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Insert a Trite Metaphor About a Corral

Posted on July 30, 2004 in Roundup

The books are all different; men argue and reach nothing; and Truth is hidden in caves.

  –The Mahabharata

square284.gifThe small press blog world went into a coma while the Democrats put on their “we can fight terrorism better than Bush can” convention in Boston, which used to a center of pacifist sentiment. Not any more. My friend George teased me about the warlike platform of the party and its candidate. Sigh. It is true. Is this a Nixon style “Southern Strategy”? Must we choose between a draft-dodging war monger and a former peace activist warmonger?

I have to confess that I didn’t much care for this week’s blogging. Many people simply parroted the convention rhetoric. It will be worse when the Republicans begin their dog and pony show.

As Greg Palast noted, it’s going to be the brick on the head following the slap in the face. Brought to you by the same people, more or less.

This roundup covers the period from 23 July to 29 July 2004

Politics


  • Mike offended some Americans with his remarks on the American convention process:

    One of Shelley’s first posts on The American Street, pointing to the Democratic National Convention (DNC), elicited a somewhat unfairly sceptical retort from yours truly. At the beginning of the week, it seemed to this non-American that the DNC and RNC serve as scripted devices whipping up an hysteria that sucks sane minds into a vain, costly and manufactured consensus underwriting a corrupt system. No matter public support for it, it remains flawed.

  • Jack threw down his gauntlet:

    It is left to the members of each generation to renew and restore the Constitution, to make it live for them. Our Constitution needs such restoration now. It has been sorely tested in the past fifteen years. Its promises have been abandoned and twisted by the rich, the influential, and the powerful. Its principles need to be rediscovered and reasserted, with energy, with devotion, and without apology.

  • God’s Ex-Boyfriend put to rest a certain calumny about President Al Gore:

    They say that if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes “true” and that history is written by the winners….For the record: Al Gore never claimed to have invented the Internet.

    This claim was a deliberate misrepresentation of what Gore actually said. The lie was started by a conservative journalist and Bush partisan, and the factually-challenged wire services and entertainment media picked up on it. Wired magazine in particular was responsible for propagating the misquote and then “refuting” it with a series of counter-arguments, half of which didn’t even contradict the supposed claim.

  • Victoria cleared her throat:

    I have to say that unless the Democrats realize there are not TWO Americas, but THREE Americas they are missing a chance to win over many, many undecided, or Bush leaning voters. These are the people I work with, people who are neither rich nor poor; people who are both black and white and other colors; people whose jobs are in danger of being shipped overseas to India and other places.

  • Randy pointed to the disparate treatment some bloggers accord affirmations of patriotism by Democrats.
  • LQ thought Kerry “hit it out of the park”.
  • Stu eschewed the vapidity of the reportage by bloggers at the Democratic National Convention.
  • Kris confessed to being a convention junkie.
  • Mileah cried “Four More Years — For Bill Clinton”
  • Kimber shared a t-shirt design.
  • Brian contemplated the legal issues involved in a web site’s use of Woodie Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land.
  • Kynn responded to an anonymous phone message on the subject of hate crimes.
  • Aurora flagellated Ann Coulter for a column that USA Today would not print.

  • Nathan removed his link to the American Life League for many reasons:

    It’s not the pro-life movement that I have a problem with; but I find the American Life League’s attacks on some Cardinals, including Cardinal McCarrick of Washington, detestable. I also find their most recent stunt, the picketing of John Kerry’s parish, detestable. I doubt they’ll be picketing outside of the Republican National Convention, or the church that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger receives Holy Communion at.


Culture


  • Pam gave the language a new word:

    Pamming about differs from merely wasting time in that the subject who is pamming about may appear to be engaged in some useful or meaningful task, but is actually accomplishing very little, if anything at all. Also, the amount of time consumed by pamming about is frighteningly large and consumes anywhere from an hour to an entire day.

  • Theodore advanced his own presidential candidate:

    Ursula the Cat accepted the Puss Party’s nomination for President of the United States today at the nation’s first ever Catvention, held inside a comfy cardboard box by the hole in the fence. Unanimously nominated also was her running mate and main competitor for food-dish access, Avatar, the country’s first openly gay and feline Vice Presidential nominee.

  • Jody mulled over what had gone right and what went right with the short feature he directed last year.
  • John chided Andrew Sullivan for not knowing that French is the third most popular foreign language spoken in the home in the United States>
  • Michael attended Comic Con where he saw Ray Bradbury in a wheelchair. Meta Manda was also there.
  • Kathryn described an experiment which appears to have falsified quantum mechanics. (semi-technical)
  • Think thought about the influence of blogging:

    If they all disappeared tomorrow the world would not be different. If all the newspapers and, I guess, television news stations, disappeared today, all but a small handful of politically-based blogs would disappear the next day.

    Blogs are not the revolution.


Religion


  • Jeanne grumbled about the whole “politics and religion” debate:

    Sorry to sound so cynical, but there’s so much distance between “shrewd political operative” and “moral voice” that I can’t reconcile them. All I can do is point out the contradiction — despite the fact that I agree that one of our biggest political problems is that “we’re losing our moral voice.” My difference with Podesta is that I think that’s a problem for Americans, not a problem for Democrats. The Republicans have a moralizing voice, but not a moral one. To suggest that the Democratic Party is losing ground because it isn’t doing as well as the other guys is this regard is, inevitably, to move in a direction that is the antithesis of morality.

