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Liberals have more fun

2011-11-28T03:55:00.001-05:00

As annoyed as I am by the Occupy Wall Street Crowd, I have a feeling they're having a lot more fun than I do, say, at a Tea Party rally with a bunch of old fogies like myself.

For one thing, I suspect they are having a lot of sex, and doing drugs that lead to incredible experiences. The most exciting pharmaceutical in my apartment is pseudoephedrine, for which I had to ask the pharmacist in soft tones, lest any designer druggies overheard, and then to swear on the grave of Carrie Nation that I had not, did not, and would not start making amphetamine before I could get it.

And sex? The last time I was drawn to a gentlemen who was drawn to me was when I myself went around complaing that it was the evil capitalists screwing things up around here, albeit not in a tent in 30 degree weather. The gentleman drawn to me agreed and we enjoyed many spirited political discussions. But one night, sensing I was hoping for more commitment, he told me we were ultimately incapatible....for one thing,he thought that would be the perfect time to tell he was married

So the only things having sex around here are two of my female cockatiels, and the ferrel cats who live around the dumpster.

(my values frown on extramarital sex, but it would be nice to at least know osomeone would find the idea of having sex with me intriguing.)

I also suspect there's a lot of singing going on in the "Occuppy" tents. Friends, maybe brand new ones playing acoustic guitars and harmonicas, channeling the pre-Newport Dylan. Not to mention modern socially relevant minstrels like Ani Difranco, Green Day, and Wilco. Throw in a little
Bruce Springsteen and you have all the ingredients for a new tv series: "Occupy Wall Street/Philadelphia/Oakland/Marquette has Talent!". Or its logical spinoff, "OWS Idol!". ("Katy is an agitator for the Indianapolis chapter of the Communist Party of the US. When her artist husband, Louie, is not in jail for trying to overthrow the US government, they form a singing duo performing at coffee shops and Unitarian churches around America. Solo yet again because of the fascist Oakland police department, Katy will be performing "O mi babino caro" from the opera Gianni Schicchi, while simultaneously defacing portraits of US bankers, and juggling"

Actually, I have many fine memories singing at parties and rallies as a left leaning college student. I was involved with a lot of this partly because I wanted to freak my parents out, and to be different. I liked the ideals pushed by the left but I didn't study them carefully. If I had, I would likely have Gone Over To The Dark Side much earlier.

Three decades later I am a little wiser, but definitely having less fun. Although getting drunk on bad beer, dating unavailable men, and watching "He Man" every afternoon in the residence hall lounge don't sound like very much fun now, anyway.

How to Do Thanksgiving With Your Sister

2011-11-26T23:29:00.001-05:00

1). Get text from sister asking if you can bring walnuts and paper plates.

2.) Stop at Meijers to get paper plates and walnuts. Remember you're out of milk.Get milk and egg nog and cereal (it's on sale) and, of course, the walnuts and paper plates.

3.) When you arrive home, realize you can't find your phone. Anywhere.

4.) Remember that your pc is down and you don't have cable, thus your
only contact with the real world is the car radio, which has two volumes: "Tinitis" and "mute".

5.). It is now 3 in the morning and you still haven't baked the cake you're ostensibly bringing to the feast. No matter, go back to Meijer's anyway.
How can you survive phonelessness....especially if your sister 's number is only on your phone. Oh, and your pc, which is down.

6). Look everywhere you've been at. Meijers: bulk nuts, milk refrigerator, shoes (someone might need them!), cameras (I'm Christmas shopping, OK, Dave Ramsey??????)
Do not find phone.

7). Ask the only 2 employees whether they've seen your phone. They haven't, but when they hear the sad story of your sister 's number on your missing phone and broken pc, one helpfully says, "Go to the library! You can get on the Internet there!". "On Thanksgiving ?". "Oh. Right. Sorry."

8.) Feeling extremely sorry for yourself, buy a phone. A cheap phone. A pay as you go phone. And a stereo CD clock radio, because you can't listen to music without a phone or computer, unless you stay in the car all night with the deaf-making car stereo, at which point you will be evicted. Go home.

9). Plug in the clock radio. Put on "The Leningrad Symphony". Get out phone and instructions.

10). About the time the Nazis reach the Leningrad horizon, realize that in order to activate the pay as you go phone, you need to call it from another phone.

11.). Begin weeping now. Go through your ancient paper address book, wondering if you have a living relative who has not moved in 20 years and has your sister 's number. "Hi Great Aunt Suzy! How are you and Uncle Joe?...He did??? Oh, I'm so sorry for your loss...When did this happen?...in 1994, I see. I think that was the year I moved to Tibet and became a monk. Well, anyway, Happy Thanksgiving ! Uh, by the way, you wouldn't happen to have my sister 's number...?"

12) decide to just wing it and try to retrace the steps you took the last and only time you went to your sister 's new apartment. Bake cake.

13) Go to bed at 6 am.

14)Hear the alarm ring at 11. Hit snooze.
15) Repeat 14 about 6 times.

16) Drag self into shower.

17)Dress, grab keys and cake, and go out to car, leaving walnuts and paper plates behind.

18). Find your phone underneath passenger seat.

19). Happy Thanksgiving!

2011-10-23T04:54:00.001-04:00

My beliefs about politics and community are ever evolving. I am never one to scold politicians--or anyone, for that matter, for changing their mind. If John Kerry was for the war in Iraq and then against it, I give him the benefit of the doubt that he altered his view after getting more information, hopefully not from an opinion poll. Of course, I like my politicians like I like my drinkers: politics only on weekends and in moderation. Or at least not a 12 pack of legislative actions a day.

I also am constantly being surprised myself as to how I'm changing....not surprised about the additional things I learn about economics and logic, but surprised at the labels I appear to be qualifying for. I've been listening to a podcast called "Bad Quaker Dot Com" which is archived, strangely enough, on badquaker.com. The hosts, Ben and his adult (or precocious) daughter Ki, keep saying things I agree with. It reminds me of when I first heard Rush Limbaugh...at that time, I was thinking, "Yeah! I think affirmative action is unfair, too! I think taxes should be lower too!" Now, although I stilll adore Rush, there are now many things we are not sympatico about. I started learning about libertarianism while I was a regular listener and it eventually won my heart.

So for several years I purchased every issue of "Liberty", until the paper one went away and we were left with the online version (which I don't like as much), read everything I could get my hands on on libertarianism, and found myself downloading Austrian economic podcasts (Von Mises, the Cato Institute, etc) like crazy. If someone would ask me what party I belonged to or if I was a Democrat or Republican, I would say "I'm a libertarian."

But since August, when I began listening to Ben and Ki, I've been more exposed to the ideas of anarchy, particularly anarchocapitalism, and I like it. Once again, I keep saying to my iPod, "Yeah! that's right! Violence ALWAYS leads to problems, and taxing is violence!" (I still don't like taxes).

The zero aggression principle is important in libertarianism too, but it is taken to its logical goal in the ideas of anarchocapitalism.

What I don't understand and am trying to is that Ben always talks about "the state" as separate from "the government". I guess the point is that even if a government is duly elected, there's a more sinister "state" that exists (or maybe one that will develop) behind it that will tend toward the evils of control, of violence, and of oppression of personal liberties. I'm not sure if I know exactly what "the state" is or whom it comprises of.

I do like Ben and Ki though. Since I'm looking for a church home, I'm even thinking about checking out the Friends' meeting house. (I should point out that although badquaker.com has that name, it is not used by the hosts to proselytize; I don't know if Quakers do that anyway. But they seem like very nice people, as have all Friends I've known.....good or bad.)

http://badquaker.com/

Rich vs. Righteous

2011-10-20T21:18:00.000-04:00

My pastor delivered, as usual, a mostly wonderful message on Proverbs last week, using Gone With the Wind as illustration (he's doing a series with a movies theme). Much of the lesson centered on the importance of prizing spiritual treasure over material treasure. At one point, the pastor turned to us and said, "It comes down to this: Would you rather be rich, or would you rather be righteous?"

I haven't sent an email to him about this yet but I mean to. The thing is, I do not think these two things are incompatible. What's more, I would argue that you cannot become rich and stay rich without being at least a little righteous....unless your vocation itself is evil. Drug dealing, for example, or bank robbery.

I know this goes against the intuition of many these days. So let me defend my opinion.

I listen to Dave Ramsey, the Christian radio talk show host/financial counselor, pretty regularly. He spends a lot of time rebutting the notion that the rich got that way by somehow having luck bestow wealth upon them, as if a million dollars was left in a basket on their doorsteps. Most millionaires, according to Ramsey, get that way by sacrificing a lot early in their lives and careers. They don't finance a car before they get wealthy, they drive a clunker. They don't get a 30 year, variable rate mortgage, they get a 15 year mortgage with 20-50% down...money they've scrimped and saved. They don't use credit cards. They eat rice and beans. In the meantime they are working like crazy.

Once again, I emphasize, this refers to MOST wealthy people, not all.

Plus, the word "millionaire" means something very different now than it did then, say, in the eighties, when my college professors were complaining about the millionaires who paid only 1% of the taxes while the rest of us paid the remainder (sound familiar)? Taking inflation into account, as well as the good economic health we experienced in the 80s and 90s, millionaires are all around. If you think about it, all it takes for a family to have a million dollars is for it to have two wage earners starting out at something like $40,000 each (getting raises to take them to maybe 60,000 after a few years) who bank 10% of their income, earning a very humble percentage of 7% or something like that, and to not take anything out until retirement. Granted, they would need to be a disciplined family, but it's not all that unusual for families to earn $120,000 a year or $150,000. So if you want to categorize millionaires as the opposite of righteous, you are categorizing a lot more people as unrighteous than you would have during the Carter administration.

So why do I think most rich people are NOT evil?

First of all, in order to become rich, you need to do many things: save, avoid buying things on credit, take good care of what you do own so that it lasts a long time, find bargains where you can, and invest wisely. Not just in mutual funds, but in life. Paying for an education that will earn you or your child a higher wage. Taking care of the small business that you are likely to own, and keeping it and your skills up-to-date. You need to avoid doing a lot too: taking out loans, avoiding expensive habits (even smoking costs a small fortune each year), being seduced by nice cars or boats that you cannot afford until after you get rich.

And I don't know of any scientific data on that, but I know that in my life, whenever I'm tithing and donating generously, things go a lot better for me financially. So I think giving generously also makes it more likely that a person will become wealthy. I could be wrong about this; I'm definitely not into the "blab it & grab it" theology and I wouldn't tell someone they will definitely prosper if they give to this or that charity, but anecdotal evidence suggests there's a correlation between giving and doing better. Maybe those who give are more careful in budgeting, or maybe they tend to be the kind of folks people want to help in a crisis (so they don't often fall into a hole they can't climb out of), but I think the correlation is there.

Secondly, you can't be greedy and profit. I know this goes against the grain too, but follow the logic on this one. If someone owns a small business, say, a dry cleaner, and decides she can get more money by doing something underhanded, she is unlikely to continue, or to do as much business as the dry cleaner's across the street. Let's say she alters the solution she uses in some way to make it cheaper....or perhaps buys solution she knows is not the best. If this alters the quality of the work done at her shop, people are going to vote with their feet for the cleaners across the street. If she underpays her employees, they either won't stay or they will not do work of the quality they would if well paid. If she overcharges customers, we're voting across the street again. If she....or anyone else....desires some material thing so very much that she decides to buy it whether she has the cash or not, the interest she pays on a financed car/house/private jet/fancy unnecissary business upgrades will keep her from prospering. Just like those of us who have financed cars or other stuff before we really could afford them don't prosper.

You can't indulge in gluttony as a rich or a poor person and prosper, because your health will suffer and that will keep you from working as much as you otherwise could,

In general, to become wealthy, one needs to be thrifty, generous, kind (at least to customers), patient, and hard-working. All of which are righteous attributes.

Bohemian Therapy

2011-10-18T07:21:00.037-04:00

Sometimes my practice of crisis intervention with families is assisted by my own experiences, as you might expect of a mental health practitioner. I was reminded of this earlier today when I heard some snippets of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody.

It wasn't the heady days of the seventies that hearing Freddie Mercury's incomparable voice and Brian May's guitar solos brought me to. It was Christmas of a handful of years ago.

I was in my sister's car with her two sons and my other sister's two daughters. The youngest of the younger set was J, then about twelve or thirteen. J had always had to fight to hold her place among her cousins, although JH, the oldest, was only four years her senior. She had tended to go ignored or teased by the others, in part because she tended to bug them a lot. As younger sisters and cousins often will do.

I felt for her many times. Although I was the oldest in my family, I always felt unsure of myself in communicating with my cousins and often said something goofy or insulting when I didn't mean to, and so I wasn't always as popular among them as I would have liked. I felt like I had to constantly prove myself.

In a family of performers, J had lots of competition from her blues singing sister and guitar playing cousins. My mom had gotten a keyboard around this time that she learned to play; the others didn't notice. She played in the school band; no one among the kids acted very impressed. Mind you, J's mom and aunts and grandmother thought she was the bee's knees; but we were old, what did we know?

In the meantime, JH and A, who lived near Seattle at the time, were playing in a band of their own, and writing songs. H was going to open mics to watch her friends sing and play, and performing the occasional solo at school.

But back to Christmas. JH, A and H were by that time mesmerized with old music. The boys appreciated the New Wave stuff their mom and I used to listen to, and H was listening to a lot of old blues numbers. So to pass the time on trips or while hanging around during visits with each other, the entire family often found themselves singing old songs from the seventies and sixties, the lyrics of which the kids were getting very good at reciting. J would hum along, not seeming quite as interested as the other three, but definitely wanting to belong.

And here we were in the car, my sister, me, her sons, our nieces, singing Ramones and Beatles songs. Eventually, we ran out of ideas and there was a little lull in the back. It was then that J's plaintive voice was heard, completely solo, a little shaky but in perfect pitch: "Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?"

I don't know how familiar you are with Bohemian Rhapsody. But it's not an easy song to sing. First of all, it's rather long for a pop song, and the words (being operatically sung and all) are often difficult to decipher ("I'm just a little sillouette of a man, scaramouche, scaramouche, will you do the fandango"....it doesn't even make sense. Although I was delighted when I was learning English country dancing to find out there actually is a dance called the fandango, which we learned by heart without prompts, but I digress). Secondly, the key changes several times.

Finally, the darn thing is so long it's hard to remember the words if you know them in the first place. But J had learned them, and she sang the whole song from the first "I'm just a poor boy" to the last "any way the wind blows" note perfect, never pausing, key changes and all. The rest of us joined in when we could, but none of the rest of us knew the words to the entire song. Even though KJ and I were actually alive, and actually old enough to appreciate it, when the song came out.

"Wow, J..." her sister said after this. "Yeah, that was good," her cousins had to avow.

The youngest cousin climbed several rungs up on the ladder of cool that night.

It's interesting, whether I'm in an interview room with a distressed family bringing their child in out of concern for his or her mental health, or whether I'm seeing a longitudinal study unfold before my eyes of the ones I love, and how they interact with each other.

I come not to praise praise and worship songs

2011-10-06T03:05:00.004-04:00

About a year ago, my pastor was preaching on legalism and, for lack of a better phrase, church snobbishness.

Ours is a seeker church, so it's important for us to avoid, if possible, any perceived barriers to anyone who might be seeking us. So he likes to emphasize the way our church differs from churches which seekers may have attended as kids. Funny skits before the sermon, a coffee shop in the corridor, a critically noted Christmas show each year, and a modern band. Which is fine.

But during this particular sermon, he was not talking so much about the good stuff we have. He had words to say about what other churches have, and how it's not necessary from a Biblical perspective. The tradition of wearing your Sunday best, for example, instead of the torn jeans and t-shirts that read "Green Day" or "My parents went to Vegas and all I got was this lousy t-shirt" often preferred by our younger members. Or of particular rituals. As Jesus to the Pharisees, he exhorted that anyone who attended one of the dress-up/ritual churches shouldn't look down on those who went to church in Green Day t-shirts or whose only ritual was a weekly spin around the parking lot to find the best place. Blessed are the poorly dressed and those who park close to the exits; they shall be excused from filling the collection plate.

But he reserved most of his fire and brimstone for the most Pharisaical icon of all: the traditional hymn. "You may have thought our church was strange to play music like this, but who says you have to listen to and sing old songs that aren't even relevant today? Who says you can't play rock and roll in church?"

I tried not to burst out laughing. Who, indeed? Since every church I've ever belonged to has played mediocre folk songs, their lyrics helpfully projected on the wall via overhead; or the modern "praise and worship" songs, most of which have melodies that evoke dishrags and limp handshakes, and lyrics that try to stray away from "we praise you" and "Lord you love me and I love you" (It's the Christian Barney song!)? If a person wanted to hear "contemporary" music at church he need listen no further than the nearest Catholic parish after Vatican II, or the nearest evangelical Protestant church after 1980 or so. My local church imploded many years ago, eventually becoming a small community with another pastor and creed I was not comfortable with; after looking to find another, I can truthfully say that finding rock and roll in church (or some semblance of it.....music on electric guitars and the requisite "Jesus is my girlfriend" songs) is a lot easier than finding traditional hymns being sung in church.

Which didn't used to bug me....until my pastor said what he said above. I started paying more attention to hymns when I heard them or incorporated them in my own prayers, to their lyrics, to their arrangements, to their lilting melodies. As a result, I am losing patience with the "praise and worship" and I truly miss the theology of old fashioned, if dated, hymns.

Who can really compare "Lord we love you/We lift up our hands/Oh yeah" repeated over and over again with these lyrics from "Rock of Ages":

Not the labor of my hands
Can fulfill Thy law’s demands;
Could my zeal no respite know,
Could my tears forever flow,
All for sin could not atone;
Thou must save, and Thou alone.

Well, OK, maybe we can find our theology in other places. What's the harm in clapping our hands and shaking our booties to simple but lilting melodies before the pastor preaches?

That brings us to my next complaint about praise and worship songs, or at least those led at my church: they are not lilting. In fact, they are awful.

I think I have the expertise to make such a judgment. I'm not a little old lady in a hat and veil primly sitting with arms crossed in the front pew, insisting that "This is the devil's music!" I grew up in the 70s, and fancy myself a pretty big rock fan (see my reviews on Amazon, for example).

Part of the problem with the music at my church appears to be the darned obscurity of the songs. I don't remember ever hearing any of them in any other setting, and I don't think I ever hear the same ones again. So very few people know the words to sing along with, and if there is a dose of wisdom in any of them, one doesn't get the chance to really get it, since that often comes with hearing a song several times.

I love my church. I love my pastor's sermons, I even love a lot of the solo songs some of the very talented singers do, and the skits, and the videos, and the Christmas play. But I dread the music we need to survive each weekend, each weekend.

Corporate Grief

2011-10-06T02:11:00.006-04:00

I just learned that Steve Jobs died on Wednesday. A shame. He did a lot to make our world what our world is today. The good parts of the world today, that is.

When I worked at a group home in the early 80s, one of my duties was scheduling our 24 hour program. I was complaining to a coworker at the agency about this onerous task. A psychologist there said, "You can use my computer to schedule."

When he said "computer", he meant a monstrous piece of machinery, about the size of a portable refrigerator, with a black screen and green LED characters (in one font, probably a look alike of He_Terminal). It probably ran on DOS, although I had no idea what an OS was then. Data was input via a floppy disc that was really floppy, really a disc, and relatively big (there had been one larger size during the PC era, from what I understand, this was the first step down).

I was not anti-computer, but I was skeptical that a computer could come up with a schedule that worked. I pictured everyone being assigned to random shifts. "No," I said, "I think the staff of Robinson House prefers to rely on the kindness of their coworkers."

"But you can program kindness into it!" he pleaded.

Fast forward to 1989. I'm in my first year of graduate school. My job at the university that would support me comes with a computer: a Macintosh, one of the first variety. It was the first time I had experienced an interactive graphic interface. I was hooked. It was during that year that Bill Gates came to UM to talk about a new operating system that Microsoft was designing that would also use a mouse and graphics. When I graduated and it was time to buy my own computer, I decided to buy a PC instead of a Mac, based primarily on price.

Fast forward again to last year, when I bought my first iPhone. Wow. I switched from a Palm Pilot, and I've found the iPhone 3gs can handle not only all the things I did with that better, there are some things I prefer to do on the iPhone than on my Dell PC, which runs on Vista. I am so fond of my iPhone (I now have an iPhone 4) that I plan on trading in my Dell for an iMac or even a MacBook when it gets annoying enough.

I've never really tried to program kindness into any kind of computer, but I can imagine it being done these days. (Don't they have an app for that?) And scheduling .... I can't imagine doing that without a computer.

I saw the old Macintosh ad, the first one, aired during the SuperBowl in 1984 or 1985 recently in a film on advertising. You know, the one with a scene that looks uncannily like the "Two Minute Hate" in 1984, with the woman running through it with a sledge hammer?

Yeah, that's the one.

What really gets me is that the athletic wear the woman is wearing does not seem very old fashioned to me. But a 1984 Macintosh most certainly does.

So I lift a glass to Mr. Jobs, who together with worthy competitor Bill Gates changed the world several times over.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about.

I wanted to talk about Borders. I got an e-mail yesterday from Barnes & Noble advising me that they'd purchased a list from Borders with my name on it, and if I wanted to opt out they told me how. And I found myself feeling the ugly gut level punch that I remember when reminded of a friend or relative who'd passed away recently. I am experiencing real, pure, unadulterated grief about Borders.

I know this is different because Borders is like the gazillionth business that has gone belly up in Michigan over the last 10 years. And I occasionally feel sad, or frustrated, that I can't get a free birthday cake at Bill Knapps, or coffee at Elias Brothers, or get my Clinique bonuses at Jacobsens. But I don't mourn these places.

The news that Borders was closing hit me in the gut. I wasn't able to go to any of the clearance sales, the idea made me too sad. I really do feel like I've lost a friend. I've gone through all the classic stages (except that acceptance one), I've cried, I've gotten physically ill.

What's funny is that I rarely went to Borders in the last 10 years. Around that time I discovered Starbucks, and that Barnes & Noble served it in their in-store cafe, and Borders didn't. I also liked the service at Barnes & Noble. They don't stock as much as Borders did in the way of merchandise, but anything they didn't have I could easily get on Amazon, another suitor of mine that managed to edge out the home town place in my heart. Now I wish I'd spent more time among the endless racks of books and CDs at the flagship store downtown, or lounging in a comfy chair or the cafe reading a copy of Mental Floss that I might or might not buy (one Ann Arbor record shop in the 70s, long gone, used to put a map pointing the way to the library near its kiosk of magazines. Never Borders).

Remember that group home I worked at in the mid-80s? It was in Allegan, clear on the other side of the state. My roots were in the Detroit metro area, and whenever I went home I looked forward to a visit to Borders. A couple of times, I drove to Ann Arbor solely to go to Borders. The original, which was sold before Borders went nationwide. It stood sort of kitty corner from where they relocated. A lot of people missed that place and the exclusivity of the original Ann Arbor location when Borders expanded...I didn't then, but I sure miss it now.

