looking for the guys who'd robbed him. Figured they'd be easy enough to find on that shiny red scooter. Fortunately he didn't find them, and he went home. Stopped and got a pint of vodka first, to calm his nerves. Told his wife what had happened, and went downstairs. His wife called his mom, a second-shift nurse, and she came over on her way home. It appeared that K. was trying to assemble Molotov cocktails and get some of his old army buddies to come over and help him get these scumballs. Or something. Even K. isn't sure what he was trying to do.

See, K.'s a Gulf War vet. His story is not unusual. He enlisted to get money for college and make his mama proud. Only he got shipped off to Desert Storm a few weeks before his time was up. He knew, of course, that that sort of thing could happen when you're in the army. In his better moments, K's grateful for the opportunity to serve his country, and grateful that he came back in one piece and that he was able to finish college and get a job. And he got married, and he's absolutely crazy in love with his wife and adores his beautiful baby daughter. His mother should be proud of him.

But the thing is he didn't come back in one piece. He has PTSD. Looking down the barrel of a gun the other night scared the shit out of him. The idea that he might do something that compromises his daughter's and wife's and mother's safety scares the shit of him. The idea that he might do something stupid and end up in jail scares the shit of him.

"I know I need help," he said to me. "I called the VA to make an appointment. I can see a shrink in like February or March."

Surely we can do better than this.

All about me

Yes, I took another quiz. Via Feministe.

Which rad old school 70's glam icon are you? (with pics)

It turns out I'm Brian Eno. Who knew?

"You're a little reclusive maybe, a little quieter than most people... But man, who needs outside entertainment when your brain is like KABOOM all the time? You are innovative, creative, and intelligent. You dress flamboyantly, gravitating towards large feathers and tinsel. Everyone respects you, and looks up to you. We are not worthy, we are not worthy..." brought to you by Quizilla

Cooking in hot weather

It's starting to cool off a little bit this week, but really it's been too hot to cook lately. Too hot really to even eat anything other than an occasional gin-soaked olive. But when it's steamy and hot and crappy like this I sometimes want a really spicy-sweet-sour soup. Not one of those fancy chilled soups, but a hot soup. With shrimps and scallops and lemon grass -- kind of like that stuff you get at Thai restaurants. I figure it's no accident that people in hot climates eat spicy food.

So I made some of this last night; it's not particularly authentic, and I don't make it the same way every time. The following instructions are just guidelines, not exactly a recipe, but I think you'll get the idea. It's kind of expensive to make unless the seafood happens to be really cheap. I like it hot enough to make my ears ring, but I've toned it down a bit here.

I wish I'd had a camera at home so I could show you how pretty it was, but you'll have to take my word for it: it's beautiful.

This makes about four smallish servings. I usually use 1 whole chicken breast, and a pound each of shrimp & scallops, and two or even three quarts of broth, but the quantities below fit comfortably into what I think is a 3-qt saucepan. I serve it over short-grained white rice (nishiki or sushi rice), but it's not necessary. You could also add some of those cellophane-type rice noodles (cook separately & store extra rice or noodles separately or you'll end up with a gummy mess).

Ingredients:

• onion (medium)
• olive oil (about 1 Tbsp)
• chicken breast (about 1/3 lb boneless, skinless)
• chicken broth (1 quart)
• garlic (1 clove)
• shiitake mushrooms* (4 largishstems removed), or some other kind, or no mushrooms at all -- about 1/2 cup sliced
• lemon grass (1 stalk)
• kaffir lime leaves (2 or 3)
• dried red chili peppers (1 or 2)
• fresh jalapeno pepper (optional - 1/2 to 1)
• fresh ginger (a few quarter-sized slices, peeled)
• juice of 1/2 lime (or more if you want)
• rice wine vinegar
• shoyu or tamari
• water (a cup or so)
• fresh basil *and/or cilantro (lots)
• cherry tomatoes (a few, say 4 or 5, cut in half)
• about 1/3 lb bay scallops
• fresh, whole jumbo shrimps (8)

