Republic of Vuscaria

Moving On Up!

2006-11-01T07:12:00.000-08:00

...to a deluxe apartment, in the sky!

OK not really hehe. But I am moving the blog over to Wordpress. It took me over an hour yesterday to upload the photos for the Halloween article, and I had all I can stands, I can't stands no more! Perhaps if Google spent more of its money on improving their servers, and less on bankrolling the American Totalitarian Party (GOP), things would work better here. And fyi, Blogger will almost certainly crash on US election night, Tuesday November 7...so plan accordingly. Firedoglake and Daily Kos are not Blogger-based, so should be up for election news.

New blog is here. See ya over there!

Happy Halloween!

2006-10-31T08:45:00.000-08:00

I don't know why people enjoy being scared so much, but Halloween is that time of year when we collectively embrace this. As I've mentioned earlier in the blog here, I loved Halloween as a child. And not the watered down "let's show scary things as harmless cute things" that you see so much of, I genuinely loved the scary...and the scarier the better. As also mentioned earlier, as kids we often put together little haunted houses, which consisted of creating a little path through the apartment, or later the house, and placing creepy things along the path that the people would take. One year we set it up in the laundry and storage room area of our complex, which had the added creepiness of no natural light getting into there, as it was underground, though the landlord had a fit and that was the last year of that. The scariest "haunted house" we put on though, was years later, when I was in my teens. We set it up in the finished basement of our house, and the horror started when people would come down the steps. My mom had taken me to a little magic and prop store the week before, and I had gotten a bunch of new little items, and coupled with some old things I had collected over the years, made some cool little displays. There was the ceramic human skull I had gotten on vacation one year...but it was hollow in the back, and I hooked up a blinking red light in there, so that red light would blink out of its eyes. This scared the littlest kids so much they ran up the stairs and back into the living room hehe. We also had one of my step-sisters just writhing on the ground in the back of the basement, with a soundtrack of moaning and groaning playing. This freaked out grandma hehe. I ended up getting one of those fake butcher knifes, and attached it to my head so it looked like I had been stabbed with it...and fake blood completed the look. This freaked out ironically my mom, who had been in the store when I bought the prop! hehe. We had other things like a ghost we operated from the second floor of the house, so that it banged up against the window in the back, and other scary things like that.

But the surprise hit in the scary department was the Tarot Reading. We had one room in the basement which we had no idea what to do with. It completely messed up the traffic flow of the haunted house, as the room was small, and people coming and going would bump each other in the doorway in the dark. That wasn't scary that was just annoying! So I got the brilliant idea of setting up a card table in there, and doing tarot readings for people. I had gotten the deck from the magic prop store, and had gotten a book from the library about reading the cards. It was waaaay more involved than I had imagined when I had thought the idea up, and there was no way I was going to be able to learn how to read them correctly. So I just ended up selecting the creepy looking cards, and placing them in the order I wanted beforehand, and of course the "outcome" of the reading was the Death card hehe. This creeped out the first few people, but then my oldest step-sister came in and sat down. She had spent the whole tour of our haunted house saying how not-scary everything was, and lookig bored. I did my little fake reading for her, and she declared it to be fake and not-scary, and then completely mixed up the deck of cards! Now what did I do hehe. She demanded I read the cards again. I tried to worm my way out of it, but ended up complying, just so the line of people wouldn't back up and ruin the fun for everyone.

I pulled out the book and started giving the meanings of the cards that had come up for my rotten sister hehe. She got this really freaked out look on her face, and ran from the room. I don't remember what I said at this point, as this was decades ago, but it took a while for her father to calm her down. At this point everyone was saying, "Me next!" hehe. I had no idea what I was doing, I was just dealing out the cards as they came out at this point, and reading the meanings from the book. But it was freaking some people out, while others were saying things like, "Yeah, yeah, that's so true!" At first I thought people were just feeling sorry for the event being thrown into chaos by the idiot sister, but nope, everyone confirmed later that the readings were "accurate". Now I hadn't bought the cards because I took them seriously, I was just looking for something fun to do during Halloween, but everyone's reaction to them was quite surprising and unexpected. We had around 50 people at the party that year, and typically we brought them through the haunted house in the basement in twos and threes, but word was percolating around upstairs that this year's was really scary! Finally we got through the last of the people, and my step-father told us kids that next year, no tarot reading would be allowed, as it had upset too many of the adults. Though our immediate neighbors had all said it was great fun afterwards.

I will now leave you with a link to one of the scariest short stories I have ever read. Put on your creepy Halloween music, turn off the lights, and read it alone and by candle-light for the best effect. HP Lovecraft's The Thing on the Doorstep.

And if you don't wake up in the morning, don't come over and haunt me!!

Exile in San Angelo, Part 4

2006-10-29T22:05:00.000-08:00

The Church - Under the Milky Way

So now it was 1986, and I was back in San Angelo. It had gotten quite cold with Winter, and after being spoiled in California, I wasn't caring for it much at all. One thing that was really cool though, was how many stars you could see in the sky at night. And when I was on the night shift, we had plenty of time to stare up at the Milky Way while in formation, and enjoy the view. I grew up in a big city, and the light pollution was such that you really could only see the brightest stars. But here in the middle of nowhere, it was like a totally different sky. It almost made freezing my ass off out there to see it worth it hehe. In January, we were back to Day Shift though. So we had less night sky, slightly less cold, and assloads more of military bureaucracy to deal with. January was the month though where the unthinkable happened. I failed one of my courses! Just barely, but still I failed. I wasn't the only one, many of us did, including my friend Rob. I was freaked out about it, but Rob didn't seem too concerned. Nothing terribly horrible happened, only we had to repeat that course, which added another month onto our stays in freakin San Angelo. Sigh. So we stayed in the same barracks and everything, but we ended up being moved into a new classroom, with people who had been there a month less, and with a new teacher. I had a mandatory "study hall" until I passed that course section...but all study hall was you had to go in your off time into a vault in the secure area, and study the same material you did in class on your own. Yawnerific hehe. I passed the course with no problem this time, and had no further problems.

Yes - I've Seen All Good People

Yes - Owner of a Lonely Heart (Complete Video)

Dire Straits - Skateaway

In February we were on swing shift again, and then we had a mandatory "field exercise" before we could graduate from AIT. Field exercises is codespeak for playing army. In other words, the military has dedicated people who are infantry people, or tank people, etc...these are professionally trained killers essentially. They were trained to shoot people in other armies. We on the other hand were linguists. While we had been given basic weapons training, it was intended mainly as a self defense thing. If a war had ever broken out, we would have been far behind the lines in relative safety, doing translations and stuff. So these going into the field things were more a way for people to pretend they were hard-core soldiers and not really admin people :) Many people took it very seriously though. So here we were, in sub-zero temperatures, forced to go out into the boonies...in San Angelo that wasn't saying much!...and had to sleep in tents, and pretend to guard empty things and whatnot. Had it not been so damn cold, it might have been fun. As it was I shivered the whole time, and didn't enjoy it much. And this was of course where we found out how deadly the cactus were hehe. We spent the whole 3 or 4 days pulling the needles out of our legs, out of our boots, etc. Some of the needles were several inches long, and hurt like you wouldn't believe. But others were tiny little splinter-sized things, and while they didn't hurt, the moment you tried to remove one, you ended up pushing it in further, and it became annoying, itchy, and eventually painful. One poor guy dove onto the ground to "hit the dirt", when playing during the simulated exercise, and ended up with a face and hand filled with cactus needles. They had to take him to the base hospital to get them out.

Fleetwood Mac - Sara

Blondie - Hanging on the Telephone

Trio - Da Da Da

Since our days were filled with music, I'll tell you about the local music store. Unlike Monterey, where the store was modern, filled with the latest music, and staffed by people who also loved music, the store in San Angelo was a depressing little hole in the wall. There was a large used music section though, and because of all of the soldiers at the base, it had a fairly interesting selection of used...read cheap...vinyl records you could buy. The owner of the store was the only staff in there, and he hated his customers. I'm guessing he hated his life lol too. He was openly hostile to any military folks in there looking at records, and the one time I went there, he did nothing but bitch and moan about the fact that I had nothing but used records to ring up. I tried politely pointing out that his new music selection sucked in comparison to what was used, but this only made him more of an ass. Had I not found a hard to find Martha and the Muffins album there, I would have told him to shove his records. That's the only thing I remember getting, other than a Yes album, and 2 David Bowie albums...though I had a stack of like a dozen. A lot of the things I was listening to here were a therefore a little older. Like Blondie, which had already officially broken up by then. I've sprinkled a selection of videos through here that were typical listening of the time.

Yello - I Love You

Martha and the Muffins - Danseparc

Hazel O'Connor - Eighth Day (clip from Breaking Glass)

There were a few other things going on during the San Angelo sojourn, but I'll save them for later, to cover them in more depth. In March though the last of us officially graduated, and were allowed to move on to the next assignment. For Rob, since he was in the Reserves, that meant he got to go home to Michigan. For a few, like my old roommate John, it meant they got to go to another base for a little more training. For me, it meant I got to go on to my permanent assignment, at Fort Hood...also in Texas...but first I got another little vacation. So I ended up flying back to Baltimore.

Exile in San Angelo, Part 3

2006-10-26T20:50:00.000-07:00

I suppose there was a lot of stress for us in San Angelo. The combination of being far from civilization, the weird schedules, the in your face security...it had weird effects on people. For me it was just dull, and picking up another book to read cured my problem. For others, it brought out all manner of bizarre behavior. For instance, there was the guy who kept trying to commit suicide. He looked ordinary enough. But one day something just snapped, and he tried slitting a wrist. I don't remember the details, but he was found in time by a roommate or whoever, and got taken the hospital and bandaged up. My friend Rob said that anyone who tried to commit suicide and failed didn't really want to die, they just wanted attention. The ones that really want to die manage to pull it off successfully. I don't know if that is true or not, but it sounded plausible to me at the time. And this guy was either an idiot, or just wanted the attention...because a few days later he tried the same thing again, but this time with the other wrist. Again he was found by someone, and stitched up. By this time his clearance was revoked of course, so his career in Intelligence was over. If he was lucky, he'd end up with a desk job somewhere...if unlucky, he'd get something more icky, or dangerous, like being a cook, or artillery-piece cleaner or something. But this poor guy, he just moped around the company area, doing cleaning and stuff. I'd see him before classes in the morning, when he'd be pushing a vacuum cleaner around with his two bandaged wrists, looking all sad. The third time he tried to go after the first wrist again, once again being found and stitched up in time. And this time another soldier was assigned to follow him around 24 hours a day, and not him out of his sight. The suicide guy looked more depressed than ever. The guy assigned to watch him looked bored, pissed off, depressed...all at the same time. I imagined back then that one day we'd find both of them trying to slash their wrists simultaneously, and then what would happen?! But alas, it was not to be. They shipped suicide guy right out of the army instead. I never did hear what became of him. I hope he turned out ok. (Images in this article are again found from the Internet, they were not taken by me.)

Then there were the gays. This was 1985, and before even the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy. Being found to be gay meant pretty much immediate dismissal from the military. And if they caught someone in flagrante delicto, so to speak hehe...there could be criminal charges brought against them as well, depending on the laws in place in the state where the soldier was caught doing the deed. There was gayness breaking out left and right in San Angelo. Now admittedly people could have been declaring themselves to be gay just to get out of the military. Certainly it would have been less messy than Suicide Guy's method. But I think these folks were genuinely gay. The first guy ended up being in the room right next to mine, in our little "apartment" like barracks room. Supposedly he was caught in bed with another guy. Which I can't even imagine, since my room was right next door, and I never heard a thing. Not any sex going on, and not any commotion from a guy being suddenly screamed at by other soldiers, etc. So the mechanics of how he actually got caught were suspicious to say the least. But I do think he was gay. He went from being just another pale skinny soldier to being the (almost) most melodramatic queen I would ever meet, in about 3 days. It was bizarre. They moved him out of our apartment and into his own room somewhere else a week later, took away his clearance, etc. I guess they were afraid he would convert the rest of us somehow hehe. He would be hoovering instead of Suicide Guy in the mornings some days. And he started with all of these odd feminine affectations, like putting on makeup, and wearing a frilly shawl over his uniform. I tried being nice to him, since we had been flat-mates for a few weeks, but he was just hostile to everyone. I ended up moving into his now abandoned room, since my roommate at the time was this creepy little guy with a creepy, hideously unattractive fiancée who were always trying to get busy in our room. And when I opened my new locker, I found Shawl Guy's gay porn stash. I had never seen any gay porn before, and I had to admit I was a little curious hehe. For the record, he was into big muscle-daddies :) I must have let out a little gasp or something, because soon I was surrounded by the other flat-mates, who then also proceeded to check out the porn. I tried to return it to Shawl Guy, by telling him about it the next time I saw him, but he just screamed something like, "Oh God, just throw it all away!!" He was there through til Christmas break, glaring at everyone every day, and then was gone when we got back. Then there was a guy I had been in Basic Training with, but hadn't seen since then. He was a short little latin guy, and had been a Spanish linguist who had done his language training in San Francisco instead of Monterey. And wow, had he changed. He had been just another army guy in Basic, but now he had turned into a flaming queen. I don't know what it is about gay latin guys, but man when they come out, they come out! Carlos Mencia does a funny little comedy bit about this topic hehe. And talking to him was surreal, since he acted like a completely different person now. He had also now had his clearance revoked, and had apparently been caught in bed with someone, but we never heard any details about it. And the whole while, I kept thinking about the hypocrisy and injustice of persecuting these guys. I mean this is the same army that was perfectly fine with my troll roommate and his troglodyte girlfriend shagging into the night, yet these guys had to be driven out of the military.

I went back to Maryland for Christmas. Me, my friend Dan from DLI, and another guy whose name I forget now, who were all from Maryland, decided to rent a car and drive back together, instead of flying. It was around 30 hours of straight driving. We'd take turns, each driving 4 or 5 hours, and then we'd take turns sleeping in the back seat. At first we were going to stop at motels on the way, but then just decided to drive the whole way through, and have an extra day or two back home. The drive was uneventful, but fascinating for me. I had never been in any of the states between Texas and Maryland before, I had only ever flown over them. So I had trouble sleeping, I wanted to see everything hehe. I ended up doing the driving through most of Tennessee, and even in late December, it was very pretty. Driving across the Mississippi river the first time was amazing. And at the time I was amazed, at how little country music there was on the FM radio when we drove through Nashville. AM was all Country Music, but FM was mostly rock and pop...and pretty good rock music at that. Virginia however, was horrible. The music I mean. Though the scenery wasn't much to look at either. We did end up driving around lost in West Virginia for a bit, in that little part where West Virginia, Virginia and Maryland meet. The other 2 guys were certain there was some shortcut there, but they had trouble finding it in the dark. We finally made to Guy Whose Name I forget's parents' house in Frederick. They gave us a little breakfast, chatted us up a bit, and then we drove to my parents' house and dropped me off. They then dropped of Dan outside of DC, and Guy went back to Frederick. Even though I still thought of this house as "home", it no longer felt like home at all. It felt like my parents' house, not like mine. San Angelo certainly never felt like home. At some point California had started being "home" to me, and I never even realized it until I had left.

We had our usual family Christmas stuff. Some old friends from high school called and dragged me out for dinner one night after Christmas, we talked late into the night, and I told them what I had been up to in both California and Texas. I told them about Rocky Horror hehe. They had seen it too! It played nearby right in town! We made plans to see it on the coming Saturday. They dropped me off back home, and my step-father was bitching and moaning about how late I had been out. I think I got home around 11pm. I laughed and told him I usually stayed up until 7am just working, and didn't even go to be until noon! God he was an idiot. He was even madder when we went out on Saturday to see the midnight showing of RHPS and I didn't get home until 2am. He and my mom weren't even home, they had gone away for the weekend! One of the neighbors had actually reported to him the time I got home. What was with these Maryland people! What the heck were they doing up at 2am anyway if they found 2am so offensive?! I wasn't the only person having trouble with relatives. Neal called me at home a few days before New Year's Eve, and told me his parents were driving him crazy too, and said we should do something fun for New Years. I mentioned that there was some laser light show and fireworks planned for the Baltimore Inner Harbor, and he said that would be great. He then showed up at my house an hour later hehe. He had assumed I would say yes, and had already driven all the way down to Delaware. (He was from New Hampshire remember). I invited him to crash with us, and oh lord, the drama from my step-father. We had a spare room, in addition to mine, with empty beds in it, but he pitched a fit anyway. I suggested that Neal and I could just rent a hotel room if it was a problem, and my mom used her glare of death powers and shut the step-father up lol. So Neal spent an uneasy few days with us. The next day we went and saw some movie in the theater...some Star Trek movie I think, I can't remember. Then Neal drove around and I showed him all of the places where I had been near our house when growing up. Including the inner city neighborhood that freaked him out a little hehe.

Finally on New Year's Eve I told the parents we were going down to the Harbor, and I thought my step-father was going to have a stroke. "You're not taking my car down there!", he bellowed. Umm, we're taking Neal's, but thanks for caring. "How can you go out on New Year's Eve, it's dangerous! There are drunk people! You better not be drunk and driving!", he blathered. No, we don't even want to drink, we don't like to drink, we haven't ever drunk anything even in the army. We'll be careful. Buh Bye! Here was the man who was always trying to get me to stop reading books and go outside, having a fit when I wanted to go outside and go to a party! It boggled the mind. We went and saw the laser light show, which back then was new-fangled and cool hehe. Then got lost repeatedly trying to get out of the city, but finally made it home. Step-father was still waiting up for us! And he had to work early the next day, how dare we go out and have fun! I thought my mom was going to die laughing at him hehe. Neal left the next day, to drive back up to New England. He was still stationed in Massachussetts for a while, and then would go wherever they were sending him next. He declared my family to be even more deranged than I had portrayed them to my friends at DLI, and vowed to never stop in Maryland again if he could avode it :) I of course had to go back to San Angelo. The guys picked me up as agreed, and we all drove back to Texas. The trip was again uneventful, but long. And even though I wasn't looking forward to more of Texas, I was more than ready to have a vacation from my family!

Exile in San Angelo, Part 2

2006-10-23T18:32:00.000-07:00

OMG, San Angelo was so freaking boring! I hadn't realized how much time in Monterey we had spent just wandering around checking out the sights...until we had all of this new-found free time, since there was nothing worth looking at where we were in Texas. I would take a walk around the base near the barracks, with the wild wind blowing and moaning around me, and there was literally nothing to walk to. I take that back. There was a depressingly small rec center, that was smaller than my current apartment. It had board games! Yawn. Getting off base was a problem, since the only real way to do it for us carless folks was to call a cab, and wait for it to get from town all the way to the base. We'd usually get a big group of us together, and pile into a cab, to go into town, and then split the rather high fare cost. But there wasn't anything to do in town either. San Angelo today has around 88 thousand people living in it. Back then I'm guessing it was lower. There was a pizza place we went to a few times, that served edible pizza. But by California standards that we were used to, where you could order anything imaginable on your pizza, and get it in any style known to man, this place was just sad. You could get pepperoni. Or sausage. Or you could mix the two and be daring. They had the standard vegetable toppings too, but nothing interesting, like my favorite, pineapple and Canadian bacon! The waitresses would just look at us like we were crazy when we asked for stuff like that hehe. We also went to the local mall 2 or 3 times, but there was nothing to buy there. Correction...there was nothing to buy there that we would actually use. The clothing shops were selling things that had gone out of style sometime when Nixon was President. Unless you wanted standard Levi's jeans, they didn't have anything you would want to wear.

I was saving my money for a car. Neal ended up buying a personal computer, he was so bored. And thank god for that, because it gave us something to do while hanging out in his room. Personal computers were a relatively new thing. There was no clear standard yet, and there were a number of different brands out there using incompatible formats. Neal got an Amiga, which was well known then for it's "advanced" graphics and games. The Commodore was also popular. Apples were used by many schools, but were otherwise kind of dull. And Microsoft/IBM? Well they were well known for putting out crappy software, so most people avoided their computers like the plague. I don't remember the exact specs of Neal's machine...by today's standards of course it was a dinosaur with pitiful power hehe...but back then it was state of the art. He got a bunch of games, which we played for hours. I forget most of them, but one of them ended up being Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a text adventure game. You can download it here, and try it out! Computers really couldn't handle fancy graphics back then, so text adventures were extremely popular. We also ended up playing Zork around this time. You can download Zork here. Hitchhiker's Guide was of course loosely based on the events in the popular Douglas Adams books. Zork was a descendant of the old Colossal Cave, or just plain Adventure. In years to come, Zork itself would spawn a whole line of games in the same genre, eventually including graphics and movies. HHGG however never had a sequel I'm aware of. In addition, the whole "Adventure" game concept would go on to spawn not only "adventure game toolkits", where the user could design their own text adventure games, but also spawned the whole genre of Adventure games played on computers.

HHGG faithfully captured the humor of Douglas Adams, and while knowing the plots of the books helped a little, it didn't help much. It really made you think to solve the puzzles. And like most games in this genre at the time, doing the wrong thing would result in you losing immediately and the game terminating...hence the expression "Save Often!". The deaths were usually pretty humorous too hehe. We never finished any of these text adventures while in San Angelo, that's how involved they could be. Though we got close to solving Zork I. (It would be years later before I would actually beat these games on my own). We spent one rather hilarious day trying to beat HHGG's nefariously difficult Babelfish puzzle. I won't spoil the fun for the reader, but let's just say that there's a whole bunch of stuff you have to do, in the right order, and there's not enough time if you screwed it up to try again before you find yourself dead hehe. Had there been more stuff to do in San Angelo, I doubt if I would have gotten as much into these computer games as I did. But it's something that's stuck with me over time, and I continue to spend way too much time goofing off playing computer games even today :)

Repeatedly voted the Worst Music Video of All Time, this video by Starship was playing non-stop on MTV in 1985. Warning: May induce vomiting, seizures, and death!