CBT

2011-06-16T00:13:00.001-04:00

My supervisor told me the other day, "You should get a certificate in CBT." "DBT?" I answered, thinking he meant Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, the Treatment of Choice (tm) for Borderline Personality Disorder, but something that's proved useful for everyone, including the therapists who lead its groups. "No, CBT. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy."

I am a psychiatric social worker at an ER. I do this for a reason, in other words, I'm not a therapist, or a group leader, or an assessor of people applying for food stamps. True, I got my degree in social work so I could "do psychotherapy", seeing myself with a comfortable private practice someday, a chair, a couch, a patient lying on that couch every hour telling me their troubles, and me helping them find a way out of them for about $110 an hour. I tried that (albeit not with a couch, since by the time I was done with social work training I found no use at all for the psychodynamic kind, which is the one that uses the couch) and I found it boring.

Immediately after graduating I worked for my current boss assessing people with bizarre delusions, dangerous suicidal thoughts, and manic people singing "God Bless America!" at the top of their lungs. Not only did this prove an interesting pasttime, but I turned out to be good at it. I'm apparently able to talk to paranoid people in a way that convinces them I'm on their side. I can provide some good support for a family facing the unbelievable fact that the son they thought was going to complete college and go on to law school has a mysterious disease called "schizophrenia" that's going to make that hard, if not unlikely. I can talk a social worker down on one of the medical units who is convinced that just because a person who's loved one just died is crying, they need psychiatric intervention. I'm not boasting, there's certainly plenty of things I can't do. Eventually I was able to come back to my ER and work full time.

I can, however, do cognitive behavioral therapy, and if I were forced at the point of a gun to be a therapist again, I'd kneel in front of my executioner and beg that it be cognitive behavioral therapy. My experience in this way of the talking cure comes from a variety of sources, some from my own treatment as someone with a mood disorder, and some from my training.

I've kind of gotten comfortable, though, doing the emergency part of psychiatric social work. On the other hand, I'm paid by the taxpayers of the county, and they may not always be able to afford me. It's always good to plan ahead....

I Don't Really Blog...

2011-06-15T23:16:00.002-04:00

I'm still miffed about this.

A month ago, someone pointed out that my Facebook page indicated that I "know" French, and insisted after I didn't pass a "test" he gave me (translating a sentence involving a couple of different future tenses into French) that "Americans can't speak French" and "It always surprises me to see the difference between what people say they know and what they actually know."

Something I noticed after I had a heated exchange with him (since which I've avoided him and haven't heard from him, either) is that if you follow the prompts in your Facebook profile which ask, "Which languages do you speak?", Facebook then lists them as "languages you know" on your profile. So he and I may be arguing semantics. But I still think it was a rude thing for him to say, and pattently untrue.

I learned French in high school. That's about it. After high school I determined that I was not going to be one of those people who said, "Well, I took four years of French but all I remember is how to say 'Let's go to the beach'." So I practice. A lot. There have been years during which I practiced pretty much daily; there have been few years, if any, that I didn't read French books or magazines or watched French television shows. In the last couple of years, having noticed some of the gaps in my ability to speak fluently when I'm in France, I have been focusing on actual educational aids: an advanced grammar book of exercises and the About.com French page, which has a quiz you can take every day.

I don't speak or read French because I think I'm cool or smarter than anyone; I do it because I think it's fun to learn languages. And I would never pose as a teacher of French or a professional translator (although I have been able to help in a pinch in my department at work, a major teaching hospital, if a francophone comes in and there's a delay in the real French translator arriving). I have thought about a goal of being able to teach, but I know I'm not there yet.

Still, hearing someone that (up until then) I respected pretty much diss my French is so infuriating for me. I goofed (at a time when I had just woken up, incidentally, without looking up the grammar points because I didn't want to cheat) on a relatively complicated translation. Does that mean I don't know French at all? Is being a French speaker like being pregnant, either you are or you aren't?

THE PENTAGON FROM HELL!!!!

2011-06-09T19:04:00.004-04:00

Following is a problem in Calculus Workbook for Dummies by Mark Ryan. It's supposed to be a relatively easy problem. I've been working on it for three days.

I don't think this bodes well for me learning calculus after I get through this algebra/geometry/trig review.

The problem is, "Find the area of the pentagon."

Now I should mention that in the accompanying book, Calculus for Dummies, I've been reminded of the following:

1) the Pythagorean theorem (and that it only applies to right triangles...who knew?)
2) The area of a triangle is 1/2 the base times the height
3) in a 45-45-90 right triangle, the ration of the lengths of the sides are: 1:1:sq root of 2
4) In a 60-60-30 right triangle, that ratio is 1:2:sq rt of 3. In other words, if the shortest side is 1, the other sides will be 1*sq rt 3, and 2, respectively.
5) Nobody likes square roots in the denominator, for some reason, so if you have something like 10/sq rt 2 you should multiply it by sq rt 2/sq rt 2 (1, obviously) for a result of 10*sq rt 2/2, or 5*sq rt 2.
6) An equilateral triangle can be made up of 2 60-60 30 right angles. Not sure if that's always true but it is in this case.

I got the lengths of the sides of the square ok (5 sq rt 2) and thus the area (50). But things kinda fall apart when I try to do the area of the equilateral triangle (or 2 60-60-30 triangles) and put them together.

The area of the triangle turns out to be (25*sq rt 3)/2. The area of the whole blasted thing is
50 + (25*sq rt 3)/2.

You are welcome to tell me why, because I can't fathom it. Please show your work, or at least explain it in terms a non-mathy can understand.

Algebra

2011-06-05T23:03:00.002-04:00

Another new tool in my calculus arsenal: Mark Ryan's Calculus for Dummies. Much more practical and with a lot more math than "The Calculus Diaries", it has been my main focus for the last week or so.

It starts with a healthy review of algebra, geometry and trigonometry. All of which I did pretty well in....woops, except for algebra. The first year of it anyway.

In my school, we took Algebra I in 9th grade (first year of high school), Geometry in 10th, and Algebra II in 11th grade. I don't know why it was split up like that. Algebra II was actually really easy for me, so maybe Geometry held some special ingredient that made it so. But in Algebra I, I was a basket case.

I have since decided that it was because I started Algebra I three days after I turned 13 (I had skipped second grade, so was a year younger than everyone in my class except Ray Bayerl, who had skipped two grades). I think my ability to understand abstract concepts was in its infancy. At any rate, I remember spending so much time figuring out how x or y could be a number (x is a letter! How can it be a number?) that it left little time for actually solving equations.

Now that I re-read that last paragraph, I see how someone can be extroardinarily talented in things like languages and writing, but hopeless in math and science. Apparently there wasn't much math and science to be missed in 2nd grade.

One of the attending psychiatrists where I work came to the US from the Soviet Union at the age of 9. He once told me that he learned algebra in 3rd grade in the Soviet Union (Russia had, and still has, the same structure of classes we do in the states, beginning with kindergarten, primary school, and high school which used to go up to 12th grade until Kruschev decided to cancel 12th grade because 12th graders don't do much of anything, he reasoned. So now kids there get senioritis in 11th grade). I think my colleague's memory is in doubt. Unless he's talking about learning about "functions." It was either in 3rd or 4th grade that we had something called "the function machine" in our math books; the picture was of a machine you could enter a number (an x), have it go through a function (formula) and end up with a result (a y).

The word "algebra" apparently comes from the Arabic word, al jabr, which means something like "restoring". Al-Khwarizmi, thought to be the founder of algebra, referred to his method of matching two sets of numbers so that they were equal, as restoring. Somebody invented an equal sign a few centuries later and voila! the modern algebra equation.

Right now, I’m working my way through trinomials and the quadratic formula. Why did we have to do all that factoring if there is a quadratic formula? Maybe it has something to do with how x can be a number.

Busted

2011-06-05T00:48:00.002-04:00

Still have a delightful new e-mail correspondence with my old math professor. Last week, he told me why he didn't want to do the DVD I'd suggested. There were a variety of reasons but one reason was that he wasn't a good instructor for the modern student who says, "If I don't immediately understand something in your class, you're a bad teacher." He then mentioned how important challenge `was in his style of teaching (which was true). The next thing he wrote was that I did well in his class because I'd responded well to that challenge.

Well, no; not if well meant getting an A or B.

One of the new fads in grade schools, which will likely trickle up to colleges, is the battle against letter grades, as though letter grades measuring someone's success in a class somehow by virtue of their being letter grades wound them. Instead of letters, why not have stars and moons? Different shapes? Hearts and flowers?

I can't imagine this guy, my professor, giving shapes or stars or flowers as grades; I imagine if someone proposed that to him before his retirement he would have quit and gone into architecture or bought a ranch out west or something.

So now I had to decide whether to tell him I got a D. We are still exchanging information about stuff to review, films, books, etc; we are still talking about a brief get together when I go up to East Lansing later for a workshop; can I continue that and not say something about this? I'm a rotten liar because I'm always afraid I'll be found out, sometimes even by my own lack of carefulness.

I wrote him back, telling him, actually, I got a D in your class...but it still was interesting and challenging. I'm interested to see what response I get, if any.

This man is the first of my undergraduate professors I've tried to contact, and he is much more approachable than I thought he would be. I've had the occasion to run into my old advisor at conferences, but that had nothing to do with me. This was all me. I looked for him; I found him.

Unforgiven

2011-05-28T22:48:00.003-04:00

When I was an undergraduate in college, I stalked someone.

I didn’t realize I’d done anything wrong for a long time; in fact, I thought I was an emotionally stable person trying to convince someone who had dated me for about a minute that we should be “friends”, and his insistence not to be was crazy.

Only one of my friends told me, “what is the big deal about staying friends?”

I had never been sneaky about it; maybe that was one of the reasons I could lie to myself for so long, saying I had done nothing wrong. I didn’t hide in the bushes where he lived and spy on him; I went right up to his door and knocked. I asked everyone I met who was involved in something he was or lived near him if they knew him. I sent him invitations to parties. All the poor guy wanted was for me to leave him alone.

I didn’t see it as something to be ashamed of for ten years. Then, I was in a 12 step program and doing my inventory, and it hit me. Now, mind you, four years earlier I had done my first 4^th step, and it never occurred to me to list it. Or, maybe I was too ashamed to. But the second time I was confronted with the horrible truth: you can never apologize for stalking.

You can't exactly look them up and call, or send them a letter; that’s more intrusion. I tried to write a song about it, with “names changed to protect the innocent”; that felt too self-serving. Somehow I was still hoping this person would hear the song. That would have been another intrusion.

The only thing I can do is to never, ever, ever do it to anyone again. Respect others’ boundaries. Believe them when they don’t want to see me…and don’t take it to heart.

I had to learn about boundaries; it was not something that was taught at my house. It is said that is frequently true of alcoholic families; I don't know, but I do know I often felt suffocated by my family and that since leaving home, have made many mistakes socially because I didn't understand others' boundaries.

Even today, if I am dating someone, it takes all the strength I can muster not to call them fifty times a day: “What are you doing? Do you still like me? When will I see you again?” And as a first-time-away-from-home nineteen year old, the thought of someone wanting to be friends and not date felt better than the thought of dating and then saying goodbye forever.

That isn’t an excuse, by the way. There was something very arrogant, not just obsessive, about my behavior in college. A sense of “I know what’s best for you psychologically and I’m going to force you to do it.” Really, even if a person had wanted to avoid me because they thought I had snakes growing out of my head, or if we both lived in the desert and I was the only person around who had any water, and they decided to stop drinking water, it would have been none of my business. The right thing to do, the only respectful thing to do, would be to let them make their own choices (although I might tell someone else, there is some guy out there refusing water because he doesn’t want to interact with me, here’s some water, can you go give him some?).

It's just something I'm ashamed of, and wish so very much I could undo.

Calculus TOS: The E-mail Exchange

2011-05-22T23:14:00.004-04:00

In the ongoing saga of me re-learning Calculus, I have several other tools in my belt. Purchased a PDF Calculus primer from one Faraz Hussein that looks pretty user friendly. I've already done the first problem set but it's all essays about philosophy. Here is the link for the place to buy it. It is only $4.00. http://www.understandingcalculus.com/

The Calculus Diaries by Jennifer Ouellette, has also arrived, and I've just begun reading it. The first thing I notice about it that is interesting is that the DVD that inspired me to look up other things on Calculus because I didn't understand it, is the same DVD that inspired her to learn Calculus. Go figure.

In the meantime, I did send an e-mail to the professor mentioned in the last link.
I didn't want to ask him for help: I'm embarrassed to admit to him I forgot everything. I just wanted to ask him if I could submit his name to The Teaching Company so that HE might be able to do a similar DVD. Despite "Change and Motion's" ability to inspire Ms. Ouellette, I'm pretty convinced that a DVD by my professor about Calculus would be better. I'm biased, but that's what I think. I also addressed him as "Mr. M___", the way he had told us to in class: "You may address me as M____, or Mr. M___. 'Doctor' is tacky." (a classmate told me that that was his way of surreptitiously boasting about his PhD). So I asked him in my e-mail if that was still the appropriate way to address him.

He answered me the next day.

He's retired, and trying to coauthor a book for which the other guy isn't around to help, he complains. He and his wife are delivering goats on their "hobby farm". ("Want a cute Nubian kid goat?" he asked me. "You'd only have to bottle feed him for a month. Three times a day." )
He may or may not really be looking for another home for the goat. He'd be open to having a drink together if I get around to my old campus again someday. He thought that at my present age I should probably call him Chuck, but added that he always felt uncomfortable addressing his teachers by their first name. "I'm not much of a California type guy", he wrote.

There was nothing in the e-mail about the DVD.

I answered him yesterday, without a lot of thought to my reply. I am excited to nominate him to this company; I want very much to do something nice for him, and I think he could outdo all their lecturers. But I made two mistakes that I fear will kill the correspondence. First, I did call him by his first name. After his eloquent but gracious statement, permitting this but modeling more formal address. Idiot.

Second, I assumed he hadn't answered me about whether he wanted me to go ahead and submit his name to this DVD company because he hadn't read my e-mail carefully enough, and wrote back, "You missed the most important thing! Look, you'd be great for this! blah, blah blah...."

I showed a friend the e-mails. She pointed out he had actually had answered my question. I had said, "What do you think? Would you like me to submit your name?" and he had answered, "So, do you want a goat?"

Maybe he gets accolades from former students every day, and maybe in particular, his "stars".

I am not a star. I got a D. And twenty nine years ago, we had a pleasant conversation after I got a B on the repeat of the class, and he assured me, "It was just because of the curve. You had a lot of competition." But once I get all the schoolgirl nostalgia separated from my honest admiration for him, I believe I will still find it appropriate to honor him in some way.

Unless he wants to change the subject again and give me a baby Alpaca.

___________________________________________________

Calculus: The Original Series, or: The 12 Most Important Things in College I Learned in Math 112

2011-05-20T06:05:00.015-04:00

Trying to get back into Calculus inevitably brought thoughts of my instructors at Michigan State.

He gave me a D. It broke my heart. But I got a lot out of the experience anyway. Here is a note I posted on facebook about it:

I'm thinking about sending this to the professor who taught the above-mentioned class. It was in 1981. He is now approaching his mid-seventies, so I feel some urgency to send it, if I ultimately do.
I am not lying about the title or exaggerating it in any way.
12 through 9 may seem puzzling, but each of them are answers to the first question on one of the tests throughout the term (10 weeks; this was Michigan State in the eighties).
5 through 7 each, in some way, refers to the bar where he and four other guys played in a bluegrass band once a week.
These are not all direct quotes from the instructor; sometimes, they are paraphrased, or merely inferred.

The 12 Most Useful things about College, I learned in Calculus (in which I got a D)

12) The upper case letters of the Greek alphabet are written thus: Α, Β, Γ , Δ , Ε , Ζ , Η , Θ , Ι , Κ , Λ, Μ, Ν, Ξ, Ο, Π, Ρ, Σ , Τ, Υ , Φ, Χ , Ψ , Ω

11) The lower case letters of the Greek alphabet are written thus: α, β, γ, δ, ε, ζ, η , θ, ι , κ , λ , μ, ν, ξ, ο, π, ρ, σ, τ, υ, φ, χ, ψ, ω

10) The names, in order, of the letters of the Greek alphabet are: <i>alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, zeta, eta, theta, iota, kappa, lambda, mu, nu, xi, omicron, pi, rho, sigma, tau, upsilon, phi,chi, psi, and omega [a]

9) [The modern English translations of a bunch of important Latin abbreviations & phrases, EXCEPT in loco parentis, which will be translated below.]

8) The modern English translation of in loco parentis is, approximately: “Just because you are not living with your dad anymore doesn’t mean someone won’t make sure you’re not staying out late and partying. Now, it’s your math professor’s job.”

7) If you go to Michigan State and are over 18, feel free to visit nearly all the wonderful emporiums of food and drink on Grand River and in East Lansing as a whole. But under no circumstances should you go to Casey’s Bar.

6) Casey’s Bar has the best Long Island iced teas.

5) Bluegrass rocks.

4) Don’t miss your opportunity; e.g., don’t be late for math, because no one will be admitted after the class is scheduled to start.[b]

3) Learn a foreign language. If you already know one, learn another. German is good.

2) A’s are much more fun to get than D’s, but you will sometimes learn more useful things from taking the class in which you got the D.

1) Never study the night before a test.

[a] This has proved very handy while solving a variety of word puzzles.

[b] Actually, I never really learned this lesson well. I was late for his class once, never again. I have been late for many other things since, however.

Marx thruogh Brown to Conservatism part 3

2011-05-19T03:58:00.002-04:00

By the time I was going door to door for Clinton for the 1992 election, I was doing brief psychotherapy at an agency in southwest Detroit, with kids and families…. very poor kids and families. And I’d started to think that, maybe the awful state of Detroit since the 60s was because of the increased entitlements it soaked up, not in spite of it.

The clencher for me was when I was treating a 14 year old for school refusal. She was different than other kids with that problem; usually, there is some underlying depression and anxiety or a messy dynamic with the parent or parents. But not with her. She just plain thought school was stupid -- which it is; but she didn’t have any ideas of anything practical to replace it with.

Wondering if “poor self esteem” was causing her to not want to jump out of bed in the morning in order to sleep at her desk at school, I asked her, “But what will you be able to do as an adult? What kind of job will be you able to get?”

She looked like me as if I had just asked what 2 plus 2 was. “Job? What do I need with a job? I’ll just go on welfare, like my mom.” After questioning her a little about this, I realized that everyone in her extended family was on welfare, and everyone she knew in the generation before was on welfare. She never saw anyone getting up to an alarm clock in the morning, never saw anyone pay a bill, never was told mom or dad or auntie or whoever couldn’t take her to visit grandma because they had to work, never saw anyone around her sacrifice or delay gratification in anyway. And she had no ability to project what it might be like to be different, so she didn’t feel at all ashamed or guilty for her plan to just have other people take care of her for the rest of her life. Something clicked right then:

Throwing money at people was making them dependent.

I remembered a plaque my 6^th grade teacher had had on her wall at the Catholic school I’d attended: “Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he eats for a lifetime.” I felt like Helen Keller must have when she figured out the sign word for water meant something wet and cool that she used to call “wah”.

In the fall of 1993, I went to California to go to a conference (where, as I discuss on another thread, Leon Panetta stole my fruit) and I had the two most interesting political experiences in my life. One was walking through Jerry Brown’s bedroom. (OK, it’s anticlimactic; my friend Sarah, now at NOW, worked for an anti-nafta lobbying group with Governor Moonbeam. She, Jerry, some French bald guy who was kind of his James Carville, and a couple other people lived in a big ex-firehouse in San Francisco, and to go from Sarah’s room in a separate structure on the roof into the main part of the house, you had to walk through Jerry’s bedroom.

I have to say though that I did meet Jerry, and he actually is very nice, albeit in a prog sort of way. He did a lot for Mother Theresa’s patients at the time, and you gotta give a guy his props for that).

The second was that I started to listen to Rush Limbaugh in the rental car I drove from Sarah (and Jerry’s) house to Los Angeles. My sister Kathy had already made the journey from leftwing feminism to logic, and was crazy about this guy; I had started watching Mary Matalin’s show and knew she subbed for him, so that gave me the courage to do what my colleagues at work would have blanched at: become a dittohead.

I still didn’t come out of the closet as a conservative to my coworkers and my family until long afterwards….really, not until 2001. My dad died in 1999 believing I’d voted Democrat in every election.

Then, after 9/11, I was introduced to one of my heroes, Tammy Bruce.

Tammy calls herself a “gay, Reagan voting, gun toting, feminist Democrat.” She wrote a book called “The New Thought Police” that not only crystallized for me the Orwellian nature of the latest Democrat platforms, but reminded me (ashamedly) of many of the actions that I and my friends had taken as leftwingers in college. She talked about how students frequently organize to harass conservative speeches with tacit approval from the universities where they speak, but any interruption of liberal speakers is not tolerated.

She talked about a double standard that I, who’d begun to challenge some of my liberal friends’ assumptions out loud, was beginning to find myself: When I was a liberal, espousing the most radical of notions (eliminating private property; gun control; abortion on demand; speech codes and the like), people who disagreed with me would sometimes seem startled or roll their eyes. Often, they would ask me questions that showed they wondered if I wasn’t right; even more often they would ask me questions that made me think they might be right….I usually never talked to those people afterward.

But I was never humiliated. I was never harassed. I sometimes felt a sense of decorum to not share my beliefs with people I respected due to their sensitivity, but I was never afraid to say what my beliefs were.

Now, and really, ever since 9/11, I have to build my confidence in order to share my beliefs with someone. One coworker was always telling me to stick to my guns, be honest about what I believed, show her the real me. I did. She sent me a lot of hate e-mails in response and finally went away (by then she’d left the job). I get yelled at, shouted down, and warned to tone down my rhetoric among mental health professionals who’ve known me for 20 years and know that I’m smart and know that I think critically before I speak.

In 2000, I’d begun to write folk songs, play guitar and sing at open mics. Starting quietly around November 2011, when a friend wrote a (very good, actually) song called “Talking Sounds Like Joe McCarthy Blues” lampooning the Patriot Act, and building to a crescendo that included nights when every single song played by everyone but me and the guy who was just learning John Denver covers were badly written numbers about the hopeless case of George W. Bush’s soul or how getting rid of Bush was important as winning the Civil War, emancipating the slaves, getting suffrage for women, and eradicating small pox all together. I stopped attending these soirees, giving up a no doubt brilliant musical career. Not only was I afraid to say something about agreeing with Bush, or how I thought Michael Moore’s film was a bunch of bull, but I was afraid what would happen to my brain cells if I heard another song by a guy who couldn’t sing choke out lyrics like, “You must be afraid George/ that must be what’s wrong/why else would you want to kill kids with a bomb?”one more time. You can see why The conservative blogs became such a haven for me.