Directions:

First you slice up the onion and saute it in the olive oil very slowly until it's very soft. Then you cut up the chicken breast and put it in and let it cook for a bit. Add the garlic and let it cook for just a minute. It doesn't really matter if you mince it up or if you run it through the garlic press. I can't find my garlic press, so I minced it. Then add the chicken broth (I used one 32-oz box of unsalted chicken broth, but I've also made it with homemade vegetable stock and mushroom broth which I bought by accident and it tasted just fine). Toss in the very thinly sliced mushrooms if you want them. Shiitakes especially seem kind of rubbery to me if you don't slice them really thin.

The next few things you won't actually eat, but they add a very nice flavor to the broth: just snip the lemon grass into 2-inch pieces - it's a bitch to chop, and you'll be picking them out later anyway; the kaffir lime leaves just toss in there whole, sort of like bay leaves. The dried peppers can be put in whole (though know your peppers -- if the broth is going to stand overnight, for example, you might want to break one or both of them and discard the seeds, unless you like really hot food). I usually also add a couple of thick slices of jalapeno pepper -- remove seeds (wear gloves!!) if you don't want it to get too hot. Peel the fresh ginger and slice into quarter-sized slices - add maybe $1 or $1.50 worth (4-6 chunks). Dried ginger doesn't work so well -- skip it if you don't have fresh ginger.

Let all of this simmer for a while, until the chicken is completely done. Add the lime juice and maybe a tablespoon or so each of rice wine vinegar and good soy sauce or tamari. The only rice wine vinegar I had was sushi vinegar, which is sweetened and salted. Worked fine - I just used a little less tamari so it wouldn't get too salty.

Taste it at this point. If you feel like it needs to be a little sweeter, add a few slices of carrot. The best time to do that whole broth part is the day before you want to make the soup, but if you didn't think of it yesterday, just let it stand for as long as you can (bring it to a simmer every now and then for a few minutes if it's going to be a while, just to discourage pathogen growth) or refrigerate it for a few hours. You don't want to just let it simmer endlessly, though, as I find this compromises the delicateness of the flavors.

When it's almost time to serve it, bring it to a gentle simmery boil and add the scallops, shrimps*, tomatoes, and the basil, stems and all (I'm talking about like maybe almost a whole one of those packages you get at the grocery store). Add more water if you need to, in order to keep everything submerged (a cup or so should do it). You can remove the peppers, lemon grass, etc. before you serve it, or just make people pick it out of their bowls themselves.

*Update: Yes, I just toss the shrimps in, shells and all. You can peel & clean them first if you want, but I think they look kind of cool whole. Plus they're kind of fun to peel at the table if you and your guests don't mind that sort of thing. Regarding the mushrooms, they are totally optional. I prefer shiitakes, but those little funny-looking ones like they have in the Thai or Vietnamese restaurants are good too, if you can find them. The button mushrooms or portobellos are not so good in this.

And also, I forgot to include cilantro when I wrote this down. Use a generous handful (not a whole great big bunch of it), rinsed and maybe torn up a bit, but don't bother chopping it. Oh, and I also forgot to say to simmer it gently for five or maybe ten minutes -- until the shrimps are bright pink and the scallops are cooked through. The basil and cilantro should still be bright green.

