Friday Fulminations

Why are the media giving the out-of-control, tantrum-throwing toddler of a minister in Florida so much power? Have none of these people ever been the parent of a three-year-old? Ignore.

Speaking of ill-parented children, I am still pissed about the Johnston-spawning Palin spawn mucking up my Dancing With The Stars, as a cautious foray into the ABC message boards indicates the presence of a rabid audience that is determined to tie up their cell lines, landlines, e-mail, and any unattended phone in the vicinity to OMG VOTE 4 BRISTOL and keep her on into perpetuity. And I so wanted to see Margaret Cho eviscerate the poor little thing with a smile.

In other news of questionable taste, my high school alumni group is in a kerfuffle because a Native American historian across the street at Notre Dame noticed that the school's mascot is an Indian, and has asked the diocese of South Bend to look into making a change. My reaction was wow, I can't believe they managed to hang onto the Indian this long, but judging by Facebook comments, the larger reaction is OMG TRADITION POLITICAL CORRECTNESS BUT NOTRE DAME'S MASCOT IS A SHORT IRISH GUY AND NOBODY COMPLAINS MUSLIMS QURAN !!!!!11!!!!!!111CHEEZITS!

The school board apparently checked with the Pokagon band of the Pottowattomie a few decades ago and got the okay to use the word "Indians" and a single image of a guy in a Lakota-style headdress (in northern Indiana, go figure). I do not know if the current Pokagon leadership have been consulted--although the band's education coordinator graduated in my class and, very not surprisingly, has so far declined to weigh in on a comment thread in which a bunch of mostly white people are insisting that it's not at all disrespectful to let a white kid in fringed pajamas and face paint hop around a basketball court at halftime, or for a bunch of white kids in the stands at a football game to do the Florida State/Atlanta Braves tomahawk chop. Or that it's no more insulting to Native Americans to call our team "Indians" than it is insulting to some curiously unspecified group to have nearby Mishawaka High School call their teams "Cavemen," or, inexplicably, insulting to... Catholics? martyrs? that the New Orleans NFL team is called "Saints."

If the Pokagon really think "Indians" and the logo and the Florida State-style spear on the football helmets is a nice tip of the hat to their culture, then I don't have a problem with it. If they'd like to set new guidelines ensuring a respectful appropriation of their ethnic group and cultural artifacts, I'm all for that too (maybe retiring the old "Indians, St. Joe Indians, whoop whoop!" cheer would be a good start? I'm just sayin'). And if they decide that all the half-assed good intentions in the world about honoring some vague notion of Native American nobility and courage through a 1950s caricature of a chief just don't cut it any more and put the kibosh on the whole thing, I'm okay with that as well. They're knocking down the old school building pretty soon anyway and moving to a new campus downtown; when it's over, it's over.

In Which Arizonans Baffle Me By Being Even Stupider Than I Feared

Jan Brewer verbally stumbled, went silent and mangled her grammar during last week's televised debate.

The result of her performance, a new statewide survey indicates, is that she is even more popular.

Pollster Scott Rasmussen found 60 percent of the 500 likely Arizona voters questioned in the automated telephone survey on Tuesday said they intend to vote for the incumbent. That's up three points from a survey taken a week before the debate.

Just as soon as I finish banging my head against this nice big rock I found, I will remind myself that polls conducted via landline calls disproportionately sample old people, and that old people in Arizona disproportionately think good thoughts about reanimated corpses (see: Jan Brewer, John McCain).

Meanwhile, the Arizona Green Party is trying like mad to get rid of the Democratic vote-diluting fake candidates Log Cabin Republican Steve May recruited from a pool of homeless street performers in Tempe. I need to stop going to bed thinking the sun has just set on the stupidest day possible, because it keeps coming up the next morning, dragging even more idiocy along with it.

In Which We Confess to a Touch of Writer's Block

So much for writing every day; three and out, just in time for football season.

The calendar, despite all my protestations, has insisted on not only rolling around to September but ticking away the days faster than I could ever have imagined was possible.

Six days now until I bundle my son and several overpriced bags onto the plane for the trip to Seattle and college. Twelve days until I trudge onto the plane with a couple empty bags stuffed inside my suitcase, alone.

I do not know how people who actually lose children to things like disease and war manage to keep going. I do not know how my father survived sixteen months of my brother being deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq. My son is healthy, thriving, and excited about getting on with his life. I am left living inside a Norman Rockwell painting.

I did not expect it to be this hard.

In Which Jan-Jan Does Her Best Sharron Angle

You've seen our esteemed governor's "opening statement" in the debate Wednesday night, if "..." properly qualifies as an opening statement, and while 36 hours really isn't enough time to recover from that display of fuckitude, now there's more, courtesy of the ABC affiliate in Phoenix and the Tucson Citizen.

In Governor Brewer's defense, this was a difficult situation for her, and not one that lent itself to her staff's go-to problem-solving tactic, which is, of course, to stop everything and pray. Maybe that's what she was doing in her head during the lengthy pause between the question and her declaration that it had been an interesting evening; clearly, the prayer warrior consensus went something like this:

This morning, in a stunner, Brewer announced she's not doing any more debates.

"All you guys were doing and talking were beheadings, beheadings, beheadings," the governor said. "That is something that has stuck with you all for so long, and I just felt we needed to move on."

Beheadings are such a drag, people. Move along. Nothing to see here.

Uh, Fellow Arizonans? Please Do No Forget to Vote in November.

This is the current occupant of the Arizona governor's office. She wants to come back for more.

Jesus god. Please vote Goddard in November.

Unrepentant Geekery, Part Deux *UPDATED*

Now with more explanation, below.

SOFA, bitchez.




















p = .738

My heart flutters.

Statistics have been the bane of my existence since junior year in college and the stats course that was required for my anthropology major. The class was taught by a wee, marginally insane Scotsman who claimed to be able to identify the county in which any given scotch was distilled, simply by sniffing it.

Suffice it to say that I would have done better if the class had focused on the whisky and not so much on the numbers. It got so bad that I resorted to carrying the floppy disk with my homework projects on it (this was in the long long ago time far far away, when data were stored on bendy rectangular media the size of a cd sleeve) through the library security zone and actually rubbing it on the sensor so I could say whoops, disk must've gotten bunged and take the blind F rather than letting the TA see incontrovertible evidence of my incompetence.

The prof ended up giving everyone a C instead of the Fs we deserved since failing an entire class presumably would not have reflected well on his teaching skills. The TA went on to pursue a career as a car show model. I kept my textbook and made occasional and inevitably tear-inducing attempts at using it as a reference over the years.

And now I found SOFA, and my life has changed. It is an open-source online stats package that evaluates your data and walks you through the process of selecting tests. It cranks out graphics. It produces results I can use. I understand, finally, and now I still weep, but this time in joy and relief.

Oh, science. We're on again.

The View from Here

My new window view.

After 16 years and four weeks, I got a window at work. My office is much brighter than it used to be, considering that "used to be" meant whatever light sort of filtered in over the bookcases and through the storage shelves. I thought I liked it that way, but since I spent today quite productively wrestling with statistics packages rather than morosely staring through my monitor into a black, black future, I am thinking that maybe light isn't a bad thing.