Marx through Brown to Conservatism, part two

2011-05-18T02:58:00.002-04:00

More excerpts from my blurb on a private forum:

The “diversity training” that was part of my job as a resident director at UM was also a revelation. We were all broken into groups to do tasks together. First, we were shown a few short films about several people who were having different problems related to their “diversity.” Each group was supposed to come up with the solutions to one of the problems in the films.

Our group had the film about a young black undergrad pledging a traditionally white sorority.

No, it’s not what you’re thinking.

The sorority loved her, she seemed to fit right in with them, they shared her interests, and she really wanted to be there. Her problem was that all her black friends were angry at her for pledging the white sorority and not their sorority. It was such cognitive dissonance for them that she feared losing some of the social support she’d counted on if she joined the white sorority.

“Well”, I thought, “this is an easy one”. I hate these group things and like to get them over with so I just took the lead. “You know, she needs to sit down with each of her friends and talk about their concerns. Are they worried this sorority won’t accept them as her friends? Are they worried she’s getting involved in a group that has been tied to racist problems in the past? And if then they won’t support her, she can move on; she needs better friends than them.”

No one said anything. I wondered if a green tumor had sprung up in the middle of my face. Four of the people just stared at me, another had his head down and was fiddling with a piece of paper on his desk. Finally, one of the woman straightened up in her chair and said, “I can’t believe you would think she should join that sorority! Clearly, her friends need to put more pressure on her to make her stop!”

I should pause here to point out that there were, coincidentally, no black people in our group. So here was this white woman who apparently was comfortable with the idea of forcing a black woman to not join a white sorority. I wondered if I’d gotten into a time warp and was talking with a parallel universe version of George Wallace.

I kept expecting someone to defend me. “But isn’t it her choice?” I finally asked, for the first time starting to second guess myself and wonder if I was missing something.

“But she doesn’t KNOW any better!” the straightened-up lady said. “We have to show her. That’s our job.”

Well, that was a relief. At least we didn’t have to make the other black students convince her to stay closer to the “colored” water fountains. We could tell her ourselves!

I was relieved when I realized the coordinator who was coming to hear our final answer was a black guy. He was pretty smart, so if he thought this lady was right I figure he could tell me why. But I was really expecting him to toss the other lady out on her ear and call her a racist bitch. Or for the lady to stand up again and say, “Kelly, you did really well in that role play.” He didn’t; she didn’t. He didn’t say they were right or I was right, it was apparently one of those things where there were no right or wrong answers.

(I assure you that Michigan has since corrected this oversight and now all the right answers are intraveneously pumped into the veins of freshmen as they repeat over and over, “tax the rich, tax the rich” during orientation week).

And we were done for the day.

It’s surreal to recall. We were at a large expensive tax funded university, most of us with parents who could afford to send us through, pampered and protected from things like “hate speech” and “the patriarchy”. And we made good use of our time to simmer and rage about our unfortunate lot. Our time was spent, in class and out, complaining that we lived in a society that was unfair and unjust, and wasn’t it cool that we, who never interacted with anyone in society, were the only ones who knew it. Mind you, I felt sorry for the guy who tried to challenge my shrill social work professor, but I still agreed with her.

So my first thoughts of conservatism as not a bad thing was my gradual realization that within liberalism there were a lot of sleazy ideas , as well as people more interested in forcing others to do what they thought they should do than in making sure others had opportunities to do what they wanted.

more tomorrow

From Marxism through Jerry Brown's Bedroom into Conservatism, Part One

2011-05-17T03:00:00.002-04:00

What follows is an autobiography I recently contributed to a private forum. I've wanted for a long time to explain how I got from passing out literature for Communism in college, to writing conservative and libertarian stuff in the 21st century. Here are some of the highlights:

"How a Marxist Social Worker Walked Through Jerry Brown's Bedroom into Conservatism and Logic"

My dad and mom were both first generation Democrats, too young to vote for Kennedy but quite enamored of him . My own first forays into politics were deliberately left of my parents, in part because of that regular adolescent ritual of needing to make your parents hate you, and in part because I had never met a Republican. I boycotted everything the UAW told my dad to (usually my dad paid as little attention to the UAW as possible; he was at least smart enough to recognize organized crime when he saw it). I subscribed to Ms. In high school, I debated ERA with everyone who could listen to me blab about it for more than two minutes. (Yeah, I knew the Republican Platform supported the ERA and the Democrat Platform didn't, but work with me here. It was a liberal idea.)

In college I started confusing a historical interest in Russia with a love for Communism. It helped that at least two of my German professors were vocal Marxists. I bought a German copy of the Manifest of the Communist Party. I hung around the CPUSA crowd and the Hall/Davis campaign people in 1984, and even put a poster up on my door in the co-op where I lived containing an envelope filled with “Join the Communist Party!” cards. (Thankfully because of some enlightened soul, it got torn down and trashed in the hallway less than 24 hours later. I followed that up by tacking a four page note on the co-op bulletin board filled with some kind of nonsense about harassment and “feeling victimized”. )

I got involved in causes at Michigan State University to complain about every word uttered by President Reagan, worked on plays about feminist lesbians and Sandinistas, and championed socialist mores without an inkling of why, except that I thought people should share things with each other, and being conservative was bad because it meant you were greedy . I had gotten a short wave radio for Christmas and began listening to Radio Moscow on a daily basis. My favorite part was “Moscow Mailbag”, in which friendly sounding Joe Adamov read letters supposedly from Westerners about the Soviet Union and answered them in a more or less friendly way. I was seeing the “Smiling Face” side of Communism.

I worked in the mental health field, and about four years later, towards my next step as a psychotherapist, applied to and was accepted to UM, partly, I assume for my entrance essay which focused on the need to politicize the masses.

The School of Socialist Work
Strangely enough, it was at UM that my feelings about the current state of liberalism began to change. First of all, I noticed the way debate was handled in my classes: it wasn’t allowed.

Oh, you could certainly argue whether the inherent prejudices in all western societies was more devastating on black people or on gays, and you could argue whether Ohio State or Iowa played better football (you weren’t, of course, allowed to say they were better than University of Michigan football, but I don’t think Marxism really enters into that). But you couldn’t argue that health care shouldn’t be “free” to everyone, that gay people should be tolerant of those who think homosexuality is against God’s will, that taxpayers shouldn’t pay for abortions, or that greed was good.

One particular class with one of our leading professors was jarring. I think the topic was divorce, and we were discussing the importance of easy divorce laws for women.

Or rather, the professor was telling us easy divorce laws are important for women, and we were raising her hands to tell her how much we agreed with her to receive her beatific smile. Some poor guy raised his hand to say, tentatively, “I’ve heard though that women are typically the ones who suffer more socioeconomic consequences after divorce….” She pounced on him like a hawk on a titmouse. “Don’t EVEN suggest that! “ she literally screamed. “That notion is put out by the Right, and it's pure propoganda!” I remember she followed that up with a rant that did not sound logical to me. Needless to say the guy never said a word in class again.

(Later, Jerry Brown's bedroom, 3 generations of cruel compassion, and a review of logical fallacies.)

Calculus and Me I: integrating derivative learning

2011-05-13T19:22:00.003-04:00

A few months ago, I decided I had to learn calculus again.

It's not going very well.

Since about 1995, I've hated that I didn't remember the calculus I'd learned in 1981 and 1982.

For one thing, I believe I had to sweat blood to learn it. So the fact I've forgotten it feels like I wasted a lot of money, time, and tears (lots of tears). For another thing, everytime I hear someone talk about math, I want to be LIKE them. I don't know exactly why. The people who know more about math who I know often know a lot less about French, psychotherapy, or Soviet and US history than I do, and those are all things I care about more than math in general or calculus in particular. Maybe I just don't want them to know anything better than me.

I also am fond of anything that refers to math as "beautiful", "elegant", or in some other way aesthetically pleasing. Not because I always thought of it that way, but because there were two times during two college courses (one basic physics, one my first calculus class) when I experienced that beauty. It was a glimpse. The physics lesson that caught my imagination was on Koeppler's theories of the planets. The second was the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus...at least after about 6 weeks of Math 112 at MSU when it sort of just clicked. But it was a beauty that was elusive to me. I am able to use algebra and arithmetic a lot to live my daily life, and there's a certain pleasure in being able to use cold water volume displacement to measure peanut butter for a recipe, but it doesn't seem "elegant". I felt like I just for one nanosecond had the golden ring in my hands, then fell off the horse or something and it got away from me, probably when the professor of the third step of Calculus in MSUs general math program told me, "Dear, if it took you eight hours to do the first homework set, you really should drop the classs. It will only get worse from here."

Right now, my armaments for reeducating myself include some things I've downloaded online (I'll try to remember to post the links later), a DVD and book set from the Teaching Company called "Change in Motion: Calculus Made Clear" (it isn't), the beginning Calculus textbook of my engineer BFF, and a square grid Moleskine planner with a pen (I could never get the hang of writing anything in pencil, which may have something to do with how slow I was at the whole darned thing).

But I have a book coming in the mail from Amazon (it was on Brian Dunning, "The Skeptoid's" website wishlist and I wanted to send something, but I ended up just sending a donation and sending the book to myself. It's called "The Calculus Diaries: How Math Can Help You Lose Weight, Win in Vegas, and Survive a Zombie Apocalypse" , so it will pay for itself I'm sure with its multitasking options, even if it doesn't help me re-learn calculus.

Rent-a-Veep

2007-07-25T22:52:00.000-04:00

The Smoking Gun has the rap on the ALGORE'S REQUIREMENTS for his lectures and other appearances.

Basically, bring the Prius, ditch the prey-ess. (That's press, for those of you north of the Mason-Dixon line)

Burge for President!

2007-07-15T21:13:00.001-04:00

Bring those babies out to be kissed!The Iowahawk for President campaign is a rolling along. Here, Iowa politicians begin their stumping duties. Well, at least.

My dad was from Iowa. It's a cool place.

A Day In the Lives

2007-07-09T17:53:00.000-04:00

You didn't hear much about this on the sixth. But fifty years ago on that date, the future Sir Paul McCartney agreed to accompany his friend Ivan Vaughan to see Ivan's other friend, John Lennon, perform in a band called "The Quarrymen". The two sized each other up backstage and the rest is history.

UPDATE: Indeed Liverpool DID celebrate, all weekend.

Note that the first item of business on Friday was a church service at where the Quarrymen played. A church service. I'm sure atheists John & Paul would approve. ;-)

Ever have one of those days?

2007-07-05T17:52:00.000-04:00

Kahlid Ahmed, MD, has, and wants to tell you about it. He may become the best guest blogger on Iowahawk since Al Zarkawi...depending on the skill of British burn treatment. Hang in there, buddy.

http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2007/07/that-didnt-go-s.html

I'm French! Honest! Oui, oui, je suis dans la resistance!

2007-07-05T17:01:00.001-04:00

National Review has a somber and fitting obit of Kurt Waldheim...whom I always confuse with Kurt Weil, for some reason... a must-read for anyone prone to think corrupt UN officials are a new breed.

If you had doubts about Waldheim's Nazi ties, David Pryce-Jones dissipates them handily by recounting how quickly the eventual Austrian president joined up with the Nazi Student League after the annexation and then the Brownshirts, then ended up with medals and commendations reserved for the most vicious of Hitler's henchmen. On a lighter note (in a black comedy sort of way), Pryce-Jones brings up the Nazi war criminal pledge: "I was never a Nazi, and if I was, I never did anything, and if I did, it was someone else's fault."

Closely related to the SS-Officer-on-May-7-Resistance-Fighter-May-8 pledge: "Hallo Herr Yankee I am ready to do my part in the Wirtschaftwunder! I was never a Nazi, and isn't it a shame, those poor Jews, I helped them all I could."

*****************

Also in the on-the-newstands NR is a blurb about current UN chief Ban Ki-moon's diagnosis of the cause of death for all those black Muslims and Christians in Darfur: "Global warming." Has the UN ever recognized genocide when it bit them in the face?

Saving You From Gender Confusion Anxiety in Cuber

2007-06-20T14:52:00.000-04:00

Cuban health care is sooo good.....they don't just want to hand it out to anyone!

(and for heaven's sake, they don't want your boyfriend to have to embarrass himself at the bodega by having to pick up your unmentionables.)

18.1.2007 21:09 MSK
Cuban Women Cannot Buy Hygienic Pads without ID

CUBA, Havana. (CubaNet). Barbara Lorenzo de Armas was told at the pharmacy she could not buy hygienic pads without producing her identity card, which was seized by the State Security in 2001 for political reasons.

Lorenzo de Armaz said she went to the local pharmacy in the Managua district, but the manager refused to sell citing a nationwide government instruction that requires an identity card to buy any goods. Without writing down all particulars of your ID, I cannot sell, he explained.

Hygienic pads are available in Cuba at the pharmacies. They sell them to women aged from 12 to 55, one pack of 10 pieces per person per month. One can easily get this article of feminine hygiene on the black market where it costs 10 pesos per pack, or on the dollar market where the price is even higher.

----PRIMA–News Agency http://www.prima-news.ru/eng/

(Prima is a newsletter about human rights that comes to my e-mail box from Russia. Given that they argued leniency for those found responsible for killing 300--mostly children--in an Ossetian gradeschool in 2004, they are hardly a right-wing organization. But they are not fond of Castro.)

We, the jury, find the defendant, Mr. Turnupseed INNOCENT of the count of manslaughter....and guilty of having a really stupid name.

2007-06-16T21:35:00.001-04:00

National Geographic ran an old show the other night about James Dean. Yes, that James Dean. (NG is expanding its pervue. But then again, how many stories about wildebeests and half naked women can you run? That aren't pornographic, I mean.) The show, called, "Crash Science", centered around Dean's death in a horrid accident on a California highway (eventually, they'll probably run out of famous tragically killed people, too.) It relied on all sorts of computer imagery, showing that, contrary to the image of the rebellious teen idol screaming along in his Porsche Spyder 550 at speeds at or over 100 mph, he was probably doing about 70 mph at the time his car and Donald Turnupseed's Ford had an intimate encounter. Which was still speeding. But sounds a little less thrilling.

(What kind of a name is Turnupseed that, anyway? Did it used to be Turnipseed? Do turnips have seeds? Aren't they a root vegetable? )

Then we are told that, actually, the cops testified to exactly that at the following trial. About Dean doing 70 mph, I mean. The police had stopped Dean doing 95 a little earlier in the afternoon, and calculated from that and the time of the accident he must be doing 70, which was a geezerly 15 over the speed limit.

But either the jury

1) was so overwhelmed by Dean's reputation as a crazed speed demon youth that they completely ignored the cops' testimony or

2) they figured that cops can't calculate.

And therefore, word has been handed down from generation to generation that that acting, car racing, homosexual James Dean was flying over the hills and fields looking for someone to kill (or a way to die) on the California highway. At at least 100 mph. Maybe more. (All of which, if you were born before 1925, is horrifying, but if you were born anytime after that, particularly after 1970, is REALLY COOL!.)

In a film from an engineering firm it's asserted that Mr. Dean was not speeding at all in his journey towards doom that fateful September day. Go figure.

....in the meantime....

2007-04-21T00:11:00.000-04:00

The skit sucked. But don't tell the boys and Amy.

We are All Hokies This Week

2007-04-20T23:25:00.000-04:00

I spent some time on [the University of Michigan] campus tonight. I very rarely do that. Not for any particular reason...I work on the edge of campus, I like the restaurants and shopping downtown (which, in UM's case, IS campus). Well, maybe it's the crazy traffic.

But tonight the psychiatrist trainees I work with had their "skit", where they get to lampoon the attending psychiatrists, and we permanent staff to some degree. I've sort of made myself a guaranteed attendee/applause leader/positive feedback giver.

I went early, and driving around, I noticed two things that gripped my heart. First of all, the building all my grad school classes were in is being torn down. I knew that, but it didn't hit home until I saw the half-bulldozed building mowed down by State Street, accross from my old church. This means that both places I spent grad school...the Frieze Building, and Outpatient Psychiatry (which has been moved to the Depression Center accross from Domino's Farms) are gone. Along with many of the people who trained and taught me and were trained along with me.

The second thing was the Rock. I think every campus has a Rock, or someplace graffitti is tacitly allowed. Ours is a big boulder at the corner of Washtenaw and Hill, which is re-painted daily with things like, "UM#1" (a perrenial favorite, as you might imagine), "Suzy's Legal!" or some sorority's letters.

Today it is emblazoned only with the Virginia Tech "VT" symbol.

I blinked the tears back and drove on to my destination, found actually a very good, free parking space (rather a miracle), and walked around for awhile. It was dusk. The skit was going to be in the Union, which was still bustling with students, some accompanied by parents apparently up for the weekend. Some 20 something guy spun the "Cube", a huge, ungodly sculpture whose only redeeming feature is that its placement on an axis allows one to move the multi-hundred pound structure so that it spins. Another 20 something came by and spun it the other way. Girls were talking to each other as they walked from building to building, others were putting up a banner across the front of the Union--where, if you remember either your POTUS history or your UM trivia, whatever the reason it was important for people to tell me when I was a kid--JFK announced his intention to start the Peace Corps during his campaign. Something young people have been jumping on and spinning ever since because of its opportunity and hope, its chance to serve.

They are very young. When I still lived in Ann Arbor, a roommate and I used to joke that the entering undergrads seemed to get a year younger every year. Now they are absolutely childlike.

I don't know any answers to insanities like the one at V Tech. I could use my mental health background to guess about whether the killer was mentally ill or a sociopath, whether treatment could have prevented this, but I really don't know. It doesn't seem the time to wax prosaic on the benefits of the Second Amendment, especially since the weapons used were apparently legally obtained.

But I do know I'm grieving. For the families who lost loved ones, for the Commonwealth of Virginia, and for our country, in its ever growing loss of innocence.

NYC has 2 Firechiefs!

2007-04-18T00:14:00.000-04:00

I couldn't resist. My 2 nephews.

Newly Found Foundry Technique!

2007-04-17T23:57:00.000-04:00

Props to Cox & Forkum, not only for having an alphabetical post list, but for pointing out Rosie O'Donnell (who I hide my family members from in the storm cellar) has recently discovered that 9/11/01 was the first time that fire melted steel.

If she promises to be nice, Rosie is hereby invited to a trip through the Ford Rouge River plant, where not only have men been melting steel for over 100 years, but melted steel has sometimes presented dangerous problems.

DETROIT FREE PRESS, 2/3/99:

DEARBORN -- In what looked like lava from an active volcano, 2,600-degree molten metal melted through a wall around a Rouge Steel blast furnace Friday in Dearborn. It was the same blast furnace where a worker, Francis Kidd, died in August from carbon monoxide poisoning. No one was injured Friday, company officials said. But coming after a series of incidents this year at the Ford Rouge complex, the early-morning accident shook up some workers. ... The problem might have been that tuyeres -- water-cooled brass valves that control the flow of air into the furnace -- had come off. And there was excess water in the furnace, which could have set off a reaction. There are hundreds of ambulance runs at the Ford Rouge complex every year. In August, a huge coal dust cloud escaped from the old power plant as workers were vacuuming coal dust out of the plant. It created a dangerous situation but did not ignite.

vt flag half mast

2007-04-16T21:32:00.000-04:00

Instapundit, as is often the case, says it best:

http://instapundit.com/archives2/2007/04/15-week/

You'd think some of those Hokie's would have had a CCW. If so, maybe we could have avoided some of this carnage.

From Russia with Love?

2007-04-15T20:26:00.000-04:00

In my Ode to Conductor Valery Gergiev blog, Electric Conduction, I have managed to (thankfully) attract some who know more Russian than I, more about the world's greater conductor than I, and those who know more about Russian culture than I. Indubitably, however, ideas/feelings/political notions are going to clash as baby boom Ameericans and post-Stalin Russians start to compare notes, even about their favorite music.

Since my music blog, which I prefer to remain politic free, was beginning to descend into a second Cold War, I thought I would invite any and all parties who wanted to discuss issues regarding Putin, Rice, Brzezinski, Iraq, Iran, whether one nation has the right to "tell" another nation "what to do", free speech and Karl Marx, free speech and Groucho Marx, Bill Clinton, George W., Thomas Jefferson, Ivan the Terrible, Abu Ghraib the deaths of journalists under Putin's regime, the Chechnyan conflict, or even why Brown University keeps Sergei Khruschev on their history faculty when all he publishes is stuff about his dad. Один, два, три, идут!

What are they THINKING?!?!?

2007-03-23T21:05:00.000-04:00

So I'm listening to Michael Savage, and a guest from Insight Online says that Ford is coming under scrutiny of the SEC. Seems that although we (the US and the UN) have ordered sanctions for Iran, and Syria, and are pretty cloudy about our relationship with Sudan (actually, we should probably have bombed Sudan by now, after evacuating all the Darfur refugees they're slaughtering...I really shouldn't listen to Michael Savage)....anyway, while all that is going on, FoMoCo has been doing hundreds of thousands of dollars of business with those three regimes. That's at least 2 union jobs! In the case of Iran and Syria, they are breaking international and US laws.

This company is in so much financial trouble already (read: an area in a 50 year mile radius around me is in so much trouble already) that this hitting the fan will be the breath that blows over the last feather standing.

At least I still owe them for Andrei the Fusion (not enough for union wages, though).

This is a bit of fun.

2007-02-27T18:43:00.000-05:00

....and some more thought provoking ones from others of the British persuations.

Now here's a scary thought from a Brit....

2007-02-23T23:53:00.000-05:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2020381,00.html

Can people really be so innocent as to believe that government subsidy has nooooo outcome on what art gets pats on the back and what doesn't? And that that coincides directly with the actual value (whatever that means) of the art?

In defense of Valery Gergiev*:

He pimps his orchestras and himself in socialist countries, capitalist countries, the moon, Tatooine, anywhere he can get money. His lauded "salvation" of the Kirov/Mariinsky theatre, and perhaps of Russian music in general, has been one of pure capitalism: advertise your product, deliver on what you promise, and ask for a grant. There are some Russian subsidies, but you know what that's like. He was playing for $3 an opera in the 1980's.

*I have to defend him because he's my secret boyfriend, that is, he doesn't know he's my boyfriend. I think everybody else does by now. Well, I don't think his wife does. Tonight for instance, I caught him outside the New York State Theatre after watching him conduct splendidly for the New York City Ballet tonight and he acted like he hardly knew me. I mean, come ON, Valery Abisalevitch, you're embarrassing me! But he's really nice and he doesn't hog the remote.

GERGIEV IS NOT A BLEEDING SOCIALIST, OK????? SO THERE.

(He actually claims never to have been a communist, and that the Leningrad Party fell flat on their face when he was elected head conductor of the Kirov. but it was the Perestroika so they just had to DEAL.)

There are Just Some Things Conservatives Shouldn't Do....