Friday Random Ten: Nothing new under the sun edition

1. Bonin' in the Boneyard - Fishbone/Truth & Soul
2. Love Me Not - Polecat Creek/Salt Sea Bound
3. Cheatin' - The Gin Blossoms/New Miserable Experience
4. There's A Moon in the Sky - The B-52s/ The B-52s
5. I Can't Make It Alone - Dusty Springfield/Dusty in Memphis
6. Red Accordion - Patty Larkin/Perishable Fruit
7. Window on the World - John Hiatt & the Goners/Beneath This Gruff Exterior
8. Little One - Elliott Smith/From a Basement on a Hill
9. Evil Town - The Pinetops/Above Ground & Vertical
10. Top of the World - Two Nice Girls/Like a Version

Biking on Wednesdays

I didn't ride my bike today. It's another bad air day, with orange level alerts for both ozone and particulates. Plus a heat index of 102 with highs in the high 90s. It's OK, I guess, if I don't ride my damn bike every single day. I don't have to feel guilty about it. But if I thought it all through, I think I'd stop riding my bicycle altogether on Wednesdays on account of here in the land of a bazillion baptists (that's pronounced 'babtists,' apparently, if you're from here), Wednesday night is church night, and no matter which route I take home, I have to pass at least two churches.

Big deal, you say. Why should a bunch of churchgoing yahoos harsh your buzz so royally that you want to stay off the street? Are they so zealous that they have to stop and witness to passing bicyclists? Is cycling some kind of abomination, or is there something in Leviticus or the teachings of St. Paul that suffereth a woman not to ride a damn bike? Are they offended by those little skirts that you wear biking? Are you such a heathen that the very presence of a bunch of christians can wreck your day?

No, I'll tell you what it is: these people are a fucking traffic hazard. Seriously.

In the first place, there's a lot of them. And because all the churches have so many different activities Wednesday nights, it's impossible to predict what time would be best to pass by. It's like there's this ebbing and flowing swarm of them and they're all over the place and they're just not looking where they are going. The teenage girls are furtively watching the teenage boys, who are of course watching them. Mom is busy trying to herd a bunch of girls who are dressed like refugees from the set of like 'Little House on the Prairie' or something across the street in the crosswalk. Grandma is clutching her pocketbook and looking around warily. She saw it on the news the other night that little old ladies get mugged all the damn time, and she's pretty sure tonight is her night. She doesn't see me of course on account of I'm white. She's easy to miss though because she's moving pretty slowly.

Dad sees me at least; he's staring right at my tits as I swerve to avoid him and the car door he has just opened in my path. I imagine he's thinking about the sins of Bathsheba* as he stammers an apology. This is by far the worst menace. The car door opening, I mean, not immodest women.

Anyone fool enough to ride a bike on city streets knows that it's safest to act as if every car door will in fact open when you're right alongside of it. But once you've seen five people get out of a Civic and cross the street and go into a building, you're surprised when the driver's door opens and someone gets out. Maybe you're riding defensively enough that you're sort of prepared for it, and there's no collision, but what was he doing in there? Having an NPR Driveway Moment^SM? Didn't think so. Getting high? Reading a little bit of scripture, maybe, before going on in to the fellowship hall?

And you can forget about anything you might have thought about how friendly and polite these freshly-scrubbed, modestly dressed people must be. They're every bit as rude and hostile as people in a hurry anywhere else. They not only ignore the presence of a passing bicyclist, they aren't paying any attention at all to passing cars, either. And they're rude and hostile when they're driving their cars too, honking and cutting in front of people, and turning without using their signals & then getting mad at other drivers for not using their signals. Oh, and harassing females. A couple of weeks ago on a Wednesday, I was going over the bridge just before this one church, and a shiny red car full of college boys rode past me, slowed down and rode alongside me for a while, then slightly behind me, then a bit ahead of me -- shouting crude sexual remarks the whole time and making rude gestures. For quite a while. I mean, it was quite a bit beyond the kind of scene where you can just maybe flip 'em a bird & forget about it. Scary-type shit, actually. Then they sped up, cut in front of me, and into the church parking lot, whereupon they piled out and started tossing a frisbee.

How fucking wholesome.

On the other hand, Wednesday is a great night to go to the grocery store, or the laundromat, or anyplace else you want to avoid a crowd.

*Thanks to Emma at Gendergeek for the Sins of Bathsheba link.