Neal and the other Persian linguists ended up finishing their training and moving on to their next Advanced Training location, in Massachussets. No more computer games for me :( But they finally ended up moving me and a bunch of other people into a relatively new barracks building, when room opened up after previous students graduated and moved on. This new building was more like an apartment complex than a barracks. Each "apartment" had 6 rooms, with 2 beds each. And they connected to a common area with restroom, living area, microwave, and OMG Cable TV!! Rob from Monterey was there with me, but the rest of the guys were complete strangers. At first we were mesmerized by our first exposure to MTV. How cool is this, music videos! This was back when MTV actually played music all day. Of course it didn't take long to realize that most of the music was terrible pop music. We started keeping MTV on most of the time, but muted...and we would play better music on the cassette player while we watched the videos and chatted. We'd then turn off the tape and unmute MTV when they played something decent. We also had our own phone in there, which meant no more queueing up in a barracks hallway to call loved ones. You just had to deal with the volume of the tv now hehe.

Compare the following video by an earlier incarnation of the same band to the previous video...assuming you have not succumbed to the seizures or death hehe. What happened to make such a great band so horrible later in their career? We decided they should have kept doing the drugs :)

We ended up changing shifts every few weeks. Our next shift was the Swing Shift, with our day starting around 2pm and ending by 11pm. This ended up being my favorite. You ended up with a minimum of time exposed to stupid military bureaucrats, could slip in until noon if you wanted, and yet got out of class early enough to still do things at night if you wanted. The final shift which I ended up on during December, was the dreaded Night Shift. Our days went from roughly 11pm to 7am. You tried to sleep during the day, which proved to be quite difficult for me, so I was perpetually tired. And since there was no meal service in the mess hall around 3 am, our "lunch time", we ended up eating whatever junk we could find in the machines in the secure area. Plus lots and lots of coffee. The one cool thing was going for "Breakfast" while on Night Shift, which ended up being around 9pm, just before the mess hall closed. There was slim traditional breakfast food pickings available, but usually plenty of entrees...so I got in the habit of chowing down on lasagna and meatloaf and stuff like that, instead of making due with the cereal or whatever. It's a habit that has stayed with me too, I still eat dinner for breakfast from time to time even now hehe. And people still think it's just as weird now as they did then :)

Project Runway Music

2006-10-22T09:22:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note...I know a lot of people were looking for the runway songs playing during the Bryant Park show for season 3. Blogging Project Runway has detailed news about an upcoming PR soundtrack being released here. The soundtrack will include other music from the show, in addition to the runway themes. (Short answer...it's not available yet, but will be soon). In the meantime, BPR's The Scarlett put the above video up on YouTube. The photos are of her meeting the Runway glitterati, but the music in the background is Jeffrey's runway song.

Enjoy!

Exile in San Angelo, Part 1

2006-10-21T11:56:00.000-07:00

And so began the Exile in San Angelo(tm). It was October, 1985, and a bunch of young college aged kids were all shipped from the heavenly shores of California, to one of the more desolate, empty parts of the country, so beloved of the US military. I ended up flying into Abilene, because there were no convenient flights into San Angelo, and ended up taking a vanride the 100 or so miles down to the base. I didn't recognize anyone on my plane, but at the airport, also waiting for the van, were some guys I had gone to DLI with. The first obvious thing we all noticed was the pronounced Texas drawl of everyone in the airport. The girl at the ticket counter ended up having nothing to do, and spent some time chatting with us. Her accent was so extreme that I was continually distracted by just listening to it, rather than to the words she was saying. And it turned out she had never in her life even been outside of Texas, which was just incomprehensible to us. Though after spending some time there, it's actually quite common for the people from small town Texas to never leave.

I had of course been to San Antonio before, when I was in elementary school (see below), and just assumed that San Angelo would be similar. Boy was I wrong. San Antonio was over a 3 hour drive away, and the terrain was quite different. Everything was flat. Flat, flat, flat. I had never seen so much wide open flat before. Of course there were small little hills, and a slight incline here and there, but you could essentially see all the way to the horizon, in virtually any direction. Everything looked bleak and desolate. In a Mad Max movie kind of desolate way. And there was cactus freaking everywhere. Not those cute little cactus you see in the store, but nasty, unpleasant clumps of mean cactus. With spines that could spear you through leather army boots. Just wandering around in the brush was not a wise thing to do. It wasn't those cute tall cactus you see in road runner cartoons, but hard to see, close to the ground clumps of the stuff. And then there was the wind. A sad, mournful, howling wind that never stopped. I noticed it the first night while I was trying to sleep. I thought my friends were playing a joke on me, standing outside my room moaning or something, like a ghost...it was near Halloween after all...but nope, that noise was the wind. And then there was the water. The drinking water that came out of the taps stank like rotting eggs. It was loaded with sulphur apparently. The locals didn't seem to mind or notice it, but if I drank more than a few sips of it let's just say I suddenly became afflicted with Montezuma's Revenge hehe. I quickly learned to only drink bottled water, and only occasionally forgot that soda served by restaurants was mixed with the toxic stuff.

So for me San Angelo was several months of the most extreme form of culture shock imaginable. I imagine North Korea might be a greater shock, but I'm hard pressed to imagine anything worse hehe. The one good thing about the assignment was that it was on an Air Force base, and not an Army Base. The Air Force seemed to be the most civilized of the military branches, and back then at least seemed to have the most modern buildings, and was willing to spend money to make the soldiers more comfortable. So instead of having disgruntled army cooks cooking for us in the Mess Hall, like we had at DLI, here the Air Force had hired a civilian firm to run its Mess Hall, and it was like eating in a fancy cafeteria like they have at some malls. The food was terrific! The menu was varied, had all kinds of wonderful desserts, a breakfast bar, salad bar, and you could help yourself to most everything except the entrees...the polar opposite of an army mess hall in other words hehe. And you were not *allowed* to clean up after yourself. You had to leave your trays on the tables when you were done, unlike at DLI where you had to bus your own trays. The rest of the base though, wow what a difference from DLI! DLI was an open base. Anyone, including civilians could just drive in and drive around. In San Angelo however, the base was closed, with armed guards at the few entrances. You could not enter without a military ID or with previously arranged permission...if your name wasn't on a list at the gate, you didn't get in. Our training there was classified, and our classes were behind yet another wall of security, where they checked ID and lists again. We were told that the guards were under order to shoot to kill anyone trying to enter without permission, and I don't doubt it. Though it is hard to believe that anyone would bother trying to infiltrate a classroom complex lol!

They didn't have enough barracks room for all of us when we first got there, and they crammed us in all over the place. Neal ended up near me in the barracks for a time, though we only shared one class, and that briefly. They had crammed 3 beds into rooms that were only supposed to hold 2, and in addition had the whole base on 3 different shifts, because there wasn't enough classroom space in the secure area for everyone at once. Us newbies started on the day shift, meaning our days started around 7am, and ended around 5pm, including PT and all of that. But my other 2 roommates were on a different shift, and were always trying to sleep whenever I was awake. We all would end up dressing in the dark, and hanging out elsewhere. Fortunately for me Neal's other roommates were also on a different shift, but they were always at class when Neal was awake...so the old crew tended to hang out in Neal's room on our off time. We did the same old things here, played role playing games, listened to music, played wargames, etc.

Our first class was a Typing class, which we all had to pass in order to move on to the next class. And this is where I learned that I sucked at typing. Other people came in, sat down, took their tests and were gone, but I was in there for at least a week hehe...it was really hard for me for some reason, and I had only ever typed before on a high school term paper we had to do once. But I finally managed to barely pass...which was good, because they hinted if you didn't pass, you got reassigned to being a cook or something worse hehe. Heck no wonder army cooks were always so grumpy and cooking such lousy food! The rest of our classes were classified, and I won't go into details. But the military websites do talk about the various jobs a bit that involve languages, and the curious can read up on it there. Our old gang of friends, even though we were all linguists, had different languages and slightly different job descriptions, so our coursework varied and went on for different lengths of time. And classified doesn't mean the work was interesting...in fact it was boring as all hell...but most people seem to think classified means James Bond or something hehe.

We basically ended up settling in as best as we could, and thankfully most of us weren't scheduled to be here for more than a few months.

Various and Sundry

2006-10-19T10:15:00.000-07:00

Here are a few items that I figured I'd dump into one post.

As reader thebaltimorefootstomper noted below, today, October 19, is Divine's birthday. Happy birthday, hon! You are missed. Divine died in 1988, before he could play his cast part as Peggy Bundy's mother on the hit show Married With Children. (This is why you never actually see her mother in the show, she is always off cam). Imagine what the show would have been like with Divine on it every week!

On Project Runway, Jeffrey wins! Congrats Jeffrey, you worked your butt off and it showed. The PR boards are predictably overflowing with drama associated with him winning, as Michael was the fan favorite, and Uli's line was generally considered to be the more wearable by the average woman. Fortunately the judges are capable of voting with their minds on the merits of the fashion, rather than obsessing on the personality quirks of the designers themselves as many of the fans do. See the Blogging Project Runway blog for more if interested.

A new season of Top Chef began last night, after the PR finale. I'll have to catch the rerun, as I went to bed instead of staying up for it hehe. I liked the show last season, but I don't like it as much as PR...probably because you really need to smell and taste food to properly evaluate it, and of course we can't do that. We can only judge at home based on the presentation. Last season, there was a veritable metric tonne of drama in the kitchen. Way more than on PR, or even on America's Next Top Model. Unlike the model show (which admittedly I rarely watch), the kitchen drama on Top Chef is probably real. I worked as a waiter for a time and kitchens really do get like that. At any rate, check out the links to the right I added for the Top Chef blogs if interested.

I get email:

BTW, why do you have such a fascist, exclusionary comment policy on your blog? You must be a +9 on the Social Libertarian/Authoritarian scale. ;)

Actually I'm a Progressive hehe; the polar opposite of an authoritarian. The comment policy here is to prevent spam bots from dumping literally thousands of comments on here, advertising various products of dubious merit.

Why do you have so many political links in your blogroll, but rarely talk about politics?

The blogs at those links to the right talk about politics in a much more interesting, informed, and often more humorous way than I can. I leave the subject to the experts, and write about other things more often.

How can you write about Rocky Horror and Project Runway when the Bush Administration is destroying America?

Seeing as I am not currently in command of a Tank Brigade, there is not much I can do about BushCo directly. And shrill blog posts about it don't really accomplish anything. The November elections will be a critical moment for the country, and I would urge everyone to vote, in spite of everything. I also urge readers in the US to get involved in the process, read the blogs linked at the right, etc. I don't think it has sunk in yet to most Americans that George Bush signed away habeas corpus rights this week for everyone he wants to go after, not just for terrorists. If he doesn't like you, you no longer have civil rights, period. I don't even want to speculate on what the country would look like if we continue down this dark road the Republicans have put us on.

I get readers:

I recently put in a sitemeter just to see how many readers there are, and what links they followed to get here. There were more readers than I thought! Feel free to comment guys, I don't bite.

However, I did notice that this blog was coming up on a number of Google searches for various things. Number one search? "Incest"! Umm, ewww. I think I mentioned the word once in the Rocky Horror tribute post, but yep, that's what folks are searching for online. No matter how weird you think you might be, there's always someone out there ten times weirder than you are hehe.

The Mixing Bowl is currently accepting new accounts. If you like techno-style music, you will like this site. Read their rather long FAQ to stay out of trouble over there. You can download and use the current version of Azureus for free if you lack a torrent program...they are picky about which program you use and this one passes muster. Signups are only open for a limited time, and may not open again for a long time, so sign up now if you want it!

And finally, here are two additional clips relating to the Russian Folk Music post below. The first is a pianist playing an excerpt from Moscow Nights (Под-мoсковыe Вечерa). The second is an old recording of the song Those Were The Days, which is the melody from the folk song Дорогой Длиннoю, but with different lyrics. Enjoy!

All Good Things...

2006-10-18T15:37:00.000-07:00

As they say, all good things must come to an end. And in spite of all of that latrine cleaning, PT at odd hours, pointless marching around, hours of language study, etc., life in Monterey had been good. We had our final exams, and everyone who had still been in the program up to that point passed. Part of the exam included an oral discussion, in Russian, with one of the instructors. The other parts of the test were pretty easy to gauge how well you had done, since either you knew the word or phrase and chose the right answer, or you had no idea and just took a wild guess. The conversation though was so free form, you had no idea. In the middle of mine, the instructor got up to use the restroom or something in the middle of mine, and I peeked at his notes to see how I was doing. His notes however, were in Sanksrit! So I got to sweat the next few days while we waited for our final grades with the other guys hehe, but passed easily.

Many parents came to the graduation ceremony, including mine. I got to meet my roommate John's parents too. We ended up having a weekend available for just hanging out with our families, and so I was able to play tourist with my parents a little. It was exceedingly odd seeing them in California though. They just looked different somehow. They had driven across country in a camper, and after visiting with me were going to continue up the coast to see other parts of California on their own. I tried to get them to try some local cuisine, but they opted for plain old cheeseburgers instead. What is the frickin point of going somewhere exotic for once in your life, and just eating the same old thing! My family is maddening like that hehe. My mom actually brought braunschweiger all the way from Maryland, just so she could make sandwiches of it for me, "because she knew I liked it." Unfortunately, I hadn't actually liked it since I was, oh I don't know, maybe 7? hehe...but I ate it anyway since she went to so much trouble.

I took my parents to see The Lone Pine, one of the usual tourist destinations on the coast. And here is where I'm going to vent. No, not at my parents lol. At stupid people, and tourism generally. California is a beautiful state. There are literally over one thousand miles of stunningly beautiful coastline to admire. It gets to the point that when you've been here for a while, you just say something like, "Oh look, another painfully beautiful piece of coast. Yawn." I hear Europe is like this too, only in Europe it's with the castles. At any rate, here we are in Monterey, beautiful coast all over the damn place, and what have the locals done? They created a cult out of worshipping this damn tree. Now don't get me wrong, from a distance, it's an attractive tree. It managed to take root out there on that rock all by itself, and managed to hang on throughout years of stormy weather. But what normally happens to trees that managed to root themselves in an environment like that, is that eventually they grow too big for their mooring, and a storm will blow them over one day and that's the end of it. But not this tree. The locals worship the damn thing. They shored up the rocks to keep it from falling. They poured concrete around it's base to keep it from falling. They've even attached wires and metal spikes to keep that damn thing anchored to the rock. The Golden Gate Bridge is more likely to collapse than that tree. And everyone waxes all poetic about this stupid thing...while very carefully photographing it from odd angles, so that all of those wires and spikes and all of that concrete doesn't make it into the photo. I'm sure more modern photos just photoshop any of them out, should they accidentally get into the picture. What is wrong with these people?! When you see the thing in person, you can't even get close to the tree because it has been barricaded away to prevent it from being touched! Seriously people, get a life! Look at and admire another patch of coast, just a few feet away! It's just a tree!!

OK I feel better now lol. Anyway, it was time for me to begin my outprocessing, and time to wish my parents well on the rest of their vacation. So we all went around, this time though with the luxury of John's car!, and turned in all of our crap and got our little forms filled out. During our stay in Monterey, we had found out where our first permanent assignment was going to be. Most of us were hoping and preying for something wonderful, like a cushy assignment somewhere like the Field Station in Berlin. And most of us got something like that. But no, not me. Since I didn't take all of my leave available in between Basic and DLI, I ended up in another group, that got stuck going to somewhere god-awful in Texas. We knew about this before graduation, so leaving California was especially bitter for me...whereas my friends had Germany to look forward to. But more about that later. We all still had more Advanced Training to do before our permanent assignment anyway, and our next stop was going to be an air force base in West Texas. Again, more about that later. But at least we knew that we friends still had some more time together before we would be separated.

Bienvenido a California, Part 9

2006-10-15T20:51:00.000-07:00

We ended up taking another major road trip, this time down to Southern California. Neal, Pat, me of course, and Dave drove down one long weekend. Dave and Pat had both spent time in the Los Angeles area before, so they were going to lead us on a little site seeing. But the main goal of our trip was to hit the amusement parks! We spent one day at Magic Mountain, and another whole day at Knott's Berry Farm. We spent part of the third day at Disney Land, and spent the remainder of the weekend just driving around. I'm not going to go into any detail about the parks...we rode rides, ate too much, had fun, etc. Though there was one amusing event while standing in line to get on a ride at Magic Mountain. We were bored, and waiting for the line to get us to the front, and we started making The Gesture (explained in detail in a precious California post). This got us quite a few interesting looks hehe. But then we noticed how few people were actually speaking English around us. We played "identify the language" for a while, and then got bored of that. God, wouldn't this line ever move! Then we started talking to each other in the languages we were studying. Neal and Pat were speaking in Persian, and I was responding in Russian. We couldn't understand what we were saying to each other, but we put on a good act of having our own non-English conversation like this. And then Neal started saying the same thing over and over again, and pointing at this woman nearby in line. Very pretty, young, dark complected, we just assumed she was latina. But no, she was Persian! And she could understand what Neal was saying! And Neal it turns out, was saying something about the size of her breasts!! That is of course when we noticed the two burly Iranian guys with her in line, who started giving us the hairy eyeball hehe. The three Iranians were talking furiously among themselves, even Neal and Pat couldn't follow it, and pointing at us. At this point I was sure we were about to get the crap beat out of us lol...but fortunately all that happened, is they sent the mother of the family over to us, who scolded us loudly in Persian hehe. (Photos here are once again found on the Internet, they were not taken by me).

The thing I really noticed about LA...and loved...was the sun! We had been in Northern California for most of a year by now, and it had been foggy and rainy for much of the time. The fog usually burned off in the morning by noon, and the rain was not usually terribly heavy, but still it was mostly cool and could be gloomy. But LA was sun, sun, and more sun. I had to listen to Pat and Dave blather on about how much they hated LA though, and how much better Northern California was. We drove around a bit, and I really don't remember much of the site seeing. We did drive through Hollywood though, which back in the 80s was extremely run down, dirty, and more than a little dangerous looking. People were openly selling drugs on the streets, hookers were all over, it looked absolutely nothing like what I had expected Hollywood to look like. (And for the record, none of us indulged in the drugs and hookers hehe, heck we didn't even drink). It turned out that all of the major studios had moved out of Hollywood long ago, and now it was just another blighted neighborhood. Today, they have cleaned Hollywood up, and it is a much safer place. If you like tacky tourist shops selling junk, you'll love it! Otherwise, there's really not much to do there for tourists, beyond seeing Mann's theater, and the stars in the sidewalks.

Back in Monterey, drama in the barracks! We had had a number of people drop out of the language program, and they ended up leaving. Meaning there were now spots available for the army to dump new roommates on people. I still had my fat Hawaiian roommate, but the guy drove me nuts. So when there was an empty room down the hall, I jumped at the chance to move into it. I had to beg my platoon sergeant to get in there, and he finally agreed to let me move, but I had to repaint the room myself before moving. So I did that, spent a few nights inhaling paint fumes while it dried hehe, but had a room to myself for a week. But we knew a new batch of soldiers would be arriving any day now, and no one wanted to be stuck with some random jerk, so others started playing the musical chairs game too. I ended up getting Mitch to move in with me. Now Mitch was a great guy, but I had no idea about his little toxic gas problem before now...gaahhh, it was horrible! Amazingly, he only roomed with me for like 2 weeks, and then surprise, he ran off and got married! And thus moved out of the barracks altogether, getting the coveted off base apartment that married folks could get. But now I had a vacancy again. This time, John came and begged me to let him move in. John was really cool, and so he did. But oh, his roommate Tim was furious! He carried on like a spurned wife. He was some weird variety of fundamentalist Christian, and kept calling me and John satanists hehe. Tim kept coming into my room while John was moving his stuff over, and moving John's things right back out. A bunch of us guys finally dragged him down to the latrine (restrooms), and locked him inside hehe...until John got all of his stuff moved.

John was a great roommate, and had a fancy stereo system, and we spent lots of time playing music for each other. Other people were always coming by to record records onto tapes, and John didn't mind. And he didn't freak out at my Frank N. Furter in drag poster on the wall...from a Rocky Horror soundtrack album I had purchased...though we never did manage to drag him down to the Dream Theater to see it. John also had a tv and vcr, which we ended up using for our rainy weekend movie marathons. I ended up seeing Pink Floyd's The Wall...though everyone kept insisting that one had to be on acid to understand it...having never watched it on acid, I don't know, but I'll let the notion pass hehe. I also saw Eating Raoul for the first time. A delicious cult film, with an offbeat sense of humor, I highly recommend it. I later ended up working with a former roommate of the director, talk about synchronicity! (My coworker hated the movie hehe). But the big movies were Monthy Python movies. Rob kept going on about how Life of Brian was the best movie they ever made. Neal prefered Holy Grail. But my favorite was and is, The Meaning of Life. And even though the movie is hysterically funny, it really did get me to start ruminating on the philosophical questions relating to such things as the meaning of life. But I'll save that kind of heaviness for another post hehe. John also had a car. And not just any old car, but a fancy old convertible. He insisted on driving me everywhere hehe...he was so grateful for getting out of living with crazy fundie Tim I guess lol...so I didn't have to hike all the way down the hill to class anymore. Or worse, hike back up the hill! Monterey has some steeeeeep hills.

We did have some army crap to contend with. Some General came to tour the base, and we had to spend 2 weeks after class marching around in formation to practice for his stupid parade. And then our commander had us all obsessively cleaning the barracks for the General's inspection. How freakin stupid it all was. We marched for hours and hours, to stroke the ego of some officer. What a waste of time and resources. And the day before the General's arrival, we were kept awake all damn night cleaning, and cleaning again, and re-cleaning....we got no sleep at all. And then had to go to class the next day like that. I would have been furious, but I was too sleepy! It's not like the barracks was particularly dirty, it got cleaned every freakin day. But this is the basic problem with the US military. It's run by idiots, and political appointees. If they would focus on important issues affecting the military, rather than looking pretty in parades and stuff like that, the world be a different place, let me tell ya.

Bienvenido a California, Part 8

2006-10-13T09:19:00.000-07:00

Even though we spent a lot of time in Monterey doing things as a group, I did manage to find time to do things on my own hehe. I managed to continue practicing piano while there, after a brief hiatus during Basic when it wasn't possible. But instead of playing every day, it was usually just once or twice per week. There was a pretty nice rec center on base, where they had some sound proof rooms where you could play music. And though you were only guaranteed 30 minutes at a time, there usually wasn't a crowd there for them, so you could stay in them as long as you wanted. Only once or twice was I ever booted out. I continued practicing while in Monterey, but my interest in it was tapering off, and after leaving I stopped practicing regularly altogether. Here are two Chopin pieces I was practicing at the time (Chopin's Polonaise #1, Opus 26 above, and his Prélude, Opus 45 below.)