2007-02-23T00:39:00.000-05:00

....yet. Skinny dip in a public pool. Transport marijuana over state lines. Or, as you will eventually see that Iowahawk points out here, try to create conservative satire by imitatating the Daily Show and trying to make it conservative. So stop it Fox. Just stop it.

And stop running spots on Anna Nicholas whatever. For once, now that we have a conservative news station, can you try, just an itty bitty bit, to be a news station?

Jefferson's leetle book

2007-02-19T22:38:00.000-05:00

So Keith Ellison was sworn in using a Qu'ran that was supposed to have come from Thomas Jefferson's personal collection. Well, that makes sense, Jefferson was a man of science, travel and the world. (and of slave ownership, oddly enough).

But I wondered if Keith Ellison, Muslim, gave any thought to what Thomas Jefferson, man of enlightenment (probably agnostic, but carrying a politically correct Christian calling card in his day) used that Qu'ran for. And specifically what he learned from it and the Muslims from whom he came in contact.

I've spoken a bit about the Barbary Wars before, Islam's first Jihad against US person and property, during which US ships were piratized and US merchant seaman kidnapped....much as English and French sailors had been....during the first days of the 19th century. I caught

Ted Samsley on Al Kresta's show the other day, and he tells the whole story a lot better. Besides, he sounds like Slim Pickens, if you ever get to hear his voice. What could beat hearing the story of Jefferson-- one of those 42 Virginians bin Laden's gonna meet in paradise--thinking up the US Marines to kick ass in Tripoli, all in the voice of Maj. T. J. "King" Kong.

It's hard for me to pick up Al's show these days, but I've enjoyed listening to him since he was a lost heretic like myself, driving the Protestant afternoon talk show on WMUZ in Detroit. He hasn't convinced me to come home to papism, but I like his political guests.

...to Each According to Scream

2007-02-02T15:17:00.000-05:00

She said it, I didn't.

If this ends up eventually disappearing from YouTube, it's a speech Hilary gives to the DNC telling them that she wants to take the profits from oil companies and distribute them....in other ways. Seems she's not such a capitalist as she was during her Whitewater days....

2007-01-14T21:14:00.000-05:00

Thanks to The People's Cube, a most righteous and mostly funny site, for this sober poem of Robert Service (eat your heart out, Edgar Allen Poe--hey, that would make a good spooky poem too, wouldn't it? but I digress):

By the way, concerning the questions of Vladimir Ilyitch's real corpse being in his tomb or not, the real Vladimir Ilyitch,who lives on my piano (at least, his head and shoulders do) got areal laugh from this poem. Here he is modeling some of his favorite hats for you.

In the left hand corner, Volodya is excited about playing Santa at our Christmas party. But now that he's got religion, he is sober about the REAL meaning of Christmas.

I cannot tell you what a help VI was on the Bush campaign of '04. He was a tireless doorknocker, cold caller, Bash-Kerry songs singer, and when we were down in the dumps, like when someone shot out the windows at the Republican headquarters in our town, it was Volodya who cheered us all up by reminding us how far we'd gotten and how silly those socia---er Democrats were. He even did a stand up routine.

Go Blue!! Wolverines forever!

Now that Voldya is a welcomed part of a warm, traditional American family, he enjoys taking part in all our traditional holidays. Here he is playing "Squanto" in a little skit the kids did about the pildgrims at Thanksgiving in one year, and hear he is as Nancy Pelosi last October on Halloween. Watch out, or she'll send insurgents into your surge! She'll tax your tax! She'll leave the mic on in the studio and you'll hear what she really thinks of the stupid "working class!" Note the bag: "From each according to TRICK, to each according to TREAT."

The Ballad Of Lenin's Tomb

by Robert Service

This is the yarn he told me
As we sat in Casey's Bar,
That Rooshun mug who scammed from the jug
In the Land of the Crimson Star;

That Soviet guy with the single eye,
And the face like a flaming scar.

Where Lenin lies the red flag flies, and the rat-grey workers wait
To tread the gloom of Lenin's Tomb, where the Comrade lies in state.
With lagging pace they scan his face, so weary yet so firm;
For years a score they've laboured sore to save him from the worm.

The Kremlin walls are grimly grey, but Lenin's Tomb is red,
And pilgrims from the Sour Lands say: "He sleeps and is not dead."
Before their eyes in peace he lies, a symbol and a sign,
And as they pass that dome of glass they see - a God Divine.
So Doctors plug him full of dope, for if he drops to dust,
So will collapse their faith and hope, the whole combine will bust.
But say, Tovarich; hark to me . . . a secret I'll disclose,
For I did see what none did see; I know what no one knows.

I was a Cheko terrorist - Oh I served the Soviets well,
Till they put me down on the bone-yard list, for the fear that I might tell;
That I might tell the thing I saw, and that only I did see,
They held me in quod with a firing squad to make a corpse of me.
But I got away, and here today I'm telling my tale to you;

Though it may sound weird, by Lenin's beard, so help me God it's true.
I slouched across that great Red Square, and watched the waiting line.
The mongrel sons of Marx were there, convened to Lenin's shrine;
Ten thousand men of Muscovy, Mongol and Turkoman,
Black-bonnets of the Aral Sea and Tatars of Kazan.
Kalmuck and Bashkir, Lett and Finn, Georgian, Jew and Lapp,
Kirghiz and Kazakh, crowding in to gaze at Lenin's map.
Aye, though a score of years had run I saw them pause and pray,
As mourners at the Tomb of one who died but yesterday.
I watched them in a bleary daze of bitterness and pain,
For oh, I missed the cheery blaze of vodka in my brain.
I stared, my eyes were hypnotized by that saturnine host,
When with a start that shook my heart I saw - I saw a ghost.
As in foggèd glass I saw him pass, and peer at me and grin -
A man I knew, a man I slew, Prince Boris Mazarin.

Now do not think because I drink I love the flowing bowl;
But liquor kills remorse and stills the anguish of the soul.
And there's so much I would forget, stark horrors I have seen,
Faces and forms that haunt me yet, like shadows on a screen.
And of these sights that mar my nights the ghastliest by far
Is the death of Boris Mazarin, that soldier of the Czar.
A mighty nobleman was he; we took him by surprise;
His mother, son and daughters three we slew before his eyes.
We tortured him, with jibes and threats; then mad for glut of gore,
Upon our reeking bayonets we nailed him to the door.
But he defied us to the last, crying: "O carrion crew!
I'd die with joy could I destroy a hundred dogs like you."
I thrust my sword into his throat; the blade was gay with blood;
We flung him to his castle moat, and stamped him in its mud.
That mighty Cossack of the Don was dead with all his race....
And now I saw him coming on, dire vengeance in his face.
(Or was it some fantastic dream of my besotted brain?)
He looked at me with eyes a-gleam, the man whom I had slain.
He looked and bade me follow him; I could not help but go;
I joined the throng that passed along, so sorrowful and slow.
I followed with a sense of doom that shadow gaunt and grim;
Into the bowels of the Tomb I followed, followed him.

The light within was weird and dim, and icy cold the air;
My brow was wet with bitter sweat, I stumbled on the stair
I tried to cry; my throat was dry; I sought to grip his arm;
For well I knew this man I slew was there to do us harm.
Lo! he was walking by my side, his fingers clutched my own,
This man I knew so well had died, his hand was naked bone.
His face was like a skull, his eyes were caverns of decay . . .
And so we came to the crystal frame where lonely Lenin lay.

Without a sound we shuffled round. I sought to make a sign,
But like a vice his hand of ice was biting into mine.
With leaden pace around the place where Lenin lies at rest,
We slouched, I saw his bony claw go fumbling to his breast.
With ghastly grin he groped within, and tore his robe apart,
And from the hollow of his ribs he drew his blackened heart. . . .
Ah no! Oh God! A bomb, a BOMB! And as I shrieked with dread,

With fiendish cry he raised it high, and . . . swung at Lenin's head
Oh I was blinded by the flash and deafened by the roar,
And in a mess of bloody mash I wallowed on the floor.
Then Alps of darkness on me fell, and when I saw again
The leprous light 'twas in a cell, and I was racked with pain

And ringèd around by shapes of gloom, who hoped that I would die
For of the crowd that crammed the Tomb the sole to live was I.
They told me I had dreamed a dream that must not be revealed,
But by their eyes of evil gleam I knew my doom was sealed.
I need not tell how from my cell in Lubianka gaol,
I broke away, but listen, here's the point of all my tale. . . .
Outside the "Gay Pay Oo" none knew of that grim scene of gore;
They closed the Tomb, and then they threw it open as before.
And there was Lenin, stiff and still, a symbol and a sign,
And rancid races come to thrill and wonder at his Shrine;
And hold the thought: if Lenin rot the Soviets will decay;
And there he sleeps and calm he keeps his watch and ward for aye.

Yet if you pass that frame of glass, peer closely at his phiz,
So stern and firm it mocks the worm, it looks like wax . . . and is.
They tell you he's a mummy - don't you make that bright mistake:
I tell you - he's a dummy; aye, a fiction and a fake.
This eye beheld the bloody bomb that bashed him on the bean.
I heard the crash, I saw the flash, yet . . . there he lies serene.
And by the roar that rocked the Tomb I ask: how could that be?
But if you doubt that deed of doom, just go yourself and see.
You think I'm mad, or drunk, or both . . . Well, I don't care a damn:
I tell you this: their Lenin is a waxen, show-case SHAM.

Such was the yarn he handed me,
Down there in Casey's Bar,
That Rooshun bug with the scrambled mug
From the land of the Commissar.
It may be true, I leave it you
To figger out how far.

Oui, Phillipe, the monitors for Big Brother can be installed right there...

2007-01-01T17:39:00.000-05:00

So I get my annual .pdf from my friends in France, to which I always look forward. (You gotta have friends in France if you like travelling to Provence, Normandy, etc., right? Plus they have an adorable 5 year old, and keep me up-to-date on the European evangelical Christian crowd. Yes, there really is an evangelical Christian crowd in Europe.

Anyway my friends are excited about a number of things. For one thing, they are expecting their second child. For another thing, their Vineyard church plant is blooming wonderfully. Their daughter has started school, and her mom has a job teaching the French kindergartners simple English: colors, numbers, etc. This is exciting not only for the teaching opportunity it affords, apparently, but because unless they are employed as school workers, French parents........

(wait for it)

..........aren't allowed in French schools during school hours.

Wow...I'm back! (am I back?)

2007-01-01T01:56:00.000-05:00

The last time I tried to get back on this blog, Blogger told me I'd neglected it far too long and wouldn't let me touch it. Which I figured was fair.

I have been spending much of my time in between this blog and now in love (no, not in real love, just unrequited love) with the new (as of the last two hours) director of the London Symphony Orchestra, the always (since 1980 something) conductor of the Mariinsky (formerly Kirov) Orchestra, Principal Guest Conductor of the Met, etc., etc., ad infinitum, Mr. Valery Gergiev, seen here just barely escaping my clutches.

I sing (well, type, in English and Russian, courtesy of an online translation site)just about daily in a blog dedicated to him and Russian music and classical music and once in awhile a few things political (like my crazy neighbors two nights ago partying over Saddam's death...isn't there a place for solemn gratitude in Islam?) called "Electric Conduction".

And yet, I yearn for a forum still to talk about the stuff everyone hates me at work for believing. (They know I'm right, they just don't want to admit it). Things like, throwing money at problems just ain't gonna solve them. And racism is wrong in whatever color, creed, or nationality it comes in. And there are only enough social services available for just so many illegal aliens and able bodied people who just don't like to work and people who don't have insurance just because they're between jobs, not because they're poor...at some point, somebody's gonna have to say "no".

So, I hope there's still someone out there who might Google a word or two in this blog. I'll start inviting people back, and maybe we'll have a bit of sober reflection of our own one of these days to commemorate the Congressional transfer of power and the Republicans loss at a chance to do some really, big, big things. Oh well.

(Do you think it was because Sonny Bono died? Don't answer that.)

Sell-Out or Just Desserts?

2005-09-27T20:26:00.001-04:00

Vox Day reported in his blog today that W. has taken the easy way out and capitulated to the madding crowd, promising he’ll get the cavalry to respond more quickly to the next disaster.  Vox, rightly, sees this as a recipe for another kind of disaster:  Tragedie a là Feudalisme, no doubt. We get the protection from the lord, the lord expects a tenth, or some fraction, of what we have, as well as the right to walk in on us whenever he damn well pleases (it all belongs to him anyway right?)

Rush Limbaugh, on his show today, calls things differently, in his ever jovial way.  You want us to take over, great, we’ll send in the military, we’ll do it our way, to paraphrase his take on Bush’s efforts to federalize hurricane relief efforts.

I’d like to think (to coin a phrase) Rush is right.  I fear Vox is.

To whom does ANSWER answer?

2005-09-26T23:00:00.000-04:00

Joining, and supporting,  Ms. Shill-han and her band of anti-war protesters over the weekend was a group called ANSWER.  You’ve heard of them before.  They’ve staged protests in San Francisco, Ann Arbor, New York, just about everywhere in the country since the invasion of Iraq was put on the table.

A grass-roots group of American citizens expressing their creator-endowed rights to free speech?  A lobbyist group?  A society of community organizers interested in helping the disenfranchised express their views?

Not quite.

According to FactsOfIsrael.com,
International A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) is a front group for the communist Workers World Party. The Workers World Party is, literally, a Stalinist organization. It rose out of a split within the old Socialist Workers Party over the Soviet Union's 1956 invasion of Hungary - the breakaway Workers World Party was all for the invasion.

Not that the WWP stopped being active after the invasion of Hungary.  Today they rally for their hero, Kim Jung Il, and for Saddam Hussein, who they insist has done “nothing wrong”.  In all their releases and publications protesting entry into the war they insisted on stating “Sanctions ARE war” instead of “Sanctions not war” as, of course, most sensible anti-war Americans were urging.

Giving the media-attention seeking Ms. Shill-han the benefit of the doubt (which takes much restraint on my part, I must tell you, and yes I do think her arrest was staged, or at least self-provoked), perhaps she is not fully aware of the parentage of her benefactors.  But surely she is aware of the website some of the signs advertise:  nowarforisrael.com.  This site, according to National Review Online (I’m too sickened to look it up myself, frankly), tells us

Meet just a few of your Jewish Supremacist Warmongers," above photos of William Kristol, Richard Perle, Ari Fleischer, Ariel Sharon, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, and Douglas Feith. It offered to explain how the Iraqi war was "conceived in Israel."

Even more reason not to feel sorry for this “grieving mother!”Perhaps she should ask Richard Perle’s family why they and other “Jewish Supremists” are forcing our hand in Iraq and other areas of the world.  I’m sure they’d appreciate it.

W: MY Water!!!!

2005-09-25T18:57:00.000-04:00

In an effort to regain the girlish figure of my twenties (or even my thirties), I’m trying to reintroduce the good habits that have gradually slithered away from me along the way. One is drinking tons and tons of water. So recently I brought my gigantic Weight Watchers mug (32 oz) to work, so that each morning I could fill up and at least get four eight-ounce servings before I left at night. But my mug has turned up missing! No one seems to be able to find it.

After steaming and stewing about what to do, I think I’ve come up with a plan. I am a social worker, you see. I am likely the only conservative social worker on the planet, working with a lot of normal, Clinton-lovin’, tax-n-spend, liberal social workers, who tell clients on the phone they shouldn’t vote for Bush (I’m serious). So, I’m thinking I’ll bring in my 22 oz “W: the President” sports bottle I got during the last campaign. Not as big, but less likely to walk away from the office, I figger.

Frankly, my dear...

2005-09-25T18:39:00.000-04:00

Why does every conservative apologist—and in this case I do mean apologist—feel compelled to add this little comment to everything they write or say about Cindy Shill-han: “Of course, we empathize with her loss.” I don’t. As a matter of fact, I don’t think I can, in that “empathize” pre-supposes that the person you are empathizing with has suffered from the loss of the person who has, in this case, died a hero’s death in battle. Cindy Sheehan doesn’t even believe this occurred. Everything that she stands for, as she demonstrates, goes against everything her son fought for, suffered for, and died for. Not to mention the fact that it gives her a soapbox for a lot of anti-Semitic screeds.

In the meantime, Ms. Sheehan’s friends this weekend (all six of them) marched on the Washington Mall. . Don’t believe those images you saw on CNN…I was in downtown Ann Arbor when the Wolverines beat Oklahoma in a bowl game, and saw one of the local TV stations filming about five fans cheering. The feed the next day made it look like a mob (the three-foot diameter snowflakes should have been a clue). Unfortunately for Ms. Sheehan and friends, they’re not facing the Huskers.

The Little Protection Racket That Couldn't

2005-09-19T22:25:00.000-04:00

The Little Protection Racket That Couldn’t

This little card arrived in my mailbox over the weekend. Note the date on it: 2004-2005. Note the number of weeks left in the period, 2004-2005.

Note further that I have been a member of this particular union local since September of 2000. This is the first membership card I have received from them.

Mind you, if unions provided what they said they provide, we could use them where I work. At my worksite, county employees all work 8 ½ hours without a break or lunch. It’s argued that in an emergency room environment---especially one in which we’re allowed to surf the Internet at leisure when things are slow—lunches and breaks are impossible to stagger. Further, we have a boss who fears criticism from his superiors, and thus can’t support us for beans. So yeah, a union steward who could do the job like the UAW guys who advocated for my dad when he sustained a terrible brain injury, somebody who could sit next to us and say, “Sorry, J. Jonah Jameson Look-alike Guy, your employees will have to get paid for that extra half hour if they don’t take a lunch,” or, “Sorry, it’s not OK for the psychiatry residents to call the social workers the n-word and make them wash their feet,” would be great.

Unfortunately, our AFSCME local is not like that. I’m not sure what they do. I’ve been to several meetings, where the board argues over various minutiae; but they cancel many of the meetings at the last minute. They charge us dues (protection money, I call it). Now, you don’t have to pay “dues” if you don’t want to. That’s right. You still have to have the same amount taken out of your paycheck. And it still goes to AFSCME. It’s just not called “Dues” and you can’t use the union for anything (only fair, no?) Of course, the money also goes to whatever AFSCME supports, in a totally non-partisan way. (Now, about that oceanfront property in Arizona…..)

I complained about this once and was assured that I didn’t have to vote for the people AFSCME endorsed.

So we are also represented by people with IQs under 70, as you can see. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. ADA and all that, you know.

I couldn't have said it better

2005-09-19T13:29:00.000-04:00

Pat Buchanan ponders the tragic result of the belief that government should care for us womb to tomb:

Even if government dithered for days – what else is new – this does not explain the failure of the people themselves.

Stranded for days in a pool of fetid water, almost everyone waited for the government to come save them. They screamed into the cameras for help, and the reporters screamed into the cameras for help, and the "civil rights leaders" screamed into the cameras that Bush was responsible and Bush was a racist.

Americans were once famous for taking the initiative, for having young leaders rise up to take command in a crisis. See any of that at the Superdome? Sri Lankans and Indonesians, far poorer than we, did not behave like this in a tsunami that took 400 times as many lives as Katrina has thus far.. . .

FDR was right. A "spiritual disintegration" has overtaken us. Government-as-first provider, the big idea of the Great Society, has proven to be "a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit."

Either we get off this narcotic, or it kills us.

Of course, these words will be shrugged off as "racist" and unempathic.

What a shame, for the victims of the next disaster.

What the...

2005-09-18T23:48:00.000-04:00

LOS ANGELES (AP) - A Russian airline delivered more than it bargained for on a flight from Moscow to Los Angeles.
A woman traveling on the Aeroflot flight gave birth on the plane. The airline says the woman started having contractions seven hours into the 12-hour flight. And the pilot requested a landing at the nearest military airport in Canada. But he was told the runway was too short for the Boeing 767 and continued on to Los Angeles. An Aeroflot spokesman says the delivery was accomplished with the help of several flight attendants after two doctors aboard refused to help for unspecified reasons. The delivery went well and the woman was able to leave the plane on her own carrying the baby boy.

Why wouldn’t doctors help?

Are Russian doctors as besieged by malpractice suits as American doctors, is that why?

One Nation Under Clods

2005-09-14T20:18:00.000-04:00

CNN, Today:

A federal judge declared Wednesday that the reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools is unconstitutional, a decision that could potentially put the divisive issue back before the U.S. Supreme Court.

You know what the libs fear the most about the pledge of allegiance?  The “one Nation under God phrase is a fly in their ointment; but the real monster under the bed is this phrase:

“and to the republic for which it stands….”

And its even more fearsome cousin:   “with liberty and justice for all.”

I’m not too worried about losing “God” in the pledge.  It’s only been there since 1954 anyway.  But I wonder if the great liberal hope is for the whole pledge to go away.  Not to keep children who don’t want to from having to say it, which I’m sure is a part of the agenda; but  they have been trying to change this “republic” to a democratic, socialist  collective, not a true republic where each state manages its own affairs with Washington only going as far as we allow its leash.

For about the tenth time this year, I corrected someone about the US being a democracy.  We are not a democracy, otherwise everything would  essentially be done by mob rule.  Forget any true minority protection in a democracy; by definition what the majority says goes, bad or not.  UNLESS…they have some kind of mafia boss types who come around and “protect” them.  Someone who tells them they’ll see the government takes care of all their needs…but of course they will owe something back to their generous benefactors.  Probably a life in poverty, on welfare, to keep the little mob in power.

Luckily, we live in a republic,  where the checks and balances—congress against court, court against executive, executive against both and congress against executive---still do at least a middling job of keeping all three branches of government  intact.   And a bill of rights for individual rights.

It must just scare them to death.

Saving Those Who Save?

2005-09-14T11:40:00.000-04:00

A friend got this at work. It's from a letter from one of her colleagues at another hospital: Charity, in New Orleans:

Before we lost communication with
the outside world FEMA instructed us to prepare for evacuation later on
that day (Tues) and much to our surprise the Governor's office was
telling
news agencies that we had already been evacuated. Needles to say, no
outside help came until Friday.

It began to become clear that if we were going to get out, we would have
to get ourselves out. Our HAZMAT Team had acquired 4 small diesel
generators for field use but did not have diesel fuel on site to power
them. Our ICU RT used his "Mississippi Credit Card" (a hammer and a
screwdriver) and some oxygen tubing to siphon diesel from on ambulance
flooded on the ER ramp. We were able to power up the ICU to run about 6
vents. For the others we used gas driven portable vents or continued to
hand bag. The roof of Charity Hospital was the only cool place to get a
few hours of restorative sleep each night so we broke away form our
12-on12-off usual staffing plan to allow each shift to enjoy a few hours with
the rats seeking higher ground.

