Insert a Trite Metaphor About A Corral

Posted on June 6, 2004 in Roundup

The Devil is not the Prince of Matter; the Devil is arrogance of the Spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt. The Devil is grim because he knows where he is going, and, in moving, he always returns whence he came.

Umberto Eco

I am thankful for Reagan’s death. Not in a mean way: the man was suffering. For many years, I could see how his struggle with Alzheimer’s took its toll on his wife. Whatever one can say about his politics, I do not doubt that Nancy loved him. If she seems relieved now, it is not out of spite. She joins the millions of widows and widowers who have watched a loved one pass on in pain. Reagan’s death reminds us that he was one of us, subject in the end to the same nature that puts us into play for a few rounds and then removes us forever.

Let us focus our energies on the living. The passing of Ronald Wilson Reagan is not a shield for the president in squatting. Bush’s crimes remain fair game. If you see a Bush supporter attempting this move, call the action for what it is: cowardice.

This roundup includes articles from May 28 to June 3, 2004, PDT.

Politics

• Evano uncovers a whoops: the mayor of Crawford, Texas is a John Kerry supporter.
  
• Mileah wants the deaths of POWs in Afghanistan and Iraq investigated.
  
• Jack carefully qualifies himself:

  I have no reason to doubt that Padilla is a bad fellow. He is, by all accounts, a street tough who got caught up in radical Islamic movements. But we really have no idea whether what the Justice Department is telling us is true or has been spun and stretched to justify their actions. We do not know whether Padilla really said what he is supposed to have said, and, perhaps more importantly, we do not know whether he was coerced into saying it.

• Randy expresses his concern about Haiti.
  
• Andrew writes about how Matthew Drudge was forced to apologize and made a convert for John Kerry.
  
• Jeremy finds out that not even the City of the Summer of Love is safe for expressions of freedom of speech:

  A woman in San Francisco was repeatedly harassed (spat upon, punched in the face) for displaying a painting of the Abu Ghraib tortures. Her gallery is now closed.

• Allison thinks Bush set a poor example when he displayed Saddam Hussein’s pistol.
  
• Kynn caught grief for an article he wrote about racism:

  These kind of folks — who go on about cultural superiority, imagine “invasions” from the south, and rant that anyone who speaks for racial tolerance is a bleeding heart liberal — are absurdly out of touch with most Americans who are sane, reasonable people without ill will to those of different races.

• Mike responded to a critic:

  The professor has a light touch, but I do understand his reasons for being angered by profanity, despite his descent to the rough-and-tumble of the blogs. It is not nice to be slagged. However, should he be prepared to engage a common-or-garden blogger (better than an angry Iraqi armed with more than a modem), I’d be happy to debate his policy proposals soberly and without resorting to locker-room language.

• Steven pointed to last week’s partial birth abortion ban ruling and said that it caused him

  to question the viability and purpose of legislation among a people with such hard hearts and broken minds. We can’t even effectively ban infanticide without one wiser-that-thou supposedly constitution-interpreting-Judge pronouncing that we are wrong.

• Stu could only shake his head:

  Surprise, surprise. The USA (=NSA) have been breaking Iranian cyphers for some time now. The stupid thing is that some Drunk high up in the Bush Administration blabbed this to their personal close friend the dubious Mr. Chalabi, who went public with it. So the genie is out of the bottle, Iran will change their cyphers and the NSA will be blind again (how genial!).

• LQ revealed that Cheney pulled some strings to get Halliburton some contracts in Iraq.

Culture

• Jeanne speaks for many Americans:

  I romanticize America. I can’t help it. I’ve always been head over heels in love with Thomas Jefferson and Harriet Tubman and Emily Dickinson and Robert Johnson and roads that go on and on through big, empty spaces, and Walt Whitman’s sentences that go on and on, creating their own mental spaces, and the lovely insanity of a bunch of rich, white guys founding a country on the idea that everyone had equal rights, even if they didn’t really believe it. In the beginning were the words and the words were so damn good we’re stuck forever after trying to make something of them.

• Cindy described the five types of blog. I guess I would classify as a Zine blog except that I update far more often than the definition allows.
  
• Caterina writes about a housing shortage among hermit crabs.
  
• Tracy bravely faces cicadas:

  Then one day when I went to workout I pulled up in front of the building and froze. They were fucking everywhere…literally. They were dripping out of this huge tree that stands before the front door of the gym. They are like flying cockroaches and there was no way in hell I was going to get out. I drove around to the side of the building and noticed that they weren’t so bad there, so I decided to make a run for it. Mistake. They came at me from all fucking angles.

• Kathryn explored her Internet past:

  Back when I was in the thick of it, I found myself mostly unable to write conherently about hypertext theory. Others seemed not to share this problem, but my sense of hypertextual structure seemed to me to be preverbal, almost, as though it had more to do with the feel of fabrics on my fingertips or with sensations on my tongue than with critical terminology….so here I am trying to talk about it. And I feel the need to because there is something deeply unsatisfying to me about linear blogging — even if we get to make lots of links to news sites and to each other — that I need to fix. And if I can’t articulate, at least to myself, what I want changed, I’m going to have a hard time changing it.

• Daniel thought about poetry:

  What am I saying? I’m saying poetry, even when it’s impersonal in the Eliotian sense, is personal, and when it’s personal, in the Emersonian sense, is impersonal and worthy of disinterested takings-on.

• Zhaf has been reading Joseph Conrad.