Public Service Announcement

If, like me, you regularly need terrain, elevation, and distance data at work and, like me, tend to have requests for map-based data answered with the question but what are the UTMs?, only for that answer to be, invariably, fuck if I know, a miracle has arrived. A gift from the mapping gods, who, previously unbeknownst to me, are named Zonum Solutions. They have a free online toolset that ties in with Google Maps and lets you get spot elevations, or set points to measure linear distance, or define a polygon to measure area and perimeter of spatial features. And--and, miracle of miracles--a window in the sidebar shows the UTMs for wherever you have the cursor positioned in the map.

Then, the FireShot add-on allows you to download the onscreen map (plus any lines or points you've drawn on it) into Photoshop to further muck around and save. I'm not sure about permissions for using the images you generate this way in publications, but at the least, you can generate nifty draft copies to hand to the AutoCAD guys down the hall, and make all the maps you want to hang on your wall.

Happy archaeologist.

Just another way the MaddowBlog serves the world.

Rain

The monsoon season continued to disappoint for the better part of two months. Oh, sure, clouds built up and danced around and even sometimes flashed lightning and growled thunder somewhere just out of reach, but the promised rain materialized exactly three times. Even then it didn't have the courtesy to put on a show during daylight hours when we might be able to watch the clouds with rising anticipation, waiting for the telltale gust of suddenly cool wind to cue the rain out of the wings and dance across the desert stage.

No, no, always at night, and usually in such wee hours that we were sound asleep and couldn't be roused to at least hear the water and hail tapdancing on the roof. Three summer mornings we awoke to sodden ground, crumpled programs of downed palm leaves and moraines of mesquite pods left by the rivulets of water across the yard like so much spilled popcorn kicked aside by the audience as it left, the curtain down, the show long over.

Until today. Today, finally, gloriously, afternoon clouds flung lightning to the ground close enough to knock out the power to the office, thunder rattled the windows before skidding off to the east along the curb of the Catalinas, rain slammed down in drops the size of bullfrog tadpoles. You want rain? I got yer rain right here. Rain rain rain, going on for hours now, the initial downpour replaced by steady sprinkles. The trash cans in the park down the street are all on their sides, dazed, accompanied by slightly less surprised tree branches; closer to home, my shovels have been blown across the yard, along with my buckets. Stacks of styrofoam cups that protected plants from the frost a lifetime ago, back when it still dipped below a hundred degrees here, have found new lodgings in the flower bed, the fence, the chiminea, possibly the neighbor's roof. The yard is a lake.

This is usually the time of year that the monsoon winds down, and after months of the near-daily routine of heat --> humidity --> clouds --> thunder --> SPLOOSH, we're usually about ready by now for it to be over. I wonder if it is still almost over this year, now that feels like it's just begun.

On We Go

Write every day, says my newly emerging star writer cousin. Write every day, says the wavering whispery voice that serves as my Jiminy Cricket at work, preferably about archaeology. Heh. Write every day, says my fantasy self in between doing sets of crazy weights and fending off Rachel Maddow's advances and pursuing a career that benefits humanity.

Fuck it, my kid's leaving, says dumpy tubby slacker me, and she sits staring blankly at the laptop, feeling vaguely guilty about not being more productive today and not spending more time reading to him when he was little and not playing Monopoly more often, contemplating checking the SunTran schedule to see when the next bus that might squash her head will be tooling by. Unless they're still on strike, that is; God, it's hard to keep track of these things sometimes.

I wonder if my mom felt this way as I was gearing up to go off to school. Unfortunately, at the same time she was also gearing up to pick up and move 900 miles away from South Bend to Dallas, so she may have been a bit distracted. She and my stepfather hit the road a week after graduation, my beagle sticking his head out of the back window of the old blue Pontiac as Mom waved frantically and disappeared up the hill and I stood in the driveway watching until they were gone and tried to absorb the fact that I was alone and home wasn't home any more. I looked through the windows at the empty rooms, half-heartedly rattled the locked garage door, and finally got on my bike and pedaled over to my German teacher's house to bunk for a while. A couple of weeks later I would shift back to the old neighborhood, this time to my English teacher's house down the block, where I lay on an improvised pile of cushions and blankets in the upstairs spare room and stared at the ceiling. I was two months shy of 18.

Eventually, the day after my birthday, I made my way to my dad's house in southern Illinois, riding the same bus south to Indianapolis I'd ridden a million times before, killing time during the two-hour layover, and finally taking an ancient I-V Coach on the last leg to Vincennes. Dad was there as usual to drive me across the river into Illinois, and after a week or maybe two he drove me farther west across another river to St. Louis, and I got on a plane and got off in a foreign country called Texas and maybe a couple weeks after that Mom flew me back up to Illinois, to Chicago, and after a few days she said I've got to let you go now and hugged me goodbye in the parking lot behind the dorm across the street and that was that.

I took the train home to South Bend several times, but it wasn't home any more without my mom and my house and dogs and bedroom, staying with different friends, occasionally running into acquaintances from high school with them and having to consciously remind myself that these were my former classmates too. It was far too easy to fall back into the third wheel mode I was used to from spending summers at my dad's, in the small town I'd lived in until I was nine, hanging out with old elementary school friends and trying to fit in with their high school friends but never quite having the right common frames of reference.

That was 25 years ago. I will be telling my son goodbye almost 25 years to the day after my mom told me goodbye. No matter how different the situation, the sense of unreality is the same. Home without him will not feel so much like home any more, and I will not feel so much like me.

Birthday Blog

43 years later, I guess I've done okay for myself. Birthday breakdown:

6:00 a.m.: girlfriend delivers coffee in bed (from Coffee Times, highly recommended if you find yourself driving on Speedway in the vicinity of Country Club).

7:00 a.m.: officemates show up with orange juice and champagne, respectively, and mimosas commence.

9:00 a.m.: meet my son at home and take off for Mt. Lemmon.

9:45 a.m.: arrive at Molino Canyon to find next to no water, but a few tiny tadpoles save the day.

Birthday tadpoles.

11:30 a.m.: son serves lunch of homemade coconut shrimp with (blue) lime sauce.

12:00 p.m.: first batch of cookies come out of oven.

1:30 p.m.: son accompanies me to gym.

2:30 p.m.: frozen pea application; SportsCenter.

6:00 p.m.: Girlfriend, both kids, and I hit Barrio. Tacos and beer.

sometime after that: happy collapse.

Bring on the 44th year.

Extra Time

I much prefer sports metaphors that open a little window of understanding life over sports metaphors that, well, define life.

Time is fluid in soccer. The match is supposed to last 90 minutes, but the referee may add time and allow play to continue if numerous injuries, substitutions, or other interruptions have conspired to prevent a fair full 90 minutes of competition. This makes for an agonizing experience when, say, your team has dominated possession and outplayed the other side and finally put a shot in the back of the net in the 89th minute. The clock rolls over 90:00 and you think the game's over, but because somebody's head got split open and had to be tended for a while, and somebody else needed lecturing after a yellow card, and the guys being substituted strolled off the field instead of sprinting, the referee says no, the game's not over yet. So you play on and wait and die every time the other team puts a shot on goal that takes a weird hop or deflects off a defender and you think goddammit, we had this thing won and you try to hold on until the whistle finally blows.