One of the fun things I got to do while in Monterey was to learn to play balalaika! This is a funny little Russian instrument, similar to a ukelele I guess, but triangular, used mainly in Russian folk music. It turned out that DLI had its own little Russian folk ensemble, that went around the Monterey Peninsula and performed for the public at various events. We got together on Friday evenings and practiced for an hour or two, but were suppposed to learn our songs on our own during the week...the group practice was just to get us all playing in synch together. So I ended up playing balalaika tunes in my barracks room hehe. Fortunately it's not a very loud instrument. When we performed live, they had these cute little costumes for us to wear. Here's a link to a Russian ensemble performing, though this wasn't us hehe, and we had more people. We had our own dancers too, thankfully, because I was nowhere near coordinated enough to dance like that!

Someone playing the balalaika

In Soviet Russia, even grandmother can be rock star!

While looking around the used-record stores, I also started noticing that they had lots of old Russian pop music. Now this was the 80s, the Soviet Union still existed, and all music was released on the state owned recording label. If you thought europop was bad, imagine government-produced europop! Most of it was pretty dreadful. But there were a few nice songs that managed to get through the censors. I've got a few videos here if you can stomach them hehe. Since the end of communism there, the music has gotten a lot more, hmm what word to use, perhaps interesting hehe. Here's a link to some more modern video. Check out #5 in particluar (about 13 minutes in)...what a fun video! If Kafka had done music videos instead of creepy novels, I imagine they would have turned out something like this!

Something more recent from a Russian band I heard in the 80s

Interlude - La Musique Trouvée

2006-10-11T19:59:00.000-07:00

Sometimes a musician or group you've loved for years comes out with something new, and you discover it because you have been closely following the band. Sometimes a friend will turn you on to something new, because they themselves loved it. And then sometimes, you just stumble upon something terrific, that you had never heard of before, and that your friends had never heard of before. But there's just something about it which can't be put into words that speaks to you.

Or maybe I just obsess about my music too much hehe. At any rate, here are some songs that I have just stumbled upon over the years, but loved immediately. Some are popular songs, some are obscure, some are not in English. Hopefully there is something here that the reader will enjoy as well!

Bienvenido a California, Part 7

2006-10-10T19:48:00.000-07:00

Lips! Lips! Lips!

In which the author pays homage to the film, Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Dana Andrews said prunes, gave him the runes...

I had originally intended to just mention Rocky Horror in passing, stating that I saw it for the first time while in Monterey, and maybe putting up a clip of the Time Warp. But then I mentioned the movie among some coworkers, and only one of the other people there had ever heard of it. You gotta be kidding me! What are they teaching kids nowadays! So I'm including many fun clips from the film here...all of the songs, plus a few other things.

Oh, it's nicer than Betty Monroe had!

I had never seen RHPS before...yes my parents were dull, and Baltimore was provincial hehe. I'm sure it was showing somewhere near my home, it's just not one of the things I was aware of. Neal of course, with his theater background was very much aware of it. And he, Pat, and I think Doug dragged me along to see the movie for the first time one Saturday night at midnight. We saw it at the Dream Theater in Monterey. It was an amazing theater. It had recently been renovated, and was the coolest looking theater I had ever been in. It had deep, comfy carpeting. And while it had normal theater seating, there were also some chaise style seats you could recline on in the front, and some love seats in the very back.

There's a light, in the darkness of everybody's life.

I was the only one of our group who had never seen the movie, and Neal and Pat were unusually quiet and uninformative about it. They just said it was a great science fiction movie. Boy was I in for a shock! The lights went down, the Lips came on, and I was surrounded by people who just wouldn't shut up. Everyone in the theater was still talking. And not just talking, shouting. I looked around to complain to Neal and Pat, and they were shouting too! WTF?! And if this wasn't enough, Neal and Pat started shouting to the theater that I was a Virgin! Not only did everyone start laughing at me, but I got pelted with various thrown items, and squirted with water.

It's astounding...time is...fleeting...madness, takes its toll...

What the hell was going on here? Well if you know of the film, you already know hehe. RHPS is a special movie. It is famous for its audience participation. The whole point is go, and shout things at the screen while the movie is playing. Much of the audience dresses up as one of the characters in the film. Most theaters have a dedicated troupe of people that attend the movie every week, and act out the entire movie like this. Most people there though just shout at the screen, and maybe get up and dance the Time Warp.

You both look like you're, erm, pretty groovy.

I had noticed an overweight woman in front of us in the theater when we got there, but so much else was going on, that I didn't really think it odd that she had kept her coat on...a long black trenchcoat. But at the moment in the clip up above when Frank throws off his cape, up she went onto her seat, she turned around, and off came the coat. Yep, she was dressed just like Frank, corset and fishnets and all. Only she weighed about 300 pounds lol. I thought Pat was going to die from laughter.

That ain't no crime!

Hopefully these clips tell the story of the movie well enough. If not, click here for a brief synopsis on Wikipedia. The movie is a kind of cross between a horror movie, a sci-fi movie, and a musical. The film is also full of little references to other famous movies, like King Kong and Dr. Strangelove. The movie was quite shocking when it first came out, due to the themes of tranvestitism, homosexuality, voyeurism, incest and even cannibalism. I was pretty open minded I thought, but I was really unprepared for Frank's behavior hehe. I was even more unprepared to see Neal strip down to his underwear, and run around the theater playing Rocky! How he got the gold painted shoes into the theater without me knowing remains a mystery hehe.

Keeping dynamic tension, must be hard work!

Meat Loaf made a brief appearance in the movie too, and performed a musical number. If you're paying attention, you'll realize that this is where Frank got the brain from for making Rocky, his own Frankenstein's creation, as it were. Neither Rocky nor Eddie were terribly bright hehe.

Meatloaf...it's what's for dinner.

People were actually not allowed to throw certain things during the movie, such as rice during the wedding scene, and confetti during Frank and Rocky's little honeymoon sequence here, due to the nice carpet in the theater, though they are often thrown at other theaters I'm told.

I'm a muscle fan!

Before this clip, there's a bit of film which unfortunately I couldn't find online. What you don't see is how Frank sneaks into both Janet and Brad's rooms in turn, and seduces them. Janet actually sees Brad with Frank on a surveillance camera, and gets upset and runs off. She finds Rocky, injured, who has also run off. Rocky had been tormented by Magenta and Riff Raff, but had managed to escape. That's why she is comforting him here. Oh, and the fact that she is a slut!

I need a friendly hand! I need assistance!

Finally a little of the plot is being revealed! There's some aliens, and the government is tracking them, and there's high technology...ok it's not very plausible hehe. But in one of the more amusing exchanges in the film, everyone catches Janet and Rocky in the act, and everyone gets jealous. Hell hath no fury like an asshole spurned (Brad)...or is it like a Transexual transvestite scorned (Frank)? I'd be a little more worried about Frank if I were them :)

Great Scott! Dinner is pre-pay-uhed!

The dinner scene is particulary amusing. You can almost see the lightbulbs go on when each person at the table realizes exactly what they're eating hehe. Well except for Rocky. He's either too dumb to figure it out, or he doesn't care!

Meatloaf...no it really is what's for dinner!

Interestingly, Brad and Janet are billed on the opening credits as "a hero" and "a heroine", respectively. Interesting, because in the movie they never do anything particularly heroic. They watch a murder and do nothing to stop it. They engage in rampant sex. In fact increasingly through the movie, I found myself rooting more for Frank than for them, even though Frank was the murderous crazed sex-pot hehe.

Your apple pie, don't taste too nice!

These 3 clips are Frank's "floor show" sequence. Now he's apparently given them mind-altering drugs, has mind-blowing sex with them in a pool, and converts them to his "wild and untamed" lifestyle. I love the mini-tribute to Ester Williams, the aquatic actress hehe.

Don't dream it, be it!

Oh snap, it turns out that Frank's lifestyle is too extreme for even the natives of Planet Transexual. Frank sings a beautiful farewell song. Why doesn't anyone understand him?! Unfortunately, once you're an expat like Frank, you can never really go home. You've changed, and home is that same old place. You don't belong there anymore.

Everywhere, it's been the same...like I'm outside, in the rain.

Alas, it's not meant to be. Real life reasserts itself, and Frank's dream must die...along with him himself. At this point I really notice how much I had been rooting for Frank. And all we have left are the dreary lives of Brad and Janet.

Say, "Goodbye!" to all of this!

We went back and saw RHPS many times while in Monterey. Took along new people, declared them to be virgins, and helped strangers humiliate them hehe. We went to see some conventional movies at the Dream Theater too, though I no longer remember what they were. But when I went to get a picture of the theater to put here on the blog, I discovered that the theater had since been demolished, to make way for a strip-mall. What a shame. It looks like the Dr. Scotts of the world won another one.

Lost in time. And Lost in Space. And meaning.

But, unlike the Dream Theater, the movie lives on! It's still shown all over place, still usually at midnight, though not as many locations as in days gone by. Here's a clip of people dressing up like the cast, and acting along with the movie. Now what are ya waiting for? Go grab some friends and drag them out to the see the movie live!

Bienvenido a California, Part 6

2006-10-09T20:40:00.000-07:00

As mentioned previously, I grew up voraciously reading science fiction. Hardcore sci-fi, like Asimov, Bradbury, Niven, etc. Fantasy literature, on the other hand, was almost completely unknown to me. We had to read the Hobbit in English class one year, and I voluntarily read the Lord of the Rings trilogy...but that was about it. I don't know why, but it just never really interested me. I did grab a copy of one of the Shannara books while waiting in an airport for a connecting flight out to DLI, but I never got through it...The Elfstones of Shannara...and I remember the title only because we jokingly referred to it as The Stoned Elves of Shannara hehe. Neal and the gang though changed all of that. These guys were hard-core fans of Fantasy, and turned me on to many excellent writers, including Marion Zimmer Bradley, Ursula K. LeGuin, Piers Anthony, Robert Lynn Asprin (and the whole Thieve's World crew), and Roger Zelazny. They also turned me on to roleplaying games. (Images are again from teh Internets, not taken by me. Note that the rpg images are from more recent editions than the ones we played back in 1984 and 1985.)

Now I was familiar with D&D from high-school, where various dorky kids would carry around their D&D monster manuals, but I never saw the appeal of it, and those kids were kind of weird and creepy in my school hehe...so that's yet another fad that had passed me by. Neal had been DMing (dungeon-master-ing) for years, and with the strength of his personality, twisted all of our arms and got regular rpg campaigns going. And I must confess, I had a great time playing. Neal didn't play D&D though, he used different rulesets. Our regular campaign was based on Michael Moorcock's Stormbringer books. Though he ran some other games to mix it up some when we got tired of that. We also played a Call of Cthulhu campaign, based on the horror novels of HP Lovecraft, a Villains & Vigilantes campaign, which was superhero themed, a Paranoia campaign, which was a darkly humorous game set in a futuristic world controlled by a computer that had gone slightly crazy hehe...kind of 1984 meets Logan's Run, but funny! We also played the silly Toon rpg from time to time, where you got to be cartoon characters. Another guy in the barracks ran a military rpg which I forget the name of...let's just say that when you're in the military, role-playing being in the military is not particularly fun :)

Rob and Mike introduced me to the world of war-gaming. Unlike the military rpgs, these were great fun. We played Risk, which I had played before, but more often more involved games, the ones with hundreds of little counters and pieces. We got a bunch of people together to play Diplomacy too, which is kind of a war-game, and which quickly became my favorite. And I was pretty good at it too! There's a lot Diplomacy info available online now, and in fact people have been playing Dip by email forever apparently, but having tried a few games, it's just not the same as the face to face game. Mike was of course pressuring us to play chess with him, him the guy with his official chess ranking. He would spend his free time studying chess books, trying to get better. While I liked chess and had played some, and had even glanced through a few books, I was nowhere near his level of play hehe.

One of the other things I did in Monterey was scuba diving. Doug and Dan had found a local instructor, but needed a few more people to get a class started so that they could get certified for diving. You can't just go to a shop and rent equipment, they actually insist that you get certified, so that you don't kill yourself underwater. They knew I would be interested, because I had gone on and on about wanting to go diving sometime during Basic Training. Oddly enought Rob decided to go along with us. Rob! The non-physical wargaming, lazy, always rumpled-looking Rob! And he really seemed to be enjoying it too. We went to the class every Sunday morning for a few months, until we got certified. The training was actually pretty cool too...though I did have a problem with the part where we had to take our goggles off underwater, and put them back on. I had almost drowned as a kid, and while I wasn't afraid of being in water, even deep water, the sensation of water rushing up into my nose while trying to get the mask back on and get the water out freaked me out a bit, and I had to try it a few times. But after that, we were certified, and could go diving on our own.

We ended up going pretty often actually. Monterey proper was terrible for diving...it was all sand underwater, and there wasn't much to see. Nearby Pacific Grove and Asilomar had the best diving, and that's where we usually went. The water was remarkably clear, even quite far down. Not Carribean clear, but we had no trouble seeing anything near the shore where we were diving. We saw the usual underwater things...kelp, starfish, fish, sea cucumbers, more kelp, yet more kelp hehe. Kelp underwater was beautiful. However, during storms, pieces of it would break off from the kelp forest and wash up all over the nearby beaches. And phew, does it reek when it's rotting on the beach! We usually had a sea otter or two following us around, at discreet distances. According to our instructor, they were actually quite friendly to divers, and quite curious, they even were known to come up to divers and pull their masks off! I can't confirm that myself, as it never happened to us hehe...but that's what the instructor said. One dive I saw a flash of grey out of the corner of my eye, felt a sense of panic, and just assumed it was a shark and I was about to die. Fortunately though, it turned out to be a dolphin following us around. It got pretty close to us several times, but never close enough to touch. One funny thing was Doug. He was always lugging along an underwater spear, and kept trying to spear fish while we were diving. We'd watch him trying to move through the water in slow motion at the fish, and the fish just calmly swimming out of his way hehe. We were more afraid of him spearing us than the fish I think!

Bienvenido a California, Part 5

2006-10-08T12:40:00.000-07:00

We took a number of little day trips all over the Monterey area; and we saw the usual touristy places, like Carmel, Seventeen Mile Drive, etc. We went over to Salinas a few times, but that was mainly to shop in the Mall there. But finally we took a real trip. One long weekend, 5 of us loaded ourselves into a car, and went up to San Francisco! (All of the images and the YouTube video come from the Internet, they are not mine).

We put the details into Cathy's able hands, and picked a bunch of fun things to do while there. The 5 that went were me, Cathy, Robin, Rob, and some Hungarian linguist whose name escapes me. In other words, 2 miscreants...Rob and myself hehe...and 3 serious people. Rob and the Hungarian linguist were the only 2 who had been to SF before, not counting layovers in the airport. So it was pretty much a constant tug of war between those 2 and Cathy. Cathy wanted to see all of the tourist spots, while the two guys wanted to show us all of the cool little spots that only locals would know about. Robin and I were just along for the ride, and started just wandering off when they would start arguing hehe. We had great fun that weekend though, in spite of everything. And we saw everything we wanted to! Well except for Alcatraz Island, but I get ahead of myself.

We drove up to SF after we got off duty on a Friday...I think this was Memorial Day or Labor Day weekend, I can't remember exactly...but it was a short day for us, and we ended up getting up to San Francisco before dark, even with all of the traffic. We stopped at the southern side of the Golden Gate Bridge, to get pictures. And just in time too. Fog was rolling in while we were milling around there, and by the time we left, the entire bridge was obscured by fog. It was so cool watching it disappear like that.

What the Castro actually looked like:

Then we drove around the city for a bit, and ended up driving through the Castro. Rob and Hungarian guy had been here before, and were watching the rest of us for our reactions. Robin and I were curious. The normally unflappable Cathy, however, was going berserk. She was reaching around and locking all of our doors, and rolling up car windows, and pointing at the gays on the street as if they were space aliens with green tentacles and all. I myself had no idea what to expect before I got there, but in retrospect, a normal street with a few guys holding hands while walking shouldn't have been that big of a surprise hehe...but that's all it was. Cathy on the other hand, apparently expected an orgy to break out at any moment, and was apparently expecting the car to be invaded :) We managed to get her calmed down, but unfortunately, couldn't get her out of the car to get a coffee or anything hehe.

What the Castro looked like to Cathy! :

We drove around other parts of the city some more, and noticed it was getting dark, and decided to go check into the hotel. Umm, oops. Reliable Cathy had not bothered to get a reservation for us! On a holiday weekend. Needless to say, every hotel in the city was booked solid. We ended up driving over to Oakland, across the Oakland Bridge, in heavy fog, and tried getting a hotel in Oakland. No luck...Oakland was booked too. At this point we were quite cross with Cathy hehe. So we started driving north, away from Oakland, and kept checking hotels and motels we noticed from the road. We finally found one dumpy little motel in El Cerrito or Richmond or somewhere, that had ONE room available. We grabbed it immediately. The room had 2 double beds, so Rob and I got one, the girls got one, and the Hungarian guy volunteered to sleep on the floor. Broken furniture from other rooms had been piled up along one wall of this room...no doubt why it was available...but at this point we were just happy to have a place to crash, and were planning on spending all waking time sight-seeing miles away anyway. And then I noticed that the beds had those little coin-boxes hooked up to them. I went and popped a quarter into one, and the bed started vibrating loudly. Yep, it was one of those kinds of motels lol. We all sat around laughing until the bed stopped vibrating. It was a nice little massage though. When we left in the morning to do more sight-seeing, we noticed all of the hookers and cadillacs in the parking lot. Gah, what a place!

We drove over into SF again, this time from the north, across the Golden Gate Bridge. We ended up. Over the rest of the weekend, we went to see a variety of fun things, including Ghirardelli Square, the Haight-Ashbury, Fisherman's Wharf, etc. We drove down curvy Lombard Street. We parked our car for a while, just to ride the cable cars...we had heard that they were talking about doing away with them altogether, and wanted to ride one before they were gone forever (fortunately, the city kept the cable cars, so you can go there and ride them too!).

We spent several hours up in the Russian Hill neighborhood...being Russian students and all hehe. We went to see the famous Orthodox Church on Geary Street, only there was a service going on when we got there, and they wouldn't let us in until it was over. They were quite grumpy with us until they found out we spoke Russian, and then warmed up considerably, and gave us a little impromptu tour of the church. We weren't allowed to take pictures, however. We saw the many beautiful icons, and tried reading the text on some of them, only to find out that the text wasn't in Russian! It was in Old Church Slavonic instead. Then we ended up in a nice Russian restaurant, where we ate yummy food. I had borshch for the first time, the traditional beet soup...though the flavor of the beets was not overpowering at all, it was more like a generic vegetable soup, but with plenty of sour cream. And then these delicious stuffed grape leaves, which I think were more Ukrainian than Russian, but still yummy. We of course liberally sampled each other's plates, so we would each get a broad sampling of the different dishes.

The last day there we spent in Muir Woods, once again north of the Golden Gate Bridge, and not that far away actually. The video here doesn't really capture the beauty of the place. And why the videographer spent so much time in the gift shop, I have no idea hehe. It was so cool to stand next to trees that were over one thousand years old. It was too late for Alcatraz Island, once we were done with Muir Woods...all of that questing for a hotel had thrown off our schedule, so we had to do without seeing it.

Before going back down to Monterey, we stopped off in China Town, looking for something to eat before the long drive. It was already pretty late, and the restaurants were mostly closed. But there were still people all over the place, and many little shops open selling suspicious looking food. It certainly didn't look much like the "Chinese food" I had grown up eating in Baltimore (Chungking lol), but it certainly looked authentic. We ended up getting bao, a steamed dough stuffed with any old thing...pork in my case...and omg it was so good.

We ended up getting back very, very late...I might have gotten 2 hours sleep before having to get up for classes the next day hehe...but what a fun trip!

Bienvenido a California, Part 4

2006-10-06T19:29:00.000-07:00

Way Back Machine, Activate! (cue strange lights and sound effects). It's 1984, all over again!

One of the somewhat embarrassing things that came about while I was in Monterey, was revealed to me by my friends, my fellow soldiers. They informed me...not very politcally I might add...that I talked funny. It seemed I had a funny accent! Technically though, it was not an accent. Being from Baltimore, I spoke what linguists refer to as the Baltimore Dialect of American English. This dialect is mostly about minor changes in pronunciation of common words. It appears to be an interesting fusion of the Brooklyn New York dialect, and the Southern English dialect. It is spoken by mostly working class Caucasians in Baltimore City itself; the further away from the city you get, the less pronounced someone's "accent" is. Also interesting, the African-Americans of the city don't use this dialect at all, speaking in the "Black English Variant" instead, as it is called by linguists.

I studied foreign languages in high school, as I mentioned below, and our teachers would occasionally mention the fact that we all spoke the Baltimore dialect, and that it had an effect on how we pronounced Spanish, French, or German words, and we had to be aware of it. They were always telling us to open our mouths up and enunciate, rather than mumbling as if we were speaking in Baltimorese hehe. I never really thought much about our dialect before I went to Monterey. After all, everyone is from somewhere, and how you speak is just one more characteristic of you as a person. I had brown hair, I had brown eyes, and I spoke English a certain way...and that's all I had ever thought about it, it's just a part of who I am. I've tried to find some online soundfiles for everyone to hear, but unfortunately there was not much available. But this link here was very interesting about accents in English generally. Here is a link about the various pronunciations of the Baltimore dialect...though it appears to be a humor site, so bear that in mind hehe...it seems to exaggerate some of our pronunciation for comedic effect :) I certainly did not pronounce everything the way this list would indicate. Though I knew older people who did have "thicker accents" which were closer to this list. Specifically, I pronounced the word "wash" as 'warsh', the word "water" as 'wooder', the days of the week "-day" as '-dee' (ie Sundee, Mondee, etc.), and the word "on" as something like 'uu-wuhn'. The name of our city I pronounced as 'Baldimore', instead of "Bal-ti-more" or "Bal-amer", as that list would indicate. My army friends started teasing me mercilessly about this, and at first I just told them to get bent hehe...but the more I thought about it, the more I thought I should try to pronounce English in some more standard way, just so I wouldn't sound like some uneducated hillbilly hehe. So I started practicing those words that caused my buddies to laugh the most, and started pronouncing them in my closest approximation of Standard American English.