Now this is just sad

Nudist's naked burial wish denied

So this 82-year-old guy in Illinois died after a lifetime of nudity. Naturism. Whatever. He fought 20 arrests for indecency since 1962. Despite his clearly stated wishes to the contrary, his brothers (one a minister, apparently) are having him buried in grey trousers and a shirt.

The jerks.

-via the BBC

And in related news, the BBC also reports that cops on a Dorset beach are going, um, undercover to catch "predatory males" making indecent propositions at a nude beach.

Truth vs. Advertising

OK.

The Dove ads. I'm sort of oblivious; I haven't actually seen any of these in the wild, but it seems like everybody's got their knickers in a twist about em. I guess there are some guys whose manhood is actually threatened by the presence in their field of vision of underwear-clad chicks who don't look like all the other mostly-unclothed chicks they like to look at while whacking off. And some other people, apparently, are freaking out because oh my god these women are FAT! Yuck! Unhealthy!! And then there are some girls, I guess, going all 'yay, it's OK to be fat! I saw this girl in this one ad, and she was like, well, not fat exactly, but she looked sorta normal, and they let her out in her underwear anyway.'

Yippee, an ad campaign giving us all permission (!) to be young, beautiful, airbrushed, and fit -- and we can even choose from several skin colors and heights, and to be something larger than a size 2. In comfortable white cotton undies, no less. Hey, I'm going to rush out and buy some of that -- what is it again they're selling? Body Firming Lotion?

What in the fucking bloody goddamn hell is that for?

Yikes. Hang on. I'm having a flashback here. I know exactly what that shit is for. They use it to take money away from women. The cosmetic-industrial complex, I mean. And it works! The part about the money does, I mean.

I found out about such things in my early twenties. I wasn't fat, exactly, but I was on a diet. I'd in fact been on a diet for much of the previous decade. Since that growth spurt right before puberty when my mother got terrified because I was already almost 5 feet tall (her height) and weighed almost 95 pounds (her pre-pregnancy weight). She was afraid for me, see, because she knew that if I got fat, no one would love me. She said it right out. It was for my own good. If I ever actually got fat, then men like my father wouldn't marry me, and women like her would talk about me behind my back, and pity me. She was not wrong, as it turned out.

But I got very good at dieting in the meantime. And exercising. And throwing up after meals. It would never happen to me, I was pretty sure of that at least. But then I was in the locker room one day and my best friend (a ballerina) pointed out that, if I stood a certain way, with my butt sort of clenched, it looked almost like I was getting cellulite on my ass.

Oh! the horror! I couldn't quite see it, but she assured me it was there. A woman in her thirties, maybe, was in the room with us, and she overheard us and laughed at us! Laughed! Had she no idea that my entire future was on the line? She dropped her towel and we stared, aghast, at the fit, trim gal we'd seen encased in lycra in the advanced aerobics class. She had stretch marks! And cellulite! And her tits -- gravity -- oh my god!

"We all get it, girls," she said, or something like that. "Might as well relax."

She was trying to be kind, of course, but my friend and I got dressed in a damn hurry, terror in our eyes as we looked around and noted that there was not one perfect body over the age of like 15 in there. And this was a hard-core fitness studio kind of place, not some YWCA full of stressed-out moms and middle-aged secretaries trying to relax in the hot tub. This was not the sort of place where you saw actual fat chicks. Models worked out there.

So off we went to our favorite department store to buy some shoes or something on the way home, and stopped by the cosmetics counter to see if there were any free-gift-with-purchase totebags, which we sort of collected. I can't remember whether there were any or not, because we were entranced by a new product on display in the very posh end of the cosmetics department.

You might say we were extra vulnerable at that particular time, on that particular day, at that particular point in our lives. It was a perfect marketing moment: naked unquestioned desperation meets product, and money will be spent.

