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Insert a Trite Metaphor about a Corral

Posted on May 28, 2004 in Roundup

If we try to flee from our human condition into the computer we only meet ourselves there.

  –William Barrett

square211.gifI had this half done last night after I came home from the monthly poetry reading at Barnes and Noble, Aliso Viejo. A headache stalled me about midway. Not one of those sharp blankets-with-claws, but a dull knocker like bones rattling in the back and sides of my head. I broke off after the Ts.

What can I say for the week? Three topics dominated the discussion: Al Gore’s speech, Bush falling off his bicycle, and Michael Moore’s winning the Palm d’Or at Cannes. I went looking for other stuff.

I am extremely concerned about this news item.

There’s a new section for petitions.

Politics

  • Brian is unhappy about preparations for the election in Boston:

    Everybody’s so busy complaining about how the Secret Service is going to shut down Rt. 93 for the Democratic National Convention, but that’s a 4-day inconvenience. This, my friends, is not just a temporary security measure, it is part of a new security program, and it’s based on police tactics used in Israel….So much for freedom. 228 years down the drain.

  • Stirling launched a Jeremiad and named names for prosecution:

    I will name one who should face the same penalty we exact on murderers and terrorists explicitly: Wolfowitz. Wolfowitz specifically for hiring a known agent of a state inimical to the United States, for sensitive tasks, thus exposing our soldiers, civilians and allies to hazards which were entirely avoidable. By backing that individual for positions of trust and profit.

  • Mileah shakes her head: “hell our occupation of Iraq is their number one recruiting tool.”
  • Randy is shocked that the United States can only come up with $50,000 to help flood victims on Hispanola.
  • Jeanne d’Arc caught Bush in yet another misdirection:

    Many of the popular programs Bush has been touting during the campaign will be cut starting in February of 2005. The Education Department. The Department of Veterans Affairs. The WIC nutrition program. Head Start. The EPA. The National Science Foundation. The Small Business Administration. Snip.

  • Deborah was outraged at the loss of options available to Minnesota women for terminating a pregnancy:

    This is not the moral or rational way to reduce the number of abortions. Piling on paperwork and scare tactics against patients may deter a few feckless teenagers from having a hastily considered abortion, but when it increases the anguish of a family who discovers their eagerly awaited new baby will not survive due to a birth defect, it is really not worth any benefit that may accrue at other times.

  • Elkit doesn’t think Bush fell off his bicycle.
  • Jeremy remarks:

    What boggles my mind is how even most of the people protesting the torture of prisoners seem to see these atrocities as horrible, but just “plain-old-fashioned” torture.

  • Victoria is flabbergasted by a recent firing in a public school.
  • Kynn announced the discovery of Weapons of Mass Destruction — on Johnston Atoll:

    Why is it okay for the U.S. to have stockpiles of WMDs but a casus belli for someone else to have it? If these weapons are evil and it’s terrifying to live under the threat of them, why are we allowed to threaten the world?

  • LQ gaped at the latest Bush lie.

  • Evano says “there’s no joy in “told you so”.

Religion

  • doug writes about the Bible:

    God’s word has been and is fallibly interpreted; it has been and is understood according to prevailing social and cultural prejudices and applied accordingly. Moreover, the popularity of the term “inerrancy” since the nineteen century has led to the ideas that: 1) The Bible speaks on everything, from prehistory, the natural sciences, the humanities, and more; 2) There are no errors at all in the Bible.

  • Kimber falls into what she calls the “Joel Wishy-Washy Zone”:

    I have no problem with catholics voting their conscience. If you want to vote against John Kerry because he’s pro-choice, more power to you. If you choose to vote a certain way because the leaders of your church tell you to, great. I think it’s nuts, but it’s a free country. But when the catholic church starts using it’s power over it’s congregations to enforce it’s agenda on secular politics through religious extortion, that’s wrong.

Culture

  • maria contemplated how blogging redefined her sense of place:

    It wasn’t until very recently, when necessity “forced” me to spend days on end by a lakeside, talking with a great number of people from my physical neighborhood, that I realized just how disconnected I have become from the place I call home. Because of my blog walks, I am beginning to know more about the subtle changes in downtown Keene, NH, for example, than about those that are taking place in Larkspur, CA, which is visible to my eyes from my window….

  • Michael congratulated a friend for being mention in The New York Times as an “obsessive blogger”. (Note that I did not make the grade.)
  • MacDiva also didn’t make the grade, but weighed in on the article.