A typical Baltimore Christmas

I went home to Maryland again for Christmas vacation. Unlike my last visit to my parent's house, this time everything was different. It was winter of course, and Maryland had its usual freezing winter weather. My parents drove down to National Airport in DC to get me, since that was where my flight ended up. We ended up getting lost in DC trying to drive back to their house, and it started snowing. Ordinarily this would have been annoying, and would have gotten my step-father extremely mad, but for some reason that night we all got a case of the giggles at the absurdity of it all. We eventually got out of DC, and had an uneventful drive north. As for the weather, I had spent the last several months in California, and I was completely unprepared for the cold. I spent my whole vacation shivering, even indoors. By the time I finally got used to the temperature, it was time to go back to Monterey. The worst part of the trip however, was my beloved Baltimore dialect. After spending several months practicing speaking Standard American English, here I was, once again surrounded by people speaking Balamerese. And I noticed every single word they said "incorrectly". And it grated on my nerves! And worse, I started noticing myself slipping back into the habit of talking like that myself. It was very frustrating. We had a little block-party get-together/cookout type thing, and all of our immediate neighbors came over one night in between Christmas and New Year's. And there I was, listening to all of the non-standard English and shivering, and lo and behold, one of the neighbor couples were talking normally! I mentioned this to them at a break in the conversation, "You guys aren't from Baltimore are you?" I asked. It turned out they were from Pennsylvania, but none of us had ever noticed before! They wondered how I knew, and I mentioned the dialect thing. And everyone stared at me as if I were a space alien hehe. Going back to Monterey was an all around relief, and I was really looking forward to the better weather, language study, and fun with my new friends.

A typical Baltimore party

It took me a few additional weeks to undo the linguistic damage a short stay in Maryland had done to my pronunciation, but I was talking "normally" soon enough. And future trips back to Baltimore had no effect on my accent, oddly enough. A more difficult habit to shake, however, proved to be my use of the word "hon". In Baltimore, this is used all the time as a friendly little add-on to the end of your sentences. Women use it with both men and women, men tend to only use it with women...but it doesn't really mean anything, it's just a substitute for the person's name. So we would say, "Pass me the salt, hon." instead of, "Hey you, pass me the salt!" hehe. But people not from Baltimore often interpret this as a sexist thing to say...especially when a man says it to a woman. It did get me quite a few funny looks!

I've given Baltimore and Maryland a fairly hard time in my posts here, calling it backward, provincial, etc. (and no doubt about it, it IS), but it turns out that there is one interesting thing that comes from Maryland...and that is John Waters and his films. When people heard I was from Baltimore, invariably I would hear the following things in the ensuing conversation, and would be thinking to myself the things in parentheses; 1) Isn't that state next to Connecticut? (No that's Massachussetts, the other East Coast M state), 2) Oh yeah, I drove through there on the way to Washington DC! (Yep, that's us, the Atlantic equivalent of "flyover country"), 3) They really like steamed crabs there! (Yep, oddly enough a coastal city eats seafood, you dork!), and 4) So do you like the films of John Waters? He's from Baltimore too! (hmmmmmm...). And actually I had never seen a John Waters movie. I was after all kind of sheltered. And his early movies are a little out there, sexually explicit, and frankly, gross. Not something parents would show their kids. And my family was dull anyway, heck my mom was still listening to Elvis music in the 80s hehe...they themselves had probably never seen a John Waters movie. In addition to their other qualities, John Waters films are known for featuring Divine, the drag-wearing chubby performer.

I ended up finally seeing some John Waters movies only later, after I left California, but I ended up loving them. I got my mom to watch Hairspray and Lust in the Dust, but she didn't really get them...and those 2 movies were pretty innocuous :) I've included a few John Waters and Divine clips here for the readers' enjoyment. And since many of the actors in his movies are Baltimore natives, listen closely for that dialect!

Interlude - My Dirty Secret

2006-10-05T17:11:00.000-07:00

Kurt: Hello, my name is Kurt, and I'm a Project Runway-holic.

Crowd: Hi, Kurt!

It's been my dirty little secret. But now it's out! Yes, I love Bravo's Project Runway. If you knew me, you probably wouldn't even believe it if I told you that. You might even suspect that I was playing some elaborate joke on you, and would be waiting for the "gotcha!" moment. But it's true, I love this show.

I watch very little tv. For a while I didn't even have a tv, once I had gotten out of the military. Over the last 10+ years, other than explicitly sci-fi programming, the only thing I regularly watched was the News. Sure, I'd occasionaly catch something that came on in the evening, or I'd watch some movie I'd been wanting to see, but that was about it. I've never really liked those reality tv shows either, so it's quite a mystery to me that I came to enjoy this show so much. As for fashion, while I myself have taken pains to find clothes that look nice on myself, it's not something I'm terribly interested in either. Never read any fashion magazines, never even really paid attention to the Miss America beauty pageants, or any of that. And oddly, my love for Project Runway has not translated into any additional interest in fashion since I started watching the show. I've never been to a fashion show, nor would I be interested in seeing one. Though it has been fascinating to see how people actually do the designing that eventually leads to finished clothing, seeing how the "fashion industry" actually works. Myself though, I don't even sew on my own buttons when they come off my clothes, after a particularly bloody outcome from an encounter with a sewing needle in my 20s hehe.

If you peruse the Bravo PR message boards, you find the vast majority of people are talking about which designers they "like", and the reasons they like a particular designer almost always center on the personality of that designer, rather than on the designs of that designer. And this is quite odd to me. To me this would be like buying a car from a particular company, based solely on the fact that you think the CEO is nice. Makes no sense at all to me. When I'm watching the show, and evaluating the designers, this is what I am focusing on:

1. They've been given a specific assignment (challenge); how well did they complete it?

2. Does the outfit actually fit the model well? Is it made well, or falling apart?

3. Does the outfit look aesthetically pleasing?

4. Would an ordinary person (usually a woman), actually want to wear it?

5. Is it something thatlooks new and vibrant, or is it something you could find on the shelf at any Walmart?

6. Does the outfit convey the specific point of view of the designer?

Now since I have no background in fashion or modelling or anything, I have to take the word of the judges on #5 up there, but I do know what I like, and what I don't like. Seeing if the outfit fits properly or if it's falling apart is easy. And I can figure out if the challenge was met appropriately. I do notice if a particular designer is acting like a jerk, but it's irrelevant in my opinion to what is coming down the runway. At any rate, enough of my blathering. On to the videos! We won't be able to see the final results of this season's show until October 18, but the Bryant Park runway shows of the Final Four designers have already occured. So here are the 4 final collections of each designer below.

Uli's Collection:

Michael's Collection:

Jeffrey's Collection:

Laura's Collection:

Which collection do you think will win?

Interlude - Foley Scandal

2006-10-05T11:14:00.000-07:00

A brief interlude from my wanderings down memory lane hehe.

The Republican Party continues its disintegration, and the pace just keeps picking up. See the Political Links on the right-hand side of the blog here for details...those folks write far more eloquently than I do on the subject hehe. Living in the US has become totally surreal. If you were to see the broadcast news here, you would be almost completely uninformed about world and political news. This is because the news providers are owned by Republicans, and that's how they want it. Fox is the new Pravda...I suppose that would make CNN Izvestiya :) Media ownership has devolved into the hands of a very few...and those few vote Gooper. The latest scandal du jour is of course PageGate. Republican Mark Foley has apparently been chasing after underage boys for years, and he's finally been caught. For those Europeans who might not see what all the fuss is, the Republican Party has been taken over by the extreme religious-right. These folks are like the Taliban, only Christian. The mere existence of gays in their party mortifies them. This is why so many goopers are closeted gays. The Republican leadership only cares about raking in money, and "winning" elections (with all of the Diebold shenanigans going on, a real win isn't needed)...and so the leadership openly, but quietly, tolerates gays in their ranks, as long they are supporting Republicans. I wrote at length about the different factions in the Republican Party below, if one is interested. But the short story is that the ultra-conservative wing of the Republicans are horrified at the mere existence of this gay man as a Congressman...and here he was, caught being a sexual predator on underage boys. The Republican leadership did what it always does...it tried to cover the whole thing up. And since the vast majority of the media is under the thumb of Republican ownership, they went along with the coverup. But this kind of story is not one that is going to stay covered up for long. And the more of it that leaks out, the more horrified the religious right becomes, and the more digging gets done, which uncovers yet more information.

So much has leaked out so fast, that the party is now in complete disarray. They've tried to spin the scandal as no big deal, but they didn't have time to coordinate their stories. So we have the following ridiculous attempts to write off the scandal as a non-event:

1. Foley had an alcohol problem, which led to him molesting boys.

2. Foley was himself molested by a priest as a boy, so now he molests boys uncontrollably.

3. The boys themselves are to blame, they entrapped him!

4. All gay people are child molesters.

5. Foley is really a Democrat, not a Republican!

6. Democrats have done far worse! Remember that guy from back in 1983?

7. Democrats have created this scandal for partisan political purposes.

I'm sure there are more attempts at spin out there, but that about sums it up. None of these things are true of course, and I won't spend any time rebutting them. But this is symptomatic of what has become of the Republican Party. It is now a craven cesspool of power-hungry, amoral people, who will say anthing at all to hold on to power. And this message is finally getting through to average Americans, who don't follow political news online (the only place Americans can get unbiased political news now). It is also being driven home to the truly religious Republicans, who only vote Republican to turn this country into a theocracy...and this scandal goes way beyond the pale of what even those folks will tolerate. And amazingly, no matter how much the major news outlets spin, people just aren't buying it this time. Without massive election fraud, the Republicans are going to lose in a landslide in the November elections. The only way BushCo will be able to hold on to power barring massive fraud will be to do something outrageous, like declare martial law and start bombing the hell out of Iran or North Korea. I've mentioned down below how this is unlikely to work out the way they intend, if they were to try it. But these aren't the brightest bulbs running the show here, so God only knows what they might do. And God help us all.

Now as for what happens after November, assuming a major Democratic Party win, this depends of course on exactly which seats change hands, and on whether or not the Senate goes Democrat as well. Down below I predicted they would not take the Senate, but the Foley scandal has thrown it wide open, in my humble opinion. Whether the Democrats will grow the spine needed to impeach Bush is more open to speculation I think. They have shown little inclination to engage in any leadership so far. And a disturbingly large number of Democrats were on board with ratifying torture, and removing habeas corpus rights for anyone the President damn well chooses to take them away from. We have a full blown Constitutional Crisis going on here, and if the Democrats can't take control, and reverse the damage of the Bush years, the rest of the world...in other words, the EU and China...will have to do something about it. Let's hope it doesn't come down to that.

Bienvenido a California, Part 3

2006-10-03T17:02:00.000-07:00

So if you haven't gotten the idea yet from the previous posts, studying languages in the military back in the 80s was more like being in college than like being in the military hehe. Maybe like being in college, but with a grumpy grandparent living close enough to constantly butt their head in and see what you were up to. :) We were supposed to be spending our free time studying our lessons...and certainly we did spend time doing that, but after 6 hours of language there's only so much more you can take before you head explodes...so we ended up spending a lot of time hanging out in the barracks, doing other things too. For me one of the big things was the music. A few popular bands had managed to get by my never-listen-to-the-radio thing, like Devo, and the Police, but for the most part if it wasn't Classical, I hadn't heard it. And while we were hanging around doing things in the barracks, introducing new music to each other became a big popular past-time. Typically someone would get cassete tape of something they liked, and put it on the tape player, and we'd listen to the whole side while chatting, or playing some game, or something like that. I can't begin to list all of the music we heard over an entire year like this, but here are some of the most memorable bands, with tracks by them that I could find on YouTube.

Rob was the Progressive Rock guy. He was always bringing in tapes of Yes, King Crimson, and other things from the late 60s up through the mid 70s. I loved this stuff, primarily because of the high quality of the musicians playing the music, how unusual it all sounded compared to "pop" music, and how the lyrics were usually somewhat intellectual, compared to the insipid lyrics of most pop songs.

Neal was the New Wave guy. He was always playing Oingo Boingo, the Cars, Frank Zappa, and stuff like that. High energy fun music. At first I didn't much care for any of it, but it grew on me, and I'm still a big Boingo fan today.

Robin introduced us all to the beautiful voice of Annie Lennox in the Eurythmics. We had all heard the song Sweet Dreams, since it was being played non-stop on the new MTV and on the radio, but most of their other songs weren't played here in the US...at least I never heard them if they were. (Here Comes the Rain was though). And thus began my life-long aural love affair with Annie hehe. A few years later, the Eurythmics would become WAY more popular here, and then you heard them all the time. But back then, it was new.

Some random guy in the barracks discovered the B-52s. We heard it coming out of his room one day, and someone knocked on his door and asked what he was listening to. He then brought his tape player out into the hallway, and we all started dancing to Rock Lobster! At the time we weren't sure if it was a new band, or if it was something weird and wonderful from the 1950's hehe. They have a lot of other quirky, great songs if you like this one.

Pat had questionable taste in music, liking mostly pop stuff...but he did introduce us to the Violent Femmes, whose first album was just terrific. Their later stuff I didn't care for though.

Cathy unfortunately was beyond redemption. She liked John Mellencamp...ewwww! :)

I was of course the Classical guy, and no one wanted to hear my music hehe...though I did push some Chopin Polonaises down their unwilling throats.

As I said earlier, Monterey stores closed early in the evening, with the exception of the record store. So we often ended up in there when we wanted to get out of the barracks and do something. Since we were always looking for new music to listen to, and we were all always perpetually broke, we came upon a genius plan; we would each buy one record, and then pass it around for the others to listen to.

I got the album Stateless by Lene Lovich. (song here is from another album)

Neal got O, Superman by Laurie Anderson (song here is from another album)

John got Nun Sex Monk Rock by Nina Hagen (song here is from another album)

Interestingly, both Nina Hagen and Laurie Anderson were classically trained musicians before they started their careers doing their unique mixtures of classicism and modernism...Nina trained in Opera, and Laurie studied classical violin. In an interview Laurie mentioned how she gave up classical violin for the same reason I gave up classical piano...she couldn't see the point of all of that rote memorization of dead composer's songs!

I owe all of these folks...well except Cathy hehe...for introducing me to so much wonderful music, and expanding my musical horizons.

Bienvenido a California, Part 2

2006-10-01T17:12:00.000-07:00

So here I was in Monterey, learning Russian. It's kind of difficult to divide up the material for these posts, since we were there for a whole year, we spent an absurd amount of time studying languages...which even for dedicated linguists, gets boring after a while. And the military-specific stuff we did daily and weekly was just so un-noteworthy. I'll try to focus on things we did in our free time. By all means holler if something sounds interesting and you'd like more detail, but otherwise I'll just plow on through hehe.

I should probably introduce some of the major characters, so I can refer to them later without going into mini-biography mode. There were hundreds of people there of course, being the military and all, but I'll try to keep the list short.

Me: The hero! Ok not really hehe. I was almost totally sheltered from popular American culture when I got to California, due to me just refusing to listen to the radio and due to not watching much tv. In school I had read a lot, but didn't do a lot of the social things that other kids had. I was quite familiar with Classical music, but pretty much completely unaware of any other music. Russian linguist.

Neal: He was a tall, wiry guy from New England. He had been involved in the theatre in school, and was always putting on a show for us hehe. His forte was physical comedy, and was great at doing impressions of various people, usually greatly comedic. He was also heavily into Fantasy literature, and role-playing games. Persian linguist.

Pat: His roomate. He had grown up in Central California, Sacramento I think. His parents had moved to Utah with him though in his teens, when they converted to Mormonism. He was technically Mormon himself, but wasn't observant. Told us many amusing stories about Utah and the Mormon Church. He had a very dry, sarcastic sense of humor. Persian linguist.

Mike: I mentioned Mike briefly in the last article, he was the older guy who saved me from doing hours and hours of pointless busy work hehe. He was naturally bald, a little overweight and often complaining about his aching this or that. Smoked cigars. He was a world-ranked chess player, and played war games as a hobby. Arabic linguist.

Rob: Rob was around 30, and was probably the most unconventional among us. He always looked unshaven, even right after shaving. His uniforms always looked rumpled for some reason hehe. He liked to smoke these clove cigarettes, which was the first time I had ever even heard of such a thing. He was a big fan of progressive-rock music from the 60s and 70s. He also was a big time wargamer. Boy was he lazy! Russian linguist.

Cathy: She was like a den mom. She was only in her 20s, but she seemed always responsible and serious. She was actually my squad leader for a time, so technically had the legal right to boss me around hehe...fortunately she was also extremely nice and not powermad. She loved travelling and was always dragging us around to see the tourist sites. Russian linguist.

Doug: He was from Nowhere, Illinois, but acted very cosmopolitan. He had studied German in high school and spoke it fluently. Since my name is German, and I spoke a little, he was always trying to have these complicated conversations with me in German. Unfortunately I was usually just saying, "Was?" over and over again hehe. Doug was always full of energy, he just couldn't sit still. He was always trying to get us to go do crazy things and physically demanding things...like he wanted to go hang-gliding and stuff like that. Russian linguist.

Dan: Doug's roommate. He often tagged along with whatever Doug was doing. He was also from Maryland, like me, but he grew up around DC instead of Baltimore. He always seemd kind of moody and depressed to me. Russian linguist.

Mitch: Very nice guy from somewhere in rural Texas. Had a slight Texas drawl, but nothing too extreme hehe. Most noted for a severe gas problem that he had, that resulted in the most absolutely disgusting farts I have ever been subjected to. You literally had to leave the room. He was a good sport about all the teasing he got about this. Russian linguist.

John: Blond guy from South Dakota. He could have been my clone, as far as our lives had been. Had a minister relative, but was skeptical about religion, was kind of sheltered, but curious about the world, etc. His parents had some money, and he ended up having one of the few cars on base, as well as a state of the art stereo system. Russian linguist.

Johnny: He was from Minnesota. He latched on to me in Basic Training, and was always following me around. He was a nice enough guy, but it was just a little creepy. He put a band-aid on his glasses to keep them from sliding down his nose hehe. Unfortunately he failed out of the language course pretty early on. Russian linguist.

Robin: She was always following Cathy around. She was from Georgia I think, and was the only girl child in a house filled with boys. She was always punching on us hehe. Russian linguist.

Tom: He was an older guy, who had been a photographer, but needed to pay off college debts, so he joined the army. He was always trying to drag us off to places just to photograph them, not to play tourist at them. He was also a Classical music fan, like me. Vietnamese linguist.

David: Very quiet guy, who always seemed to be hanging around, but I never really learned terribly much about him, even though he was always there! Kinda chunky, kinda insecure perhaps. Chinese linguist.

My goodness, it's like reading War and Peace! So many characters to keep track of hehe. Don't worry, there won't be a quiz later :)

I'll finish up this post by introducing The Gesture. The Gesture was invoked often, and resulted in much laughter and even got a few people in trouble hehe. It all started with Neal, as humorous things often did. Neal was totally unhibited with his movements and gestures, and would do pretty much anything to get a laugh. So he was quite fond of making stupid faces, or performing various Silly Walks, á la Monty Python. One of the things he would do to get us to laugh, was to hold his fist in front of his mouth, as if he were performing fellatio on it. He would then poke his tongue against his cheek, to make it look like a guy's dick was actually in his mouth. (Yes, it was juvenile hehe). By itself it was good for a giggle, and then after that it was just stupid. It became funny, however, if you would do it in someone else's sight, in an attempt to get them to laugh, at a time when they shouldn't be laughing. Like, for example, when they were in formation! Since I was in a different company than Neal was, we would often try this on each other, while the other's company was forming up outside the barracks. I'm standing there in formation, trying to look all serious and military, and I look up and see Neal leaning out the barracks window, making that dick-sucking gesture hehe. Just try keeping a straight face during that! Trying to get the other person to bust out laughing was the funny part. This was not The Gesture however.

One of the things we would do was we would get a group of us together and rent a TV and a vcr, and would watch movies all weekend. Well one of the movies we rented one time was What's Up Tiger Lily, by Woody Allen. If you haven't seen it, it's a pretty amusing film. Allen took an old Japanese spy movie, removed the Japanese dialogue, rearranged the order of the scenes, and then added completely new English "dubbed" dialogue for comedic effect. But there was this one scene in the movie, where a man is peeking through a keyhole of a door, and he sees what appears to be a woman taking a bath. The dialogue dubbed onto the scene was the guy making some rather obscene noises with his mouth hehe, that sounded something like a person putting the tongue outside of his mouth, and flapping it up and down against his lips, while trying to say something like "blub-a-dub" over and over again. (Try it to get the effect!). Anyway, we would try to duplicate this sound for comedic effect, and when you would hear it, it would remind you of the movie scene, which was also funny, and would get you laughing. The Gesture was a mixture of this noise, plus the previously described dick-sucking gesture, and the combined Gesture was usually enough to get a whole round of laughter going.

I ended up using The Gesture during Russian class, while the teacher was faced away from me, and looking at the students opposite me...our desks were set out in a U shape, and the teach was in the middle of the U. The guys on the other side would be trying to produce some complex grammatical construct in Russian, and I'd let loose with The Gesture and they'd bust out laughing, and the teacher would start scolding them. This only made it funnier for some reason. One day our little old Ukrainian-lady teacher got so flustered when they couldn't stop laughing, she stormed out of the class hehe. By that point the whole room of us were laughing so hard tears were coming down our faces. What can I say, 6 hours a day of intense language study does this to people :) The other funny use of The Gesture happened when Neal and I were walking from the Mess Hall in the barracks toward his room. One of us started with the Gesture, and the other one chimed in doing it as well, and we were making quite a racket in the hallway. And then out of nowhere, the Sergeant Major for the company walked out of door to the hallway, and was right in front of us, and there we were, making The Gesture right in his face. The Sergeant Major was a short, fat little guy from Guam, who was always getting angry at something, and when he got angry, his face got all puffy and red, and his voice would get higher and higher in pitch, and he'd be screaming louder and louder, and you were just waiting for him to have a stroke or something. He saw us making The Gesture not a foot away from him, and his eyes bugged out, and he was speechless! Neal and I ran out of there as fast as we could, and ran up the steps towards his room. He collapsed onto the floor of his room, literally rolling on the floor laughing hehe. I'm just glad we didn't get punished for acting like idiots hehe.