  • Doug returned to prayer journaling after a bad experience ten years ago:

    It was presented as a way of tracking how God granted my requests, which “proved” his existence. In my case, it was more the way God wasn’t answering my petitions — or so I thought. Had I stuck with the theological mindset of that group of self-styled “prayer warriors” I’d have no doubt become a convinced atheist.

  • Natalie issued Part Eight of Blaugustine’s Interview with God.

Personal


  • Susan struggled with the death of her father.

    The scourge of writing is that once the voice is found, it won’t be tamed. In flesh and blood I’ve shuttered up my lips that even opened for a moment for a sip of morning coffee are seen by the pain that’s hiding deep within to rush out in a wail, a keening sound that only morning greyness of the sky itself is large enough to accept until the one whom I can cling to hurries home to hold me close.

  • Bill ended up at a bowling alley:

    You roll the ball down the wooden lane toward the bowling pins. Did you know that there is some kind of oil on the wood? It gets on the ball. It gets on your hands when you touch the bowling ball. Under no circumstance sould you ever go into the men’s restroom at a bowling alley to wash your hands. The men’s restroom at the alley has not been cleaned since well before the First Gulf War. Yeeech!

  • Maria described her two constant companions:

    Anxiety is garrulous, and she likes to wear chiffon that floats wherever she steps. Pain is reticent, though it tries to be polite, at least when it comes to accommodating anxiety.

  • Jill took a trip to Boston and didn’t mention the convention:

    Mother Ju was very well behaved, which I attribute to the anti-depressants that I discovered in her medicine cabinet. That’s not to say it didn’t get a shade hairy at times, most particularly the moment that I gasped for air after her absentminded driving led us a shade too close to a moving vehicle. She admonished me for my intake of breath and I had to explain that shear fright was not presently in my control.

  • M. Luminous found herself with a lesbian-oriented older sister’s disease:

    I’m not a very jealous person, but in the past few weeks, I have been feeling little twinges of envy for my older brother. Engineer Brother is getting married next summer, and while I am thrilled for him and his fiancee, Arwen, there is a tiny part of me that sits back and grumbles about how unfair it is that he gets to have a wedding and I don’t.

  • Terje announced that he is engaged to the most wonderful woman in the world:

    It’s typical of me to attempt to explain some simple thing with too many words, for anyone left to hear them, sort through them, shift them for meaning, a lot of patience is neccessary – May has had patience, for which I am really grateful. But I know she knows how I feel about her.

  • Maya made her tenth move in twenty years:

    i was separated for 8, which accounts for most of my moves. i chose, like a gypsy, to move as soon as my lease was up, yearly. now that my husband and i are reconciled, our other option is to live in our condo which does not appeal to me at all. we found, again, another transitory place — this big house with garden, in a village where hopefully i’ll find a piece of land to build that house where i wouldn’t have the ache to move out of.

  • Rachel wrote about the girl she babysits every week.
  • Irene found herself rich when she went to Bali:

    I’d turned into a millionaire practically overnight! Do you know how heady a feeling that is?!


    My MYR$502.70 converted to 1,150,000 rupiahs. Wow! I sent a text message to Dad celebrating my new millionaire status and he replied, “Congrats! Spend! Spend! Spend!! I fancy a Porshe….”

  • bittersweet talked about a trip

    The weekend was incredible fun. There were a couple of downers, like getting a massively exhorbitant parking ticket outside our hotel in Kensington, and losing my new swish D&G sunglasses (yep, gutted about that one)….

  • Tracy was ticketed:

    A few weeks ago I was cruising through a quaint little town called North College Hill when I happened to look into the rear view mirror and spied the prettiest red and blue lights flashing behind me. They really are pretty, especially at night…especially when you’re a bit intoxicated. Not that I was.

  • Mary Lou confessed a dark secret to her daughter:

    I want a Garden Gnome. Not one of those really cheap icky ones, but one of the really cute ones that cost about 249.95! Then Donna cracked up and said she had been meaning to google Obscene garden gnomes and see what came up. FUNNY!!!!! There is a site about three sites down that has funny jokes etc on it but no obscene garden gnomes.

  • Rae mused on the art of the apology:

    See, at work there is this woman that just can’t seem to do her job right. She’s a good woman, I like her a lot, but month after month I’m correcting mistakes she’s made. After five years, my patience is gone and my temper is frayed. I jumped her case pretty badly last week. As only I can do, and through e-mail, where she can refer to it in case she forgot the point I was trying to make.


    Well, what I jumped her for………..ended up being my mistake, not hers.

  • Kimber is looking for a job change:

    Mostly I’m just bored and ready for something else. Something more challenging where I can learn something and use my brain a bit would be nice. The problem is unless I totally change professions, there isn’t much opportunity for challenge and learning. In the Administrative Assistant world, when you move up, it’s just more of the same work you were doing before for more “important” people. And the higher up the AA food chain you get, the more you have to dress like a muckity muck and act like a muckity muck and get involved in all the unpleasant office politics and put in longer hours.

  • Leigh stopped at the Corn Palace and other sites enroute to Deadwood, South Dakota.
  • Madge was awestruck and humbled by a forest fire.
  • Caterina went to Blogon.
  • Roberta shared a game she used to play with her husband.

Photos


Poetry


Missing Bloggers


Recent Reading

Petitions & Appeals


Web Links

Kavsika the brahmana, who is now roasting in Hell, set his heart on Virtue, and in all his life never told a lie, even in jest.


Once, having seen their helpless victim run past him and hide, Kavsika sitting where the rivers meet answered the thieves: “That way.”

So be as the swan, who drinks from milk and water mixed together, whichever one he chooses, leaving the other behind.

  –The Mahabharata

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