So now, after watching Vaughn Walker chest the ball off his own goal line and dribble circles around Prop 8 for the length of the field and fire an unstoppable shot into the top corner for a sure winner, we have extra time. Yeah, Walker put the first extra two minutes on the clock himself--the metaphor breaks down here a bit, but still--but now the 9th Circuit has added what feels like an entire additional half.

A federal appeals court decided Monday to put same-sex marriage in California on hold at least until December, interrupting the wedding plans of scores of gay couples who were hoping to exchange vows later this week.

We are told this is actually a good thing from a strategic standpoint, since it prevents the case from being prematurely kicked up to a Supreme Court that might not rule in our favor.

Loyola Law School professor Richard Hasen said Monday's order was strategically advantageous for supporters of same-sex marriage, no matter how disappointed many couples may be. If the panel had refused to place a hold on Walker's ruling, the supporters of Proposition 8 were prepared to seek a stay from the Supreme Court. The court is believed to be divided on the question of gay marriage, with Justice Anthony Kennedy considered a swing vote. A vote on a hold might have pushed the justices into taking an early position on the question.

"I think there are strategic reasons why even the most ardent supporter of gay marriage could opt for a stay," said Hasen, an expert on federal court stays. "The concern is that rushing things to the Supreme Court could lead to an adverse result [for supporters of gay marriage.] If this case takes another year to get to the U.S. Supreme Court, there could be more states that adopt same-sex marriage and more judicial opinions that reach that conclusion."

Hasen said the hold "takes the heat" off Kennedy and takes the case "off the front burner for a while."

I'm not sure how a year's extra time makes Judge Walker's findings of fact any more or less compelling to Justice Kennedy, nor am I sure how many more states are poised to adopt marriage equality instead of strengthening its prohibition. And I'm really not sure how the scoreboard showing states approving and states opposing any civil rights legislation is relevant to the Supreme Court's evaluation of the legislation's constitutionality. As much as I would love to see, say, 45 more states adopt marriage equality in the next year, that shouldn't be a necessary or even contributing condition to Anthony Kennedy deciding that the 14th Amendment really does still count, and that equality is not negotiable.

Yet again we are being told to just wait a little longer, to be patient, to let the dust settle and not pressure people in power, to see if maybe somebody somewhere in some other state will pick up the slack and do something, because if enough states do something, maybe it won't be so hard for the people who can do something federally binding to actually do it.

Hey, you've already played 90 minutes plus two, so what's two more, and two more, and two more after that? And if the other team manages to poke one in because you're exhausted and your keeper's screened? Well, you're used to losing, so no big deal, right? Right.

I Know What I Want for My Birthday

Specifically, what I want at 5 pm PDT on my birthday. To hear the California bells ringing all the way over here in the desert.

Final Stay Order

My current favorite four words in the English language, second only to here, have another beer: IT IS SO ORDERED.

You and Me Both

Another Day, Another Fail

Rachel Maddow's producer and chief blogger were in Arizona yesterday to have a look at the border fence in Nogales, talk to the Santa Cruz County sheriff, and wind down at the Tap Room at Hotel Congress in Tucson with a couple hundred Maddow fans. They brought hats to give away. I couldn't go.

The knees were too reluctant to bend in regular ways, and the wobbly legs wouldn't have managed a couple hours of standing in a crowd. *sob* I have not yet mustered the resolve to look at the blog to see the pictures.

The little building blocks making up the tower that tells me who I am are being yanked out one by one in a supremely irritating Jenga game--a knee here, an elbow there, a kid leaving home way over there, a hopeless romantic finally looking in the mirror someplace else--and pretty soon all I will have left is the irritation my father tells me I was born with, the surliness an old boss pointed out on a regular basis, a general air of death glare I am stunned to hear about every. damn. time. but which would go a long way in explaining repeated episodes of involuntary solitude over the years.

I am an object lesson in VSEPR theory. I wish I wasn't.

I'm Just Sayin'

If anybody should appreciate that basic human decency requires marriage equality, it should be a guy whose own parents could not legally marry in 26 of the states in the union when he was born. Somebody like, say, Barack Obama. I'm just sayin'.

If anybody should appreciate that separate does not mean equal, it should be a guy whose skin color would have relegated him to separate, crap accommodations and train cars and water fountains and bathrooms and hotel rooms, if he would have been allowed into one at all, a scant few years before he was born. And it should really be that guy if he grows up to be a fucking constitutional scholar. Somebody like, say, Barack Obama. I'm just sayin'.

If anybody promises to be a fierce advocate for a specific segment of society should that segment elect him to the presidency, he really ought to spend more energy fulfilling promises to the people who actually voted for him than placating people who did not and never will vote for him in the first place. He should not tepidly announce that he didn't really like Proposition 8 because it was sooooo divisive, and then trot out an aide to assure the conservative wing that he really really really doesn't think anybody afflicted by The Ghey should be allowed to get married, but should settle for a bargain-bin generic package with some of the same benefits--if individual states decide to do that; heavens, this can't be a federal matter--and be grateful for it.

If anybody pulls that kind of bullshit once, let alone over and over, he can forget about my money and my vote. I won't support someone who's happy to make me a second-class citizen.

I'm just sayin'.

More.

Loving v. Virginia was decided two months before I was born. Marriage equality continues to evolve on a timeline that parallels my own; California's Proposition 8 was ruled unconstitutional today, twenty years on the dot--and almost to the hour--from my own state-sanctioned opposite wedding. It was a long time ago and I was young and clueless.

Tonight I'm sifting through the reaction online and watching Maddow while nursing my stitched-up elbow. Judge Walker's findings of fact echo every argument for equality made on this blog and countless others. It's a dream ruling, written in dream language--fuck, I could have written big chunks of it, save for the inability to use the word fuck in judicial documents--and it appears to be watertight at a level I never dared hope for. In a judicial equivalent of holding the playground bully at arm's length with a hand on the forehead while he flails away impotently with fists that won't hit the mark, Walker issued a stay on his ruling that gives the H8ers until Friday to take their best shot at filing their appeals. Given the laughable lack of coherence the defense exhibited in his courtroom during testimony, I don't think he's very worried about what will happen when the case hits the Ninth Circuit.

Walker's ruling was heavily based on the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, the same 14th that Sens. McConnell, Graham, McCain, and Kyl are so anxious to overturn that they can't help hopping from foot to foot. So boom, in one fell swoop the 14th becomes a rally point for attacking fecund Latinas and domestic-minded gays. The more interesting things get, well, the more interesting they get.

Ted Olson, one half of the team that argued against Prop 8, on Maddow tonight:

We've got to stop thinking about equality in terms of conservative or liberal. We need to start thinking about the fact that gay and lesbian citizens are our brothers and our sisters; they're entitled to equal places in our society. That should be a conservative value, it is also a liberal value, it is not something that should split us.

Von dein Mund, etc. And on we go.

And the Moral Arc of the Universe Bends a Touch Closer to Justice

Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California constitution the notion that opposite sex couples are superior to same sex couples.

Details and commentary will be everywhere soon. The full decision is here.

True Colors Revealed to be, Unsurprisingly, Blindingly White

I wish I had written this, because it's so well done, but really I wish no one would ever have to write anything even approximating this in America. Racism, xenophobia, sexism, and bullheaded deliberate ignorance of our own laws, all in one tidy package courtesy of Russell Pearce and Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham and assorted nutters from the east and west.