Though every time we saw the Sergeant Major after that, we'd have to chuckle...while hoping he didn't notice us.

Bienvenido a California, Part 1

2006-09-29T22:54:00.000-07:00

So here I was, for the first time in my life, in California. I flew into San Francisco at night, unfortunately, so didn't see much of the city. I took a connecting flight on a small little plane down to Monterey the same night. It was pretty foggy, and I got a few glimpses of the ocean on the way down in the moonlight, but that was it. There were only 2 other people on the plane with me, but it was a very short flight. I'll spare the reader all of the boring details of what the next few days were like, checking in to the Presidio, but there was something amusing that occured. My friend Mike from Basic had arrived a week before me. (We usually referred to each other by our last names as was army custom...but here in the blog I'll use their first names to preserve their anomymity). Mike was an older guy, pushing 40 I think, and was one of the guys I played the illicit chess with in Basic hehe. He had come straight to Monterey from Basic, instead of taking some leave. His hope was to spend the 2 weeks between Basic and Advanced Training in the comfort of his barracks room relaxing. He inprocessed as quickly as he could, but then, lo and behold, they wouldn't let him relax! They kept giving him full days of "busy work" to do...things that didn't really need doing, but were meant to keep the soldiers from getting into trouble. Like wandering around the base picking up cigarette butts, that kind of thing. He warned me about that, so that I wouldn't inprocess too quickly. Mike was a trooper! (Once again these pictures come from teh Internets, they were not taken by me.)

Only a dozen or so other folks arrived when I did; most of the rest of us got there the next week, as they took their whole 2 weeks of leave right then. Those of us there early were saving our leave for later, like for me, I wanted to have a nice long summer vacation the next year. I tried warning the other folks who were inprocessing with me to take their time, and a few of them did...though a few others decided to be quick...and those got stuck with the busy work. They gave us a sheet of paper with all of the things we had to do to check into the base, along with a map, and let us do it at our own pace and without supervision. However, the unti commander could demand to see our sheets, and we theoretically could have gotten into trouble for taking too long. So I spread out my inprocessing over the next week, doing 2 or 3 things per day, and then having the rest of each day for relaxing and fun. They did end up asking what had taken so long at the end when I turned in my sheet...but I just said that there were long lines everywhere hehe!

So here I was, an 18 year old guy, 3,000 miles away from home, away from parents, and away from supervision, so what did I do? Well I went looking for books of course! Monterey had lots of little bookshops, and I spent hours wandering around and perusing the shelves. I then spent most of the free days in my barracks room, quietly reading, and staying out of the sight of the barracks staff. We had actual private rooms, instead of one big quonset hut holding dozens of people. Our rooms were 2 people per room. And we had women in our unit as well, whereas basic was all male, the women were in their own seperate units. So while we were wandering around doing our inprocessing, and spending the rest of the days slacking off, I ended up meeting a lot of the other people I'd spend the next year with. My roommate Arnold checked in a few days later. He was a big chubby Hawaiian guy, who always seemed to be out of breath. He was nice enough, but his mother was always sending him odd little care packages filled with Hawaiian and Japanese snack foods. I loved different cultures, but some of that stuff was just nasty! He was particularly fond of this dried squid she sent him. I tried it, and it had very little flavor...but it left a nasty aftertaste in your mouth. He would sit on his bed and eat, and eat, and eat...he seemed to go into a trance while he ate...and he'd stop when the bags of snack food were empty. It was a wonder to behold.

We started exploring the area around the base in our off time, before classes started. None of us had cars, and most of us were perpetually broke, seeing how we were low-ranking enlisted guys hehe...so for 3 weekends out of the month, we tended to do inexpensive things, and then when payday came, BAM! off we went looking to blow all of our cash hehe. Living in the barracks was free, and food in the mess hall was free...but you were stuck eating whatever they felt like cooking that day. So we could spend the majority of our pay on food, or stuff. Some guys went out drinking and came back totally blotto, but the guys I hung out with and I didn't spend our time that way. Our first weekend there we went down to downtown Monterey for the first time. It was very pretty, but there wasn't as much to do there as I had expected. And everything closed early! By the time the sun went down, the stores were all closing. So if you wanted to do something other than eat out, you had to be quick at the end of the day. The record store stayed open a little later, so we often ended up there. I experienced very little culture shock in California. The only thing that I really noticed as different, was how the drivers acted around pedestrians. In Maryland, you took your life in your hands whenever you tried to cross the street. Cars would not stop for you. Heck some drivers would even jokingly try run over the pedestrians, and then swerve away at the last minute. You'd see a gap in the traffic, and you'd run for it. In California though, cars actually slowed down for you when you wanted to cross, and would give you the right of way. It was very disconcerting. I live in California now, and it's still something I've never gotten used to.

Our classes finally started, and I should probably talk a little about them. We'd get up early in the morning, and were expected to do whatever barracks cleaning chores had been assigned for us that week. They had a roster, and it rotated from week to week. So one week I would have to polish all of the brass railings on our floor of the barracks before breakfast. Then the next week I might have to clean the toilets in the latrine. Then the next week I wouldn't have to do anything at all. Compared to basic, where we all did this kind of thing every day for two months, this was heaven. We'd have a brief outdoor meeting in formation outside the barracks, where the'd take attendance and stuff, and our commander would give us whatever news there was...usually nothing terribly interesting. And then we had to show up for class on time, but they let us find our way there on our own, we didn't have to march there together like in basic. The mess hall was open for breakfast beforehand if you wanted to eat there, or you could stop in a little cafe by the classes and get a little something, if you didn't mind paying for it yourself. I usually skipped breakfast in the mess hall, since the lines were horribly long, and their breakfast food was just awful. We'd then have 6 hours of language training, divided into 1 hour increments, with a break for lunch in the middle somewhere, which varied by classroom. We were with the same class all day, so the same 10-ish people in the same classroom. Our class had men and women, and army and some navy folks as well. While the highest ranking person was technically "in charge" of us, in practice as long as we weren't disruptive, and kept getting passing grades, we were left alone as far as our language learning went. After classes in the afternoon, we had to report to our physical training (PT). So we had time to wander back to the barracks and change, and just had to show up on time. We'd then do our excercising in unison, as the military seems to love that kind of thing, and then we were off for the day. We were expected to study enough in the evenings that we continued getting good grades in class, but we were not supervised in the evenings. We did this Monday through Friday, and then usually had the weekend all to ourselves.

People usually say great things about the Defense Language Institute, but the failure rate among it's students was ridiculously high...around 50 percent. And before you could even go there, you had already taken and passed a language aptitude test before Basic, so it wasn't the students. The quality of the texts used was variable, some were good, others were just poorly organized. Also many of the teachers were not credentialed professional teachers. For the Russian program at least, the vast majority were just Russian-speaking immigrants from the Soviet Union, usually older people. The methodology was pretty much exactly how NOT to learn a language. They put the students on the spot, and force you to speak out aloud, while the teachers generally would just say that you got it wrong. Instead of getting a lot of language drills, you typically got 1 sentence in each section, as they went around the room one student at a time. There was a documentary about the school a few years ago, and language experts agreed it wasn't a good way to teach languages. As to why the military runs it's language school like that, well I can only speculate. At the time I went back and forth between two theories: 1) The military was run by idiots, who couldn't figure out how to teach languages well, and were too dumb to ask for outside help, and 2) The military was run by geniuses, who were deliberately failing out 50 percent of the students as a clever way to get more soldiers into less popular job descriptions!

After seeing the Pentagon's handling of Afghanistan and Iraq, I'm inclined to believe that they are just idiots.

Joignons L'armée!

2006-09-27T23:52:00.000-07:00

In 1984 I graduated from high school, and joined the US Army. Initially my step-father had sarcastically said that I should join the army back around Christmas, or he'd throw me out of the house hehe. At first I was totally opposed to the idea, primarily because over the years I had become appalled at US foreign policy. And then I started saying I was interested in joining, as a form of reverse psychology with my step-father, thinking that since he hated me doing anything I wanted to do, he would start opposing it and start insisting that I NOT join. But the more I thought about it over the time between that Christmas and the end of the school year, the more I thought it was a good idea. I wanted to go to college and study Russian...I was planning on becoming an interpreter, and Russian was certainly an "in-demand" language in the 1980's. And nearby public Maryland colleges simply didn't have Russian programs. So my alternatives were to go to a very expensive private college, go to a public college in another state nearby, and have a long commute, or have to live on my own and work and study at the same time...or I could join the military. And at the time, the army had a quite nice signing bonus, in addition to a college fund you could pay into. The air force would have been my first choice, but they wouldn't guarantee me Russian language study. And the navy had no signing bonus at the time for my job description. So the army it was! And I must confess, the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to get out on my own. And travel! I wanted to see the world, not be like all of those boring stick-in-the-mud Maryland people who never leave and never do anything interesting. (The images in this article come from the official US Army website, with the exception of the barracks photo, which I found on some random personal website.)

We saw the movie An Officer and a Gentleman before I shipped out for basic training, and my step-father, who had been in the army during the Vietnam war, said that the movie was pretty accurate about what basic training was like, though it was about navy officers. It's a great movie if you haven't seen it, even it it isn't completely accurate! I worried some about what the military would be like, and if I had the physical endurance to get through the basic training. I didn't play any sports, I read books, and I certainly was no athlete hehe. So I started doing situps and pushups in advance, trying to prepare for the PT test (Physical Training) that you must pass to graduate from basic training. I also started jogging around with my dog when I walked him. I ended up having a number of interviews with security people, and many friends and family members also told me they had been contacted as well. Since my MOS (job) required a security clearance, they were asking all kinds of questions about what kind of person I was. It was kind of funny after a while. "No, I really didn't ever murder anyone." "No, I'm sorry, but I never shot up heroin." "Alas, I never beat my parents or sold women into slavery." I must have been a very boring interviewee for the man questioning me...we were a dull family from a national security point of view lol!

Finally they decided the nation was safe with me in uniform, and off I went, a week before my 18th birthday. I did my basic training in Missouri. In the summer. I can honestly say it had never occured to me to go to Missouri. St. Louis and the Gateway Arch are there, and that was all I knew about Missouri. I ended up not seeing the Arch both times I went through St. Louis, there just wasn't time. So after flying in to St. Louis, they got us on a bus that went to the military base in the south of the state. The bus ride took forever. But eventually we got there. We had 1 week to get acclimated to military life before the real training began. They marched us around everywhere, issued us uniforms, gave us stupid looking haircuts, etc. I'm not going to bore the reader with details about basic training, but I will say that it was really very little like what I expected. The first few days of the real training were stressful, with the drill sergeants screaming at us non-stop...but after a few days, things calmed down into a routine. The physical part of basic training was not hard at all for me, surprisingly. But oh my god, the boredom! We had more hours in the day than they had things for us to do, so whenever we finished, they just had us studying out of our dumb little field manuals. There's only so many hours you can spend doing that before you've memorized the whole thing. And so I became a subversive!

There were a number of other linguists in basic training with me...and after basic training, most of us would end up at Advanced Training together too...but all of us linguists were bored to death. And they had very strict rules in Basic about what kinds of things you could have in your lockers, and what things you could do. Books were forbidden, which drove me nuts. But you couldn't have certain games either. We linguists ended up making chess boards out of paper, and hiding them in the barracks. Amazingly we never got caught. And I ended up sneaking a few books into the barracks when we were finally allowed to go to the PX. So when we weren't cleaning the barracks unnecessarily for the 20th time, or folding our socks into ridiculously shaped bundles, we were playing chess or chatting in there. The only really difficult part of basic was the 15 mile hike we had to do. I had been hiking around with my dog for years, but I never had a heavy pack to lug around with me while I was doing it. And of course it was the middle of summer, so the heat in Missouri was intense. But we all made it through the hike, and collapsed in the barracks at the end of that. And then we graduated! Well most of us graduated. A surprising number of people "dropped out" of the training before the end of the 2 months. And they weren't the people you would have expected. But most of us graduated, and then we had our orders for our next assignment, Advanced Training!

For us linguists, that meant we were on our way to California. Most of us were going to Monterey, but a few ended up being sent to San Francisco. Since then, I've heard the San Francisco school has since closed, and now everyone goes to the Defense Language Institute in Monterery. But we were all taking some leave before our training started, so we got to go back to our homes for a bit. For me this meant I flew back to Baltimore, and spent a week with my family and friends. Maryland was exactly the same as I had left it. Fortunately, some of my high school friends hijacked me and dragged me off to do fun things, because I think I might have strangled my step-father hehe. We went to a baseball game at Memorial stadium, which I normally would have hated, but since my friends had planned it all, I just kept my mouth shut. And the Orioles were still playing there, and that game not only did they win, but they hit home run after home run. The stadium was going crazy with excitement, I never had fun like that at a baseball game before :) We had a big neighborhood barbecue too while I was there, which was a lot of fun. After my week off, it was on another plane, and off to California!

(I feel I need to mention, given the current political situation, just how strongly I would urge US citizens to NOT join our military at the present time. When I joined, even though the Cold War was still going on, it was unlikely that it would erupt into something serious...and if it had, the entire world would likely have been nuked in the process, and it wouldn't have mattered anyway. But this current regime under Bush is something completely different. It is treating our military poorly. It is treating our military with contempt. It is treating the other nations of the world horribly. And now that Bush wants to openly torture people with our soldiers, and wants to suspend habeas corpus protections, no American with any sense of morals or decency would be a party to any of that. What he has ordered done to Iraq is unconscionable. And God only knows what the Republicans will do next, given the nearness of elections that they are likely to lose in a landslide. The actions of our current government shame me...they should shame every American.)

My Not So Interesting Life, Part 6

2006-09-26T11:53:00.000-07:00

I was never particularly athletic in school, and was completely uninterested in the popular American sports of baseball and football. This was a long-running theme in our household, and one of the things my step-father was always giving me grief over. He'd be watching a football game on tv, and I'd be reading some book or other, and it just drove him to distraction. I think he really had a hard time understanding the concept that not everyone on the planet was exactly like him, and might actually like different things. I was dragged along to baseball games at Memorial Stadium periodically, and was usually bored to tears. I did love the hotdogs and hot pretzels you could buy there though, so the trip wasn't a total loss for me hehe. I did love bowling though. My parents and grandparents (step-father's parents) joined a duckpin bowling league, and every Wednesday night for several years that's what they did. I would often go along and cheer them on, and would spend some times playing the arcade games at the bowling alley too. Duckpin bowling is a weird little Maryland variety of bowling, though I've heard some people say that they've seen it in New England too. The pins are shorter than in standard "10 pin" bowling, and the balls are smaller and have no holes drilled into them. You hold the ball in the palm of your hand instead, and roll it down the alley off the ends of your fingertips. The rules are the same as regular bowling, except you get 3 balls to throw per frame instead of 2. I ended up joining a league with my mother and step-father on Sunday mornings, and we did this for years, and mostly had great fun. The team makeups changed from year to year, since some years it was only 2 people per team, and some it was as many as 5. As difficult and complicated as my relationship with my step-father was, we had a good time for the most part bowling. We came in 2nd place one year too. (As usual, none of these pictures in this article are of me or mine, nor were they taken by me...they are found from around teh Internets!)

During high-school I also spent a lot of spare time helping Aunt Duck. Aunt Duck was a 70-something lady who moved into our neighborhood, and was renting a house down the street from us. She was having another house built for her elsewhere, and she was in our neighborhood only until it was built. She was no relation to us at all. She was from Baltimore originally, but had married a British man and had spent most of her life living abroad and travelling extensively. Her husband had recently died, and she had moved back to the States to be near her family. I ended up meeting her because she was having a yard sale to get rid of all of the excess furniture and stuff which she no longer had any room for. She had so much stuff to get rid of that her yard sale was going on every day for months. I went over to see what she had out on her yard one day with some friends, and I was captivated. Her things were just so beautiful and unusual! She had a paisley chair like the one in the picture here, only hers was a bright, bright orange. I loved it; everyone else hated the color. Aunt Duck said that everyone else in her family had hated it for years, but that she loved it too. She said I must have superior taste! And proceeded to show me all of the other furniture she had crammed into the house. And I do mean crammed, her home in England must have been huge...the spare bedrooms here were just wall to wall furniture stacked on top of each other.

It started pouring down rain outside out of nowhere, and us kids all helped her get her things back inside before they got ruined. She was so grateful she sat us all down gave us delicious European cookies I had never had before. We were all still hanging out in there when her 40-something daughter came in, along with other family members, and we all got to talking about all of her things, and how the rain had ruined the yard sale, etc. I ended up staying and helping them go through some of the harder to lug around things, since even though I was a scrawnly little non-athletic kid, I was in better shape than anyone else there hehe! I think we ended up spending more time reminiscing about where Aunt Duck picked up this or that thing that she had, than we did anything else. I ended up going back pretty often, at the request of her daughter. She was concerned that Aunt Duck might strain herself with heavy lifting, and she had just had heart-surgery a year or so ago, so she should have been taking it easy, but she was full of energy, and was climbing all over the place sticking little pricing stickers on her things. I ended up spending hours and hours helping her do this, deciding on the prices to offer things for, and doing as much of the heavy lifting as she would let me do. I ended up going down with them to Arlington, Virgina one weekend, and helped them clean up and paint a condo they owned down there. My parents let me go; I think my step-father was relieved I wouldn't be reading all weekend :) They had professional movers to move the heaviest furniture into the new house when they finally moved out of our neighborhood, but I spent several weekends over there helping Aunt Duck get settled in and unpacked. She was so unconventional, and her family was so much more interesting than most Maryland people were, it was just a pleasure to spend time with them.

Usually for vacations we were going now to Ocean City, Maryland, instead of New Jersey. My guess is my step-father preferred a town that sold beer hehe. Ocean City, NJ was more for families, while Ocean City, MD had more for those without kids or with older kids to do. We of course did the same usual beach things. One of the wonders of Ocean City, though is Thrasher's. They make the best french fries I have ever had, anywhere. The last time I was in MD, I detoured all the way over to Ocean City just to pick some up. Traditionally they are eaten with liberal dousings of vinegar, and some people put Old Bay seasoning on them too (the same thing they cook the steamed crabs with)...but I prefer them plain, with salt only.

One year however, we went somewhere else for vacation...Hooper's Island in the Chesapeake Bay. Have you ever had a vacation from Hell, where everything goes wrong? If not, did you ever see the movie Vacation, with Chevy Chase? That's what this vacation was for us. Hooper's Island is a pleasant enough little place, surrounded by tidal marshland in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, connected to the Eastern Shore of Maryland by bridge...albeit a very VERY provincial place, even for Maryland. The people have their own little dialect of English going on there, which we had difficulty understanding. They called everyone not born on the island "city folk" hehe. My uncle (step-father's mother's brother-in-law, we all just called him Uncle) owned a house on the island. Originally he had just bought an overgrown piece of land, completely covered with trees, right on the waterfront. When they went to start tearing down some of the trees to build a vacation house, they found a long abandoned house there. They should have torn it down, but Uncle Lloyd was nothing if not cheap hehe, and he was determined to renovate the thing. When we went there part of the old house was still so unsafe, that pieces of the ceiling plaster would regularly come falling down. My uncle had hard-hats just sitting there for people to wear if they were on that side of the house. My step-father, mother, 3 step-sisters and myself were stuck here for a week. The weather was unbearably hot, and there was no air conditioning. On top of that, there had just been a hurricane passing up the Atlantic coast a week or two before, and when we got down there, the bulkhead keeping the Bay out of the back yard was gone. So every high tide, the backyard flooded. We kids were playing around in the water, among the wreckage of the bulkhead, and a snake ended up crawling onto my little sister and scaring the crap out of all of us. We weren't sure what kind of snake it was, but she swears it bit her, even though there were no marks. My step-father ended up cutting his hand very badly when he tried to open one of the windows that had gotten jammed shut, and had to be taken to a nearby emergency room off the island. My sisters managed to backup the septic system somehow, so all the toilets were overflowing all over the place. And the pilot light on the water heater kept going out, so not only did we repeatedly run out of the house at the smell of the gas, we were worried we might end up blowing the whole place up hehe. But the final bit of misery came the day we decided to take the motorboat out to Barren Island. This little island is only above water during low tide. As the tide comes in, the whole thing submerges. Which is why it is barren, nothing can live on it, it's all sand. It was great fun to go out there, since as the tide went out, it left a lot of interesting little shells and creatures behind that you could look at. But then the tide started coming back in. We kept trying to get the boat launched, but the tide was quite strong, and we kept beaching it. And since the island was quickly going underwater, there was a definite sense of urgency. The waves coming in were crashing over the side of the boat, and my mom was furiously bailing the boat, my sisters were crying hysterically, and my step-father and I were trying to drag the boat far enough away from the island that we could start the motor. Of course this is where we discovered the jelly fish problem. The recent hurricane had apparently pushed thousands of jelly fish up into the Bay. You usually saw them in the ocean, not in the bay, but here they were, stinging the hell out of us. And finally my step-father managed to break the motor somehow. My god, what a nightmare! We eventually got back to the house, avoided the flooded yard, the hard-hat area, the gas leaks and the broken glass and overflowing toilets, and treated our jellyfish stings.

I don't think a family has ever been so happy for a vacation to end as we were when we drove back to the mainland!