When Tues rolled into Wed without any FEMA presence a morale crisis
erupted. Although many staff were incapacitated with fear, grief, and
despair, others dug deep and rose to the challenge. We could not
communicate with police, National Guard, or FEMA but our ICU residents
were able to text message and get live connection on air transmissions
to
CNN. [We then] got a
call from private air ambulance services wanting to send in his own
helicopters to start the evacuation. ...The commercial guys were able to
communicate with military helicopters and by 11PM Wednesday the
clap-clap
thunder of a Black Hawk was heard overhead....

... Amazingly there were thousands of people
waiting, ready to help but no one had known of our plight. We dumped our patients
with brief medical records taped to their forearms into waiting
ambulances for dispersion all over the region.

We continued the air evacuation all day Thursday, Thursday night, and
Friday AM. Nurses cat-napped on the concrete roof by putting their heads
on the legs of colleagues who bagged and comforted those waiting for the
next helicopter. Not knowing the structural integrity of the roof top,
the Black Hawk pilots stayed powered up while we loaded our patients,
docs, & O2 cylinders. After 48 hours of screaming commands over the
deafening sound of the Black Hawks our entire ICU staff was both deaf &
mute. By Friday afternoon we had completed our mission and walked the
three blocks back to Charity in chest deep sewage just in time to
discoverthat FEMA had arrived to begin evacuating our hospital.

If you ever here anyone say "send in the feds"...

The Physics of Psychotherapy

2005-09-12T00:07:00.000-04:00

The Physics of Psychotherapy

I sucked at physics, both in high school and college, and what I remember about the science of physics is vague. The fact that Copernicus’s elegant explanation of the earth and other planets and their movement in the sky challenged my then-atheist brain …how could something so ordered exist without a supreme intelligence?  The laws of thermodynamics.  Words like “vector”, “fusion”,  “quark”.

Ergo Kelly the psychotherapist, not Kelly the rocket scientist or engineer.  Today I found myself thinking about some of the principles in therapy that I have learned while being a psychotherapist, while doing crisis intervention , while interacting with the residents and medical students who work with us, giving them tips and helping my department function as a training environment.  And  I was reminded that I use a lot of physics dicti in my mental health work.

     Every Action Has an Equal and Opposite Reaction

There are so many therapeutic hours wasted because either the therapist, the client, or a parent doesn’t expect people to act the way they act when something is said or done.  I have literally heard parents say (more than once):  “But he doesn’t like it when I punish him,” or even worse, “He won’t let me punish him.”  Despite media suggestions to the contrary,  you don’t need your child’s permission to do what’s best for him.  And a child  whom a parent simply watches tear the limbs off the cat or purposely break a Mingh vase,  saying simply, “Oh, Johnny, please don’t do that.  Mommy doesn’t want you to do that” will not only keep on doing it, they will do it harder.   I know, this sounds simplistic, but there are otherwise bright and talented people who can’t understand why they cannot reason with a three year old, or thirteen year old.

The teenage years provide a great laboratory for testing the above maxim.  When I was doing family therapy,  I joked  that I was going to write a book about parenting adolescents.  It would be very short.  It would read, “All parents should sit down their thirteen year old children in the living room and tell them solemnly, ‘Alright, things are going to be a little different around here.  I want you to go out there right now and do every drug on the street, drink as much alcohol as you can, and have sex with everyone in your class.  And I don’t want to see you back in the house on weeknights until 3:30 a.m.  Is that clear?’”  Because then the teenager, insistent that he or she was being completely independent in thinking, would strive every day to do the opposite.

Tongue in cheek, obviously; and not all children do exactly the opposite of what their parents say.  Some are bright enough to realize that such a tactic puts them firmly under their parents’ control,  obliging them to wait until they know what their parents think to decide what to do.  And some are the kind of kids that don’t tend to end up in therapy, who catch on quickly what’s good for them and what’s not.

     The Universe Tends Toward Disorder

That reassuring notion that reminds us that we’re all headed for hell in a handbasket, barring a miracle .  A fitting miracle occurred approximately 2,010 years ago in Jerusalem and has something to do with “sacrifice” and “grace”; but this miracle doesn’t preserve our houses, nations, or the star around which our planet revolves.  From the tiniest organism to the largest galaxy, everything is pretty much falling apart.  Our bodies begin falling apart shortly after they’ve grown to their full potential….around age 25, decay sets in.  Left to themselves, without some positive outside influence, people become antisocial and even criminal.  The same is true of groups.  Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” is a perfect illustration of this concept.

For families, the above maxim has obvious implications.  Once again, you cannot expect children to parent themselves.  Just as it takes work to reverse disorder in any system, it takes work to discipline.  It is going to be hard for you.  This is another thing young parents sometimes have a hard time accepting.

One of the saddest scenes to happen in a family (and I’ve seen it happen more than once) is to see an adoptive family reject, or to be kinder, give up on the child they’ve adopted.  “We bit off more than we could chew,” “He’s not happy here, so he must not belong”, “We’ve done everything for her and she hates us anyway,” are things I’ve actually heard (keep in mind that, by virtue of working in crisis settings, I would not see the majority of adoptive families who do very well).   All of these notions stem from a total lack of knowledge about the Law of Entropy, or at least its application on human beings.

You bit off more than you could chew, did you?  This gem, said right in front of the adoptee, came from someone who specifically chose a handicapped child to adopt.  Not only were they frustrated with the amount of time and attention he needed, they were also naïve enough to believe that he  would immediately bond with them, although he’d lived in an institution for seven years.  They were incensed that he missed his lifelong friends.  They were incensed when he misbehaved—not out of righteous desire for him to do better, but because they considered it a personal attack.  “He’s not grateful.”  Newsflash: in the words of Rosalie Sorrells, author of The Hostile Baby Rocking Song, “[Children] don’t care what you say.  They don’t listen to you.  They will not listen to you until they are 35.”   (Which is why reasoning with kids instead of doing parenting ---loving them, disciplining them,  reinforcing the behavior you want and extinguishing the behavior you don’t want—doesn’t work).

“He’s not happy”.  Give him a chance!  You’ve only had him two weeks.  He’s just gone through a pretty big change.  Another news flash:  kids from troubled environments aren’t happy all the time.

“She hates us.”  See Rosalie Sorrells quote above.  So what???  Were your parents your favorite people when you were fifteen?  Is it possible the word “hate” may have cropped across your mind, if not your lips, if  your mom insisted on going shopping with you and your friends?  Told you you could not date the neighborhood hoodlum?  Actually, for once, followed through on her threat to get rid of the TV if your grade fell?

The universe tends toward disorder.  Babies do not come into this world the innocent beings Rousseau painted; they have their own personalities, traits and will.  And without loving behavioral shaping….as well as parents who don’t expect them to be saints right out of the box…..they too tend toward disorder. No doubt this is hard work for the parent.  But it’s not the kid’s job to make it easy.

     You can’t create something out of nothing, and you cannot turn something into a different thing.

Matter is matter.  You can rearrange it, you can melt it or freeze it, you can shoot it up into space. You can mix it with other things to make a third thing. But you, with your limited human abilities, cannot create more of it or less of it, or give it a different composition.  If you have a certain number of molecules of gorp, that number of molecules will always be the same, even if they are mixed with something else or in five different places after you’ve worked your magic on it. You simply cannot make more gorp.

This has a lot of implications for therapy.  If you phrase it, “You can’t do the same thing over and over and expect different results”, it applies to professionals who are sabotaging their own career through bad habits; to substance abusers who insist they can “handle” their drug of choice; or to codependents who are sure that if they yell loud enough or plead sweetly enough a substance abuser will stop using.  Sometimes when I’m sitting with someone who is truly in anguish in one of our interview rooms at the ER, I’ll get a picture in my mind of him or her as a little kid with a big top hat, bow tie, and wand, frantically waving the latter to get something to change into something else.  As a clinician, my job is to get them to put the wand away and figure out how the “trick” is actually done.  In other words, they’re going to have to work, and they’re going to have to learn something different.

A lot of depression results from frustration at trying to thwart this physical maxim.  Seligman’s “Learned Helplessness Theory” postulates that we begin to feel helpless when we receive “punishment”, or painful results, over and over again as a result of a repeated behavior.  Since helplessness and a feeling of hopelessness are classic symptoms of clinical depression, there are theories that postulate depression sometimes comes from learned helplessness.

There are probably many other things in physics that parallel human behavior.  But it’s late, and I get up early.

So, where can I get a passport for my own country?

2005-09-10T22:13:00.000-04:00

Got our little township newsletter today. Not much going on in our corner of the world. But--great news---we can now get our passports here!

Catch the title of that passport? Unicorn and lion look a bit unfamiliar to those of you who have a US passport? I know, it's a bit hard to read. Here's a picture of the passport indubitibly photographed by my fellow township dwellers:

That's right! I can get a British passport right down the street!

We're just 229 years behind around here...

This Time, We Did the Right Thing

2005-09-09T23:36:00.000-04:00

After five years of hearing everyone bad mouth the US, after being disillusioned myself due to the police state we seem to be heading toward, and especially after the bickering about whose fault what was down South, it was a pleasure to get my hands on the July 1978 Issue of TIME.

I don't read TIME these days; gave up around the same time as I learned that you can't really solve problems by throwing money at them and that "do-gooders" do more harm then good with their social welfare policies. But I was cruising around one of my favorite Russian propaganda sites when I found a cache of what must be every TIME to have a Russian on the cover, from Vladimir Lenin to Vladimir Putin. Smack dab in the middle was this one of Natan Sharansky (then Anatoli Shcharansky). You can read for yourself a bit of Sharansky's story a few entries below; basically, he was a "refusenik" in Russia--a Jew not permitted to emigrate--who brought international attention to his cause and others through his activism. He was tried and sentenced as a CIA spy; and sent to 13 years in the Gulag. After an early release, where he was exchanged for a real spy, Sharansky moved to Israel and became an influential member of the Prime Minister's cabinet. He quit his job with the government this spring in protest of the Gaza Strip removal of settlers.

But back to 1978. I Googled the magazine issue, and found someone selling it at a pretty fair rate. I got it in my hands today.

What a time that was...everyone was talking about "de'tente" and should we say this or that for fear the Russians would take it the wrong way. Andy Young was shooting his mouth off about "hundreds of thousands" of mythical political prisoners here when interviewed about Sharansky's case.

But the good news was...people got angry about those things! Even TIME criticized Young's remarks. And printed Soviet citizens' views, such as that of Sharansky's mother, that the more pressure we placed on the Kremlin, the better it was for her son, for her family, and for all those whose freedoms were curtailed.

In particular, Jimmy Carter referred to Anatoli Sharanski by name in several public speeches, calling him a political prisoner and demanding his release. Jimmy Carter! Yeah, the malaise guy! Communists apparently got under his feathers enough that he actually said something strong, if not actually doing something.

Luckily, in this case, "saying things" helped. Sharansky notes throughout his book definite differences in the way he was treated that corresponded with news he got from fellow zeks just entering the prisons or even, at at times, with Pravda, about Western speeches. He couldn't have his wife's picture; then suddenly he had his wife's picture. He would be moved from hard labor to stuff less likely to break his back. Finally, of course, he was released 2 years early, although the Soviets called it "banishment" and made sure to announce to him that he was being punished by being kicked out of the USSR. Thus, Sharansky even had a good, hearty laugh as he stepped through the Iron Curtain.

Of course, this was also after Reagan had been making references to him in his Presidential conferences and speeches. Which was most certainly more effective.

But it's nice to remember that, once upon a time, Carter and the people like him were on our side.

That's more like it! (He must read Ke-Blog!)

2005-09-09T23:21:00.000-04:00

September 4 thru 20-Flags at Half-Staff in Memory of Hurricane Katrina Victims

Proclamation by the President: Honoring the Memory of the Victims of Hurricane Katrina
A Proclamation by the President of the United States of America

As a mark of respect for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, I hereby order, by the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States of America, that the flag of the United States shall be flown at half-staff at the White House and on all public buildings and grounds, at all military posts and naval stations, and on all naval vessels of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia and throughout the United States and its Territories and possessions until sunset, Tuesday, September 20, 2005. I also direct that the flag shall be flown at half-staff for the same period at all United States embassies, legations, consular offices, and other facilities abroad, including all military facilities and naval vessels and stations.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this fourth day of September, in the year of our Lord two thousand five, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirtieth.

GEORGE W. BUSH

Ben Stein Wins My Money!

2005-09-08T21:01:00.000-04:00

If I had any, that is (see today's first post).

I found out about it in Snopes. For once, a red blooded, sensible American really does say something worth spamming people with.

But I'll share the link with you, instead, if only to give American Spectator the appropriate credit.

Read it. You won't be sorry you did.

and another other thing

2005-09-08T20:20:00.000-04:00

But let's not get silly about it. Today I saw a Nextel flag at half mast. Just a Nextel flag. No US or even state flag remotely close by. I guess they figured they should have some flag flying at half mast.

Which reminds me of long ago, when we lost President Nixon. President Clinton had of course called for the 1 month or whatever of observance with the flag. I was working in Lincoln Park (home of the band), just on the edge of Detroit, at the time. Up the main drag, Fort Street, was a McDonalds. I didn't notice anything unusual the first day that all the other businesses flew lowered Stars & Stripes. But the next day when I stopped for lunch, to my amazement, McDonald's had their own flag, yellow with a smiling face of their famous mascot, flown at half mast.

Which just goes to show, I figured, that even Ronald McDonald was feeling sad, and thinking perhaps we were all too hard on ol' Tricky Dicky.

"Nobody laughs or the clown gets it."

....and another thing!! vol. 2

2005-09-08T20:17:00.000-04:00

Why aren't the flags at half mast? I mean, for the victims of Katrina?

After 9/11, weren't they down for a month or so?

Actually, the flags here are down right now, but only for Judge Rehnquist (not that there's anything wrong with that) and for Michigan servicemen we've lost in Iraq.

But I haven't heard any anouncement about that kind of gesture for those we lost in the hurricane. It would be nice, I think.

NWA, please buy back my ticket!

2005-09-08T19:44:00.000-04:00

I am a simple soul. (Read, "my credit bites the big one"). I have a simple apartment roof over my head, a piano, a guitar, and a computer, and enough to go out for one big night on the town when I turn 59 1/2 in IRAs. So when I find something extra...at least this month...the thought occurs, "What do I need this for? There's at least 10,000 homeless people down south who need this more than me." But much of that stuff is of the variety victims of Katrina can't use yet, like cooking utensils, clothes, or books on doing therapy with black gay Jewish dwarves from broken homes (and the women who love them).

But I have something else...a virtual ticket. I planned a trip to France last year that never happened, partly because I didn't have the money to travel while there, partly because I'm sick of France. As a result, I've cancelled my ticket twice. Apparently though, cancelled tickets of the "special sale!" variety don't go away immediately; the money, in effect, remains in a "bank" you can use to buy another Northwest ticket within a year, provided it costs as least as much as the original. I've also had to pay 2 cancellation fees for this "non-refundable, non-transferrable" ticket, so my virtual ticket bank is worth at least a round trip ticket for a Louisiannier/e, or for a volunteer flying from Minneapolis to Baton Rouge.

I figured NW could give me a yes/no answer on this pretty quick if I called: Yeah, I know it's supposed to be non-transferrable, but in this case, if I want to give you *back* the money, isn't there some way we could turn this into a win-win situation? My boss (who, strangely enough, is Peter "Spiderman" Parker's boss too, although we are in totally different lines of work), Animated "Lemon" Buchanan, is traveling along with a bunch of other professionals from the hospital (Animated "Lemon" is a professional airhead, but he also trains dogs and works on a S.W.A.T. team in his spare time). At any rate, excited both at the prospect of knowing a seasoned crisis clinician would accompany the stellar group of doctors, nurses and others we're sending down, AND at the prospect of someone else(anyone, please, as long as they don't micromanage me!!!) being at the helm at our agency besides ol' Animated Lemon, I thought, I'll donate my ticket to him. If they wouldn't let me designate a recipient, I figure I could just stipulate it be used by Salvation Army, Red Cross, or another Christian ministry.

Now, either NWA is waaaaay to big for its britches, or they have their operators filling in for their striking mechanics, because I could not get a single live voice when I called their service line. Everything sent me back around the voice jail cellblock. The reservations operator thought my idea was great, but she couldn't figure out whom to direct me too to find out if I could do it. Just to find out if I could!

Finally, I sent an e-mail.

That was on Monday. Monday morning. 9/5/05. No answer as of Thursday night.

What it Looks Like to Wait for Your Government to Take Care of You

2005-09-02T09:51:00.000-04:00

I keep waiting. I keep reading, listening to WJR, watching Fox, as well as CNN which does tend to have more news more often, if more looney. Of course, I work during the day, so I don't know what Rush is saying. But I would just love to hear one person say, "WHY ARE WE EXPECTING THE GOVERNMENT TO CLEAN THIS MESS UP???????" The criticism of FEMA, a useless agency if there ever was one (it once paid yours truly and several other bachelor's prepared mental health workers $15 an hour--in the early 80's, mind you--to sit around watching Cosby and MTV, in the guise of providing crisis help that farmers in west Michigan didn't ask for or need after flooding that occurred a year before the counseling was made available)is laughable. It's like criticizing circus clowns for not preventing a plane crash or criticizing first graders for not rescuing the kindergarteners in a school fire.

"But we pay taxes so that FEMA can take care of things like this!" That's true. And that's exactly why relying on a system of high taxes to shell out world class service doesn't work. You can have one or the other. Not both. Like any government beaurocracy in the US, FEMA probably gets things done eventually, but it has no incentive to do a good job (the Republicans will take the heat for criticizm of Katrina clean-up at the poll; if anyone at FEMA loses their job over it, it'll be one or two administrators among hundreds of thousands of workers. After all, where's the competition?)

"But if the government doesn't save us, who will?" Heavens! Save us from the government saving us. Save us from "entitlements" that teach our children that there is no hope for them to earn their own way, and that they must depend on the government for their very sustenance. Save us from hoodlums disguised as government beaurocrats who would try to convince us that, in the middle of the Bill of Rights, a list of rights of the individual citizen in the new republic, our forefathers crafted a Second Amendment that just applied to the army. (Would you want to be in New Orleans unarmed today?) And save us from a government that tells us it knows better than we do how to handle our money, despite its own failures in managing its own. The people of the New Orleans basin have endured a terrible storm, loss of homes and whatever personal treasures stored in them, their pets and livestock. They've walked miles and miles with no food and water to be packed like sardines in a football stadium with no more food or water, where people are dying, commiting suicide, killing each other, and setting fires (that's just inside the stadium). The last people they should want to see saying, "There's no need to fear, the beaurocrats are here!" is FEMA.

Oh. I forgot. I haven't answered the question. Who will help? Who has to help? You. Me. Their neighbors. Where are the churches, for heaven's sake? Doesn't the Catholic Church pretty much rule the roost in N'arlins Parish (after all, they're called "parishes" instead of "counties"; that must have something to do with the church). Of course, knowing the MSN, it's quite possible the churches are knocking themselves out and providing as much shelter, food, water, and consolation as they can, and we're just not hearing about it. But if each one that's dry isn't packed, that's inexcusable.

Finally, it may not have occurred to some that it is possible for natural disasters to knock us off our feet. We are not invincible. There may be some things our government, or anybody, cannot save us from. (I'm imagining Roman senators yelling at one another regarding who didn't do what to prevent the disaster at Pompeii). That might be frightening to acknowledge, but it beats blaming each other. Blaming each other doesn't get a single mouth fed or a single tear dried.

Read This Book!

2005-08-30T18:45:00.000-04:00

Depressed?

Read this book:

I am serious. Yes. A book about life in a Soviet prison, camp, and a variety of punishment cells, as well as a sham trial, can be as effective as Prozac. Well, I have to admit, I have not done a double-blind study yet, but I wanted to run around the block and sing.

Natan Sharansky, known then as Anatoly Shcharansky, his Russian name,fought, hard, for the rights of dissidents, particularly Jewish dissidents, in his Russian homeland in the 1970s. During that time he and his new bride Natasha, who had changed her name to the Hebrew Arial, were also just learning about their religion, since fifty years of Leninism had kept it pretty much hidden from their families. But by the time the Soviet authorities caught up with him and he was thrown unceremoniously in Moscow's Lefortovo prison, Anatoly Borisovitch had learned enough Hebrew, enough songs about Zion, and enough about his history to keep his mind occupied for the next 9 years (it helped that he'd been a chess prodigy as a child, too, and could actually play chess games in his mind while in solitary).

Well aware of what few rights he did have as a "zek" (prisoner), Shcharansky kept the guards going by insisting on keeping his "book of Hebrew folk songs" (read: Psalms). His cheekiness, his faith, and his sense of humor, as well as his empathy for all his fellow zeks (be they Jew , Christian or atheist) is so moving that the tale is uplifting. Shcharansky found a way to survive and be human in a completely inhumane environment.

Well! Now that I'm done reading about how to survive if you have to endure being placed in a tiny metal Soviet cell, I can move on to reading Pat Santy's book and learn about how to choose which lucky, eager people get to get shot up into the sky in order to realize their dream of being placed into a tiny metal Soviet cell. In space.

The irony in that is manifold. Especially if you happen to know that Pat and I first met in jail.

(We weren't in jail. The people we provided mental health services for were in jail.)

2005-08-29T21:53:00.000-04:00

Truth, Lies & Common Sense blogger Russ Vaughn posted this poem attributed to Marsha Burks Megehee:

The Folded Flag

His Mother held the folded flag,
It was a somber day.
A mosaic of tears and memories,
As she heard the bugler play

The last song for a soldier,
As she held his folded flag
And memories of the letter
He wrote her from Ft. Bragg.

He wrote, "Please Mom, don't worry.
I have to see this through
Make your world a safer place.
It's something I just had to do!

It's not just Nine-Eleven Mom,
That stirred my warrior soul,
Not screaming words of Jihad,
A hero's words, "Let's Roll!"

Scenes of Dark September, Mom,
As people fell like snow.
For me, it was the tattered flag
Raised high...at Ground Zero.

Remember how I waved her Mom
When I was only ten?
I waved and waved her on The Fourth,
And Veterans Day...waved her again!

It was the words that grandpa said,
"She stands for all that's true.
Her red is for the blood men shed.
Son, that's what soldiers do!

Guard her well and wave her high.
Let no one treat her bad.
Honor the men who died for her,
They gave her all they had.

A gift of home and family,
Golden memories as they grew old.
A fine young grandson...like I have.
Son, Freedom's bought....not sold!"

So Mom, If I should pay the price
To keep her waving high,
And you receive the folded flag-
Mom, be proud of me.....don't cry!

Place my flag on grandpa's shelf
With his medals from World War II
And the folded flag.....he got last year
That grandma gave to you."

His Mother held the folded flag.
It was a somber day.
She placed it high on "grandpa's shelf",
Then bowed her head to pray.

Vaughn's own's poems are also quite moving. Check them out.

Oh my God! I'm an adulterous useful idiot!!!