Now it's not enough to cluck about illegal immigrants while pretending you're really talking about the Irish and Polish and Russian alongside the Mexicans, er, the Latin Americans, not enough to rage about oprimando el numero ocho para servicio en espanol and insist English is the official national language even though it isn't. Now all the pretense that it isn't really racism is being dropped, and it must come as such as a relief to be able to talk this way, about breeding seasons and dropping young like livestock, and stop pretending they ever thought these people were human in the first place.

"We need to target the mother. Call it sexist, but that's the way nature made it. Men don't drop anchor babies, illegal alien mothers do." That statement was being pushed by the author of Arizona's immigration law. He's not alone.

The neat distillation of current anti-immigrant thinking was in an email spread around by State Senator Russell Pearce, and cited by The Nation's Robin Templeton in a report on the recently revived, anti-immigrant rhetoric on birthright citizenship — the part of the Fourteenth Amendment that stipulates that babies born on American soil are automatically granted citizenship.

"It's invasion by birth canal," the leader of a California anti-immigrant ballot initiative told the Los Angeles Times. The head of an anti-immigrant group in Virginia called for an investigation into "whether or not illegal aliens have a preferred breeding season."

Read the full piece for the full revolting story.

America's Pastime Is Ripping My Heart Out

Goddamn baseball. Goddamn Cubs.

The Cubs ended a bad road trip that saw Ted Lilly and Ryan Theriot traded, the bullpen setting a major-league record by giving up 11 straight hits in a 12-run inning, Carlos Gonzalez becoming the fourth player in history to complete a cycle with a walk-off home run and Silva's heart episode Sunday.

Garblarghphawhargle. [/random unintelligible noises] This season can't end soon enough.

And the Immigration Blowup Continues to, Well, Blow Up

If your attention has been focused elsewhere this week--say, on cut-up and sewn-together joints, as mine has--you may have missed the news that a federal judge put the kibosh on several provisions of Arizona's new immigration law, specifically, the parts requiring cops to double as immigration agents and demand papers from anyone they stop who they think might be here illegally. A lot of people saw some very big red flags snapping in that breeze, and so, too, did judge Susan Bolton.

The overall law will still take effect Thursday, but without the provisions that angered opponents. Sections barred from being enforced include:

• Requiring a police officer to make a reasonable attempt to check the immigration status of those they have stopped;

• Forbidding police from releasing anyone they have arrested until that person's immigration status is determined;

• Making it a violation of Arizona law for anyone not a citizen to fail to carry documentation;

• Creating a new state crime for trying to secure work while not a legal resident;

• Allowing police to make warrantless arrests if there is a belief the person has committed an offense that allows them to be removed from the United States.

"Requiring Arizona law enforcement officials and agencies to determine the immigration status of every person who is arrested burdens lawfully-present aliens because their liberty will be restricted while their status is checked," U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton ruled.

The predictable response reared its head, right on schedule.

The federal judge who halted parts of Arizona's immigration law is getting "thousands" of e-mails and phone calls, many in opposition to her ruling - and a few threatening her life.

A guy I play soccer with did not threaten the judge, but did post a status update on his Facebook asking if Bolton would give him back the $5000 he paid to go through the immigration/citizenship process when he came here from Greece. Another soccer acquaintance, this one from Poland, chimed in and said she'd like her 5k back too. Both said they don't see anything racist about SB1070 as it stands, and don't know why the hispanics think it's just targeting them instead of the Greeks and Poles and Chinese, and the Greek guy said he wouldn't mind carrying his passport and being questioned by a cop every day if that's what it takes to stop illegal immigration.

I try to avoid this kind of discussion on Facebook, so I did not post a response pointing out that (1) SB1070 has absolutely nothing to do with the legal citizenship process and thus isn't handing out fee waivers to every dehydrated Guanajuate who stumbles across the border, (2) the reason the Greek guy and Polish girl had the opportunity to fork over five grand and be welcomed with open arms in the first place is because (a) they came from countries whose quotas aren't filled and oh yeah (b) are, respectively, a software engineer and a cardiac nurse, not the (c) unskilled laborers from Latin America who would find themselves on a citizenship waiting list several generations long, and (3) if the Greek and Polish underclasses could walk here instead of having to pay for a boat or plane ride, it wouldn't just be the Mexicans and Salvadorans feeling like they have a target on their backs.

The Greek guy's wife is having a baby any day now. I wonder if Yorgos would always remember to take his passport and naturalization papers with him on the inevitable 2 a.m. runs to Walgreen's when the baby has a fever and he might not stay under the speed limit or come to a complete stop at every sign before turning. I wonder how excited he would be then to cooperate with a cop who thinks his skintone, beard, and accent mean he's not supposed to be here. I don't know why he doesn't think this could have happened to him, or why he thinks he would welcome the impingement of the freedom he shelled out all that cash to have. It's moot in any case, since Bolton's ruling ensures that he won't be faced with that situation, but I almost wish it wasn't. Because lots of shit sounds like it's a good idea, or would at least be tolerable, until it actually happens to you.

...

We have been a tad under the weather since Monday, with "under the weather" here meaning "operating with one functional limb." And it turns out that one-handed typing isn't as much fun as I'd been led to believe--who knew?--so posting will be light for a while.

Burning Questions

The pre-op check-in nurse is very nice on the phone. She goes through the vaguely familiar litany of questions--it's been six years since the last knee mishap, so some parts are foggy--starting with the actual spelling of my name, rather than the common two-letter transposition that turns me from half-Czech to all-Cuban, progressing to allergies and abnormal neurological history (seasonal and none, in order) with a side trip to consult the travel guide to East Narcotia (they all make me puke, hellooooo Advil) and finally to detailed directions on how to find the outpatient surgery department. She is adamant that the correct elevator is no more than ten paces from the door. I feel like a pirate.

One last thing, she says. Would you like a chaplain to come say a prayer with you before surgery? Hmmm. No. No, I would not. I would like a bartender to come pour me a shot of bourbon before surgery, if it's not too much trouble.

So I'm off for an overhaul on Monday morning, armed with my lucky boxers and a Sharpie for scrawling helpful notes and reminders for the surgeon all over my legs and arms. Right knee? Scope here pls. Left knee? Insert cortisone here. Right elbow? Slice and splice here pls. Left elbow? THIS IS THE ONLY FUNCTIONAL JOINT LEFT IN MY BODY NO MOLESTAR POR FAVOR KTHXBAI.

Stay tuned for the Boltgirl Frozen Peas Rehab Journal, sure to contain such exciting entries as Stationary Bike Chronicles and Honey I'm Ready for Another Gin and Tonic and Holy Fuck This Hurts.

Reunion

A few days ago I took a break from the interminable parent information sessions accompanying new student orientation at my son's university and spent an hour wandering the grounds and gardens on campus, getting to know the cool-and-mist-loving Pacific Northwest flowers and trees that are new to me. One flower in particular caught my eye, a stand of tall stalks topped with spiky balls in varying stages of bloom that shimmered purple.




















Half-bloomed, with bee; click to make life-sized.




















Fully bloomed, sans bee.

"They're wonderful, aren't they?" came a voice behind me. I turned to see an elderly man who I had not met, but whose crooked-toothed, lopsided grin was familiar.