I wish I could remember what that shit was called, or who made it, but it was one of the high-end cosmetic companies and it smelled really, um, well it was made out of seaweed I guess, and it came with this specially designed device for massaging it into your ass and your thighs. What it did, see, was break down the cell walls of cellulite and if you used it faithfully every day for the rest of your life, you would never be troubled by cellulite. Totally scientific. Breakthrough discovery. You might get a fat ass, but it would be as smooth as it was the day you were born. Sort of.

Well, we both bought some, free tote bag or no. And we used it every day until we couldn't stand the smell any more. And that shit was expensive! And oh my god, it stunk! And you know what? It didn't work! It did absolutely fucking nothing! Plus it had the extra bonus effect of making us look at our asses every day, right after we stepped off the scale, to see if it was working. If we'd been able to get a full-length magnifying mirror we would have, to better see our hideous flaws and repent. I would quite cheerfully have donned a burka to hide my shame at the horror that was my own perky little 21-year-old ass.

Jesus.

So, yeah, now it's 20-some years later. I have cellulite. And stretch marks. And I guess my ass is kind of big, now that you mention it. And let's just not talk about gravity and my tits in the same sentence.

And they are still trying to sell me that shit?

I'll keep my fifty bucks, thanks.

Patriarchy's many cornerstones

Over at I Blame the Patriarchy, my fellow spinster aunt hits the nail on the head yet again in her discussion of a couple of issues that continue to baffle me beyond all reason.

"... I reveal no secrets when I say that many traditionally whitedude-o-centric institutions are so deeply entrenched in fucktarded patriarchal ideology that the spinster aunt necessarily writhes in ambivalence when she hears of women (or other oppressed groups) who try to bust through venerable dudely barriers to claim a piece of the action."

Yeah, exactly.

What set her spinning on this one was a news item that I noted sort of sadly and moved on before it made my brain hurt too much: a bunch of Catholic women risked excommunication by ordaining themselves or each other or whatever (unofficially of course) as priests and deacons. Out on a boat, I guess, so that they were not subject to the jurisdiction of any particular terrestrial authority (and, I imagine, they didn't want to drag some unfortunate parish through hell along with them, just in case there was trouble).

It just seems silly to me somehow, to want so badly to participate in a system that prohibits you from participating and works against your interests. No, not merely silly -- it's fucking nuts. Commenter Jennifer, over at Twisty's place, quite properly invoked Audre Lorde's The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master's House.

Duh.

But then Twisty also brings the gay marriage question into the mix. This is another one that makes my head spin. I mean, it's totally crazy that some people are allowed to participate in this sanctified activity and some aren't. It's a total no-brainer in my view that if straight people are allowed to do it, gay people should not be prevented from doing whatever it is that people do to get married, nor taking advantage of whatever patriarchy-supporting (or not) perks it offers. What puzzles me is why anyone wants to do it, and why there are so many perks attached to it. I guess Twisty says it more succinctly here:

"It’s not that I think homos shouldn’t get married; it’s that I think nobody should get married. Of patriarchy’s many cornerstones, marriage is the cornerstoniest. So, c’mon, let’s abolish the whole thing! Who’s with me?"

I'm in! I'm in!! Though as I pointed out in the comments over there (can I quote myself here?), I support it in an abstract "why the hell not" kind of way:

"I don't want my relationships regulated or defined or subject to legal obligation. [...] The only benefit to me personally that legally-sanctioned same-sex marriage could possibly hold is that I could more meaningfully choose not to marry anyone at all. I have successfully taken a stand against marrying a man by not actually marrying any of them, but my opposition to marrying a woman has gone largely undemonstrated."

You won't find me at any protests carrying any signs or arguing much about it. I guess I can't get all worked up about being denied a right I don't especially want, even if (in the context of things) it's only fair that I should have it.