My Not So Interesting Life, Part 5

2006-09-24T19:52:00.000-07:00

I must come across as some deranged hooligan, to those who have been reading along up until now hehe, but as a child I was usually the good one, occasionally led astray by my more mischievous friends. I enjoyed school for the learning, if anything I got bored that the pace was too slow. I excelled in English and language studies, loved history but hated memorizing dates, and only really had trouble with math. Like most of the family on my mother's side, I had some musical talent. My great-grandmother had been a church organist, and continued playing piano at home from a wheelchair up until her death. My mother studied piano as a girl, but as an adult only played the occasional church hymns. I ended up starting formal lessons when I was still very young...during first grade I think. I continued with the lessons through high school, and at one point was even thinking seriously of a career as a concert pianist. I ended up deciding against pursuing that for a variety of reasons, but the main ones involved how much I disliked learning pieces that I did not enjoy listening to myself, and I increasingly wondered why people were spending hours and hours of their lives learning how to play the same piece of music over and over again until it was "perfect." Isn't this what machines and computers were for, endless mindless drudgery? I continued playing piano, but ended up setting my career sights on other things. It's been over 20 years since I played piano regularly, and I do miss it from time to time, but not enough to go out and buy a piano hehe. (As usual, none of these pictures in this article are of me or mine, nor were they taken by me...they are found from around teh Internets!)

One of my favorite pieces by Chopin. Youtube has it split into 2 parts:

I also spent a lot of time with my voracious reading. By the time I was in high school I was reading a lot of history books, books related to music specifically, such as composer biographies and things like that, and science fiction for fun. I was particularly fond of extremely thick books packed with information, and multiple volume sets of books on various themes. I was turning into quite a snob! I refused to listen to popular music on the radio at all, and only listened to the Classical station. Admittedly I probably wasn't missing much. This was the disco era after all. I learned a lot about human nature while listening to classical music. One, most of the people and around me at the time were idiots, who couldn't appreciate music unless "it had a really good beat and you could dance to it!"...and two, most of the people who did like classical music were also idiots, and all listened to the same old boring pieces, and didn't seem at all interested in the "good stuff." So most people musically were either narrow-minded and shunned classical as too snobby, or narrow-minded and only listened to the classical that their friends listened to. I also started listening to the various talk programs on NPR, like All Things Considered. I ended up discovering a wonderful celtic music program around this time, The Thistle and Shamrock, with Fiona Richie. I had never really heard much Celtic music before, and took an instant liking to it. There's quite a bit of Celtic blood in our family, maybe that explains the connection I felt to it.

I started actively studying languages at this time too. I was taking a Spanish class in school, which I ended up loving and getting A's in. I just learned languages very fast and easily. I started reading simple stories and novels in Spanish and French. By my senior year, I was taking Spanish, French and German! I practically lived in the Foreign Language department hehe. I was fascinated by the phenomenon of language, and studied other languages at home...like Greek, Latin, Italian, and Russian. My love of languages has endured to this day. When I graduated from college, it was with a degree in Russian Language and Literature, and a minor in Linguistics.

Not much of interest happened in my life outside of school through high school. My mother and father had separated back when I was still in elementary school, as I said earlier. My father and I had never been terribly close, and he became a little on the weird side. He essentially turned into Disco Stu, of Simpson's fame. He thought of himself as quite a ladies man, with his platform shoes, disco moves, and his Afro hairdoo. He was so into disco, he taught his own disco dance class and started doing disco DJ-ing. He must have realized that he looked ridiculous, as he would tell people that his hair was naturally like that, and he had been having it straightened all of his life! I kid you not. The guy went loony. My mom had custody of me, and I saw less and less of him, primarily since every time I went to his place on weekends, he spent the whole weekend out partying and I was the free babysitter for his girlfriend of the moment's kids.

And my relations on his side of the family...oh my gawd, these were the most boring people on the planet. My grandfather (father's father) was a minister. So when we visited them, I couldn't exactly weasel out of going to church either! They would let me help them with their gardening though, which was surprisingly fun. As a city boy, I had never had an opportunity to do anything like that. And the parsonage they lived in had plenty of land around it, and quite a big vegetable garden. One funny thing that happened...one morning I was helping my grandfather get ready for the Sunday church service. Usually I just helped staple the little printed handouts together, but one day someone couldn't make it, and he was running around all stressed out. The only time I had ever seen him stressed in his life, I might add. And he told me to go get the Holy Water, and pointed vaguely behind the altar. There was this door back there I had never noticed before. And suddenly it was me who was doing the stressing out. I had never thought before about where "holy water" came from before, and I had no idea what was behind that door. Maybe God was in there! Holy crap, had I been thinking impure thoughts?! Maybe it was some overworked Angel, who was grumpy at having to fill so many fonts every week, and might take it out on me! I kept fiddling around, afraid to open the door, and my poor stressed out grandfather just kept pointing at the door like I was some kind of idiot hehe. I finally gathered up the courage to open the door, and...wait for it...in the room there was a sink! I couldn't believe that holy water came out of pipes. I mean, what did they hook up to? Did planes have to fly around the celestial plumbing, on it's way into the air directly to God? I hesitated again, and went back to my grandfather and asked him if he wanted water from the sink. "OF COURSE I want water from the sink! Where else would water come from!" he exclaimed. I got him his water, and watched him say a little prayer over it. Poor granddad, with his deranged afro-wearing disco son, and his idiot grandson! :)

As for my mom, as I said earlier she dated for a time after separating, but eventually settled on one man, who she would later marry. He had 3 daughters already, so I went from being an only child to the eldest of 4. He moved in with us, and then we moved into a 3 bedroom townhouse further out in the county. He and I never got along well, and we ended up arguing pretty much constantly. Though every once in a while he would end up taking my side in some familial dispute, against my mom. Which would surprise me to no end hehe. I was bookish and quiet, he was a tv-watcher and rowdy. And his daughters were just like him. They only came over every other weekend, as their mother had custody of them, and everytime they came over, it was like a tornado had blown into town for me and my mom. There wasn't a moment of peace and quiet until late Sunday night, when they went back home to their mom. My stepfather was always trying to shoo us out of the house, especially in the summer...when all I wanted to do was read in the air conditioning...it gets hot in Baltimore in the summer! He'd send me to the community pool with my step-sisters, and I'd take a book along with me. They'd of course complain about this later and I'd hear no end of whining about my reading choices. "A book on Russian history? What are you, a Communist?!" he'd bellow. I ended up spending a lot of time walking my dog in the woods behind our house hehe, rather then dealing with that. It ended up connecting to the nearby Gunpowder Falls State Park, and had a stream running through it. It was quite pleasant, as long as it hadn't rained lately, when the stream would go from placid little thing to raging river, and would become uncrossable without getting soaked. There was one particular spot along the stream where there was a little waterfall, maybe about 15 feet at most, and you could sit on the rocks as the water swirled by and over the edge, and dangle your feet over the edge, without ever getting wet.

We moved one final time a little further out into the county, when my mother and stepfather bought a new townhouse. This was just before my senior year in high school, though it was a short move and I still went to the same school.

My Not So Interesting Life, Part 4

2006-09-23T08:39:00.000-07:00

I was fortunate in that since having children young was popular in my family, I got to meet a lot of relatives that other people never a get chance to. Like my great-great-grandmother (my grandmother's grandmother). But unfortunately these folks all started dying when I was in elementary and junior high schools. I went to many funerals during this time, and at first it was very sad, as I missed these people very much. But my family is nothing if not just a little touched in the head hehe, and we somehow even managed to turn death into comedy gold. (None of the photos in this article are of me or anyone I know, nor were they taken by me, they come from teh Internets!)

My great-great grandmother died first, when I was in fourth grade and we were still living with my grandmother. She had been living with her daughter and her daughter's husband (my grandpop), in a rowhouse in Baltimore. My grandpop and my great-grandmother had moved from southern Pennsylvania, where they were born, so he could work for the Baltimore Fire Department. We used to go over and visit them all fairly often. I loved their old house. For someone who had lived in apartments his whole life, it was decidedly huge. It had a creepy unfinished basement with a dirt floor, and all kinds of odd things stored down there from another era. Like an old icebox. This was used to keep food cool before the invention of the refrigerator. It was basically a refrigerator-shaped wooden box, that an Ice Man would deliver a giant block of ice for every few days. He'd drive down the alley running along the back of the rowhouses, and bring the ice out of his truck and into the houses with a pair of oversized Ice Tongs. The ice was constantly melting into a container underneath, and it had to emptied several times per day. According to my grandmother they were still delivering ice for it when she was a girl, but it hadn't been used for decades.

The house also had a number of things that must have been designed into it during the Victorian era. Like a little sitting area in the entryway for servants. In Victorian homes the servants would sit out there when the ladies would go and have tea with each other or whatever...the ladies would be in the "sitting room", and the servants were near enough to do anything their ladies needed. Now no one in that neighborhood ever had any servants, least of all anyone in my family hehe...but that's how the house was laid out. There was a formal dining room only used on holidays and special occasions, and a dining table that seated easily 20 people. And there were sliding doors, that slid right into the walls if you wanted to incorporate the space of the Sitting Room into the Dining Room when entertaining. They had apparently done this a lot when younger, but of course by the time I was born they were all already pretty old.

My great-great-grandmother died a week before her 90th birthday when I was 9. At the funeral parlor, things started off well, considering how our family tended to behave :) We had 3 days of viewing, while she was on display in the funeral parlor. The first day was sad but uneventful. The second day however, was much more interesting. The kids all started getting antsy, and started playing around a little more than they should have been. So we were all banished to the basement of the parlor, where there were various vending machines, where a buffet was laid out, and where the adults could smoke if they wanted to. Since this was the only room inside where smoking was allowed, and this was also where all the food was, this tended to be where all the people ended up. And it turned out that the last time the soda machine had been stocked, the man stocking it had forgotten to lock it. I'm embarrassed to admit it, but we all availed ourselves of the suddenly free sodas for two days. We emptied that machine! It was like a party in there, with my uncles passing bottles of soda around like it was going out of style. My great-great-grandmother had a wicked sense of humor, and regularly used language that would make me blush today to repeat it...I can only imagine she would have approved of us down there in the basement while she was up there in the viewing room. I loved her very much, and still miss her.

My grandpop died about a year later. I went to his funeral but didn't attend the viewing, since I was very sick at the time with the flu. After retiring from the Fire Department, he had apparently taken to drinking pretty heavily. According to his daughter (my grandmother), he had started a little before retiring hehe. At any rate by the time I was born, he had already suffered rather severe liver and kidney damage, was catheterized and was forbidden drinking for good. Though occasionally someone would sneak some alcohol into the house for him. My great-grandmother would pretend she didn't notice, but she was a smart cookie, and no one ever got anything past her. She let him get away with it. She herself had been a church organist, but had to stop playing when diabetes led to her legs having to be amputated. For all of my life, she was in a wheelchair. No one ever treated her as "handicapped" though, she was literally a force of nature moving around the house. She continued cooking for everyone right from the wheelchair. She laid out a big Thanksgiving spread every year, that took several days to prepare for. She made the best pumpkin pie I ever ate, and her turkey was to die for. She used to get out of the chair and sit out on a swinging glider on the porch in the spring and summer, and we'd drink iced tea together and talk about things. She used to let me ride around in her wheelchair like a race car driver through the house. When I wasn't doing that as a child, I was usually sitting in front of the kitchen sink, pulling all of the cast iron cookware out from under the sink, and practicing my drumming. She spoiled me way too much. She ended up dying when I was in junior high, and she ended up in the same funeral parlor as her mother and husband had been in a few years before. There was a Weeping Willow tree in her back yard, which she said was her favorite of all the trees. Hers was not as big as the one in the picture above here, but it did have the signature "cat tails" on it, which we were always taking cuttings of for her and displaying in a vase inside the house. Every time I see a Weeping Willow now I think of her and smile.

My Not So Interesting Life, Part 3

2006-09-22T12:18:00.000-07:00

My parents separated when I was 9, at the end of 3rd grade for me, at the beginning of the summer vacation. My mom got custody, and for the first time that I was old enough to remember, we moved. They were going to start bussing during the next school year, and my mom did not want me going to the school they were planning on sending me to. I was really too young at the time to make an objective comment on her motivations, but as an adult looking back, I tend to think it was a rather racist attitude on her part. Instead of walking to school like I had been, there would have been about an hour each way of school bus riding each day, so I wasn't too sad about moving away from that at the time. Most of my classmates in elementary school up until that time had been non-white, and it really was just something I never thought about much. The older I got though, the more I realized that there was a lot of closet-racism going on around me. (None of the photos in this article are of me or anyone I know, nor were they taken by me, they come from teh Internets!)

I was in charge of packing up the things in my own room for the move. But I ended up helping with packing the rest of the apartment too. I certainly couldn't leave the well being of my Esso Tiger glass in the hands of mere adults! (Esso became Exxon sometime shortly before our move). This was the coolest glass ever, and my prize possession. It has the phrase "Put a tiger in your tank" printed on it in 9 different languages. I took it to the Nameless Man (from the doorbell incident hehe), and he taught me how to pronounce several of them correctly. I was heartbroken years later when someone accidentally broke the glass. Everyone kept giving me "replacement glasses" for the next several months, but none of them were ever as interesting. We moved in temporarily with my grandmother on my mother's side, while my mom was looking for her own place. She lived out in Baltimore County, along Route 1. My mom was the oldest of a horde of children, and her youngest brothers were still in high-school, so the house was quite crowded.

An aunt in San Antonio, Texas had a baby, and my grandmother decided to go visit. I don't remember the details, but I ended up going along. We were there for about a month. And none of my parents were there! I was in heaven. My grandmother spent her days doing baby things, and I was banished from the apartment with the other kids...there were 2 cousins my age in addition to the new baby. I don't remember much about the trip, but I did get to meet fire ants for the first time. In Maryland, the ants were tiny little things, and all you had to do was keep them out of your food if you were having a picnic. But these fire ants were something else. They were huge. They would "bite" you and then your skin would burn and get all swollen. Any time we kids saw them we proceeded to stomp on them all. And then inevitably one ant would survive the stomping, and a kid would start screaming in pain from the bite. They were scary and fun at the same time! I also remember the intense heat of the sun in Texas, and trying to stay in the shade.

Eventually we came back to Maryland, and I started school a little late that year. Towards the end of fourth grade my mom and I moved into our own apartment back in Baltimore City proper, but within a short walk from the county line. There were lots of trees around, and even a little woods nearby. We lived here until junior high. But one thing we had been doing every summer, and which we continued doing into junior high, was going to Ocean City, New Jersey for summer vacation. We went with my dad when my parents were still married, and then went just my mom and me, and then she brought along a boyfriend whom she would eventually marry. We did the usualy vacation things here...swimming in the ocean, getting sunburned, miniature golf, the RIDES! (my favorite), bicycling on the boardwalk early in the morning, going to the movies, etc. One year when my dad was there we went fishing. Everyone had these fancy fishing rods, except for me. Some stranger saw me there looking bored, and gave me a thing of fishing line with a hook on the end. I could hold it over the dock, but it was impossible to throw it. So I just stood there holding my fishing line, and watching the grownups. New people came up and saw my pathetic "fishing rod" and laughed and pointed. But the joke was on them! I was the only one who caught a fish that day. It was this huge flounder, and he put up quite a fight. We ended up giving it to the man who gave me the fishing line, since we were staying in a hotel. Do people even eat flounder? I dunno, but we didn't keep it hehe. We walked back to the hotel, as a thunderstorm started pouring down on us. There was lightning everywhere. One bolt of lightning ended up hitting the sidewalk just a few feet in front of my dad and me. Scared the living shit out of me! Every hair on my body was standing on end, and you could smell the ozone in the air. Fortunately that's the closest I've ever gotten to lightning during my life hehe.

As for movies, Ocean City was where I saw Jaws. Right on the boardwalk. We came out of the theater that night, and everybody was freaked out being right on the ocean hehe. That summer everyone was yelling "Shark!," and everyone would run out of the water. I must confess I yelled it a few times myself :) We also saw The Omen here one year. It was the first R rated movie I ever saw. Scared the bejeezus out of me at the time. My mom kept covering my eyes at the scary parts, which if anything made it even scarier. Everyone cheered in the theater when the evil nanny died. We also saw Logan's Run when it came out here. This was such a cool movie at the time. And it was fun teasing my mom, who was about to turn 30, by telling her she better start preparing for her "run"! She was not amused hehe. This is the movie that got me interested in high-tech stuff and futurism. I ended up buying the book and really enjoying it too, but it was quite different from the movie. Fortunately I read the book before my mom did, because she freaked out from whatever sex scenes were in it. It was probably what got me interested in science fiction, though I had been watching Star Trek (TOS) reruns for years by then.

While looking for an image online of the "put a tiger in your tank" glass, I actually found some of them for sale on ebay. I may have to break down and get one hehe.

My Not So Interesting Life, Part 2

2006-09-21T08:24:00.000-07:00

Baltimore was described by one of my high school teachers, who had traveled extensively, as being a "beer and pretzel town." And boy was she right. When I was growing up, people didn't travel far from their neighborhoods in the city. And in the suburbs, people rarely went more than a few miles away, unless they were going to work or leaving the state for some reason. And leaving the state wasn't something one did there habitually. (Yes, people went on vacations and left the state. Some people even worked in DC but lived in Maryland, and so technically "left the state." There is however a difference between driving for 20 minutes and crossing a state line to work, and flying to Kuala Lumpur.) In some ways it's like New York that way. Imagine New York though with a fraction of the people, but with most of them being factory workers and only ever shopping at Walmart. The local cuisine is of course the steamed crab. They steam them, and then dump them on a table in front of you, on top of brown paper. No plates. They just dump them on the table, with nothing but a big sheet of brown paper between the food and the table. They then serve horrible beer to go with it. This site demonstrates the procedure of eating them. While I love crab, I really hated ripping the creatures apart to eat them. When we went out to places like that, I usually ordered crab cakes instead. Crab cakes could just be served on a plate, but they were often served on a bun, like a hamburger. (None of the photos in this article are of me or anyone I know, nor were they taken by me, they come from teh Internets!)

But about Baltimore...it's basically a provincial, blue-collar, and somewhat stinky place. No doubt the suburbs are filled with people who would be horrified to think of their city in those terms, but there you have it. (Keep in mind I moved out of the state back in 1984, so if the city is less stinky now, hey that's great! I'm just saying how it was then hehe.) And by provincial, I mean that it never really occurs to the majority of the people there to leave...or even to wonder what life is like elsewhere. It certainly never occured to me as a child, until I met the Steamer Trunk.

I mentioned in Part 1 how we children used to get into trouble. Not serious trouble, but we got into mischief, as my great grandmother would have put it. At one point, we discovered the wonders of calling the Operator on the telephone, and asking her stupid questions. That stopped when our phone was temporarily disconnected until our parents talked to the Operator hehe. But then looking for something else to do, we discovered the wonders of ringing someone's doorbell and then running away, so that when someone came to the door, there would be nobody there. Hey, we were 8 year olds! Don't tell me you never did anything bad when you were 8 :) Of course you wanted to see the person get annoyed at the door, so you wanted to run far enough away to avoid getting caught, but not so far away that you couldn't see the person coming to the door. We did this for a few days to various neighbors, and it had gotten back to the parents through the grapevine that someone's kids were up to no good...but since we hadn't been caught or seen, it was unclear exactly which kids were responsible. So one night my parents hinted that if I were involved in this latest scandal, I would be severely punished...but since there was no proof as yet, I was only getting a warning.

And then we stumbled upon the Victorian house. It was near our aparment building. It had been converted into like a dozen apartments itself. And there was a nice line of doorbells on the front door of the building. People inside would have to come outside of their apartments, and some would even have to come down a set of stairs or two to get to the front door. Which was good, because there was nowhere nearby to hide, and we'd have to run like mad to get away without getting caught hehe. We had some fun with this house for a day or two, and then Sharon the little witch struck! Our friend Sharon quietly rang one of the doorbells without telling us, and then just quietly left, while we were all milling around on the porch getting up our nerve to strike. (She was like that, she was the evil one among us :)) So when the man opened the door wondering who had been prank ringing his bell for days, and saw us all standing there giggling, it was a shock for everyone I think. All of the kids ran away at top speed. Well except for me; I just stood there like an idiot. He then promptly grabbed me by the arm, and dragged me into his apartment.

He was intending to make me call my parents on his phone, as a way of punishing me and getting some peace from those rotten doorbell ringing kids. But my parents weren't home. Had they been home, I wouldn't have been out running around and ringing people's doorbells! And I blathered on and on about how unfair it was, since I hadn't rung the bell, evil Sharon had...blah blah blah. At this point I was convinced I would be sent to prison or something. Even though us kids got into mischief, we were good students and not really bad...and none of us really had any idea about crime or whatnot. He got me a soda, and sat me down intending to wait for my parents to get home, and he started talking to me. And it turned out his life was completely bizarre to me, me being a stupid semi-juvenile delinquent from this provincial city. He traveled! And to other countries even! No one in my family had ever left the country, except for my uncles and grandparents who had been in the military. They left because the navy had sent them out, not by choice. And the moment they had a choice, back they came. But this single, 30-something man voluntarily traveled. He had moved into that apartment about a month prior to our lawless bell-ringing, but prior to that, he had been living in France. France! He told me they didn't speak English there, and I couldn't even imagine it. At first I thought he was lying to me hehe, to make fun. He spoke fluent French. And Spanish! He knew some German too but he said he wasn't fluent in it. No one in my family spoke anything except English. And this was typical for Baltimore at the time.

His apartment was completely unlike ours. Ours was filled with a bunch of junk, while he had nice stuff. He had books everywhere. We had a bookcase in our apartment, but my dad didn't read for pleasure at all, and my mom's idea of a good book was one that Reader's Digest had condensed for her. She encouraged me to read, but she herself was more likely to watch tv while reading one of those condensed books. This stranger listened to Classical music, while my parents would listen to Elvis and 1950's pop music. He had artwork! We had a lava lamp. And his coffee table wasn't a coffee table at all...it was that Steamer Trunk. I had never even heard of such a thing. He opened it up to show me that it was indeed used to hold things that one traveled with...a fancy suitcase. He had just used it when he came back to the US from France. Over the course of a half hour or so, this man, whose name I can't even remember any more, opened my eyes to the idea that life could be dramatically different than the life of everyone I had known up to that point in time. It really was my first culture shock experience. For the first time in my life, I looked at my family and my life from outside, and saw it from a stranger's eyes, and it looked quite strange!