2005-08-29T13:40:00.000-04:00

With a hat tip to Pat Santy, MD (aka Barbara Stanwyck) via gidgetgoes:

Katharine Hepburn

You scored 14% grit, 33% wit, 42% flair, and 26% class!

You are the fabulously quirky and independent woman of character. You go your own way, follow your own drummer, take your own lead. You stand head and shoulders next to your partner, but you are perfectly willing and able to stand alone. Others might be more classically beautiful or conventionally woman-like, but you possess a more fundamental common sense and off-kilter charm, making interesting men fall at your feet. You can pick them up or leave them there as you see fit. You share the screen with the likes of Spencer Tracy and Cary Grant, thinking men who like strong women.

How you compared to other people your age and gender:
You scored higher than 16% on grit
You scored higher than 51% on wit
You scored higher than 70% on flair
The Classic Dames Test written by gidgetgoes on Ok Cupid

But I've never gotten up in front of my union siblings in a red dress and told them to refuse to work with anyone who didn't promote Marx and Lenin. I've never pouted for the Hollywood Ten, or Nineteen, or anyone else who whined about private enterpreneurs boycotting their goods because they didn't like working with Communists, felons, or just plain old crybabies. (Especially when said crybabies had insisted on their own boycott of non-Marxist art in the '30s). And I may be guilty of past youthful indescretions with at least one attached gentleman, Lord forgive me, but I immediately felt guilty and cut all ties with him. I would rather die than have people call a relationship between me and another woman's man "one of the world's greatest romances." Yecccchhhh!

But I'll take the grit, wit, flair, and class, thank you.

Shrink Man!

2005-08-28T15:57:00.000-04:00

I saw Spiderman for the first time this weekend (OK, I'm slow). It got me thinking as to how Dissentin' Beets Trotsky says he learned English from comic books back in the '80's.

My friend Dissentin' Beets, who I've mentioned here a couple times, finished his psychiatric residency this year, and due to homeostasis, or his great love for us, or his devotion to academe, has signed on for a three-year fellowship here. But 34 years ago, when he was a gleam in his Muscovite dad's eye, only his mom knew he was going to be a doctor.

I'll get back to comic book characters in a minute, I promise, but Dissentin' Beets' mom is my real hero.

She originally was from Ukraine, and if I remember correctly while DB's dad worked at the car factory, she taught secondary school in Moscow. She had one of those little red cards in her wallet that allowed the family to get a bit better apartment, a little more food, and got DB piano lessons for a couple years (he was headed for the Conservatory!), but DB says "you lived one life outside, and one life at home. No one really believed the Party line." In 1977, when Jimmy Carter pressed hard for the release of Jews from the Soviet Union, DB's mom jumped at the opportunity. Although the authorities insisted it would be "no problem", they made every effort to make it impossible. "You need your original birth certificates", they said, knowing full well everyone's birth certificates as well as almost all official papers were destroyed in World War II bombings. No problem....DB's family used the black market just like everyone else. Forged birth certificates were a snap.

(One of my favorite stories by Dissentin' Beets is that of Turning His Family In to the Secret Police. One day when he was seven, they were on a trip to trade some tires for American dollars, the only currency he ever remembers seeing, by the way. It was winter, and while his parents went in to the gas station to negotiate, DB stayed out to play in the snow. A plain clothes policeman--as he later discovered--came by and started playing with him. "So, what's your name? Is your family here? What are you doing?" "Oh, we're here to get some American dollars!" Luckily, they were on their way with a bribe, but for the next couple of years DB was nicknamed "Pavlik Marozov", after the Soviet children's "Hero" who turned his father in for being anti-Soviet after the revolution)

There were a few other difficulties. Raising the money, keeping DB quiet...Oh! the family had learned you don't tell your kids you are defecting, because when they tell others about it, suddenly the children disappear. So DB was told, "We're going on a long vacation, and you can't tell anyone." He says he did get suspicious, though, when all the furniture, including his piano, disappeared. "Oh,we're buying more when we get back."

Finally, on a warm spring night when DB was about to turn 10 years old, they were on a flight to Europe and thence to Cleveland. Unfortunately, in 1982, the economy in Cleveland wasn't the greatest, so a job for mom or dad was hard to come by. But there were aunts and uncles to stay with, and a huge orthodox congregation that took DB and many other Soviet Jews in. DB describes the rabbi in charge of English as having rather a mean streak. He sat all the young boys in a circle one day for the express purpose of telling them there was no Father Frost (Santa Claus). Now, on New Years in the Soviet Union, since neither Christmas nor Hanukkah was celebrated, all kids looked forward to Father Frost delivering packages to their homes, and DB was no exception. His mom made a big deal out of it, scrimping and saving throughout the year so she could spoil him on that one day. There was a window in their apartment that didn't open, and she had convinced him that Father Frost could magically get through it with his toys. "Santa Claus is for Christians!" the rabbi says. "Jews don't believe in Santa Claus."

DB says he tried to argue with the rabbi, but you can guess how far he got! DB's mom must have wanted to kill him. She had at least 2 good years before he suspected a thing!!!

Still looking for work (DB's mom had found work at a dry cleaner, which she later bought and still runs),DB's dad began salvaging broken and trashed items, repairing them, sprucing them up and reselling them. DB began helping. "I did the toys. Whenever I sold toys, I bought comic books. And that helped me with my English."

Comic books also provided a way, come fall, to cope with some of the less open minded class mates in the fifth grade. DB was shocked--shocked! to find out American kids were suspicious of Russian kids. Back home, they were still playing Red Soldiers and Nazis. Who cared about the Americans? (Although they did have gas mask drills, supposedly for nerve gas attacks from some imagined 1970s enemies). Then of course there were the anti-Semitic kids he'd already learned to defend himself from. So much easier to do, though, if you pretend you're the Hulk or Captain America.

It's a long way from being a part of the 20th century's most failed experiment to treating psychiatric illnesses (and doing it well) after being trained at a great school. Mild Mannered Dissentin' Beets Trotsky (aka "Shrink Man") has a lot of people to thank...some at the university hospital we work for, no doubt; some at OSU, where he went to medical school. But I think the super hero is his mom.

I Was Drunk the Day My Mom Got Out of Prison

2005-08-27T12:00:00.000-04:00

If you've always wanted to create the world's greatest country song....well, you're out of luck because "You Don't Have to Call Me Darlin', Darlin'", as quoted above has already been written. But you can be a happy wannabe playing at Country Western Song Machine. There's a link on my sideboard, too.

Selectively Wary; Blatantly Blind

2005-08-24T19:36:00.000-04:00

The Lost Liberty Hotel project treads on! According to Freestar Media, Logan Clements was told unceremoniously by Weare Selectmen that they are much too polite to want to seize Justice Souter's property for him. Don't they get it?? Never fear, the townsmen and women of Weare understand what Logan points out, that protecting Souter from his own poor judgment (should that be capitalized? No, I think not) sends exactly the wrong message....that he is above the law, not an equal, as the Selectmen insist, and a petition is circulating to get the Lost Liberty Hotel on the ballot! Yay!

You can contribute to this worthy cause here. This will also let you read about it if you have no idea what I'm talking about.

Martial law declared in Michigan!

2005-08-23T21:04:00.000-04:00

I love my job. Usually. But not this week. Got one of those throat-in-your-heart crisis calls yesterday. Lady says she just wants to alert us her friend's coming to the ER and told her that "if you don't help him, he has a gun and he'll go back to his car and use it". The rest of the information she told me suggested her friend was quite at risk for harming himself, if this last chance to seek help wasn't heeded. She didn't say he was threatening to harm anyone else, she didn't say he told her he was planning on bringing in any gifts to us that might go "boom", she just gave me his name and said she wanted to be sure we helped him. She was worried about him finding out she was the one who called and thus declined to give information about herself. Rather than pressure her for more information, my mind was working on making sure we could help this fellow when and if (hopefully) he arrived. I advised my coworkers and boss, and we called security so they would be aware there was a possibility he'd be armed. Common sense.

What I was not expecting was for the police to come in (thanks to another invititation by security) and drill me, before this guy even showed up. Who called me? What was her name? Why didn't I get her name? [What kind of little police doo-bee are you?] What's her phone number? How old is she? It was especially irritating because, after this woman's friend did come in, was cooperative, and was pleased with the outcome of his assessment, another cop called me at home asking me the same questions!!! I tried to be helpful but finally I said, "I told all this to Officer so and so three hours ago." "Oh, you did?"

Well, yes I did, and by the way, why do you need to know anyway when 1) he's come in asking for help, 2) no one has committed a crime, and 3) he's actually in a secure treatment setting?

Should have flashed my own KGB badge.

Occasionally...well, not really occasionally, quite frequently, actually, mentally ill people will either decide the president of the United States is personally screwing up their life (I mean seriously, like ordering a special unit being inserted in their chest by aliens at night so that he can make the mentally ill person do things he or she doesn't want to do, which obviously is quite a pain), or they will go to a re-election rally and get up really close to the front and threaten to kill the president. The first incident doesn't usually draw attention unless the mentally ill person calls the White House line over and over and over and over again until it drives the operators crazy, or sends an e-mail to the Secret Service or CIA about his or her woes. The second incident draws immediate attention. But either way, we often get Secret Service people crawling around (sorry to use that word crawling, but they always seem kinda reptilish to me) saying "Has so and so ever been here? What can you tell us about him?" "Nothing." "Uh.....he signed a release of information." "Can you show it to me?" "Oh...uh...gee, I guess I don't have it with me..."

I have their full sympathy when someone has made a direct threat against anyone, let alone the leader of the free world. But whenever we've had contact with them, it's not been the case. The perpetrator has generally been someone diagnosed with schizophrenia, that diagnosis that tends to produce the more odd delusions that wouldn't be able to be acted upon anyway (especially if you are now locked on a hospital ward having been stuck in the butt with a cocktail of Haldol and Ativan. He is going to send death rays from his mind. He is going to cause a terrible event to happen (again, by thinking about it, not by sabotage he could actually work out). But, along comes the SS (hey, now there's an acronym)..."Did he tell you about these 'death rays' of his?"

Don't you guys have a President to protect, or something?

Working in the mental health field always comes with some Faustian bargains, if you have any sense of principles at all. I know I marched into community mental health out of college with the idea that "Mental Illness" didn't exist and that involuntary commitment was evil; how dare we take another's rights away? 20 years later I have petitioned probably a hundred men and women myself for involuntary commitment, believing that they were ill enough not to know they needed treatment and that they were in danger of harming themselves or someone else because of that illness. But damn me, damn all of us if we don't try as best we can to protect everyone's dignity to the best degree possible in that process.

And in the meantime, I hate law enforcement of any kind being at the hospital. They drive me nuts.

Welcome home, Scott.

2005-08-21T20:05:00.000-04:00

http://www.scottrandolph.net/2005/08/17/cindy-sealed-the-deal/

Oh my God....they killed Kenny! and Holly! and Suzy! and .....

2005-08-21T19:46:00.000-04:00

I had a dream.

I dreamt that Trey Parker and Matt Stone used antichoice superhero Dianysis, seen here depriving people of their choice to express their opinions (and their choice to live----ex-utero, incidentally)

in a really cool episode of South Park! And lo, it was funny. Especially when Kyle said, "But Dianysis, how come young kids like us have to have sex? Don't you guys at Planned Parenthood Golden Gate just want us to keep having sex so you can sell more birth control and testing to us? Like the Calypte HIV test, of which you, yourself, Dianysis, recently owned 200,000 shares of stock?" (tip from Dawn Eden)

And when Stan's Uncle Jimbo said "I have sex all the time and see? I'm just fine!" and everyone gets really quiet and his friend Jimbo says "Hmm...maybe celibacy isn't such a bad idea after all."

And when little Wendy tugs on Dianysis sleeve and says, "Dianysis...Dianysis..have you seen my friend Holly Patterson? I haven't seen her since you sold her that RU-486 pill. She didn't want to tell her dad coz she was afraid, but he was so worried about her. You told her to just go home and not say anything and she'd be fine."

(Holly Patterson died September 17, 2003 from medication given by Planned Parenthood Golden Gate after succumbing to side effects the FDA has been since criticized for ignoring; Holly's family says Golden Gate's president----"Dianysis" in the Planned Parenthood infamous cartoon---has done nothing to help them).

Dianysis (ignoring her) "Don't you kids all want Teenage safe sex kits?" and most of the kids yell "I do! I do!" and she throws out a bunch of little blue kits.

"Sweet," says Cartman. "Astroglide! That's what my MATURE friends online tell me kids need for anal sex."

"What's anal sex?" says Butters.

"CARTMAN!!! What the hell are you talking about? You don't want anal sex!" Kyle shouts!

"Of course he does!"Says Dianysis. "Don't all young boys?"

"Lady,you're nuts," says Stan.

"Anal sex is MATURE sex." says Cartman. Stan whispers something to Cartman, and Cartman throws his "safe sex" kit in the air, Astroglide and all. He backs away from Dianysis. "Keep away from me with your God damn Astroglide, Lady. Nobody's gonna put their ***** up my @ss."

Nobody noticed that Kyle stepped away, but he's returned with the Super Best Friends!
"Hello, Dianysis", Jesus greets her wearily. "Oh! We meet again, Jesus!" Dianysis answered nervously. "Mr. Smith, Buddha, Vishnu, Moses." They nodded in her direction, not amused. "Can you send her to hell?" Kyle asked Moses, hopefully. Moses spinned silently for awhile and replied, "Technically, this would be against the rules, but the SuperBest Friends have given Dianysis so many chances to leave children alone, and she keeps blowing them, maybe we can discuss this. Super Best Friends HUDDLE!"

Cut to scene of hell. Satan, clearly bored, is showing a weeping Dianysis around Hell. "Well, I guess you can have Chris's old room now that Saddam's killed him. I really miss Chris, but I'd probably always go back to Saddam anyway. Well, gnashing of teeth starts at 6, you don't wanna be late for that, wailing is pretty much whenever, you'll sorta get the hang of it. Oh. Try not to get on Pol Pot's bad side. Vindictive? You wouldn't BELIEVE! One wrong word and suddenly he's got the entire 5th, 6th and 7th circles pitted against you. Paranoid little devil, if you'll excuse the pun. Just avoid him, that's my advice......"

(Saddam, Satan, and Chris, in happier times)
It was a great dream. Of course, it was just a dream, nothing Matt Stone and Trey Parker had anything to do with.

The South Park images herein are thanks to Comedy Central, Matt, Trey and the gang allowing folks to join their website and engage in fair use of their images. Dianysis is from a cartoon very recently in a blatant place on the Planned Parenthood Goldengate Website, in which she not only incinerated peaceful picketers with very odd "Christian" signs ("Pray for Thy Sins?" Who prays for sins? Dear Lord, I lift this sin up to you, please bless it and see it safely in its travels....), but kills and tortures other pro-life advocates. As blogger Dawn Eden points out, Dianysis sounds like the Greek god of debauchery, and looks like the name of the president of Planned Parenthood Golden Gate, Dian J. Harrison. In fact, the character even looks like Ms. Harrison, if you follow the links. Once complaints started coming in, according to Ms. Eden, PPGG pulled the cartoon from their homepage, but they still provide the link to it, for any thirteen year old to see.

Mme Chang has dibs on Hillary

2005-08-19T18:39:00.000-04:00

Have you ever heard people say that the Nixon presidency could be read like a Shakespearean tragedy? My pastor brought that up again last week when he was talking about pride, and I started thinking, "If Shakespeare wrote the Nixon presidency, who wrote the other ones?" I have to admit, I came at this totally with an eye of mischieviousness, not political in the least. But I've come up with some ideas. Maybe you can think of some more.

They are listed in order of president's name, author, book (presidency) title, and excerpt:

Madison
Dolly Madison
Men: Who Needs Them?
"They'll never remember him after we leave."

Jackson
Jeff Foxworthy
You Might Be a Jacksonian Democrat if….
"Your friends come barefoot to the inaugural, and there's two covered wagons on the front lawn of the White House.”

W. H. Harrison
Ernest Hemingway
The Last Days of Tippecanoe
"I lit a cigarette. It started to rain. He talked on. And on. Then he got sick. Thirty days later, he died. Well, that's that, I thought."

Lincoln
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Wives and Punishment
"Day after day, he wondered how long it would last. He kept thinking, why don't they just shoot me?"

Garfield
Swami Jimi Davisu
Channeling Garfield
"And he will return in the 20th century as a fat feline who loves lasagne"

T. Roosevelt
Michael Chrichton
National Park
"Crazed by the industrial revolution which made the bear extinct, T. was obsessed by bringing this primitive animal back to life. And building a canal in central America."

Taft
Dr. Atkins
The All-Fat, No-Exercise Diet
“Our stately president, all 300 pounds of him, is a prime example of good health!”

Harding
Agatha Christie
The Tea-Pot Affair
"Scandalously, they put the tea-pot under the dome."

R. Roosevelt
Homer
ROOSEVELT REX
Πδηγαπ ςτφχοοπ. Βεζρσε ςστ!!

Nixon
Wm. Shakespeare
The Prince of Loma Linda
“A splicer, a splicer, my kingdom for a splicer!”

Ford
John Cleese
Tumbling Through Washington
“I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up.”

Clinton
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Those Crazy Nineties
"But we all had a swell time, no?"

G. W. Bush
Louis L’Amour
The Man From Crawford
"It was almost noon. Bush and Bin Laden stared each other down, man to man, mano a mano, in the street outside the jailhouse. The light of the sun glinted off of Bush's marshall's badge. This was what he'd waited for. The moment of truth had come."

ya pays ya money ya takes ya chances

2005-08-16T21:41:00.000-04:00

Stealth Christian and conservative Alice Cooper's Dirty Diamonds came out today. Just listening to a couple of the snippets on Amazon tells me he's keeping up shadowboxing with the devil; and here's another of the unexpected "opposites attract" coups I love so much in pop: he covers "Pretty Ballerina", which for those of us who remember, was the B-side to the Left Banke's only big hit, Walk Away Renee, in the 60's. Has Alice Cooper, like, ever done a cover before? Not only is it a great match, but there's a so-obvious-that-it's-not-really-in in joke there--Mr. Furnier's wife, Sheryl, owns a dance studio in Phoenix, and if youngest daughter Sonora Rose has kept up her studies she should be en pointe by now. Seriously, what I've heard sounds great, albeit not as edgy as Brutal Planet or Dragontown, but hey, we all slow down in our late fifties!

And surprise, surprise, how did I miss that Sir Paul has a new one coming out too? All I know about Chaos and Creation in the Backyard is that it has a lovely picture of the future Knight Bachelor in back of 20 Forthlin Road in Liverpool among the undies hung by either Papa Jim or an aunt. I haven't been brave enough to listen to the samples.

A Paul McCartney CD, as John Lennon or George Harrison would have told you (Ringo Starr is far too kind) is very hit or miss. And sadly, it all depends on how much emotional pain he's in. If his writing partner is in an identity crisis and stuck in a lifeless marriage on the couch, strung out on drugs and staring at the TV; and if Brian Wilson has just come out with The Greatest LP Ever, and getting everyone back in the studio is like pulling teeth, he can chrystalize a Rubber Soul or a Sgt Pepper. If said partner has said "I want a divorce!" and he's said "I want a divorce too!" and suddenly his entire identity dissolves before him as his best friends sue him, he comes out with "McCartney". When the new band quits and he and his wife get mugged in the middle of a foreign country--"Band on the Run". If the love of his life, after doing everything she was supposed to to take care of herself, succumbs to the same disease that took his mother away when he was 14, he gives us "Flaming Pie."

But beware the good times. They bring such bilge as "Tug of War". "Londontown". Need I say more?

I'll just keep reading www.Beatle.de and see what the reviews say. In the meantime, I'm spending my money on the president of the Solid Rock foundation in Phoenix, AZ.

Incidentally, for a good read and a good laugh, catch Ace of Spade's post on 6/26/05 about Alice giving a reporter trying to trip him up on the war on terror a good spanking. Welcome to that reporter's nightmare!!!

Did they really say that? Part II

2005-08-15T20:08:00.000-04:00

Another incredible audible, heard today on WJR again. Someone from Israel, presumably Israeli, presumably Jewish, says "Let's hope this [the forced move of the last Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip] will lead to the end of the suicide bombings."

Huh?!?!?

Nobody's really expecting that, are they? Because it's not going to happen. Not because of a concession on Israel's part, at least.

Does anyone believe that the lynching of African Americans in the south happened because the police stopped harrassing the KKK? Or that Hitler retreated into his bunker because he heard the Americans were giving chocolate to the German kids? No. The lynchings only stopped when legislation (not court decisions, incidentally) was passed and enforced to integrate the south, and when African Americans especially risked their lives to stand up for their rights. And we know the show of force Hitler faced.

There are two possibilities regarding the ability of the suicide bombers to "negotiate" with others. Either they are, despite the Authority's insistence to the contrary, completely in bed with the mainline Palestinians; in which case the PA has been encouraging their acts while the "peace process" has gone on. It seems unlikely they would stop now. The second possibility is that the PA is telling the truth, and that the bombers are rogue terrorists, whom no one controls. This leads to the same result.

As for the move from Gaza, it's a done deal. Israel can recoup something from it. But not because it's going to affect the suicide bombers. It may or may not affect the PA.

But what it is doing is showing the world once again the lengths Israel is going, unilaterally, to get along with their neighbors. Unfortunately, the task of fighting the suicide bombers may involve really pissing those same neighbors off.

....still waiting

2005-08-11T17:05:00.000-04:00

No Cherokee Nation, Eastern Band flag yet in the escalator well.

Ke-BLOG! multiple guess!

2005-08-11T14:12:00.000-04:00

From the CNN hotline:

From: CNN Breaking News
Subject: CNN Breaking News
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2005 15:17:16 +0000

-- U.N. nuclear watchdog agency adopts resolution calling on Iran to halt
nuclear fuel development.

....or else? Hmm, let's ponder, shall we?

"U.N. nuclear watchdog agency adopts resolution calling on Iran to halt nuclear fuel development RIGHT NOW OR ELSE:

a) Kofi Anaan will hold his breath until he turns blue."

b) John Bolton will have to turn this hemisphere around!"

c) we will boycott Persian carpets, except for all employees of the UN, to whom you will now pay a sizeable kickback for each Persian carpet sold. To whomever you sell them, we don't really care."

d)Hans Blix will come round, ring you up that he's coming, and, after giving you enough time to rearrange your nuclear facilities into nice little baby powder factories, bless your weapons of mass destruction".

e) or we'll hit you like a girl!"

f) we'll start singing 99 Bottles of Beer On the Wall".

g)________________________________"
(insert your idea here)

h) all of the above

We Sat in the Sub All Those Cold Wet Wet Days

2005-08-07T13:44:00.000-04:00

This is a special Ke-Blog! news bulletin.

The Russian Navy, with assistance from an international group of volunteers, has succeeded in rescuing a crew of its sailors from the Cat in the Hat's submarine.

Mr. in the Hat could not be reached for comment.