But the light that dear Aunt Twisty flipped on for me was the one illuminating that towering institution of misogyny and patriarchal power: the symphony orchestra. I haven't been paying a lot of attention to the classical music world for a very long time now, and it was with a little surprise that I noted the fuss about Marin Alsop's confirmation as music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Surely that can't be remarkable? Alas, yes it is. She's not the first woman conductor, but the first woman conductor to be appointed artistic director of a major orchestra.

This one caught me up a little short, as it was once upon a time my ambition to be a symphony conductor. I had no idea the odds were so stacked against me. I mean, it would have been much easier for a little girl growing up in the 60s & 70s to become a fireman or an astronaut. It seemed at the time, that women my age would have a much harder time fighting their way to the top in law or medicine or business. Surely not music? But it occurs to me: f I'd known all this, would I maybe have fought harder for it? Like somehow if I'd stayed there & fought for my right to exist in that particular patriarchal edifice, would I now have some kind of clue what would motivate a boat full of Catholic ladies to defy authority and ordain themselves in order to participate more fully in an organization that oppresses them? Maybe I'd be able to get a little bit more excited about demanding to be allowed to marry a girl if I wanted to.

Then again, maybe not.

Beer just wants to be free

Open source beer? Yep. Via BBC.

Spider pics

Some nice photos of jumping spiders via Hattie's Blog.

Still too busy to post much, but do check out the puppy pictures over at Twisty's place -- and read her posts while you're there. She's very funny. And smart.

Karaoke anyone?

TC Byrd was up too late last night over at Hattie's Blog and tossed me the ball (which she got from Gwen at Gwen's Petty, Judgmental, Evil Thoughts) on this goofy 'Fantasy Karaoke' meme. All there is to it is to name the song you wish you could sing at a karaoke bar but so far don't have the guts to do it.

That would be all of them, I'm afraid. It's not that I don't have the guts, but I just am a totally lame-ass singer, and I can't remember lyrics, and I can never quite see the words on the teleprompter screen. I just don't have this kind of fantasy. Ever.

I confess I've never been to a karaoke bar, although we did once bring a karaoke machine into the radio studio during a fundraising drive and I did participate in the "call in your pledge right now or we'll sing 'McArthur Park' all the way through" episode. But I didn't sing; I played air tambourine or something. If there was anyone still listening they did not call for fear of being made to sing on the air. We had to sing it.

That was not my fantasy though. And I had much better luck fundraising-wise when I threatened to play Side 2 of "Hammered Dulcimer Holiday Classics" if nobody called. I got lots of pledges. Then about an hour later someone called and said she would pledge a whole pile of money but only if I played said side in its entirety.

You win some, you lose some.

OK, maybe I'd do 'Proud Mary,' or that one about 'Jeremiah was a bullfrog,' which we used to play on the jukebox and get up on the stage above the dining room and lipsynch to at my friend's dad's restaurant. With choreography. When I was in like second grade.

But I'll only do it if you don't call in your pledge right now.

It's not the heat, it's the stupidity

The first thing I heard this morning was the annoying local host on our NPR affiliate telling me the high today was expected to approach the record set in like the 1940s or something - around 100 -- and that the heat index was 107, whatever that means. And plus there's an air quality alert of Level Orange, which means you shouldn't go outside, basically. Especially not to ride your bike. Which I did anyway.

I left the house early, and it was plenty cool, considering. The ride home is very likely to suck. On the other hand, it's not very far, and there's beer in the fridge. And lots of other icy cold beverages. And even some mint-flavored Klondike Bars in the freezer.

I'll wait & see how bad it is when it's time to go home; maybe I'll leave the bike here. Tonight's low temperature is supposed to be around 80, so I suspect it won't cool off all that much. On the other hand, it's a bad air day & I'll feel guilty calling a cab.

Sunday shoe blogging

I know it's Monday, but here is my neighbor looking at a 1960-something (?) BSA Rocket 3. I like his shoes quite a lot. I guess you'd have to call him a metrosexual; he's the only straight guy I know who has more shoes than I do. You can click on the image to see a little bit more of the motorcycle if you want.