Oh, and if you were wondering, he ended up agreeing to not tell my parents about the doorbell ringing thing, if we never rang his doorbell again hehe.

My Not So Interesting Life, Part 1

2006-09-20T11:08:00.000-07:00

My friends are constantly bitching at me for not having more photos of places I've been. This is due in large part to the fact that I just hate doing touristy things, and when I travel I try to avoid those places that everyone seems to love to photograph. I like doing things that the locals do instead. And while these things are memorable to me and great fun, they're not very photo-worthy usually. I'm going to look for some photos on the Internet and narrate some things from my life though, just to shut them up hehe. (None of the photos in this article are of me or anyone I know, nor were they taken by me, they come from teh Internets!)

I grew up in Baltimore. Our first apartment was some forgotten dump that we moved out of before I was 2 years old. All anyone can remember about it is that the building was blue. The second apartment was in the Waverly area, within walking distance of Memorial Stadium, John's Hopkins University, and a few parks...pretty much straight north of downtown Baltimore. South of us a block or so everything turned urban and all concrete, but we had a lot of trees and grass around us to play on. I returned to visit this neighborhood the last time I was in Baltimore, back around 1990. It had changed a lot...there was graffiti everywhere, and it didn't look very safe. I pulled into the old apartment complex parking lot, and they had a security guard there, which we never had when I was growing up. The whole area looked sad and smaller than I remembered, but then we moved away when I was 9 years old, so no doubt I was much shorter then hehe. Memorial Stadium was demolished in 2001.

My father was in the Navy Reserve, and many weekends we would go down to the Baltimore Harbor, where he had something official to do with the renovation of the USS Constellation. As cool as being on the ship was, for a young child it quickly got boring, and I was never allowed to touch anything, and there was nowhere to sit down. The Harbor is now all built up and pretty looking, but back then it was very run down, and was mostly crappy looking parking lots. I'm sure the renovation was very interesting for the adults, but it held little interest for a 6 year old.

I was an only child, but there were a number of other kids living in our apartment building, and we used to get into a lot of mischief. One of the things we liked to do was to scare the hell out of each other. Our parents let us create rather elaborate "haunted houses" for the neighbors to walk through during Halloween. The adults would pretend to be scared, and good fun was had by all. Though one elderly lady really was freaked out when we presented a bowl filled with cold cooked macaroni, and told her it was human brains, while plunging her hand down into it while blindfolded. She avoided us kids after that hehe.

But the big thing I remember from this time was Black Aggie. The legend of Black Aggie is widespread in the Mid-Atlantic states area, whose real history you can read about here and here. But being children and not really too concerned about facts and things like that, we had our own legend of Black Aggie. First there was the old mirror game, familiar to many around the world. You would take a lit candle into the bathroom, in the dark, and you were supposed to chant the name,"Black Aggie," and turn around 13 times in front of the bathroom mirror. The legend was that some horrible ghost would appear in the mirror and do something awful to you at the end of this. Usually we would chicken out and run screaming out of the bathroom before we ever got to 13 turns. Of course the other kids outside the bathroom trying to scare you while doing this didn't help! I made it to 13 once and absoltuely nothing happened. But then my friend Linda went in and got to 13, and then screamed and ran out, terrified. She swore she saw a woman in black in the mirror. Doing this on rainy days, with thunder and lightning was of course ideal. Our parents were always telling us not to do it, no doubt because they were afraid we would burn the house down hehe...but it only increased our belief that you could summon something awful this way.

And then there was the statue. Because of the Black Aggie legend, we children referred to every seated statue as a "black aggie". And the East Coast of the US is just littered with statues all over the place. I never really noticed how many statues Baltimore had until I visited California for the first time, where there are hardly any by comparison. The birds in California are forced to hang out on the power lines, unlike the Baltimore birds, who are busy pooping on all of those dumb statues hehe. At any rate, our elementary school just happened to have one of these old seated statues right out in front of it. And the story went that children who sat on the lap of the statue at midnight would be crushed to death, as the statue came alive. Or sometimes they said it happened at sundown. No one ever died from this statue of course, but we were 7 year olds and what did we know :) So one autumn day, my friends managed to get me to climb up onto the statue at our school, and it just happened to be near sundown. The stone was extremely cold, and was covered in large amounts of bird poop, but long dried. No one else was nearby, and then we heard it. The Voice! And then I felt something moving against my shoulder! I thought it was my friends just trying to scare me, but then I noticed they were running away across the playground in fright. It wasn't them! I ran the hell out of there myself at that point hehe.

None of us ever went near the statue again.

An Ill Wind Blows

2006-09-19T10:38:00.000-07:00

No, not a political wind for once. Though Bush is acting increasingly batty, even for him...and that's saying a lot. I'm talking about the Santa Ana Winds.

We've had an interesting summer here. It was not terribly hot, until the end of August, when it suddenly shot up over 105 degrees F (over 40 degrees C) for a week. I live on the edge of Los Angeles, at the eastern edge of the San Fernando Valley...it gets even hotter on the western end of the Valley. For those not familiar with the LA area, the weather varies dramatically around the city, depending on your location, due to distance from the ocean, elevation, and whether or not there's a mountain range in between you and the coast. When it is sweltering in the Valley during the summer, it's usually cool and comfortable on the coast in Santa Monica. And it gets progressively warmer the further east you go. It also gets smoggier, as the wind blows the pollution inland towards San Bernardino.

Where I live north of Los Angeles proper in Glendale, we usually get a nice little coastal breeze, but it's been warmed up a little by the time it gets to us. It's warm, the sun shines hot, but the breeze is cooling. Nights are usually cool, and we have the windows open. Days we need the air on during the summer though. I'm at the edge of two valleys, the San Fernando to the northwest, and the San Gabriel to the northeast. North of me is La Cañada (the gorge in Spanish), and north of that are the deserts. The serious mountains are further north and east of me.

So we had a nice comfortable summer until the end of August, when it became extremely hot during the day...but then the nights were bearable at least. And then we finally had one overcast day last week. I was in heaven! It's been sunny for months, and after a while you really do get tired of it. The morning might start foggy, but it burns off by 10 AM at the latest where I am. So after all summer of hot and dry, a cloudy day was great! And then these frickin' winds came. Instead of our breeze coming from the ocean, it's now pouring down from the desert, through that gorge. And since I'm right at the bottom of that gorge, it's a strong wind too. It's a hot breeze, and it's making the air full of sand and grit...not quite as bad as the wind blowing sand at the beach, but it's still noticeable. Everything is covered with gritty dust. My eyes are burning from it, and the nose keeps filling with sandy gunk, needing frequent nose blowing. Yick!

At least it's not as bad as the first year I lived here, when the winds were literally hurricane force, and the sand in the air cut the skin like a knife. But it still makes everyone a little irritable. I'm really ready for a nice rainy winter!

"[T]hose hot dry [winds] that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen."

--Raymond Chandler, from Red Wind

Mickey Has Gone Over to the Dark Side

2006-09-06T11:16:00.000-07:00

ABC/Disney's involvement with The Path to 9/11 is truly odious and disgusting. This radical right propaganda hit piece is masquerading as truth, while it is in fact mostly fictional. Other bloggers go into detail about the nature and extent of the propaganda, and here are some of the links:

Glenn Greenwald

FireDogLake

Daily Kos

Digby

Adding more links as I find them.

But my questions are these:

Who exactly shelled out the $40 million to make this thing?

Who is footing the bill for the 6 hours of prime-time commercial free programming?

If ABC is itself funding this obvious propaganda piece, isn't it illegal? Isn't it a campaign contribution waaaay in excess of the maximum allowable by law?

Oh Mr. Rumsfeld, You Really Didn't Want To Go There

2006-08-30T20:22:00.000-07:00

Towards a Progressive Foreign Policy

2006-08-25T10:39:00.000-07:00

Democrats are often bashed...fairly or unfairly...as being weak on foreign policy. I'm not going to get into that debate, but let's just state for the record that there is more to being "strong" on foreign policy than wanting to bomb the hell out of people hehe. There is more to foreign policy than wanting to maintain an American Empire at the expense of the rest of the world.

But as Progressives, what kind of foreign policy should we be pursuing? How do we project our progressive ideals onto the world stage, in a coherent and moral way? I would suggest that at the end of the day, our foreign policy can be advanced without making us a diseased, pariah state, hated by the rest of the world. I humbly offer these guidelines:

1). Our foreign policy should be morally good.

2). Our foreign policy should advance our ideals, without imposing them at gunpoint on other nations or groups.

3). Our foreign policy should help derail the insane foreign policy agenda of the Neocons and Neoliberals.

4). Our foreign policy should peacefully promote democracy.

5). We need an effective terror prevention regimen.

At this point most of us bloggers are well aware of PNAC, and their agenda of world domination and American Empire building. Most of us are disgusted by it. While I'm not suggesting we should pursue an "anti-PNAC" agenda, we should however study the PNAC agenda closely to see where it went so wrong.

1). Our foreign policy should be morally good.

This may sound like a no-brainer, but of course to the winguts it would be a novel idea. The ends NEVER justify the means, period. No matter how worthy our goals, if they can't be acheived with moral rectitude, they are not worth acheiving.

In the foreign policy arena, this means that we should not be using war as a way to enrich our corporations. We should only declare war when our survival is threatened by an aggresor, not when one of our major economic sectors would get a few quarters of boost.

2). Our foreign policy should advance our ideals, without imposing them at gunpoint on other nations or groups.

Exactly what "our Progressive ideals" are, is of course open to debate. And no doubt it would be a vigorous one hehe. But such things as 'everyone wins, not just major corporations'; 'it is appropriate for government to actually govern' (as opposed to marketing itself in constant campaign mode, like BushCo, or outsourcing all government functions to poorly performing third parties); 'health care for all is a national security issue, not merely an economic issue'; 'peaceful cooexistence is preferable to armed interventionism'...and etc.

Some of our domestic ideals become foreign policy ideals, as we project them onto the world stage. Being Progressive does not make us "anti-globalist"; in fact if anything, globalism is only going to accelerate over the coming decades, and we have a wonderful opportunity to make sure it happens in a way where most people in the world benefit from it. The "Party of Davos" should not be the only ones reaping the rewards of globalism. Being pro-globalist does not mean we are in favor of selling our citizens short to enrich corporations...it means we can see that enriching everyone, regardless of national identity, is good for everyone, especially our own citizens. We have to make sure that it happens in a way that not only the strong and rich benefit, however.

3). Our foreign policy should help derail the insane foreign policy agenda of the Neocons and Neoliberals.

By pushing our foreign policy agenda, we can help corral the lunatic fringe into an open and more honest debate. Specifically, we need, as a nation, to engage our "enemies" abroad in dialogue. We don't have to like them, but we need to talk to them. We kept talking to the Soviet Union throughout the duration of the Cold War, while thousands of nuclear warheads were aimed right at our cities. One button push could have wiped us out. And yet we kept talking! It's time to put an end to this doughy pantload foreign policy of fear, so beloved by Bush, Lieberman, and their ilk.

We need to normalize relations with Iran. And Syria. And Cuba. And North Korea. We need to talk to extra-national groups like Hezbollah. And the other "terrorist" groups. Hell, BushCo engages in the same kind of terror tactics as these groups do...kidnapping, torture, etc. We need to stop these affronts to human dignity in our own actions, and we need to engage all of these groups in dialogue, even if they haven't yet renounced terror. I'm not saying these nations and groups are nice. They are not nice. But we need to talk to them anyway. Yes it will drive Israel nuts. AIPAC's collective head will be spinning around like the girl in the Exorcist hehe...but tough shit.

4). Our foreign policy should peacefully promote democracy.

Rather than try to impose democracy from without, while occupying nations with our military and killing hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians, like BushCo is doing to Iraq, we should peacefully promote the ideals of democracy. The idea that every person has value, and has a right to representation within their government. This also means that we need to speak out against anti-democratic regimes around the world.

Currently we appease and prop up these authoritarian regimes, because they gave us something we wanted in exchange. Like oil deals. Or access to ports. This must end. We need to support the democratic governments of the world, and put the other governments on notice that their lack of democracy is unacceptable.

This does not mean we arm rebels. This does not mean that we immediately break off relations. This does mean however that we use our influence to bring about peaceful, democratic regimes in these countries.

5). We need an effective terror prevention regimen.

The "Global War on Terror" is a failure. I don't think it was ever meant to succeed; I think it was just a convenient way to justify trillions of dollars of corporate welfare...because the whole basic tenet is flawed. You can't wage war on a method of warfare, it's absurd.

We do, however, need to effectively defend ourselves from terrorists. We don't do this by invading random countries and destroying their infrastructure, and pissing off their citizens even more, and thereby genereating even more terrorists. We do this by keeping cool heads, and protecting ourselves here at home.

We scan every ship that enters our ports. The technology to do this exists already. American companies sell it to foreign governemts already. It is cheaper than the Iraq debacle.

We scan every piece of luggage that enters a plane. Carry on and otherwise. All of it.

We secure our border. This does not mean a fence. Or armed militias wandering around lawlessly. But we do have to make sure that everyone entering the country is doing so legally.

Immigration. Ah, the political football of immigration. Neither Dems nor Repubs are willing to talk about it honestly. But we Progressives must. We need to legally allow in as many immigrants as businesses need to staff their job openings, after exhausting the pool of willing applicants who are citizens. Anyone working illegally needs to be deported, and the corporation employing them heavily punished. But the big issue with immigration is not really numbers coming in, or border controls...it's people overstaying their visas, and there being no follow up on that. We need to more aggressively make sure people leave when their visas expire...or more forcefully encourage them to get extensions to the visas.

There is much more to be said about what a Progressive foreign policy would look like, but hopefully this is a helpful place to start.

Political Spectrum

2006-08-17T12:37:00.000-07:00

UPDATE (8/23) I will be accepting data through this weekend, and then will hammer out the blog article with what I have at that time. So you have until Sunday, August 27 to get data to me if you want to participate. (I'd urge people to take the spectrum test after that date anyway if you still haven't, just because it's interesting to see where you fall on the political spectrum, and where the various candidates fall in relation to you. I'd also urge people to throw some money at the Political Compass folks if you have found their services to be of use. No I have no affiliation with them at all, for the record hehe).

I am working on an article about the political spectrum in the US today, and could use your help! Specifically I want to plot online Democratic activists/bloggers and where they fall on the chart above. The article will be analysing this data and comparing it to the Democratic party generally, and the implications of this. You do not have to be a prolific blogger or poster to participate...just reading blogs regularly is fine.

To participate, please go to the Political Compass website and take their test. (Took me about 5 minutes). Please take the test, even if you have taken another political spectrum test recently, as each different test is somewhat biased in certain ways. Please take this specific test again, even if you have taken it before, so that the results are as accurate as possible.

Once you have taken the test, on the Analysis page you will be presented with a graphic image similar to the above, but with a red dot on it showing where you fall on the graph. Please make a note of your politcal compass, the postive or negative numbers towards the middle of the page; the first will be Economic Left/Right, and the second will be Social Libertarian/Authoritarian. Please also note in your email how you self-identify politically (ie. Democrat, Progressive, Liberal, Moderate, etc.)

You can email the results to me or post them here in the comments. Your name and where you fall on the graph will not be identified; the data points will just be plotted with no name next to them.

Please note you don't have to be a registered Democrat to participate, please just accurately state how you self-identify politically.

Thanks!

When the Revolution Comes....

2006-05-10T09:55:00.000-07:00

The Republican Party has continued its unravelling since my last post...in fact if anything it is happening even faster than I thought. Bush is at his lowest approval rating ever, and about to enter Nixonian territory. They are giving an extra 70 billion in tax cuts to their rich base, in an attempt to drive up support, but this cynical handout is going to make things even worse. Is a Revolution inevitable? Is it imminent?

As a brief aside to anyone who may be reading my ramblings hehe, it is not my intention to post here daily, weekly, or even monthly. I post when I feel like I have something I need to work out in my head, and that might be interesting to others. I also do not post on day to day happenings or news, but generally speculate on bigger trends, or on the long term.

At any rate I made an assumption a few months ago that we would work through the current constitutional crisis engendered by Bush. But I am no longer certain that we will in fact be able to come through this peacefully. And I'm not even certain that a revolution would be a bad thing. (By revolution I mean any sudden dramatic political change, not necessarily an armed insurrection).

We have seen the GOP noise machine (The Mighty Wurlitzer) increasingly losing it's stranglehold on the news...real news is leaking out all over the place. And the majority in the country are mad as hell...it's finally dawning on ordinary people that they are being screwed by BushCo, and that it's only going to get worse for those people. We have seen immigration protests that make previous protests look small by comparision. We have seen the Stephen Colbert event...ignored by the corporate-controlled media, but blasted into a celebrity moment by the Internet. We have seen the stirrings of spine in a handful of Democrats on the Hill. We have seen so many scandals in the administration that it would take to long list them all (but the most recent as of this post is Hookergate...and of course the media is trying to ignore it).

As I mention in the previous articles here, the country is split essentially three ways, into 3 approximately equal blocs of voters; Progressives, Moderates, and Reactionaries...the actual party these people are in is irrelevant for this discussion (see the other posts though for more info). None of these groups can govern on its own. And the Progressives are still growing their legs, they are the newest bloc that is only now coalescing. The current governing coalition is Reactionary-controlled, with a bare minimum of Moderates to give them a majority that won an election. And of course it was a near thing, with known election fraud, and a contrived war to boost their numbers. These people would not otherwise have had enough support to govern. And with the current poll numbers and unravelling of the GOP, they have already lost the bare minimum they had then.

This administration is not going to go quietly however. They are going to fight to keep control of the House, the Senate, and the Presidency through 2012. I mentioned before that it was going to get ugly, but it may be even uglier than I thought. Predictions like this are difficult due to rapidly changing circumstances, and behind-the-scenes events that us in the general public may be unaware of. But let's make a few assumptions for the rest of this article.

1. Let's assume that the Democrats gain control of the House in November.

2. Let's assume they do NOT gain control of the Senate.

3. Let's assume impeachment of Bush does not get off the ground.

4. Let's assume Rove is indicted however.

5. Let's assume that half a dozen new scandals have erupted by 2007, which we have no hint of yet.

6. Let's assume the GOP continues down the road of enriching Big Oil and Big Pharma.

Now the mood in the country is already quite sour. Most of the political blogging community is obsessed with politics, and has been for years...they are of course very informed about current events, and all of their friends tend to talk this stuff all the time. I myself have always been a news junkie, but was never terribly interested in politics. But events have forced me online just to find news (see below for more about me). I bring this up because most of my friends are not political at all. They don't read blogs, they haven't been following all of the Republican scandals, indeed some of them don't even vote. I have had political news forwarded to my email by friends who never paid attention to that kind of thing before. And even THESE ORDINARY FOLKS are in a quite sour mood. This is not just angst about high gas prices. Ordinary Americans, Democrat, Republican, whatever....are mad as hell about the status quo. American Idol is no longer enough to distract these people from what is going on.

And what happens when these ordinary folks turn on the news to find out about what they are pissed off about? They don't find news...they find stenographers reporting the GOP party line. At first they think they are watching FOX, and change to another network, but all of the networks are the same. Well not counting Comedy Central ironically hehe. Now for you and me who have been politically obsessed for some time, this is old news. But for the ordinary American out there, this is a big shock. My own parents have noticed this, and these are people who have trouble logging on to check email, and are about as non-political as my cat.

My point in mentioning all of this is that we have an increasingly large number of people for whom the status quo is intolerable. The future looks bleak to them, and the present is mired in corruption and scandal. And when they go to vote the bums out in November, the combination of gerrymandered districts and Dieboldesque election fraud will prevent signicant change from occuring. Revolutions occur when peaceful change becomes impossible. And the current fascist regime has gamed the sytem, to make change impossible peacefully. Revolution is not inevitable for us...I get the feeling that most people would prefer a peacful transition...but the GOP will do everything in its power to stop any peaceful change, and it is unlikely enough Repubs will jump ship to support such a transition. I believe this may make revolution inevitable.

Now exactly what is going to happen is impossible to predict with any accuracy, but a "successful revolution" would have the following basic outline. Power would move to a new bloc, controlled by the Moderates and including the Progressives. (The Reactionaries lost out..how sad). The oil industry will be nationalised. This is not a requirement, but public outrage will demand it. We will end up with a national health care system, that benefits people and not only the drug industry. Abortion rights will be offically enshrined into the Constitution, as will gay rights. Media monopolies will be broken, and real news will end up on television once again (though tv is old media, and people will turn increasingly to the Internet for news anyway...but at least journalism will replace stenography in most places). New restrictions on presidential power will be formalised, and written down. Much of the secrecy of our intelligence agencies will be done away with. Immigration reform that benefits everyone, and not just the bottom lines of big corporations will go into effect; there will be a general amnesty for those already here. The courts all over the country will be purged of the incompetent cronies that Bush placed there.

In other words, for the Fourth Republic, we will reject tyranny, and choose a Progressive future. These changes will of course outrage the Reactionaries, but they will be powerless to stop them. (I am assuming no civil war breaks out...but who knows? These changes certainly won't play well in South Carolina.)

The creeping fascism of the current government is a pox upon us all. It can not be allowed to continue. That whole "unitary executive" nonsense MUST be done away with, or we lose our Republic. The pathetic attempts to hold the current regime together by bankrupting the country to enrich a small minority is doomed to failure...and must not be allowed to drag down the whole country. If it takes a revolution to stop this madness...then bring it on!

The Coming Dark Age

2006-02-23T09:07:00.000-08:00

This article started ruminating in my mind as I was pondering the disaster of the two Bush Administrations, and how incomprehensible it was that any sane group of people could take the actions that they have taken. Compound that with the behavior of the Democrat opposition, or lack thereof. It appeared that the country had gone mad, but any conversation about this inevitably turned back to who was going to win on American Idol, or whatever.

So some basic questions before we start this analysis:

1. Clearly the Bushistas are engaging in a propoganda war against the US citizens, but why?

2. Clearly there has been a record amount of corruption and cronyism during this administration, but even the opposition is virtually silent about it all...why?

3. What was the criteria used to determine membership of the "Axis of Evil" (Seeing as the ability of these countries to damage us directly is nil to completely non-existent)?