He told me the plants were called globe thistles, and, chagrined, I glanced down at the thorn-tipped leaves and spiky stalks and said Oh, of course, a thistle, I should have looked at the foliage. These aren't like the thistles I grew up with. He smiled and told me about the globe thistles in his back yard, how they used to be covered with bees every summer, but that he hadn't seen a single bee this year and was worried that the hive had died or moved on. He asked where I was from and asked questions about saguaros and their flowers, and after a pause regarded the thistles again. "They're so fascinating, how different they look at different times. See these new ones that are all spiky and silver with a purple glow, and then these that have bloomed and are covered in almost a periwinkle?"

Yeah, I said, and then inside they have such a deep purple at the base of the blooms. Really striking. He leaned closer to a flower, examining it, and said, "You know, you're right. I'd never noticed that before. Nature is so wonderful when you take a moment to stop and just look at it. You'll always see something new," and I heard his words in his soft, measured voice and looked at his kind, gauzy eyes and gentle smile, and on that cool, overcast day a thousand miles from home I saw my grandfather again.

He wished me a good rest of my visit, I wished him luck with his bees, and he continued on to wherever he was walking. It was a good day.

Placeholder Posts? We Got 'Em!

I am freshly back from Seattle and am trying to remember what I do for a living. Please bear with us.

Oh.

Apparently the Pentagon is only trying to decide if they'll go with bright colors, neutrals, or camo for the new ghey-proof shower curtains they'll have to order if DADT is repealed. No segregation after all, Marine Commandant James Conway's musings aside.

Well, now that that's all cleared up, I'm off to the Pacific Northwest for a few days of gentle weather, good coffee, and damp green scenery. Don't trash the place while I'm gone, 'k?

Offered Without Comment.

Well, other than Jesus fucking Christ, of course.

"We think it would be irresponsible to conduct a survey that didn’t try to address these types of things. Because when DADT is repealed, we will have to determine if there are any challenges in those particular areas, any adjustments that need to be made in terms of how we educate the force to handle those situations, or perhaps even facility adjustments that need to be made to deal with those scenarios."

Wait, I guess I do have one more thing to add. Hello, military? You have already been showering, sleeping, eating, shitting, training, and bleeding next to gay servicemembers since day one at Ft. Leonard Wood, since D-Day, since fucking Valley Forge. And your gay brothers- and sisters-in-arms have somehow managed to resist throwing themselves at the giant throbbing hunk of man/woman you apparently represent and just done their jobs. So you really don't need a fucking survey about how the delicate sensibilities of a Marine tank crew are going to be offended if their gay TC doesn't shuffle off to the gays-only rack at night. And you don't need to think about gay-only racks, showers, messes, or anything else in the first place.

If you want to segregate somebody, segregate the dumbasses who think they need to worry about dropping the soap into their own gobshite stupid facilities, and leave the professionals alone.

Because I Have Far Too Much Time

I think this template. The previous one with all the leaves was just too busy.

DOMA: Quick Hit

It will take a while to read through the details, but the short version is that a federal judge in Massachusetts found DOMA (well, specifically, Section 3 of DOMA) unconstitutional.

To further divide the class of married individuals into those with spouses of the same sex and those with spouses of the opposite sex is to create a distinction without meaning. And where, as here, “there is no reason to believe that the disadvantaged class is different, in relevant respects” from a similarly situated class, this court may conclude that it is only irrational prejudice that motivates the challenged classification.149 As irrational prejudice plainly never constitutes a legitimate government interest, this court must hold that Section 3 of DOMA as applied to Plaintiffs violates the equal protection principles embodied in the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Both the Fifth and 14th Amendments are cited as being violated, which bodes well. However, the Tenth is cited as well, and that gives me pause. If states' rights to define marriage are being held as the major constitutional tenet being violated by DOMA, I am forced to (1) remember that I live in Arizona, and (2) conclude that my state's reaction will probably involve (a) passing a second, we-double-dog-mean-it marriage amendment, (b) criminalizing all non-procreative sex acts for people under 65, and possibly (c) seceding from the Union when the state legislature realizes suing the Feds to remove the 5th and 14th amendments from the Constitution ain't gonna fly, and it's the only way to avoid having to recognize the marriages of Tucsonans who might flock to Cedar Rapids for summer wedding junkets.

Another take on the potential Tenth Amendment can o' worms is at FireDogLake. Much reading to do!

Zzzzzzzz

There is something to be said for the lazy days of summer, and perhaps more to be said when such a day hits a level of lazy that is magical enough to knock our neuroses clean outta the park. About 7:30 last night, as we lounged on the couch having just wrapped up The Godfather and carryout pad thai, the girlfriend wondered if we should have had a party or something for the 4th, thrown a token hamburger on the grill, asked some people over to watch fireworks from the roof, anything. Nah, I said, not at all.

The Fourth has been a big deal to me for a long time, wrapped up in childhood memories of my grandfather and homemade ice cream and band concerts in the park and watermelon and fireworks, and more recent memories of my personal coming-out anniversary.

This year? Pfft. I hung out with my girlfriend and my son, lollygagging in the breeze from floor fans that made the hot day tolerable, sucking on Otter Pops, catching up on classic American films all of us managed to miss the first time around due to either not being born yet (him) or being busy with other things, apparently (girlfriend and me). Rocky, Godfather, pad thai, family, relaxing in the present instead of dutifully hauling out the memories of the past.

It was a good day.

Monsoon, Mon-not-soon-enough

The cicadas are in overdrive. Stepping from an air-conditioned office into the parking lot briefly feels good, like a basket of warm towels fresh from the dryer feels good, but the muzzy warm blanket feeling quickly cedes to holy fuck it's hot oppression. Clouds pause at the mountaintops, think about it for a while, and then text all their friends and it's a flash mob of cumulonimbus goodness spilling from the Catalinas over the edges of the basin, promising globs of dark gray there, and over there, and especially over there, rolling over and mercifully blocking the late-afternoon sun, but not yet right here overhead. The mob teases with a few flashes of lightning in the distance and some puffs of promising wind moist with creosote and water on soil, flings a sprinkle of droplets against the window, and then calls it a day.

Maybe tomorrow.

Meanwhile, we roast, and schedule hanging up the laundry for sometime after midnight when it might drop below 100 degrees, and glance up at the single cloud milling aimlessly on the horizon and hope its friends get their shit together a little more productively today.

In Defense of a Referee

Oh, England sucked yesterday, and the general quality of the refereeing might have sucked more (Mexico-Argentina AR, I'm looking at you particularly hard). Frank Lampard tied the game for England with a blast that bounced off the bottom of the crossbar and landed a full yard inside the goal before bouncing out, except that neither the center referee nor the assistant referee saw it. No goal, no tie, and, ultimately, no quarterfinals for England. Efan Ekoko noted that of the 40,000+ people in the Bloemfontein stadium, those two men were the only two who didn't see a good goal, and the replays from the camera positioned high in the stadium at the goal line, and the one in the back corner of the goal, make it blindingly obvious that the referees biffed it.

And we instantly howled for cameras on the goal line, or chips in the ball, or SOMETHING to keep blind referees from fucking up yet another match.