Dog dream

I dreamed last night that I was running with the alphabitch herself. That's her at left, sitting in what was then the only comfortable chair in the house. We used to fight over it sometimes. I wish I had a picture of her running, so you could see how perfectly beautiful her tail was. I can remember it, but sometimes I'm afraid I'll forget.

In the dream, we were just running together, down by the creek in the park, and she wasn't on her leash. I'd always wanted to do that with her, let her run off the leash, but she was a little bit unreliable and liked to start fights with other dogs. And eat garbage. But in the dream, we just kept running. Sometimes she followed me, and sometimes I ran to catch up to her, and sometimes we ran beside each other.

It was a very happy dream, and she's been on my mind all day. Maybe I'm having dog dreams on account of looking at pictures of TwistyFaster's dangerously cute new puppy. I can't help going back to look.

Visitor

I guess this is going to be an all-bug blog for a while. I'm too tired of looking at words all day to write anything, so here's another nifty bug.

You can click on the picture for a closer look, should you want one. It's not a very big specimen, but I think it's kind of pretty against the peeling paint and the oxidized metal. Not a great place for a bug to be, what with people going in & out & closing the door, so my friend transported it across the parking lot & into a nice leafy tree. It stayed there for a while but was gone by the time I arrived, alas.

Glad I got to see the pictures, anyway.

Fish or cut bait

This is a catalpa (or catawba) worm. It's the caterpillar stage in the life cycle of the Catalpa sphinx moth. The moths lay zillions of eggs on the leaves of catalpa trees, and when they hatch, they (very swiftly!) eat all the leaves & climb down to the ground to pupate in the dirt. I think you'll get a larger picture if you click on that one, & you can sort of see the bare twigs where there used to be leaves. Apparently these make excellent fish bait, but I'll probably never confirm this myself. I'm also told that there is a species of hunting wasp that lays its eggs on these particular caterpillars; haven't seen any of them yet, though.

Not a dog blog, exactly

I got a nice note admiring Stella from ae at arse poetica with an invitation to visit her dog (dingo!) picture archive featuring the very lovely & pointy-eared Kate, a.k.a. Miss Katherine Fuzzypants. Worth a visit. Nice blog, too. Thanks ae! Stella (a.k.a. Mrs. Snackwell) enjoyed the pics also. Here is an old picture of her from her second birthday party. Note the pearls, a gift from my stepmother.

It's not too late

You can still tune in to World O'Crap's "Ultimate Wingnut Challenge" in which she has, I guess in the manner of some kind of sports tournament or one of those survival-on-an-island type reality shows, chosen a field of nutjob columnists and is having a contest (readers get to vote!) to determine who is the "King of the Wingnuts." It looks like we're still in some preliminary elimination rounds. Go here and scroll down to July 11 for the first post & then read 'em all, if you haven't been following it.

I can't stop giggling.

Blogging vs. life

I don't have a computer at home any more, and I've been insanely busy at work lately. I mean the going back to work after dinner & walking the dog & working til 7 am, then going home long enough to shower & change & come back for more type of insanely busy. It'll pass, I'm sure. So I haven't had much time to post anything, or read anything, or think about anything. But I did add some new items to the blogroll (and made a separate list of other canine-related blogs). If you're interested. Especially check with Magpie, Shakespeare's Sister, Majikthise, and Baghdad Burning, and Orcinus; they're paying way more attention than I am these days.

It's probably a good thing I haven't been paying attention to the news; it makes me madder & madder every time I hear anything. I mean, what do people think? Are they surprised that the thugs we elected are acting like thugs?

Books Books Books

Oh dear -- I've been away for a few days and I got tagged for the infamous Book Meme.