Personal

• doug shared his history of sexual identity.
  
• Raven has been driven away by spammers. (OK, I broke the rule. But just for this.)
  
• maria overheard a mournful call:

  the sounds I heard were human and that they were sobs, coming from deep within a wounded soul….on the biggest rock jutting from the quilt of perennials whose names I do not know, there she was, the youngest daughter – about 8 or so, I would say – sitting with her head balanced on knees drawn up. Her face, framed by black hair that fell from a perfect part, was almost luminous from the sorrow that kept washing over her in great waves.

• Leigh discovered that her chocolate bath beads weren’t what she thought they were.
  
• Awake took some time to go through a box of books that his great-grandmother presented him before she died.
  
• Natalie explains the business of what she sees when she closes her eyes.
  
• Brian shut down his BKO Forums. How about trying a bot, Brian?
  
• Elkit attended Carnaval in San Francisco and wrote a piece that sounds like an attempt to one-up Crazy Tracy:

  I found myself checking out flavored condoms when one of the worker-owners approached….I told her I’d never tried the flavored condoms, and was wondering if they really tasted okay, or if they were just as gross as the regular kind. Naw, she said, they really are alright, they really do taste like the flavor advertised, and not just like flavored latex with a spermicide aftertaste.

• Kimber took a breath after visiting Ian’s new school:

  Ian will be going to the regular kindergarten, he will NOT be in the dreaded TLC/ABA program! Even the coordinator of the program said that he is way too high functioning to go there after she went to see him at his regular school. He will not be assigned a 1:1 aide. He will be given reasonable accomodations including additional in-class staff as needed during the first month to ease his transition. He will still be getting OT and ST but they are going to work on moving that into the classroom as well. And they are going to continue to use his picture schedule and let him carry his squishy toys as needed.

• Teresa explained her absence:

  All this time I’ve been sharing a computer with the Cute Little Red-Headed Girlfriend, but now she has one of her very own. I’ve been setting it up for her with little tweaks and software and as you may know, that can eat up some time. Especially since the computer is the first Windows unit I’ve owned since the days of DOS.

• Irene posted 100 things you never knew about her. Watch for next week’s stunner.
  
• Jill posted her own, shorter list.
  
• Kate planted some California Poppies after a mini-melon disaster last year.
  
• Mary Lou topped my Memorial Day misadventure story with a meteor shower:

  I had gotten up to pee, and check my blood sugar, and I was reading to get back to sleep, when the whole world exploded! It was right over my head, and sizzled, and crackled and then boomed away towards the Casdades. I jumped out of bed and ran into the Living room and Tim was already looking out the window. I said I think it was thunder, and he said there isnt a f—— cloud in the sky? the moon was out and fully bright . Dogs and neighbors were now up looking out doors and windows.

• Bill had his own “sound and light show”:

  I was expecting a little rain, but then the power went out and I looked out to see a major limb off the big cedar elm. During the lightning flashes I could see that it was totally blocking the road and that there were several smaller branches down in the yard as well.

• Manda reported a quirk in Irish law:

  Drove like a madwoman (this is why it’s scary for goonley to be a passenger) from Galway to Dublin this morning to return the rental by noon. It’s 212km, but mostly on two-laners, sometimes with tractors, so I became a crazy passer. The traffic laws here, like the pirate code, are really more like guidelines. (If you think that’s funny, the quote actually originates with goonley.) There is no highway patrol.

• Bill saw a terrifying future in the dentist’s office.
  
• John found a commemorative brick.
  
• Pam shared news of a day in the life.
  
• Ellen redid her office:

  “Krećenje” is what it’s called, and the process is rolling this thick white wet plaster over the walls and ceilings. Bosnian buildings are constructed from concrete, not wood or brick, and the walls are then plastered, not dry-walled. To “clean” them, you just add another layer of white plaster.

• Bea saluted her grandfather.
  
• Nancy shares yet another tidbit of life in India:

  Almost everyone here has a ration card. The ration shops sell rice and sugar and kerosene etc. at subsidised rates for the poor. For years we didn’t have a ration card, but we finally applied and got one with great difficulty – it took about six months of going back and forth to the government office concerned. We did it because government agencies often ask to see a ration card as a proof of identification, or of address. Unfortunately, when we got the card the address was written incorrectly, but that’s the way things happen.

Photos

• Theodore: Rock your Gypsy Soul
  
• Deborah professes love for her digital camera.
  
• Michael: Cut his hair
  
• Coup de Vent: Balance
  
• Kris: more vacation photos

Poetry

• Greg: Token Poem
  
• Susan: Change of Life
  
• Michael: Psalm to Sandman

Missing Bloggers

• Tamara
  
• Maya
  
• Rae
  
• Treesong

Recent Reading

Buying books through these links does put a little money in my pocket. Thank you!
• The Voice That Is Great Within Us: American Poetry of the Twentieth Century by Hayden Carruth (a well-read, dogeared copy)

• Wheelock’s Latin, 6e and Workbook for Wheelock’s Latin, 3rd Edition, Revised

Petitions

• Free John Moss
  
• Reduce Global Warming
  
• Call for a Paper Ballot
  
• Reign in the Army Corps of Engineers

Web Links

• Duck Slang
  
• Web Page Tools
  
• Implosion World
  
• Introduction to Web Site Captures
  
• Hermaphrodite Grizzlies

A human writer realizes that other human beings may be victims like himself and he should unite with them against the aggressor, not become one.

Anais Nin