  • Andrew took a shot from the left at Michael Moore.
  • Mike countered:

    Hey, don’t get me wrong. I may be no fan of Michael Moore, but if his work contributes to bringing down the trans-continental gang of money-laundering, drug-running, oil-swilling neo-Nazi thugs and war criminals now slaughtering hundreds of thousands of innocents across the world, I’m all for it.

  • Stephen comments on Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence.
  • Kathryn thinks about judgements:

    One of the things that drove me batty about studying literature in grad school was that once one strayed outside the safety of the canon, academics seemed to provide no methods or guidance for telling whether a work of fiction was any good.

  • Rae sized up an insurance scam.
  • Stu explained how to Googlewhack.
  • Chari had problems posting comments with MT 3.0. She found out why.
  • Bea railed against prostitots

    If I see one more set of shorts for girls under ten years old from a major retailer with “bad girl” splayed across the ass, I’m going to set fire to something. I swear to god.

  • Yule examined the place of women in the recent spate of pornography out of Abu Ghraib:

    It has nothing to do with any essential nature of women (I don’t subscribe to nonsense like that), nor with any dualistic notions of “good girls/ bad girls” (I reject dualisms as social constructions which humans “solve” in order to flatter themselves), but with how class position structures parameters within which you act, and with how genders and classes will be reified by pundits and imagerists (actually, I prefer to think that Goya, far from reifying “majaism,” was commenting on it in a very astute and critical way).

Personal

  • Bittersweet groaned over the post office losing a package she sent to her mother:

    I tried the parcelforce website and they told me to call parcelforce. So I called Parcelforce and did the automated track and trace option. They told me it was a Royal Mail package and to call a Royal Mail number. The Royal Mail automated option told me it was a Parcelforce package and to call Parcelforce. Great.

  • Blaugustine revealed what she sees when she closes her eyes and presses her fingers to them:

    A sort of cartwheel made of light spins round and round in wide wobbly circles, generally anti-clockwise….Then, usually on the bottom right of my field of vision, tiny pictures start appearing and dissolving. They are often negatives, light on dark, and always sharp but strange, surreal, mostly faces or figures.

  • Tracy has a new woman in her life:

    We were both born on March 20th–she in 1966, me in 1964. Yes, that makes me older. (I think this is the first relationship I’ve ever had with anyone younger than me.) We each have one sister named Lisa. We have matching elbow scars. Our favorite color is dark green. She is a teacher. I have always wanted to be a teacher. Okay, I’m stretching it here a bit…

  • Francis talked about the weather:

    On Saturday, it hailed with a fury on Birds Island. Only pea-sized, it wasn’t dangerous and we were snug inside the house so I didn’t even bother to go out and see exactly how much it might hurt to stand and get pelted by pellets of ice. Nonetheless, it was impressive, lasting nearly half an hour, and the ground was white with it afterwards, almost like snow.

  • Kimber describes herself as “flat out scared to death” of the program for autistic children at her son’s new school.
  • Irene wondered if she’s making it too hard to get married.
  • Jill confesses her worst fear.
  • Metamanda blogged from Glasgow.
  • Pam is afflicted with roofers.
  • Robert made me hungry:

    The superb ramen shop I drooled all over in Ramen Empire, my local greasy chopstick, my emporium of illicit cuisinal ecstasy, has inexplicably shut its tacky doors forever and there is no one hammering on those doors asking why, why, except me

  • Andrea talked about the progress that a shy friend had made in dating women:

    not only had he managed to date girls with increasing confidence, he’d even got serious with one. He wistfully told me that she was still back in Australia, finishing off her degree. Then he told me he’d been getting horny without her and would I, as a friend, to make him feel better, shag him?

  • Susan took comfort in words.
  • Ellen listed the reasons why she hasn’t been blogging.
  • Michael had a pass made at him.
  • Nancy faces water issues:

    The procedure for getting a full tanker load is ridiculously complicated, but once you’re on the bucket list, things seem to be automatic. BUT – you must have your buckets ready when the tanker comes; you can only fill each bucket once, at least in theory, and you have to give baksheesh to the driver (Rs. 5). And someone has to be available without notice when the tanker comes.

  • Kris talked about her vacation.
  • Zhad’s car was stolen and found again:

    There it was. It was in the furthest lot away from the road, completely out of sight behind a fenced-in garbage bin. Another car parked next to it had the passenger side window broken out of it and covered with plastic. I identified my car for Officer G—– and inspected the inside of it. Although the inside of the car was a mess, the result of the thieves searching for something of value (and not finding anything), nothing appeared to have been stolen or damaged. Even the change in the ashtray remained.

  • Sally continued to think about her encounter with a homeless person.

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An age rich in discoveries (like our own) is likely to be rich in confusions (like our own).

  –William Barrett

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