[Note: so that Vincentt's comment makes sense, let me add that I just cropped le chat's picture. There once was a male human next to him. I'm trying to get my profile back up here. --Ke-BLOGger]

Did they really say that?!?

2005-08-04T14:32:00.000-04:00

And that I couldn't make up.

1)Ad heard yesterday on the radio: "Are your computer skills getting in the way of your career progress?"

Uh....only when my boss is watching.

2)Excerpts from Kwame Kilpatrick's semi-concession speech after his semi-loss to the mayoral primary in Detroit, which you will never hear again in the MSM: "They will not talk about Kwame Kilpatrick anymore." Did he hear himself say that?

Maybe he's finally taking my advice, and planning to open that Ethiopian-Irish restaurant that I thought his name belonged to when I saw it on the SMART busses during the last campaign. (You know, like Carlos-Murphy's, Jose-Babuschka's.....)I've got some ideas for the menu: Meat feast & boiled cabbage; corned beef & sponge bread with spice tea (yummmm)...

3)Lady who called in about where she could get cheap mental health care--including seeing a psychiatrist for treatment for panic attacks--after I gave her the name of a very nice place. "Oh, thank you!" Pause. "But do I have to go there?"

Uh, no lady, just drive up; they have great big jars out front full of Xanax and Klonopin with great big scoops. Help yourself.

5)And just for kicks, here's something that I couldn't make up, but somebody did, and Dr. Sanity was smart enough to blog it in her posts of August 4...Blogger BS Bingo, that is. Among some other clever stuff.

I know...They've Been Forcing You to Listen to Air America!

2005-08-02T20:23:00.000-04:00

In the meantime, what the hell is this guy's deal anyway?

Basayev admitted to being "a bad guy, a bandit, a terrorist" but said Russia was worse.

Dude! Your henchmen (and women) locked little children up in a school building and shot them!!! After deliberately plotting to do so on September 1, when you knew babies would be there!!! What the hell could be worse? Have they been cannibalizing you?

What Putin, or the Russian media, or whoever is responsible for censorship there, needs to know, is that the more exposure this a**hole gets, the better it will be for their side. Unless they try to censor other voices, as frequently happens here.

You can only come if you say there is NO famine in Ukraine

2005-08-02T19:59:00.000-04:00

Putin's Soviet Union...excuse me, Russian Federation (that whirring sound you here is James Madison spinning in his grave) is back to it's old tricks.

Funny, they don't even realize how close to the old Pravda ABC is.

This harkens back to the very, very old days when the New York Times' Jimmy Durante...oh, I'm sorry, Walter Duranty, get those two mixed up all the time...happily informed us that we were just picking on Uncle Joe to say that he was making people starve to death by collectivization of farming in the USSR. He was there, you see, he talked to the people, and everyone was thrilled with Stalin's policies. (Later, there was some speculation that, in addition to the garden variety Soviet censorship, ol' Walter faced a bit of blackmail courtesy of the Checka, the KGB's predecessor). At any rate, like Sydney Shanberg after him, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Lying (at least Sydney had the decency to write an apologetic screenplay). To date the Times refuses to acknowledge Duranty was wrong. Of this you can read more on an anti-Kerry page I just discovered (too bad), that looks a little pro-Kerry at first. It still has some merit, if only for the Soviet memorabilia! (My favorite!) Enjoy it while it's still up!

Losing Space for Diversity

2005-08-01T20:29:00.000-04:00

I was up to one of my favorite tricks this afternoon: haranguing Dr. Dissentin' Beets Trotsky. I wanted him to tell the hospital staff to display the original flag of his homeland; not the dorky blue, white and red striped one, but the big red one with the yellow hammer and sickle in the corner. Suddenly, it occurred to me, I could ask the hospital to display MY nation's flag.

To make a long story long, The University of Michigan Health Systems, part of the campus that brought you winning and losing scores for your race, has decided to "celebrate diversity" by filling up the eastern escalator wells with flags. Lots of flags. And today we got e-mails requesting that, if the flags of our ancesters are not represented, we let the administration know so they could order them.

I have a lot of different ancestors from a lot of different places. They tended not to hang on to their family Bibles (if they had them) and they tended to wander a bit. One fought in the Union army during the civil war...and deserted, so people tended not to pass on much information about him. John Adams and John Quincy Adams are distant cousins, so they got a lot of airplay, but that didn't tell my sisters and brother and I alot about our heritage growing up. Supposedly, the Adcoxes in Tennessee had Scotsmen in the background and Irishmen, and some Germans. And the Normans from Iowa had French Canadians and English. But there was never much certainty about that.

But there are two more direct ancesters we know stories about and could actually point to from our history were from North Carolina and were Cherokee. A foremother of my dad defied tribal wisdom to marry an American Revolutionary soldier; my mother's great great grandmother declined Andrew Jackson's invitation to walk from North Carolina to Oklahoma (she wasn't into long hikes).

Believe it or not, apparently such a small amount of native American blood is necessary in some tribes to make one an "official" member of the tribe (in Ward Churchill's case, whining at a loud number of decibels sufficed). I never pursued it myself. My mom looked into it but there was some kind of road block....my grandfather didn't remember his ancestor's name, there are some people that should be on the rolls in Tennessee and North Carolina that aren't because they did hide, etc. Doesn't bug me. I certainly don't want to claim I "suffered" in any way as a minority, because I haven't. And I haven't done anything for the tribe, except buy a mug and a picture at the Visitor's Center, and talk up the play they show at the ampitheatre there (Unto These Hills--It is really good by the way)...and now, I've sent in info to have the hospital order a flag.

But now I've been thinkin'....what if everyone with an indigenous background on the hospital staff insists on, say, a Seven Nations flag, a Navajo flag, a Sioux flag...and what about the Bushmen of Africa? The Maori of New Zealand? The Aborigine tribes of Australia?

Do the 12 tribes of Israel have different flags?

Oh well. If I've unleashed a monster, maybe someone else will see what overkill all this "diversity" is.

...although that is a cool flag, kinda, isn't it?

Take off, eh?

2005-07-26T16:59:00.000-04:00

It's official! Canada is the dumbest government in the world! Here's a press release to prove it....from the Canadian press, and if that doesn't put the cork in the bottle of maple syrup, I don't know what does:

Canada wins dumbest gov't at Stupidity Awards
Canadian Press

MONTREAL: The Canadian government secured a surprise win Friday, beating out such luminaries as Iran, North Korea and the United States, for the dumbest
government of the year at the World Stupidity Awards.

It also bested the United Nations in a hotly contested category that organizers
said proved Canadians can compete with the rest of the world.

"Canadians often feel we're in the shadow of the U.S., especially when it comes
to stupidity, but now we're proving we're world class," said Robert Spence,
spokesman of the awards handed out during the Just for Laughs comedy festival.

"And as host country, who could ask for more?"

--You said it, Bobby.

Well, we at the Daily Funnies feel inclined to celebrate our brothers and sisters to the north by dedicating today's funny to them. So take off, you hosers!

Heard this one on the LaPuke brothers report, courtesy Dick Purtan & co., this a.m.:

Q: How do you keep Canadian Bacon from curling?
A: Take away their broom.*

Here's how Canada got its name: When J. MacDonald and Friends were trying to figure out the name of this great place, someone had a great idea. Let's stick all the letters into a hat and draw 3 of them - That will be the new name of this place.. So they did so.. 1st letter is pulled and the guy shouts - "C" eh!? 2nd letter is pulled and the guy shouts - "N" eh!? 3rd letter is pulled and the guy shouts - "D" eh!?

A Canadian is walking down the street with a case of beer under his arm. His friend Doug stops him and asks, "Hey Bob! Whacha get the case of beer for?"
"I got it for my wife, eh." answers Bob.
"Oh!" exclaims Doug, "Good trade."

Q: How many Canadians does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None. Canadians don't change light bulbs, we accept them as they are.

Why it's great to be Canadian!
It's great to be Canadian for many reasons. Canada has been continuously declared to be amoung the best countries to live by the United Nations. Perhaps the following or some of the reasons why.

We are proud to be Canadian!
We're awfully nice to strangers,
Our manners be our curse,
(We're just to darn nice...)
It's cool in many ways to be Canadian,
(It's cool 'cause it's cold up here,)
We won't say that we're better,
(No!)
It's just that we're less worse.

-"Proud To Be Canadian" Arrogant Worms

Things Canadians are proud of...
*Smarties.
*Crispy Crunch.
*Coffee Crisp.
*The footballs and fields are bigger, and we have one less Down.
*Lacrosse is Canadian.
*Hockey is Canadian.
*Basketball is Canadian.
*The biggest flags ever seen/flown at any Olympics were Canadian... The second time it was smuggled in because they made a rule against it cause of the first time.
*Mr. Dress-up can kick Mr. Rogers ass.
*Maple syrup kicks Mrs. Butterworths ass (...don't know about Aunt Jemima though).
*Tim Horton's kicks Dunkin Donuts ass.
*Waaaay better beer commercials/contests and beer company give a ways. Example: the *Molson Canadian House Party...where you get to keep the house. Trashed or not.
*In the war of 1812, we pushed the Americans so far back... passed their 'White *House', burned it...and most of Washington. We got bored because they ran away so we came home and partied. Go figure.
*Canada has the largest French population that never surrendered to Germany.
*The largest English population that never ever surrendered or withdrew during any war.
*The only person who was arrested in our civil war was an American mercenary, who slept in and missed the whole thing... but showed up just in time to get caught.
*We knew plaid was cool far before Seattle caught on.
*The Hudson's Bay Company once owned over 10% of the earths surface and is still around as the worlds oldest company.
*The average dog sled team can kill and devour a full grown human in under 3 minutes.
*We still know what to do with all the parts of a buffalo.
*The Canadian Civil War was a bar fight that lasted a little over an hour.
*We don't marry our kin-folk.
*We invented ski-doos, jet-skis, velcro, zippers, the long distance and short wave radios that save countless lives each year. Oh yeah...and the handles on beer cases big enough to fit your hands with mitts on.
*We all know that a scale that measures boiling water at 212 degrees and freezes at 32 is asinine.
*We've ALL have frozen our tongues to something metal and lived to tell about it.
*We can out drink Americans in a heart beat!!
*Our elections take only one day.
*Help from Canada...

PRESS RELEASE:

Prime Minister of Canada to Visit Washington Statement by the Press Secretary

President Bush and Prime Minister Martin of Canada met on Sept. 24th with the Canadian Leader strongly supporting the war on terrorism. Prime Minister Martin issued the following statement:
CANADIANS WILL HELP AMERICA WITH THE WAR ON TERRORISM!

WE HAVE PLEDGED:

- 2 BATTLE SHIPS,

- 600 GROUND TROOPS,

- 6 FIGHTER JETS.

AFTER THE AMERICAN EXCHANGE RATE, THEY WILL END UP WITH:
- 2 CANOES,

- 6 MOUNTIES,

- AND A BUNCH OF FLYING SQUIRRELS

There was a Canadian magazine that had a contest a few years ago to come up with a Canadian analogue to "as American as apple pie." The winner was "as Canadian as possible under the circumstances."

Have you heard about the big jazz hit up in Canada?

"Take the Train, eh?"

Q: What does a Canadian say when you step on his foot?

A: "Sorry."

Sign reported at the anti-Bush protests in Ottawa: "Please Leave"

". . . jokes in Canada are not illegal. They're just federally regulated."--Mark Steyn (Wall Street Journal)

******************************************

CBC's version of the popular TV series "Survivor"

CBC Television is developing an Albertan version of "Survivor" the popular TV show. The rules are simple.

Each contestant must travel from Edmonton to Fort McMurray through High Level, Grand Prairie, Peace River, Hinton, Edson, Jasper, Banff, Red Deer,Calgary, Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, Brooks, Drumheller, Lloydminister and back to Edmonton again driving a Volvo with a bumper sticker that reads:

I'm votin' Labour,, I'm Gay and I'm here to Take your Guns.

*****************

There were 4 guys mountain climbing in the rockies all three were avid hockey fans. As they reached the summit, the first guy runs and jumps off of the mountain and yells "this is for the Los Angeles kings"

The second climber runs off the summit and yells "this is for the Detroit Red Wings"

The third climber runs and pushes the fourth climber off the summit and who happens to be from Calgary and yells "this is for the Edmonton Oilers"

One day, Satan was out for a walk through Hell, making sure things were running smoothly. When he got to the Lake of Fire, he saw a man sitting by the lake, relaxing in a lawn chair, and not sweating or looking uncomfortable at all. Perplexed, Satan approached the man and asked:

"Young man, are you not hot or bothered by this heat?" The man replied, "Oh no, not at all. I lived in downtown Ottawa and this weather is just like a typical July day in the city."

Satan thought that this was not a good sign, so he rushed back to his office and turned up the heat in Hell another 100 degrees. Satisfied with himself, he again returned to the Lake of Fire to check on the young man.

When he got there, the man was showing a few beads of sweat, but that was all. Again Satan asked the Ottawa native,

"Are you hot and uncomfortable yet?"

The young man looked up and said, "No, the temperature is just like a hot August day in Ottawa. I'm coping it just fine."

Satan decided that he had to do something drastic to make this man's stay in Hell unpleasant. He went back to his office, turned the heat all the way down, and then turned up the air conditioning. The temperature in Hell quickly dropped well below zero. As he approached the Lake of Fire, he noticed that it was now frozen over. He also saw the young man jumping up and down wildly, waving his arms and yelling into the air.

"This looks promising!" thought Satan. Coming closer, he finally made out what the man was shouting:

"The Ottawa Senators have won the Stanley Cup! The Ottawa Senators have won the Stanley Cup!"

Bag o' Fish

A guy sees a Newfie walking down the street carrying a bag of fish.

He walks over to the Newfie and says: "Hey Newfie, I bet I can guess how many fish you have in that bag. If I get it right, will you give me one of them?"

And the Newfie says: "Heck, if you can guess how many fish I have in this bag, I'll give 'em both to you" (at 45 minutes past the hour)

Jean-Marc and Jean-Pierre

Two Quebecois walked into a pet store. Right away they go over to the bird section. Jean-Marc says to Jean-Pierre, "Dats dem." The store clerk comes over and asks if he can help them.

"Yea, we'll take four of dem birds in dat cage up der," says Jean-Marc. "Put dem in a paper bag. They leave the store. They drive for three hours until they are high up in the hills. They stop at the face of a large cliff with a 500 foot drop.

"Dis looks like a good place eh?" says Jean-Pierre.

"Oh yea, dis looks good," agrees Jean-Marc.

They flip a coin and Jean-Marc wins the toss. "Tabernac! I guess I got to go first, eh?" says Jean-Pierre. He takes two birds out of the bag, places them on his shoulders and jumps off the cliff.

Jean-Marc watches as his buddy drops off the edge and goes straight down for a few seconds and goes "splat."

As Jean-Marc looks over the cliff he shakes his head and says, "Fock dis. Dis budgie jumping is too dangerous for me!

Eskimo Moon

What do Eskimos (northern Canadians) get from sitting on the ice too long?

Polaroids.

Newfie Virus

Hi. I'm a virus from Newfoundland.

Please forward this email to all the contacts in your address book.

Then delete all the files on your hard drive.

That's great, thanks very much.

(Time stamp: 13:09 Jul 26 05 15:26 Jul 28 05 Newfoundland)

The Fox Hat

July 1999. The Queen of England is making an official visit to Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. All the locals are quite excited to have the Queen come to their town for the first time ever, and they have prepared quite a welcome for her. When she steps off of the plane, everyone is quite taken aback to see the Queen, while dressed otherwise quite normally, looking especially resplendent in a magnificent fox hat - like a Daniel Boone coonskin, only made of fox. Sweat is streaming quite un-majestically down her face.

The cameras are clicking away as she steps off the plane. After the official greetings are over, and the mayor of Moose Jaw has a private moment with the Queen away from the cameras and onlookers, he finally unleashes his curiosity.

"Excuse me, Your Majesty, but I must ask. I have never seen you wearing this magnificent fox hat before,but I wonder why you chose to wear it on such a hot day?"

The Queen. replies: Well, my good man, that is quite simple, you see. I always trust the judgment of the Queen Mother when it comes to fashion. And when I told her I was going to Moose Jaw for the first time, and asked if I should wear anything special in honor of this trip to Cahnahdah, she said, "Moose Jaw?? Where the fok's 'hat?"

------------------------------

*Canadians curling:

I woke up. I went downtown. To look for a job.

2005-07-26T16:33:00.000-04:00

So, what is your Friendly Neighborhood Blogger doing on her summer vacation? You may think, dear reader, that having used up all my vacation time with a broken arm and a disobedient vascular system, and having used up all my money on E-Bay while using up said vacation time, that I would have nothing to do. That I'd be stuck listening to old Donna Summer albums on the Victrola, and watching the Three Stooges on On Demand. Ha! Little do you know the excitement of a Funnies editor, who has great sources of humor streaming into her mailbox everyday.

Of course, sometimes I am thwarted in what I would like to do by powers beyond my control.

For instance, I was bored one day last week and tried to get the world sucked into a black hole

But wouldn't you know it, the Super Best Friends came just in time to stop me. Foiled again!

Darn those South Park guys!

I pondered the value of money. And why the bleep people don't recognize FDR's profile, or know he's on the dime, since he was president for what, 30 years or something.

I looked into getting a hole in my head.

And I shopped for a bridesmaid's dress at www.uglydress.com.

(I really did shop for a bridesmaid dress but we got to pick our own so if it's ugly it's my own damn fault, not Diabetic Pomegranate Roosevelt's, God damn it.)

I counted the blessings I have by virtue of not going to some exotic place for a vacation:

When the Victrola stopped working, I boogied to the Scandinavian sounds of "Apache" (they could NOT have been serious when they made this video)

I catharted vicariously through Kung Fu Fighting stick figures

And I wondered if and when Eminem would sell out.* Warning: Rude language ahead.
*(No I di'int.)

Finally, in pursuit of a more cultured way to spend these hot, humid days, I tried to learn all I could about flatulence at www.heptune.com/farts.html.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy these pretty much stupid websites as much as I have.

Post Title Explained: If you don't recognize it (that makes me feel old!), Cheech and Chong had a delightful skit called "Sister Mary Elephant" in the 70's. The words in the title are a hapless attempt by a high schooler played by Tommy Chong to read a barely-started assignment, "What I Did On My Summer Vacation."

If a piano fell on this website you'd have A Flat Minor consideration

2005-07-22T09:56:00.000-04:00

Vox Day cited an apparently interesting article (I didn't read the whole thing) from New York Metro today about how these carazy celebrities are behaving. You should check it out. It has a real funny picture of Tom Cruise in a straight jacket. (I haven't heard him dis straight jackets yet, just meds.) Vox was struck by the question, "Are only the crazy drawn to fame, or does fame make the famous crazy?"

Vox replies:

My personal suspicion is that it is the crazy who are drawn to fame. Even in the less-famous world of celebrity punditry, you have only to witness the delusional opinion-spinning of a Sean Hannity, an Al Franken or a Michelle Malkin to wonder if these people have it all together. The fascinating thing about Ann Coulter's pundithood, what sets her apart, is that she gives off a powerful sense of not giving a damn where she is or with whom she is speaking, as opposed to the desperate If-I-am-not-on-Fox-I-do-not-exist brand marketing of so many other chattercrats.

While fame opens doors and makes many desirable things more accessible, it is a curse in its own right. I have known very few famous people that I considered to be sane who enjoyed the celebrity aspect of their fame for very long. And those I've known who consciously sought, and failed, to find success in those industries that lead to celebrity were, almost without fail, more than a little off their rocker.

This could be true in some cases. But I think fame and the people who push us into getting there or staying there, particularly if it happens early in life, are a huge nurture factor in the "nature vs. nurture" scheme. In discussing this on the comments section of Vox's blog, I was reminded of the work of Paul Peterson, who runs an agency called "A Minor Consideration." Paul, who fans of TVLand might know as Jeff from The Donna Reed Show spends a lot of time advocating for kids who still work in the show business industry under less-than-savory conditions. His web page contains some interesting information about how kids tend to be affected by some of this and also some thoughtful opinion.

Snappy answers to stupid questions

2005-07-21T21:11:00.000-04:00

Today, Christiane Amanpour had the nerve to ask Tony Blair if he thought British policy was responsible for any terrorist activity in either the July 7 or July 21 bombings in London. Microsoft Picture It!, or my lack of expertise therein, prevented me from fully imagining how I would have liked the conversation to go, but I think you get the idea:

"I don't know Christiane; are your poor journalism skills
responsible for the bad rap the media gets these days?"

The Babe Hits a Homer

2005-07-20T12:23:00.000-04:00

Barbara Simpson, WND's "Babe in the Bunker", has a good column this week concerning the jihad still being fought under our naive noses here. An excerpt:

How many times do humans have to be hit on the head before they pay attention?

Oh, I don't know. Let me count the ways: The U.S. Embassy takeover in Iran; the Hezbollah kidnapping of 20 U.S. and other hostages in Lebanon; destruction of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut; destruction of the U.S. military barracks at Beirut airport; truck bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait; truck bombing of U.S. Embassy annex in Beirut; downing of Kuwait Airways Flight 221; Madrid restaurant bombing of U.S. military; TWA flight 847; the Achille Lauro hijacking; the Rome and Vienna airport bombings; TWA flight 840; West Berlin disco; Pan Am flight downed in Lockerbie, Scotland; the first World Trade Center Bombing; Oklahoma City bombing; car bomb at Riyadh headquarters of U.S. military, Khobar Towers at Dhahran; U.S. embassies at Nairobi and Dar es Salaam; USS Cole,[sic] 9-11; American Consulate in Karachi; attacks in Saudi Arabia of housing compounds, Saudi oil company kidnapping and U.S. Consulate; Madrid trains; the murder of Theo van Gogh; the London bombings.

What's the link? Islamic militants with the stated aim of destroying the West, the United States, Israel, all we've done and all we stand for. They make no bones about it.

The insistance of liberal politicians to paint any of these tragedies as anything other than the responsibilities of the terrorists themselves, and especially to make this the fault of America or Israel, sickens.

...Remember what it was like BEFORE, Reg.

2005-07-20T12:06:00.000-04:00

A look in on Tony M. Nythop's Flying Ricsu's little known sketch about a politically incorrect meeting:

"What have the Arabs ever done for us??"
"Numerals?"
"Well, yes, numerals..."
"...and algebra. And astronomy!"
"And medicine."
"And embalming. Remember what mummies were like before, rotting and stinking all over the place."
"Alright. But BESIDES numerals, algebra, astronomy, medicine, and embalming, what did the Arabs ever do for us?????"
"Domesticated the camel?"
"Oh, shut up."

Save Seventies Slang!

2005-07-17T15:08:00.000-04:00

Men and women of the cusp of the Baby Boom, our heritage is in jeopardy!