One thing, though, keeps me from being able in good conscience to string the Uruguayan crew up next to Koman Coulibaly: Because both of the referees yesterday were properly positioned, neither one of them had a good enough view of the goal line to be absolutely sure the ball crossed completely into the goal. Cue the BoltGraphics Generator, please:

The red dots are England attackers, the black dots are German defenders, the green dot is the German keeper, the blue dots are the referees, and the x is the spot where the ball smacked into the turf. The center referee was roughly 30 yards from the goal line, the assistant--who was properly lined up level with the next-last defender--was at least 40 yards from the goal line, and both were partially screened by at least one player (in the case of the AR, the keeper). So with a vantage point quite distant from the goal and maybe six feet off the ground, tops, neither man had much of an angle to determine if he saw green between the ball and the line during the split second bounce before the ball came out.

Of course it's an obvious call when you're positioned either on the goal line or thirty feet above it, and it's especially obvious in slow motion. But standing on the ground, thirty yards distant, in real time, without x-ray goggles? Not so much. ARs are required to follow every ball to the endline, precisely to ensure they'll be able to determine whether it has completely crossed the line and avoid controversial situations like this one, but it's physically impossible to get to the endline at the same time as a 40, 50, 60 mph shot taken from 18 yards away. So yeah, it was a goal, and yeah, I was pulling hard for England, but no, I can't fault the referees on this one because they're not fifty feet tall or wearing jetpacks and thus couldn't know without a doubt that the ball was over.

If FIFA really insist on staying in the dark ages and not employing video or microchip technology, they could at least put a line judge on each end of the field, opposite the AR, whose job would be limited to goal/no goal, corner/goal kick. The dirty hippie in me doesn't need situations to be set up for everyone to win, but really hates to see people unnecessarily set up to fail unless they're playing euchre against me, and FIFA's refusal to add extra eyes, either human or electronic, to a 110 x 75 yard field with 22 players moving at top speed does exactly that.

The Tevez "goal" in the second game, of course, from a good two yards offside, is a whole 'nother thing, and that thing is a giant bucket of suck. See, I'm not totally a reffy homer.

Stop the Presses

The bloggy bizness exposes me to a good deal of wankery, but I have inadvertently stumbled upon the biggest bunch of ginormous wankers in the history of forever. Otherwise known as Wikipedia editors. Oh my god, just go over there and read.

Side note: if Brave does ever get made (is it in production? pre-production? pre-pre-production? be prepared to back up your answer with several paragraphs of self-referential faux legalese and vaguely-remembered Logic 101 bullshit, or they won't let you be an editor any more), I'm going to have to see it several times. Girls with arrows! Emma Thompson!

A Scooby Snack for the Abby Wambach Girlfriend Contingent

Hello, intrepid Googlers. Trusty source K sent along this little tidbit for World Cup season: interactive Abby Wambach.

Enjoy.

World Cup Action: a Snapshot

Trident was packed, again, for the US match yesterday morning, with a raucous and nervous and finally triumphant crowd. Pity the poor Bud Light girl who was trying her damnedest to get people to own up to drinking Bud Light so she could hand them beads and official Budweiser vuvuzelas.

People weren't having it.

Bud Light girl: Who's drinking Bud Light?!?
Assembled patrons: *crickets*
Bud Light girl: Who wants beads?
Patron: Do I have to drink Bud Light to get them?
Bud Light girl: Yeah.
Patron: Oh. Never mind, then.
Bud Light girl: ...

Bud Light girl, trying again: Who wants a vuvuzela?
Assembled patrons: *crickets*
Bud Light girl: Do you guys want one for your man cave?
Guys at table: Sorry, what?
Bud Light girl: Do you have a man cave?
Guys at table: Uh, no.
Bud Light girl: ...

The US got shut out and shot down almost as badly for the entire match, until Landon Donovan finally put away a rebound in the 91st minute, and the crowd erupted and dissolved simultaneously in roars and tears. What a fucking heart attack of a match.

Note to Clint Dempsey: yes, you got royally robbed when your 21st-minute goal was disallowed on a phantom offside call. That does not, however, mean that you should spend the rest of the match carefully nurturing your hangdog pouty face and staying down on the ground a little bit longer each time you get bumped (yes, I saw that on the next-to-last one you took a forearm that split your lip; cool, but you're really going to be okay). Get the fuck up and play already.

On to Saturday!

Why Didn't They Think of This a Month Ago?

Because, much like John McCain having a foolproof plan to catch Osama bin Laden but refusing to reveal it unless he was elected president, God has a plan to zap the Deepwater Horizon's blowout shut. He just hasn't been asked nicely enough yet.

'Nuff Said

IANAL

I Am Not A Lawyer, but I am a referee, and Koman Coulibaly was crap today in the center of the US-Slovenia match. Sure, the US sucked in the first half, and the defense in particular wasn't alert enough to notice the Slovenian ballboy who apparently snuck into the 6-yard box and nailed Tim Howard's feet to the floor before the first goal, but goddammit, what a second-half comeback by the Yanks, and what utterly fascinating calls by Mr. Coulibaly.

The disallowed goal, in particular, featured at least three Slovenians hugging US attackers who were trying to run onto Donovan's serve, and after Maurice Edu destroyed the ball into the roof of the net, no explanation was forthcoming from the ref other than *shrug* no goal.

Fucking fuck. England need to beat Algeria this afternoon, and then beat Slovenia on Wednesday, and the US need to fucking start the Algeria game Wednesday like the devil hisself is holding a lighter to their Nike Dri-Fits.

Note to the guy in the striped polo at Trident this morning who is a clone of That One Guy who unfailingly shows up to every bar I've ever watched a game in: charging the television while screaming probably won't actually affect the outcome of the match, but please do take one more step forward and see if you can cram your head all the way through the screen, because I suspect having large shards of plasma screen stuffed into your mouth might shut you up, if only for ten or so blessed seconds.

Where Have We Seen This Before?

Hmmm. Execs from the top five oil companies were called on the congressional carpet yesterday to explain why they've all been using the same cribbed disaster response plan that was apparently originally written for a well located in an Inuit neighborhood a long time ago. Would saying the entire thing was made of weapons-grade awkward be a gross understatement? Yes. Yes, it would.

The second squirming executive at 0:57 is very familiar, but I just can't put my finger on where I've seen him and that look on his face before. Oh. Wait.

Yep, that's it.

Michael told me to write a disaster response plan, but I spilled my gallon can of Cheez Whiz on it. Costco, nine bucks. So I copied this other plan I found on the internet, and if anyone asks about it, two words: Caribbean. Walruses. It could happen. That's five words. Sometimes you have to think outside the box. [/kevin]

General Announcement to the World

Except for the opening match and the US matches, I am at work during the World Cup, during which time I have my DVR set at home and am carefully avoiding any website that might contain the slightest whiff of scores so that I can watch the games when I get home and experience them fresh out of the package.

Please, world, do not text and e-mail me asking what I think about the latest upset, because what I am thinking is FUCKING HELL, PEOPLE, DO NOT TEXT ME SCORES!

*deep breath*

That is all.

Hmmm

President Obama, on Gulf Coast peeps adversely affected by the volcano of oil:

He said, "I will be their fierce advocate to make sure they are getting the compensation they need to get through what is going to be a difficult season.''