Total Number of Books Owned: I'm afraid I can't give an accurate answer just now. See, my books are all mildew-y and I don't know yet how many will survive. At least a few hundred, I'm hoping. The paperbacks seem least affected. I've been going through them all wearing these silly purple non-latex gloves and a mask & eye shield wiping them off with bleach. Some can't be saved, but most probably can.

Last Book I Bought: Haven't bought many books lately on account of the mold problem. Must be that new collection of travel writing by Jan Morris that's sitting on the table next to my bed, and which I haven't read yet. And/or Bill Bryson's new book, "A Short History of Nearly Everything." I think I bought them both at the same time, and there they sit.

Last Book I Read: I haven't been reading very much lately, either. I think I read a few of the pieces in "Best Non-Required Reading 2005" or some such, before I loaned it to somebody. Or maybe one of those goofball 1970s mysteries by Oliver Bleeck that I found on eBay. I love those.

Five Books That Mean a Lot:

1. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. I know that both Susie (of Suburban Guerrilla fame) and Fred Clark (at the highly excellent Slacktivist) named this one. Susie says she keeps getting too distracted to finish it, and I can see how that would happen. It's all about subplots. The first time I read it, I could hardly put it down even to sleep. But it's like 1400 pages long, so I did have to sleep a couple of times. Plus it's exhausting reading. You can't skim or let your mind wander for a second or you lose your place. Fred had the same impulse I did, though, which was to flip back to the front and start again as soon as he finished. I think I read it three or four times straight through when I first got hold of a copy. I read really fast, and I rarely need bookmarks, but with this book, I needed two: one to keep my place in the main text, and the other to keep my place in the extensive endnotes, which are essential if you are trying to understand what the hell is happening. It's a hilarious book, yes, but it's miles deep and also completely absurd and full of despair and hope and -- oh, just go read it.
2. The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker. This one totally blew me away when it was first excerpted in the New Yorker in (I think it must have been) the mid eighties. I think this is the first book I came across that made such great use of footnotes and rambling, demented digressions about nothing in particular. Had rather too much influence on my own writing, I fear.
3. The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare. Young adult fiction about an orphaned teenager sent from the opulent, tropical plantation where she'd been raised by her rich (but alas deeply indebted, leaving her nearly penniless when he died) and indulgent grandfather to live with her mother's sister, who had run away and married a Puritan and lived in New England. Cultural misunderstandings rule the day, and though our young protaganist is a good sport, she is clueless about household chores and protestant worship practices, among other things. I loved this book as a girl. For one thing, I moved around a lot as a kid and changed schools nearly every year, so the "girl out of place" motif resonated powerfully for me. For another thing, I read anything I could get my hands on about the colonial-era witch trials in the US, and even though this one is fiction it quickly became a favorite -- in no small part, I think, because the puritanical witch-burning mindset is just background. The author does not explain or moralize or theorize -- and you could absolutely see how such things could have happened -- in a way that nonfiction just can't show the average third- or fourth-grader.
4. The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Suess. Meant a lot to me because my dad read it to me every night for years, always that one and one or two or please dad three more? It was also important to me because it was in staring intently at the pages of the book as dad recited it (he had long since memorized it, bless him) that it occurred to me that he wasn't just making shit up: the words he was saying corresponded in some way not just to the pictures but to these mysterious black shapes on the pages. I started noticing the same patterns in other books and it wasn't very long before my parents found me out & made me read the bedtime stories to them.
5. Only one more? OK. Ada, or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov. Gloriously complicated (and in certain ways profoundly dysfunctional) characters, pyrotechnical wordplay (in multiple languages). I first read it when I was too young to fully get all the truly twisted implications it presents, but I think it was the first book I read that didn't delineate "good vs. evil" in the way I had come to expect. I think I'll re-read that if the mold hasn't totally consumed it. I only have it in hardback, alas.

This meme has been around for a while, so I'm not going to tag anyone in particular. If you haven't done it yet and feel like you want to, consider yourself tagged.