There is a very badddd site called IntheSeventies.com that is being pirated by X-ers and post-Xers. Bogart, huh? At least, I don't ever remember hearing "What's Up Homie G-Funk" in hgh school. Or, "Yo, Wazzup G-unit! Welcome To The Hood Home Slice". Or even "Don't have a cow, man" which I think got its start from Bart Simpson.

There is only one thing to do. Overwhelm the site with appropriate 70's lingo and definitions. Audi 5000! TCB!

..But Would The Facial Have Helped?

2005-07-17T00:02:00.000-04:00

Fairly good satire about Gitmo from the folks at BrokenNews.com here.

A Face Only a Mathers Could Love

2005-07-16T20:23:00.000-04:00

The Detroit Free Press says this guy is the most successful musical act in the world (Oh, World! as the pundits at Punch used to say each month advertising the recordbreaking "Oh, Calcutta" as the world's longest running stage play).

I guess that bodes well for us ugly ducklings.

This is the second time in less than a year that the Joint Operating Agreement (the vehicle that makes Knight-Ridder an effective journalism monopoly here)has decided whatever is going on with Eminem is more important than anything else in their purview. The story that presented this picture (along with a whole gallery detailing the life of our resident rap superstar) appeared on the front page yesterday with, I swear, 60-point headlines. It looked like an announcement that World War III had been declared. Instead, it's a brainless speculation about whether Mr. Mathers is thinking of hanging it up. No, not even retiring, just moving from recording to producing more. Last time, the Detroit News devoted their front page to the release of "Encore".

Don't get me wrong. I like Eminem. I have a couple of his CDs, as well as the 8 Mile DVD. And I confess a certain hometown pride for him, sort of like what I have for the Pistons, Bob Seger and Jack White. But I don't need to know everytime he decides to drink Miller Light or Molson.

Of course the dumbing down of the news is just what the unions warned us would happen when the Free Press and News merged. But I'm not sure that's the origin of the JOA's decision to place the quotidienne life of someone with, maybe, the talent of Cher, above anything else happening in the world: the President's latest speech, the latest casualty in Iraq, the eroding of our freedom by whatever the Supreme Court is doing, etc. I think it's exactly the opposite, and that if the two papers were alive and competing today they'd be drooling over the chance to spotlight the white rapper du jour.

Steven Cox had something to say about this phenomenon, the laudeting of things unlaudible, in this month's issue of "Liberty", in a small piece on pg. 10 called "Incumbency of the Masses." Cox's theory is that, despite how loudly we cheer for this or that artist or politician, there are no real "leaders" anymore in any field. No one who goes out of their way to exceed expectations, to be other than predictable. He goes on to say,

"How did it happen? Well, for one thing, what do you expect, when virtually all intellectual endeavor--even poetry--is conducted within the hive of state-supported institutions, and intellectual pursuits that are not so conducted (i.e., architecture, film) are carried on by people who were educated in such institutions and remain haunted by their 'standards', the standards often being little more than the systematized expectations of a multitude of unremarkable men."(emphasis mine)

Now, perhaps the only "state-institution" or state sponsoring Mr. Mathers got was the Warren Public School system (which cruelly perpetuated his image above in its official photograph record). He certainly doesn't owe anything to the NEA. But consider that one of his best songs, "Stan", owed much of its success to its sample from Dido's "Thank You." Or that the subject matter of his music, while it pushes the envelope of violence in some instances, focuses on those favored by everyone in hip-hop: sex and why women piss him off. It doesn't take much to realize that originality is not abounding here.

To be fair, I don't think Eminem wants to be known as an "artiste". He's probably having fun with what he's doing, and he's making enough money to send his daughter to college ten times over. Which is probably all he, like most entrepreneurs, ask of their work. But watch the critics, and the madding crowd, swoon.

This is the same madding crowd, of course, that is crucifying Tom Cruise for stating his unusual, anti-pharmaceutical beliefs. As if Tom Cruise, in edition to being a good actor, should be held up to the standard of official spokesman for the American Psychiatry Association. Or Pfizer. Why can't he be crazy if he wants to? Isn't it the responsibility of you and I to not go to a Tom Cruise when we're seeking medical advice, anyway, but a qualified professional? Of course, in today's climate, actors and musicians are treated like gurus atop the Mountain of Life.

Thankfully, Eminem, for one, has avoided being lauded in that way, eschewing interviews, trading Orange County for a relatively quiet life in Oakland County, and verbalizing his disdain for approachibility in his songs. Which I laud him for. And hey, good choice in flunkin' that hairdo, G.

Gonzo Gov, cont'd

2005-07-14T11:37:00.000-04:00

So the people on my joke list thought my Top X List (where x is a number other than 10, in deference to the Late Show's copyright) about Uncle Ted as Michigan's Chief Executive was funny.

I guess the fact that they have told me that means my other jokes aren't very funny.

But anyway, here's the list:

THE TOP TWELVE THINGS THAT WILL CHANGE WHEN TED NUGENT BECOMES
MICHIGAN GOVERNOR:
12) The Spirit of Detroit statue in front of the Coleman Young Building will be torn down and replaced by a big statue of Fred Bear bagging a grizzly.

11) All joint sessions of the legislature will begin with a resounding chorus of "It's a Free for All"
10) Meetings with the governor will be casual: loin cloth optional.
9) Kid Rock appointed to new position as
Gubernatorial Sidekick
8) Every citizen will have the right to carry concealed
weapons, and to play "Wango Tango" realllly loud on a
Stratocaster guitar.
7) No Child Left Without Archery Lessons
6) Instead of Urban Recovery Zones: Exotic
Animal Preserves from the Detroit riverside to the borders of Washtenaw,
Oakland and Monroe counties.
5) Opening Day of Deer Season will be declared a state holiday. Michiganians will be encouraged to involve themselves in a solemn
Opening Day celebration involving loud music and Native American rituals.(You can mix things like that when you're governor).
4) There will be one governor at the annual governer's convention who might strike fear in Arnold Schwarzennegger's heart (unless he's packing heat, too)
3) The governor will optimize his accessibility to the people of Michigan through weekly Camp Meetings, filmed at Isle Royale amidst the wolf pack. These will feature His Honor dressed in camouflage and face paint answering all questions put to him by screaming that kids downloading illegal MP3's should be executed, or by promoting his next Sunrize Safari to Africa.
2) The ACLU, anyone named Clinton, Sir Paul McCartney, PETA
and anyone who's been caught dissing an officer of the law will be banned from the state. The name of the town of "Clinton" will be changed to "Gonzoburgh".
AND THE NUMBER ONE THING THAT WILL CHANGE IN MICHIGAN WHEN TED
NUGENT BECOMES GOVERNOR:
1) State Bird and Mammal changed from Robin and White-Tailed
Deer to Stuffed Robin with White Wine Sauce and Venison Steak.

Gonzo Government!

2005-07-13T16:04:00.000-04:00

Could this be a real alternative to the Granholm-meister next year?

Yes, the MotorCity Madman has kind of, sort of, in a way declared his candidacy thus:

AUSTIN, Texas — As Motor City Madmen go, Jack White and Eminem have nothing on
57-year-old Ted Nugent.
The self-described "Rosa Parks with a guitar and
a
raised middle finger" might be bringing his right-wing
politics-on-steroids to
the Michigan Governor's Mansion.
He's
considering
a "high-percentage maybe"
run for the office. He yells at me
his platform,
which includes something about
"cops that have their legs
blown off and
soldiers who are in wheelchairs and
children with
leukemia, who don't get
the money because some fat pig welfare
brat is
sitting on his worthless
(expletive.)"

"Yelling" his platform indeed. Uncle Ted can't speak under a couple hundred decibels.

One of my favorite brushes with greatness (second only to speaking to Michael Palin on the phone) was flirting with Ted on his old radio show (the one that disappeared shortly after he spent an hour on it describing all the various ways Janet Reno could have lingual contact with his posterior). I called in to tell him about another conservative talk show in the area that he did not know about. I told him I was nervous and he said, "Oh, you're not nervous around your Uncle Ted, now, are you Kelly?" I melted.

Not sure about his views on due process, though.....

(from The Miami Herald)

A vocal advocate of the NRA and staunch Republican, Nugent raised eyebrows in
April when he made a gung-ho speech at the organization's annual
convention.
At the convention, the rocker said, ``To show you how radical I
am, I want carjackers dead. I want rapists dead. I want burglars dead. I want
child molesters dead. I want the bad guys dead. No court case. No parole. No
early release. I want 'em dead. Get a gun and when they attack you, shoot
'em.''

The Real Contemporary Christian Scene Isn't in Nashville

2005-07-13T12:24:00.000-04:00

Kate Bowman explains why so many Christian musicians run like hell from the Christian music industry.

I think this is why I've come to prefer the music (and lyrics) of Bruce Cockburn, Nick Cave, and Alice Cooper's "trilogy" CDs ("Last Temptation", "Dragontown", and "Brutal Planet.") Lately it seems as though "Artists Who Happen to Be Christian" are expressing things better than "Christian Artists". At least, they're the ones speaking to me. . . .

The Wrath of the Great Supermarket

2005-07-12T21:25:00.000-04:00

Russia's PrimaNews tells us (in English, helpful to many of us) about a frightening situation in Turkmenistan, where journalists are kowtowing to the Grand Poobah's, or Great Samurai Bashenturkey's, or whatever he is, damnation of a newspaper editor.

I subscribe to several Russian newsfeeds, but this one tends to focus primarily on human rights issues and liberty. And it's a little less tabloidesque than the average Russian journal.

And I'm sorry, I do love this title: the Great Saparmurat Turkmenbashi. Wasn't that a character Bugs Bunny dressed up as in a cartoon?

(Hey, uh...nobody denounce me, OK?)

Images of Liberty Lost

2005-07-12T21:06:00.000-04:00

Here is the home Logan Clements plans to seize in order to build the Lost Liberty Hotel and Just Desserts cafe'. Yes, it belongs to a private citizen (Justice David Souter), but no matter, since Souter & co. ruled that a city or town can allow a developer to take your property if his or her project will provide better tax revenue (read: if their project serves better the common good. Hmmm...common, commoners, community, Communism....oh! sorry, just got carried away there).

Logan now has links on the Freestar Media website that allow the concerned, bothered, or downright p.o.'d citizen to contribute as small an amount as $25.00.

Now won't this site look much better with a hotel, cafe', parking lot and a neon sign on it? You know it will!

2005-06-23T20:29:00.000-04:00

Once upon a time, I worked at a jail. I pretty much did the same thing I do now; in fact, I had the same job title: "Psychiatric Emergency Services Professional". I was part of a team that tried to identify who among those booked had serious mental health problems, and make sure that they got the treatment they needed while they were sitting around waiting for whatever was going to happen, to happen. I also did suicide lethality assessments for people the officers had on "suicide precautions", the most embarrassing place to be in the jail. If you were on SP's, you had to stay in booking behind a big piece of Plexiglas...Not unlike if you were in the zoo...So everyone coming and going could see you. You wore a white jumpsuit, so people knew you either had some weird medical condition, or you were booked drunk and detoxing, Oh. They took your underwear away, which the guys hated. And your toilet was conveniently located in the middle of the cell, again in front of God and everybody.)

Anyway, that's not what I wanted to tell you. I wanted to tell you about how we and the officers treated Korans. (And we didn't spell it all hoity toity, like Qu'ran, either, mister.)

The jail I worked at, Washtenaw County Jail, is located in Ypsilanti, Michigan, just on the border with what one of the sergeants referred to as The Peoples' Republic of Ann Arbor (for good reason; I think Ann Coulter lives here to spite people). More to the point, the Hogback Hilton, as the sheriff's Department on Hogback Road is known, is a mere twenty two miles from what I truly believe is the safest place in the US: Dearborn, Michigan. Dearborn has the densest population of Arabic folks, anywhere except in the mideast. When I climbed up out of our dungeon office at about 12:30 on September 11, finally persuaded by an armed National Guardsman that I reallly should leave the building , after I blinked a few times to get used to the sunlight I couldn't figure out why we had more guards outside. What, Al Qaeda's gonna strike here? I thought. Where Auntie Sarita and Uncle Mohammed live?

So anyway, what with folks from Dearborn going back and forth to Ann Arbor and sometimes not minding their p's and q's, and with African American guys getting into "Black Islam", we had a number of folks in the jail who needed Korans. Maybe about a third as needed Bibles.

Well. Another odd custom they had in the jail was a "shake down". I found out about "shake downs" when books I lent to inmates started disappearing. We'd hear over the radio, "Shake down cell block E" or something, and then we'd learn later that the inmates had been searched, and anything in their cells taken out. I asked someone what happened to Book X and he told me, "Man, they took it, I asked for it and they said, it's gone." I asked a more senior employee about this and she said, "He's probably right." Apparently a makeshift weapon or something equally suspicious had been found, and that was the protocol. I made a lot of Xerox copies after that.

As you can imagine, we would get several requests for Bibles and Korans after shakedowns. Well, not us, but the Chaplain, this exceedingly large, exceedingly conservative black guy who use to roll his eyes when these other black guys would say, "Hey, chaplain, can I get another Koran? I lost mine in the shakedown yesterday." Then he would order it and it would be there the next day.

My point is this: it was no big deal. On the one hand, no one's religious liberties were curtailed. If you wanted a Koran, you got a Koran. If someone took it fairly or unfairly, you got another one. People talked about praying, so they weren't being kept from praying. Some people complained that we weren't doing enough for them (just like in every other area of their lives), and we listened and didn't punish them for complaining.

On the other hand, we didn't expect the guards to pretend to be Muslim themselves, like the guards at Gitmo! They did not have to treat the Koran differently than any other book. No white gloves required. If officers' or other inmates' lives were in danger, or if an escape was thought to be immanent, they were welcome to throw any Koran in the dumpster out back along with Bibles and anything else they picked up in a shakedown.

And you know, the Arabic inmates never rioted because of this insensitivity toward the Koran. If they were talking to their Dearborn or Westland or Detroit relatives on visiting day about this heinous treatment, those relatives weren't then going home and killing each other over this affront to the Holy Book.

When I think of our efforts to go out of our way to treat Guantanomo prisoners less like prisoners, and more like babes in a nursery, I'm reminded of Rick Nelson singing, "You can't please everyone, so you've got to please yourself." I think that both the media and the administration are forgetting that our national interests are paramount here. Yes, of course, humanitarian treatment is important, and so far I haven't heard any inhumane treatment even alleged, let alone proven. Flushing a Koran down a toilet is not inhumane, because a Koran isn't human. A Muslim flushing a Koran down a toilet would probably have some 'splainin' to do, but because of his own conscience. What, if somebody ends up in San Quentin who worships Harry Morgan like a God, would that mean splicing old Dragnet and M*A*S*H reruns with porn films and showing it to the detainee till he welches inhumane? We are delving into the depths of silliness.

2005-06-11T15:31:00.000-04:00

"C'est parfait, monsieur Clinton, once zees peecture ees taken, France's reputation will be restored, and you can put your hands down again."

Se necessita un cambio

2005-06-05T01:15:00.000-04:00

I think it was John Anderson I woke up to that winter day. Not John Anderson the erstwhile independent candidate for POTUS, but John Anderson the twangy country singer that sang about a girl named Charlotte "just a swangin'". Or it could have been someone equally twangy and bad, like Hank Williams II. Because I immediately realized something was wrong. After all, I'd fallen asleep listening to W-4 (WWWW), Detroit's BEST rock station at the time, a fact of which I'd finally been convinced, since they'd begun to play some punk and new wave selections in their weekly "W-4 Play" segments. Why was I waking up to the music my father forced me to listen to in his car? Had he snuck into my room at night and changed the channels?

It got even weirder when the regular W4 DJ, someone named Carl I think, came on and said something like, "That was [insert name of awful country singer here] on the new W4 Country." And that was that. Same station, new format, and no warning. Within a couple of weeks Carl and all the other rock DJ's were gone, replaced by DJs who seemed much more enthused with the platform.

My next personal contact with the unforgiving brusqueness of the radio business was my "relationship" with the two DJ's who ran the morning show on the Detroit FM Christian music station. (Many Christians will tell you they have a "relationship" with God. We evangelical Christians have "relationships" with our Christian music channel DJ's, our Family Christian Store clerks, the nursery room lady, the Christian guy who works in another department but comes to the water cooler around the same time we do....these relationships provide great ways of distracting us from those annoying commands Jesus gave us, like loving our neighbors, judging them not, and making disciples of all men). At any rate, because I had a "relationship" with both of these folks, regardless of the fact they did not know me, I was devastated, devastated I tell you, when one of them was unceremoniously fired. He had just bought a house, and his wife was due with a baby several days later, so it didn't seem likely it was his idea. How could a Christian company just greet someone by saying, "Pack up your desk, today's your last day." My housemate told me, after listening to the DJ who replaced my family member (you know, the one with whom I had a relationship), "I can see why they replaced him with _____, he's much more talented; and that's the way they do it in the broadcast world."

I knew she was right about that. Just a few years earlier, one of my aerobics instructors turned out to be a DJ. She knew all the WWWW DJ's who had come in to find out they were spinning country tunes all of a sudden, not rock and roll. She told me that not only were they not told of the format change until they arrived that day, but they were made to wear these silly cowboy hats and t-shirts with slogans they didn't particularly endorse. Shortly after our discussion, my aerobics instructor was unceremoniously fired when her station went to another format overnight. She and her husband ended up moving out of state.

So I've come to see the radio business as a cruel, low-paying industry, which allows DJ's and talk show hosts less and less control over their shows....and that this basically equals less and less free speech. They spoon out more pablum for the masses. Finally, it seems like employees must live on pins and needles about their employment.

I'm still convinced that it's not fair to fire someone who is doing a good job with such little notice. But last week, I learned the wisdom of not telling your staff when your format is going to change.

WSDS is a little station in Canton, MI that has been providing a host of community functions (SDS stands for "serving the Detroit suburbs") including Chinese, Greek and Hispanic programming, public service announcements, and of course, Elvis impersonator contests! Doesn't every community need those? But its prime reason for being, since the sixties, is a certain brand of good country music (not John Anderson) that includes early Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash, Western swing, bluegrass, country gospel (including a great deal of local talent). They also play alternative country a couple nights a week, as well as rockabilly. Several months ago, the DJs, who talk pretty freely between songs, mentioned the station had been bought by a new owner. And about 3 weeks ago, they began announcing that on June 1, the station would switch to an all-Spanish language format.

Yes, you heard me. Freely talking DJs. Three weeks ago. Began announcing. And they wouldn't stop. Every chance they got, these people wailed and moaned and bitched and carped about not only losing their jobs (which is understandable) but about the station's change of format (which I will grieve too; but is it that much of a disaster? Isn't it good to have a Latino station too?). "__________ can't be here today because she is just so sick about what's going around here, so I'm sitting in for her." "I always play a song dedicated to the boys in Iraq here, and this'll be the last chance you have to hear something like that, because the station's going to an all Hispanic format on June 1." (Well, maybe the Americans running the station who happen to speak Spanish will dedicate songs to the soldiers too, d'ya think?)

Look, I'm not a bilingual-nation person. I think these people in California trying to make their kids' principal speak Spanish because the students aren't doing well in an American school need a swirlie, OK? But I can certainly understand the desire of a Latino immigrant, or even a high school student learning Spanish, to hear songs from the old country in the old language once in a while. And I kinda get the feeling these guys are crossing from the "oh, I wish our kind of music would stay on the radio" side of the room to the "but you don't understand these people, they listen to this strange music and they speak this strange language" side of the room. And that sounds like swirlie-seeking behavior, too.

The main point, however, is that I've learned by all this. I've learned that it's probably NOT a good idea for a radio station owner to show her or his hand, if she's about to change the format. Firing the employees after a stealth format change is unneccary, as the old WWWW Detroit DJ's would be glad to tell you. If they don't like the format, they will go away.

Okay, so maybe H.W. isn't so Deep after all

2005-05-31T19:32:00.000-04:00

Well, we can stop holding our collective breath now. You were, weren't you, ere these 33 years? Ever since our soap operas and Jack La Lane shows (does anyone but me remember Jack La Lane?) were first interrupted by endless testimony before congress...and not, this time, about blue dresses or insider trading? Or at least since you saw that great film with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman running through the halls of the Library of Congress trying to stay one step ahead of the Washington Post deadline, with the help of their old buddy, Deep Throat?

Of course, the problem was (at least, for those of us who like our mysteries eventually solved) is that Woodward and Bernstein, the crackers of Watergate, would never tell us who Deep Throat was. That is, until today.

I was prepared to wipe that smug, 30 year old smile off my face as early as Super Bowl Sunday, when I read the Post's report that Deep Throat was at death's door and they soon expected to reveal his identity....as I watched MY pick for deep throat, US President #41, in the front row of Alltel stadium, laughing and sharing popcorn with US President #42 and not looking very sick at all. Damn. But today Deep Throat himself spilled the beans.

It turns out he's Mark Felt, then the #2 man at the FBI (as opposed to HW's #1 post at the CIA). Guess he decided not to wait till he was pushing up the daisies to let us know. Maybe he wanted to share some of the glory he's getting now. His family says he's an American hero who put himself at "great personal risk" to bring criminals to justice. I think he put himself in a dark garage to bring personal enemies down to a fate worse than he was getting by not reaping the rewards he felt he deserves. G. Gordon Liddy, predictably, thinks he is not a hero, and that he thwarted his heroic attempt to put himself at great personal risk to keep the Democrats from running a prostitution ring out of the Watergate hotel.
Whatever.

At any rate, did you know that the same guy who wrote the script for "All the President's Men" wrote the script for "The Princess Bride"?

Grandpa: [narrating] Nothing gave Buttercup as much pleasure as ordering Westley around.
Buttercup: Farm boy, polish my horse's saddle. I want to see my face shining in it by morning.
Westley: As you wish.
Grandpa: [narrating] "As you wish" was all he ever said to her.
Buttercup: Farm boy, fill these with water - please.
Westley: As you wish.
Grandpa: [narrating] That day, she was amazed to discover that when he was saying "As you wish", what he meant was, "I love you." And even more amazing was the day she realized she truly loved him back.
Buttercup: Farm boy... fetch me that pitcher.
[It's right over her head, so he has to stand next to her]
Westley: As you wish.
[Cut to them kissing]
The Grandson: [interrupting] Hold it, hold it. What is this? Are you trying to trick me? Where's the sports?
[suspiciously]
The Grandson: Is this a kissing book?

Ken Clawson: Please, listen, now, if you're going to refer to that alleged conversation with Sally Aiken, you can't print that it took place in her apartment. I have a wife and a family and a dog and a cat.
Ben Bradlee: A wife and a family and a dog and a cat. Right, Ken, right, yeah. Uh, Ken, I don't want to print that you were in Sally's apartment...
Ken Clawson: Thank God.
Ben Bradlee: I just want to know what you said, in Sally's apartment.

Keep that one under your hat for the next Trivial Pursuit game you play.