Well, they're fucked. Good luck, Gulfies! Hope that works out better for you than it did for The Ghey.

Fucking Hell

More cutting-edge oil cleanup tech from BP.



That'll help. Jesus fucking christ.

Jan-Jan and R-Pea Explain It All For You

A facet of the immigration debate that tends to be overlooked is the impact on families when half the people in a household are citizens or legal residents and half are not, and the undocumented half get deported--specifically, when the undocumented people are parents, grandparents, or other caregivers and the citizens are minor children who were born here. It's such a problem in Tucson that the Sunnyside Unified School District has joined a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of SB1070, Arizona's "papers please" law that compels municipal law enforcement to determine the immigration status of anyone they stop who they think is Mexican may be in the country illegally.

State Senator Russell Pearce (R-Fuck Mountain) and Governor Jan Brewer (brrrrrrr) floated competing solutions in which they both attempt to be Solomon, but without getting that Solomon wasn't really serious with that whole chop-the-baby-in-half thing. Brewer--who, by the by, has perfected the facial shrug like nuthin' you've ever seen over the past couple of months--says that deported parents should just take their kids with them back to Mexico (cannot embed; go watch) Problem solved!

It is illegal to trespass into our country. It has always been illegal. And people have determined that they want to take that chance, and that responsibility, it's not gonna tear them apart. They can take their children back with them.

We are a nation of laws. That's why we are America.

Of course, this is the same Jan Brewer who explained her refusal to sign a bill banning texting while driving this way:

"You can write all the laws that you want," Brewer said. "But it sometimes doesn't make a whole lot of difference. People don't follow them."

O_o.

Pearce, on the other hand, thinks the best way to alleviate the problems faced by mixed-status families is to eliminate them altogether. What's that you say? 14th Amendment to the what? I do declare, sir; you may force me to brandish my cane in anger! Jesus.

Pearce needs a civics refresher--preferably in any state other than the 50th-ranked for education, of course, so OMG ROAD TRIP TIME--if he really doesn't understand the Constitutional issue in play here.

First of all, that's not the law. It's an unconstitutional declaration of citizenship for those born, uh, in the Wong Kim, uh, decision before the Supreme Court, it made it very clear in the statements from the senators at the time that the 14th Amendment was written, made it clear it did not pertain to aliens and those we did not, who did not have legal domicile in the United States. It's the most irrational and uh, uh, self-defeating provision you can have.

True, the 14th Amendment was written specifically to ensure that the children of freed slaves would be automatically accorded citizenship, without thought to waves of people coming to the US from points south 100 years later, but, just as the 1st Amendment has been interpreted to apply to forms of speech media and the 2nd to high-power firearms that were inconceivable when the amendments were originally penned, the 14th is interpreted to apply to all people born within our borders. In fact, that interpretation comes from the very Wong Kim decision Pearce erroneously cites as proof that anchor babies are really alien babies who should be sent home on the next saucer outta Roswell.

The 14th Amendment's citizenship clause, according to the court's majority, had to be interpreted in light of English common law tradition that had excluded from citizenship at birth only two classes of people: (1) children born to foreign diplomats and (2) children born to enemy forces engaged in hostile occupation of the country's territory. The majority held that the "subject to the jurisdiction" phrase in the 14th Amendment specifically encompassed these conditions (plus a third condition, namely, that Indian tribes were not considered subject to U.S. jurisdiction) - and that since none of these conditions applied to Wong's situation, Wong was a U.S. citizen, regardless of the fact that his parents were not U.S. citizens (and were, in fact, ineligible ever to become U.S. citizens because of the Chinese Exclusion Act).

Pearce appears to be construing "subject to the jurisdiction" as "have a green card in their pocket," which isn't mind-bogglingly narrow and stupid (although it is) so much as it is so incredibly transparently hypocritical as to barely merit a response. Because, in Pearce's book, undocumented people are double-dog subject to every other jurisdiction in the US, especially the ones that are now empowered to dump them on the other side of the fence from the Nogales Burger King if they don't have their birth certificates on them when they're pulled over for a busted taillight.

So there you have it. Pack up your kids and walk away from the better life you came here to give them, or... well, or forget about the better life thing altogether, because the Constitution only applies to people we think it applies to. And there's no point in writing laws, because people ignore them, unless, of course, it's a law that white people don't need to worry about, in which case WE ARE ALL ABOUT THE LAW, PEOPLE. Oh, Arizona. You never fail to disappoint.

An Addendum.

One indelible memory of my buddy Dave, and then we move on.

Waaaay back in the day, a bunch of archaeologists would hit the bar by the office on Friday afternoons for a beer or three over an hour of bullshitting. My son was tiny then, and liked coming along because the bar had a nice walled patio with a koi pond and room to roam, and on one particular Friday--he was three years old--he hopped up into Dave's lap for a while while we drank and yapped.

The next morning, he climbed into his seat at the breakfast table.

Boltgirl: Oatmeal? Cheerios? What sounds good?

Boy: All I need for breakfast is a cup of coffee and a cigarette.

Boltgirl: O_o

Boy: Well, that's what Dave says.

Boltgirl: Um, whatever Dave says, you just do the opposite of that, okay?

The man was the embodiment of if you can't be a good role model, be a dire warning. And now we move on.

And We're Done

Dave was a bastard.

He was brilliant, but had a quick mind and a quicker temper. He did not suffer fools, gladly or otherwise, and had little patience for people who were slower on the uptake than he was, or for people who he thought were lazy, either intellectually or physically. A fierce intellect in a tempestuous man. Many people loathed him, several feared him, not many liked him.

But he liked me, and somewhere underneath that writhing mob of demons he wrestled daily, I saw somebody I could connect to. I did the analysis for a couple of his projects and spent occasional weekends working on papers with him at his cabin in the White Mountains. For all his failings--and it would take a separate blog with its own server to catalog them all--he was unfailingly generous with me, unfailingly kind and nurturing with my son. We fished, he cooked, we talked, I learned how to be rigorous in thinking about archaeology.

About nine years ago, after an adult lifetime spent alienating colleagues and screaming, drunk, at underlings in the field, he hit bottom. It wasn't hard enough to either kill him or render him amnesiac, but, as he put it, the inter-ocular impact was fairly high, so--with the help of our boss, who is the finest human on the planet--he started to work on getting his shit together.

And in doing so, he gave me the courage to get my own shit together.

He got serious about finishing the cabin, so I lugged tools up over the Rim and hammered floorboards into place and stained paneling and raked cinders. We fished. He cooked. He delighted in my son. He started finishing projects that had languished for years, and started making amends with people he had insulted and abused in the years when the drink and the hot temper and the unbalanced brain chemistry had the upper hand. He wanted to know what I was working on, and was excited to collaborate on new research with a colleague who not two years ago was ready to shoot him on sight. He was slowly turning things around.

But all the years of booze and cigarettes won out in the end. The last five years brought multiple heart surgeries, each leaving him more debilitated than the last. I visited him in the hospital and found a hollowed-out shell with a rat's nest for hair and the sunken, glittering eyes you see in daguerrotypes of Civil War soldiers. He had lived for field archaeology and walking his dog in the woods, but his now-trembling legs and failing eyes kept him from all but largely ceremonial trips out to stumble around Las Capas, where he no longer terrified the workers but instead mostly left them wondering who that shaky old man was. Two weeks ago he went under for a final time to correct a kink in his gut. He went septic and then he went comatose. He finally died last night. He was 61 years old. He leaves behind no family except a Rottweiler named Lovey.