4. Why are we so desperately engaged in friendship and cooperation with countries that are openly hostile to us, completely undemocratic, and are a much greater danger to us than the so called "Axis of Evil"?

5. Given the security concerns that we face in the post-Soviet era, why is so much energy being spent by the Bushistas on issues like restricting abortion and gay rights?

6. Given the obvious complete disarray of the Democratic Party, why is none of its leadership actually doing anything effective to rebuild and fix the party?

7. Why is the Bush Administration so willing to throw the whole international order into complete chaos, abandon our treaties, alienate our allies, blatantaly engage in human rights abuses abroad, etc.?

These questions are usually answered with truisms that don't sit quite right, because taken together, the answers do not make sense. Yes, it is possible for a reasonably intelligent person to have some conflicting views that they never quite sort out, but it is inconceivable that an entire government bureaucracy could have a similar disconnect on such a wide range of issues, througout our entire ruling class.

This article assumes that the reader has read the previous article (The Coming Constitutional Crisis), "The Third Wave," by Alvin Toffler, and the following articles available online here, here, here, and here.

The linked articles are a lot of reading, they are long, they are dry, they go into detail about US history and economics, but it is very important to understand this stuff. Because without understanding this stuff, what is going on today politically makes absolutely no sense.

Seriously, go read the articles! No cheating!

Now in "The Coming Constitutional Crisis" below, I speculated on events that will inevitably transpire if we stay on our current course, with a projected time frame anywhere from 10 to more likely 20 or 30 years into the future. I point out the current (small-ish) differences in the different voting blocs in the Democrat and Republican parties, and how their interests not being served by the current party configurations will lead to the 2 party system going the way of the buggy whip. This article here, however, is dealing with the reality of today, and of the next few years. The differences mentioned are to a large extent increasingly Social, and not merely Economic; of course the traditional difference between the 2 big parties was that one skewed laissez-faire while the other skewed regulator on economic issues. In "The Fourth Republic" and "The Big Bangs", Stirling Newberry talks about 3 purely economic divisions of the country, irrespective of party. Specifically, the Reactionaries (who want things to remain (economically) as they have been, and who are ready and willing to gut our Constitution to enforce their own affluence at the expense of all other Americans), the Conservatives (I would call them Moderates; they are the people who want things to remain
(economically) mostly as they have been, but who are willing to make minor adjustments, such as tax reform, to spread any economic pain out among more people), and the Progressives (who recognize that our current economic and constitutional models are hopelessly broken and must be completely scrapped for something new).

Now I know you read those linked articles, so I don't have to cover the ground Stirling already covered (Seriously, go read them!!). But in a nutshell: we are at the end of an economic and constitutional phase, and the next phase has not yet been formulated anew. The Liberal Democracy brought into being by FDR is dead. The economic basis that accompanied the Liberal Democratic Republic is in the process of collapse, to be a complete collapse within the next year or two. The resulting consensus politics that made this system work is also dead.

Now, let's recap who the players are, and see where that takes us.

Social Groups

Rapturists
Neocons
Republicrats
Progressives
Neo-hippies

Economic Groups

Reactionaries
Moderates
Progressives

(Please note that my Moderates are Stirling's Conservatives, and that the social and economic Progressives are not necessarily the same people)

In addition to these groups within the 2 major parties, there are also many third parties out there that become important, but not dominant. I will summarize them here, but will not mention them beyond this point. The Libertarians will tend to support any Neocon economic proposal that tends to deregulate, reduce spending, make life easier for Business generally, etc. They will tend to support any Progressive social proposal that enhances individual liberty (drug legislation, abortion rights, gay rights, etc.) Ten or fifteen years ago the Libertarians would be lending their support pretty much overwhelmingly to Republicans; today they are much more likely to swing Democrat because of the social agenda. The Green Party, while not huge, is important in that they are unlikely to lend any support at all to issues or candidates that are willing to stick it to the environment for a quick buck. My "Neo-hippies" above are essentially Greens that haven't left the Democratic party yet, primarily because they think they can skew the Dems more Green by staying in (some time soon it will dawn on them that their efforts have failed, and they will dribble out of the party until none are left). These third parties are important because the votes are so incredibly close on so many issues, that the independent voter will often be the vote that decides the issue.

Now the economic groups above cut across the social group "party" lines, but as a generalization we can divide them up thus: Reactionaries are Rapturists, most Neocons, and a small number of Republicrats. Moderates are the majority of the Republicrats, the remaining Neocons, and about maybe a third of the (social) Progressives. The (economic) Progressives are the Neo-hippies, the remaining (social) Progressives, and a small number of Republicrats.

And this, my friends, is why our government looks the way it does today. All of the major players on the political stage understand implicitly what is coming economically. They know that within a few years at most, the value of the dollar is going to collapse. They understand that the standard of living is going to drop 20-30 percent for all Americans across the board. The only issue that divides them is how to game the system, and protect their core voters, by selling out the core voters of the other groups. In other words, corruption, propoganda, crime, etc., are now tools with which to keep one's constituency from feeling the pain of that coming 20-30 percent drop in standard of living, by stealing from the rest of the country.

The Bushistas are in power with one simple platform: enrich the Reactionaries at the expense of everyone else. Understanding this makes their regime suddenly comprehensible. We are fighting Iraq, and soon Iran, not because they are a threat to us, terrorism or otherwise, but because they were planning on abandoning the dollar in favor of the euro when purchasing oil. No, we don't care so much about physically scooping up the oil in those countries; we care about the indirect tax on the entire world we will lose if they stop buying oil with dollars. (Saddam was planning on abandoning the dollar before he was invaded; Iran is creating an Oil Bourse that will not only allow it to abandon the dollar, but anyone else, world-wide, who prefers buying their oil with euros can use the Bourse.) Terrorism is just a scare-word used by the regime to cover up what they are doing, and to motivate people whose interests are not being looked out for.

It needs to be pointed out that the Democrats are not innocent. They were not hoodwinked, or tricked, or anything; they are full, willing partners in this. Their only saving grace is that they would moderate what the Bushistas are doing slightly, and attempt to enrich the Moderates as well as the Reactionaries, while leaving the Progressives out to dry.

It also needs to be pointed out that the Neocons, who basically engineered this whole thing, are beholden to the Rapturists, in order to govern; hence the plethora of abortion and gay rights bloviation going on, and the whole Terry Schiavo debacle. The Rapturists are genuinely in favor of restricting civil rights; the Neocons are just cynically chiming in, in order to get the Rapturist vote on economic issues.

And finally, why are so many "journalists" in the Main Stream Media busy fellating these people on a daily basis? Because, they are opposed to the Moderates spreading the coming economic pain more widely, and hope that by kissing enough ass, they can be included in the rampant corruption and cronyism of the Reactionaries.

And one last note: It is unlikely that the Reactionaries will be able to protect the standard of living, even of their own base, by the methods they have chosen. Especially now that the Bush Administration has begun unravelling. The Dark Age is fast upon us, our governing coalition is unable to protect even a third of the citizens from its effects, and it's not going to be pretty.

The Coming Constitutional Crisis

2006-01-29T22:10:00.000-08:00

No, not that constitutional crisis. I'm assuming for the moment that we will successfully overcome what the Bushistas have done to the United States. I'm talking about what happens after both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party implode.

The founding fathers were very shrewd. They wrote our Constitution for an agricultural country, that was at the dawn of its industrial age. They weren't prescient by any means, but the industrial revolution was already underway in England at the time, and like good science fiction writers of our own age, they were able to speculate on the basic outline of what life would be like in the coming centuries. In many senses they were much like us; we are also at the dawn of a new age, the information age. And like them, we can only vaguely speculate on what is to come a few hundred years from now.

Some of their ideas worked out very well. Like for example, the system of checks and balances that have served us so well (up until recently). Some of them were good ideas perhaps for the time, but since the founders didn't know all of the details of the coming industrial age, those ideas didn't work out quite as well. For example, the founding fathers saw what was happening to London, as industry was becoming concentrated there. People flocked from all over to work in the cities, because that was where the new jobs were. And where the jobs are, that's where the money is. Political power of course follows the money. The founders thus saw big cities as corrupting influences, and sought to offset that by requiring state capitols to be far from big cities. This is why New York has a state capitol in Albany, and not somewhere convenient to New York City. The ease and speed of 21st century travel have completed negated this attempt to put lawmakers far away from the big cities. And of course those once small towns are mostly much bigger themselves today anyway.

But back to the Constitutional Crisis. The information age is of course the problem. We were given by the founders a system of government meant to weather the industrial age...which it has...but it wasn't designed to handle the information age. And it is showing signs of stress. I'm going to focus on our political parties, and on how we do elections. I'll leave the rest as speculation for the reader. I'm assuming the reader has read "The Third Wave," by Alvin Toffler. He goes into great detail about how life is likely to change in the coming years.

Those familiar with American history are of course familiar with how our parties developed, and how we got saddled with a "two party" system. (Google it if you need to, or check Wikipedia). The first two major parties that formed had one major issue that separated them, and that issue was states rights. One party was essentially for, and the other against. Years passed. The industrial age ramped up and really started humming. We had a civil war. The north, and the Republicans won; states rights lost, as the secessionists were forced back into the union. This is a bit of an oversimplification, because states rights remains an issue to this day, but it is no longer the polarising issue that it once was.

Now that states rights was no longer a pressing issue, a period of relative political chaos emerged, with the two parties somewhat adrift. The country was recovering from the civil war too. But then a new polarising issue emerged...an issue completely dependant on the industrial revolution itself. As the industrial revolution was approaching its height, its zenith if you will, everything, and I do mean everything, became massified. Everything was done on a new scale, and that scale was huge. Toffler goes into detail about this. Transportation systems were no longer adequate to deal with the congestion of the ever-growing cities, hence we got mass transit. Little red schoolhouses were no longer adequate to teach the ever-increasing population, hence we got mass public education systems, and etc. But the big issue that divided the two political parties now was massified labor needed to do any work in a factory environment.

The Republicans of course represented management, while the Democrats came to represent the workers. Years passed, many strikes happened, two world wars erupted, (Hitler even commited genocide by means of his massified death factories), and finally the Cold War came and went. The capitalists won the Cold War of course, and to some extent it's fair to say that management beat labor, but that's a bit of an oversimplification. Because once again we find ourselves at the beginning of a new age, and even though the way the drones are treated by employers is still an issue, it is no longer a pressing issue. Primarily because the technological changes are putting an end to massified labor pretty much altogether.

Once again, we have two parties, but no major ideology for them to fight over. The country and parties drifted for a decade, and now things are changing once again as the information age is picking up speed. We've already seen a number of things that can clue us in on how life will be 50 or 100 years from now, when the information age is here in force. Computers. The Internet. Biotechnology. Nanotechnology. Globalisation. Again, Toffler goes into a lot of detail about this stuff.

But this time, things are different. Because there isn't one polarising issue with two opposing issues for our two parties to pick a side on. Oh they have both tried. Some of them think globalisation is the issue, with the Republicans trying to be isolationist (always a popular favorite for America), while the Democrats have tried to be globalist jet-setters. But then poll-obsession sets in, and some Republicans come out trying to be more globalist than Democrats. Some say that Fundamentalism is the polarising issue, with Repulicans generally aligning with them, and Democrats staying with more Mainline churches. But then again poll-obsession sets in, and you actually hear Democrats saying that they have to try to out-conservative the Republicans. Anyone remember Kerry when we he said he wanted the rednecks in their pickups to vote for him? Yeah, I winced too hehe.

We've heard a lot of people refer to these people as Republicrats, or DINOs and RINOs (Democrat in Name Only, Republican in Name Only)...and there is a certain truth to this, but people are missing the point. We've heard people from the progressive blogosphere screaming at Centrist Democrats, complaining that they aren't being represented. Ultra-conservative Republicans feel the same way about the Moderate Republican Party too, rest assured. People are seeing the symptons, but missing the point.

The point is that the information age is more complex than the industrial age. The industrial age took an agricultural world, and just massified it. Automated it. Did everything on a bigger scale. The information age however is both demassifying everything and connecting everything together in more complex ways, all at the same time. Like the Internet. There are millions of computers hooked together, but they are no longer massified, like an assemblyline in a factory. This process is happening all over the world, and to every formerly massified institution. Like the nation-state. Like the national political party.

It looks like balkanization to the untrained eye. But in fact it is different, since there is a new connectivity in place afterwards. We saw Yugoslavia, Czechoslavakia, and the Soviet Union all demassify already. Yet the new countries that emerged are more connected with each other now than before. This is a trend we will see continue to spread around the world. The concept of the nation just isn't relevant any more. This is why so many Muslims aren't integrating well into their new European homes when they immigrate. Oh yeah the religious differences cause tension, but the big problem is that it's difficult to form a close bond to an idea that is on the way out. What will information age political units look like then? When the process is complete, I'd speculate that we will have a fully interconnected globalised world; a United States of Earth. Only the component "states" will be much smaller than current nations. Indeed, nations that join such a world government will almost certainly devolve and split up...if the devolution hasn't happened already to them.

Yes, this means that the US will also split up...yet after splitting up we'll be even more connected than we are already today, inside a global political entity. But I'm jumping too far ahead. In the immediate and near future, we have to see what happens to our political parties, our elections, and our Constitution. Again globalisation is not the polarising issue. I'm guessing local/state/"national" rights will be the issue again, but I jump ahead. In the near term, we have to deal with ways of approaching the coming interconnected world. Some people react to this with happiness (think the Federation in Star Trek). Some people react to it with suspicion, fear, and a desperate need to control it (think the Dominion). And others just want to ignore it, and be left alone. We can label these 3 approaches to the coming futurism as Globalists, Totalitarians, and Anarchists. (thank you Wired magazine).

Globalists embrace the future. Totalitarians are afraid of the future, but accept the inevitablity of it's coming; they are determined to control it at any cost. Anarchists are in denial about the future, and just want it to go away, or leave them alone. These three forces are present around us today, and I know you want to pin the Totalitarianism on the Republicans, but it's not that simple. Each of the two parties has all three of these tendencies within themselves, and this is what is tearing our parties apart. The problem is not that the leftwing or rightwing blogosphere is unwilling to reach toward the Center. The problem is that the Center is a different party! People hurl the term Republicrat as an insult, but it's true.

There are now TWO Centrist parties, who have more in common with each other than with the "core" of their old identities. These Centrist parties are Globalists. They are socially moderate, fiscally moderate, and internationalists. They will eventually tear away from their Democrat and Republican parties, and merge together. Let's just think of them as a new Republicrat party.

There are two Totalitarian parties also. We are of course very familar with the Republican one, they are the Neocons. The Democrat Totalitarians are harder to point out. Many of them have already left the Democrats and joined the Republicans; some of them left for third parties. Some of them you can indentify yourself if you look hard enough. These people are afraid of the future, but resigned to it coming. They however feel the need to control it totally. They need all of the hi-tech gadgets they can get, because the citizens are dangerous. They are more afraid of the globalists outside the country than the citizenry, but you never know who you can trust. Better just monitor everybody! These people are socially conservative, but fiscally liberal, oddly enough...after all, all of that surveillance costs money! If I had to speculate, I'd say that the what is left of the Republican party after the dust settles from the Bush era scandals will remain a Neocon Totalitarian party...just much smaller than it is today.

The Anarchists are more complex. Partly because they are secretive. Partly because they are nostalgic for the good old days. Partly because they are refuseniks when it comes to the future. On the Republican side, we have the ultra-rightists crazy religious folk, like Pat Robertson. These people will end up leaving the Republican party, feeling betrayed by both it's globalist Republicrats, and by the Totalitarians who were way too interested in spending sprees and spying on people. We can call these people the Rapturists, just to make discussion easier. They are socially very conservative, and fiscally varied, but usually conservative...some are almost communist though, in the sense of rejecting capitalism. Religion is their big issue, fiscal issues are secondary. They are of course isolationist. The Democrats have their own nutjobs though. Some people mistake them for hippies. But they aren't really. These are the people who are trying to live off-grid (google it!), who aren't rejecting technology per se, but who are using it to disconnect themselves from the future society. They don't hate the Internet. But they are using the Internet with a deep sense of paranoia and distrust. And probably only when they have to. We can call these people Neohippies. They are socially liberal, fiscally liberal, isolationist of course. Many of them have left the US to live abroad, many of them have retreated to rural areas, and avoid the cities like the plague.

Where does this leave progressives? Progressives are an interesting combination of globalist and anarchist. Some are more of one than the other, it's not a monolithic party descriptor. But this is why Progressives are feeling so unrepresented today...because they aren't! The DNC is a centrist globalist party. Progressives are anarcho-globalist leftists. It's only a matter of time before they split.

This leaves us with the following parties when all of the dust finally clears: Neo-hippies, Progressives, Republicrats, Neocons, Rapturists. How these will combine with the Third parties out there already remains to be seen. But I'd predict that The Libertarians will remain virtually intact. Others are bound to merge together. We're basically looking at between 6-10 major parties for our information age political landscape.

And this is where the Constitutional Crisis comes into play. Our current system is completely unable to deal with having 10 or more parties out there. Look at how poorly it is representing the "third parties" today. The difference is of course that the number of people registered in these 10 parties will be orders of magnitude higher than anything even the Libertarians have now. We will have to ditch the Electoral system completely. (Good riddance, the founders only included it because they didn't trust the potentially uneducated farm folk). But how will we handle a "winning" party that only gets 12 percent of the vote? We had Bush 'win' with under 50 percent, and look at all the drama that caused. (Ignore any voter fraud issues for the moment when you think about it).

This is the basic problem coming. We will need to address how we handle a multi-party election when everything is set up for only 2 parties. Do we become a parliamentary democracy? Do we kludge together some stop-gap system and keep what we have? I leave the answer to someone smarter than me! hehe

Hello There

2006-01-23T21:49:00.000-08:00

Hello there. I'm pretty new to this blogging thing. I've been online since around 1988, when being online meant you used a blindingly fast 2400 baud modem to connect to a pay service. Mine was Compuserve. All you saw was their content, and whatever user community there was; Compuserve's was actually pretty vibrant.

Then a few years passed, I moved to a new state, I got a new computer, and there was a real Internet out there. But it was very small. The whole worldwide web thing was brand new, and totally sucked. When people said Internet, they usually meant Usenet, or ftp. I spent lots of time on Usenet. If you've never seen Usenet I highly recommend it, just to see how weird the digital landscape is. I haven't bothered with it regularly though for a few years, but it's not quite as vibrant as it once was.

I had heard about blogs a while ago, but it never really occured to me to want to bother with them. Reading a bunch of rants is just not as appealing now to me as it once was, hehe, and I wasn't quite narcississtic enough to want to blather on and on myself.

But then something extraordinary happened. And it has nothing to do with blogs or Internet discussion groups per se. But some more background first. I'm a news junkie. I love reading the news. I'm fascinated by what's going on around the world, in particular. I hate newspapers, primarily because they are so cumbersome to read unless you are inside, sitting at a table, and I always seem to get covered with ink when I read them. But they cover lots of news, and in depth, so I used to read them often. Magazines are much easier to read, not messy, but tend to be more about their advertising than about any news. Anyone who read Wired when it first came out, and who has seen it lately, knows exactly what I mean. Television. Well local news was always useless. But at least the weekend Talking Head Shows were usually excellent, and the nightly "International" programs were usually good. When CNN debuted, I fell in love. 24 hour news! How cool was that. Sure, the news wasn't as in depth, but goodness you could see it continuously. And CNN came across as remarkably unbiased.

So there I was, happily watching CNN for news, watching the Talking Head network shows on the weekends, but gradually abandoning network nightly news, because it was increasingly irrelevant. And then news moved online. It wasn't terribly good in the beginning, so I kept watching CNN, but Internet news got better, and not only was it available 24 hours a day, but I could read the exact stories I wanted, and skip all the junk I didn't care about, like Sports news. I then started hitting some foreign news websites, just because as good as CNN was, it was a little weak on International News, and I wanted a local perspective anyway. I also started reading GLBT news online, since CNN just never reported gay news (and still rarely ever does).

When September 11 happened, I was at home and watched it on CNN on tv. I woke up early enough (Pacific Time) to see a big commotion, but didn't know exactly what had happened, because all of the channels were broadcasting live coverage of something that looked like a train wreck from a great distance (turned out to be the Pentagon burning). I went online and found out exactly what was going on, and was able to watch the second plane hit the WTC in real time on tv. I spent the most of the rest of the day checking websites and channel surfing simultaneously.

I'm not sure exactly when it happened, but at some point over the last year, CNN just stopped reporting the news. Oh yeah, they still have 24 hour coverage of the Runaway Bride, and I know more about the poor couple where the man fell off of that cruise ship than I do about most of my family. Anderson Cooper originally was doing some really great investigative reporting, but his shows just stopped being about anything important at about the same time. So here I was, doing my usual online news quest, CNN reporting nothing at all interesting happening, 365Gay.com was reporting all kinds of gay news, and Ha'aretz Daily was reporting things that CNN didn't seem to even know about. I ended up having to do a Google search to find more news about something Ha'aretz reported on only briefly, and that search led me to a blog. And all I could say was Wow! All of these stories that the main stream media was either completely unaware of, or deliberately refusing to report on, like CNN refused to report on GLBT news.

So anyway here I am, a news junkie who started out just trying to see the news, but who found a bizarre, creepy America where the press has stopped reporting news, and was only publishing Republican talkingpoints masqerading as news. And where the news was being reported by people like me. I never wanted to be a journalist particularly. But here I am.

This blog will be more about how I interpret things that are going on in the world. I'm assuming anyone reading this has read the news blogs linked to here. For the record I'm somewhere between a Libertarian and a Liberal (most recent Political Compass scores of -3.25 Econonomic issues, -7.28 Social issues). The linked blogs are all either liberal or progressive slanted news. (I'm sure there must be conservative blogs out there that is trying to report objectively, but I haven't found it. And since I'm not conservative at all on social issues, and only conservative on certain economic issues, I don't really care to read a conservative blog anyway. The hysterical ranting wingnut blogs are of course completely uninteresting to me.) Topics covered will likely be some political analysis, some social analysis (religion in particular), futurism, and any other strange little thing that is obsessing me at the moment hehe.