Dave was a bastard. But he was my bastard, and he loved me unconditionally and believed in me when I didn't believe in myself.

Rest well.

In Which Afghanistan Suddenly Becomes Far More Interesting

This could go one of two ways.

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

I wonder how long it will take to find out which way our road will fork.

La La La La Football

It is World Cup time, people.

La Familia Bolt hit Trident Bar & Grill this morning at 6:20 to secure a table and get a breakfast order in before the rush. Which was a good thing, since the place was packed by kickoff.

Breakfast of champions. Eggs may also have been involved.

The first three minutes had me expecting an ocho-zero blowout for Mexico, but the Bufana Bufana shook off the early pressure--thanks in large part to their 22-year-old keeper, who stuffed one shot from a yard away and brilliantly parried a long-distance strike--and built a steady head of momentum on midfield possession leading to clever through balls. South Africa scored first on an excellent counterattack and crazy-angled shot to the upper corner, far post, and then Mexico put in 90-year-old Cuatehmoc Blanco and we figured it was all over, but then four guys busted into the six yard box uncovered and there wasn't much the keeper could do about it. Game 1 final: 1-1.

And we're off!

Cooties.

My new go-to video.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Oh, if you want the whole thing, it's here.

For Damien

...and for everyone else who is being driven to despair by the news of the day, a stop-the-presses moment that doesn't involve catastrophe: I like something David Brooks wrote.

Yes, I know. Take a moment to absorb that little bit of oil-water interplay, and then trundle over to read Brooks' thoroughly pleasant defense of the humanities.

In other happy news, the start time for the World Cup can be counted down in double-digit hours now, and both Jozy Altidore and Gooch Onyewu have been declared fit for the US, meaning we might make it out of pool play after all. And--and--the completely civilized +10 time difference between Tucson and South Africa means we will not need to drag our sorry carcasses out of bed at two in the morning to watch the matches. Indeed, not only will we be awake, but we can have breakfast! And breakfast beers. Vladimir Weiss, Jr. (Slovakia) is my player to watch in Group F; you heard it here first.

And Now for Something Not at All Different

Do you need a break from reading about the Gulf of Mexico and weeping? Well, go read this and continue weeping for what we have become. Or maybe for what humanity has always been, what we were supposed to leave behind when George Washington built that city on the hill, but what we have been unable to escape.

Physicians for Human Rights has released a 27-page report which clearly documents what we already know: The Bush Administration tortured detainees. The more startling conclusion is this: The Bush Administration experimented on those detainees in order to refine, define and justify their torture regimen.

Nothing like setting the bar, jumping over it, then defining that bar for everyone else as some sort of standard. Yet that's exactly what they did.

We're not supposed to overreach in our metaphors, in our stark comparisons, for fear of understating the horrors of the Inquisitors and the Nazis while simultaneously overstating the evils perpetrated by our government, in our name. Because we're not that bad. We can't be that bad and still be us, because Americans don't do those things. Except that they have, and they do, and it's been utterly without hesitation or reflection beyond wondering exactly how much shit they--we--can get away with before the stench becomes so bad that even the most resolutely entrenched-in-denial among us can't look the other way any more.

This is not what my grandfathers fought for in World War II, to borrow a meme that's currently popular among right-wing Arizonans aghast that their forebears sweated and bled to allow Mexican gardeners to prune the oleanders in Scottsdale for three bucks an hour. That aside, this is not why they fought, not why my great-uncle Jim was shot down and killed over Hildesheim, not why my grandfather's friend Virgil took a bullet in the spine at Anzio and came home in a wheelchair. It's also not why my brother left the better part of his spirit in Baghdad and not why his best friend bled out in Kandahar. Unfortunately, his buddy's death and the rest of the deaths and maimings he saw on a daily basis mean torture is simply, to him, justified retribution. The rage and hatred of war left him not giving a rat's ass about torture as long as it happened to the bad guys.

Our leadership is supposed to rise above the blood in the eyes of the guys on the ground. It didn't.

I Stand Corrected

In the last post I waxed concise about being able to write about the human condition due to a fundamental belief that bullshit is not immutable.

I apparently forgot I was living in Arizona.

A group of artists has been asked to lighten the faces of children depicted in a giant public mural at a Prescott school.

The project's leader says he was ordered to lighten the skin tone after complaints about the children's ethnicity. But the principal says the request was only to fix shading and had nothing to do with political pressure.

The "Go on Green" mural, which covers two walls outside Miller Valley Elementary School, was designed to advertise a campaign for environmentally friendly transportation. It features portraits of four children, with a Hispanic boy as the dominant figure.

R.E. Wall, director of Prescott's Downtown Mural Project, said he and other artists were subjected to slurs from motorists as they worked on the painting at one of the town's most prominent intersections.

"We consistently, for two months, had people shouting racial slander from their cars," Wall said. "We had children painting with us, and here come these yells of [epithet for Blacks] and [epithet for Hispanics]."

Thanks, I guess, to K for the Wonkette tip; the comments there are the only thing keeping my gallows humor over this fucking state alive, which in turn is about the only keeping me sane.

On a Particular Silence

I have written maybe five words about the oil spill. Not because I love lightly regulated offshore drilling leading to the destruction of an entire ecosystem, but because I just can't do it. I can write about human rights abuses and injustices and crap Supreme Court decisions like the inversion of Miranda because they are, at least in theory, reversible.

I'm not sure the apocalypse in the Gulf is. And I can't deal with that much sadness.

Rachel's on it; go there and weep.

Conflicted

Raging atheist here, recovering Catholic, lapsed Catholic, collapsed Catholic, Imagine No Religion, the whole deal. Every time Pope Palpatine and his minions make a new pronouncement about Teh Ghey being the biggest threat to humanity since ebola and Hitler combined, I think my jaw can't drop any farther through the floor, then Papa Ratzi flaps his yap one more time and I resign myself to losing my lower mandible until the Deepwater Horizon relief well hits it sometime this coming August, we hope.

For some reason, though, I can't shake the hold some of this stuff has on me. Way back when, I went to the 10:00 Smells 'n' Bells mass (at Sacred Heart Basilica on the campus of Notre Dame) every damn Sunday, always sat in the same spot next to the second column from the sanctuary on the right, next to Emil Hofman, and soaked up the incense and stained glass and the incomparable sensation of being surrounded by the biggest fucking pipe organ on the planet and 1,200 voices raised in song, led by the forebears of these kids.

So yeah. Today I racked up all the YouTube videos of the Lit Choir I could find, and spent the day writing archaeology against the background of the voices of angels, while from time to time mulling the latest bit of WTF sent along by K. The source of solace is simultaneously the source of so much pain. Well, I guess that's Catholicism in a nutshell for you: on the one hand being so enraged and bitter that this had me delightedly snorking coffee out my nose, and on the other hand having a part of my heart so deeply tied to place and past that this brought tears to my eyes.

And our hearts, forever.

Uhhhh.

Well, this is lovely.

Nowhere to go. Nowhere! Won't someone please think of the oppressed white people for a change?