Another interview: This time John asks the questions...

Okay, here's one more round of the "five questions" interview meme. This time John, from Mind on Fire has posed the questions. I think he missed his calling; he asks great questions and gets his interviewee to talk (write, in this case) entirely too much.


If you could be a character from any SF series which would you choose and why?

I’d be Mendoza, from Kage Baker’s “Company” novels. It sort of frightens me what that says about my psychological makeup, but nonetheless…. Mendoza, if you haven’t met her, is a cyborg, an immortal rescued from the not-so-loving arms of the Spanish Inquisition by Facilitator Joseph. Joseph is employed by The Company which, in the 24th century has discovered not only how to make infants and young children immortal, but how to travel in time. As a cyborg, Mendoza also works, as a Preserver. Her specialty is botany. Mendoza, however, is not a good cyborg. She doesn’t much like the Company, the Company wishes that she had never been made a cyborg, and she just doesn’t behave. Which is why she gets banished to around 150,000 years ago - that way, she’s out of the way and can’t cause the Company any more trouble - or so it hopes.

So, as to the why…Maybe it’s because Mendoza seems to embody one of my favorite sayings: she’s old enough to know better - way old enough - but is still young enough not to care. She knows she’s going to get in trouble, but she goes ahead and follows her heart anyway. Other than that, I don’t know. All I know is that I connected faster with Mendoza than I have with just about any fictional character I can think of.

Fill in the following: I am a [blank] junkie. Explain.

I am a music junkie. I need my music, and it doesn’t much matter what kind it is. I don’t really love hip-hop (in fact I’ve been known to express the opinion that while hip-hop is art, it isn’t really music as far as I’m concerned), and country music isn’t my favorite (but I listen to a lot more of it than I used to, since I’ve been learning more about all the cross-pollination between country and rock), but I’ll even listen to those if there’s nothing else.

I trace this addiction back to February 9, 1964. I was seven years old and spent part of the evening hiding behind the piano (it was a Sunday and I had school the next day, so I was supposed to be in bed by 7:30) watching the Beatles in their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. Changed my life. After that, while all of my little fellow and sister second-graders were running home after school to watch cartoons, I was running home to watch the daily local L. A. imitations of American Bandstand. Ever since then, if I go too long without hearing some music I get just about as cranky as I do if I go too long without reading, which would have been the alternate answer for this question.

Quick! What were the last seven books you read?

Now, this one is easy, but only because I’ve been keeping a list this year. You’ve caught me in a cycle of reading more of what my best friend calls “popcorn books” than I usually do, but that’s fine. Reading is for fun, too. So, here is the list, slightly annotated, of the last seven books I’ve read, beginning with the most recently finished:

All Saints, Liam Callanan (2007) - fiction, and a very loopy book - that‘s the best word I can think of to describe it. Most of the characters, teachers and students at a Roman Catholic high school, are pretty dysfunctional. But Callanan manages to portray them as fully human even when they are doing things that are not admirable. Oh, and John…this book takes place in your neck of the woods; the fictional school is in Newport Beach and UC Irvine even makes a couple of quick appearances.

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, Charles C. Mann (2005; trade paperback edition, 2006) - Anthropology/archaeology/history. Mann discusses new ideas of the life the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere led before and at contact with Europeans. Excellent book. I highly recommend it. (See my review, below)

Tutu Deadly, Natalie M. Roberts (2007) - fiction; of all things, a comical murder mystery. This one is supposed to be the first of a continuing series featuring a dance teacher in Utah who “doesn’t always play well with the other adults”.

The Collar, Jonathan Englert (2006) - Anthropology/sociology/religion. Follows a year in the lives of several Roman Catholic seminarians, very frank without being dismissive of the religious journeys of the men portrayed. If I were teaching a class in the anthropology or sociology of religion, this is one of the books I’d teach.

Michelangelo’s Notebook, Paul Christopher (2005) - Da Vinci Code territory; very much popcorn reading. So much so that I don’t remember much of the plot even though it hasn’t been long since I read it.

The Alexandria Link, Steve Berry (2007) - Also in the mold of Dan Brown, except with better writing and plotting. The protagonist is an ex-government lawyer on the trail of what really happened to the great library at Alexandria. Of course, the bad guys want to get their first. Again, popcorn reading, but of a better quality.

Hotel California: The true-life adventures of Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young, Mitchell, Taylor, Browne, Ronstadt, Geffen, the Eagles, and their many friends, Barney Hoskins (2006) - Music; Hoskins is a music writer and critic, and he’s really done his homework here, having at one time or another interviewed most of the people he writes about. Frankly, there’s a lot of gossip here, but especially if you love the music of this era and genre as I do there is also a good deal of deep background on who influenced who musically, who worked with who on what music. I liked this book a lot.

Why did you become Mormon? Why did you leave?

I became Mormon mostly, I have to admit, because I knew a lot of Mormons at the time - I was baptized when I was 16. But, I had also gone to seminary for about a year with a friend and I figured that what the Mormons were teaching made just as much sense as what I’d heard in any other church I’d ever gone to. I was especially impressed by the second-chance thing, aka baptism for the dead. I’d had a bad experience previously visiting a church and getting into an argument with the Sunday school teacher when she said that people who died without hearing about Christ were just out of luck and were destined to spend eternity burning in hell. Oddly, when I went to participate in baptisms for the dead in the L.A. temple I was so creeped out by it that I didn’t want to ever go to the temple again under any circumstances.

When I left for good (I was in and out, active and inactive, for an extended period of time), it was after a revelation I had one Sunday afternoon as I was teaching a Relief Society lesson. As I was talking, I realized that I didn’t believe most of what I was saying, that I was being a hypocrite, and that I just couldn’t do that anymore and have any respect for myself. I don’t know why it happened just then. I’d been having arguments with myself about doctrine, about custom in the church, about everything about the church, for years. I’d literally be alone in the car and arguing with myself about stuff like blacks and the priesthood, about the place and role of women in the church, about various points of doctrine and history. But that afternoon was it. I just couldn’t do it anymore. And I never went back.

What world event would you like to see in your lifetime?

My first instinct, when I read this question, was to flutter my hand in my best beauty queen/Miss Congeniality imitation (I adore that movie) and say something like “world peace”. And that would be wonderful. And politically correct. But if I were really to be completely honest, as much as I’d like to see everybody just get along, what I would really like to see is proof…convincing, irrefutable proof that there is other intelligent life in the universe. Heck, maybe then it would turn out that Ronald Reagan was right about something and that knowing there was someone else out there would help bring us together, make us realize that the lifeboat comparison is really true - we are all in this together and if we keep fighting, we’re all going to drown. Is that what they call having one’s cake and eating it too?

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Again, as before...it's your turn. If you would like to be interviewed by me (littlemissattitude) and pass this meme along, here's what you need to do:

1) Leave me a comment telling me you want to be interviewed. Either leave your e-mail address in the comment or e-mail me at ElnFrei at aol dot com with your addy.

2) I will respond by e-mailing you five questions of my choice.

3) You answer the questions in your blog.

4) When you post your answers, include this explanation in the post and offer to interview someone else.

5) You send five questions of your choice to those who ask to be interviewed.

Happy Birthday, Debbie Sparks...

It's May 9. That means that it's Debbie Sparks's birthday. I almost feel guilty remembering that, because I don't remember most of my friends' birthdays, even those I've been friends with virtually all my life. I only knew Debbie Sparks for two school years. Yet I always remember her birthday.

There's a reason for that, though. The second year I knew her, 1970, when we were in the 8th grade, her birthday fell on a Saturday. She had a huge party in the afternoon, and then all of us were off to a concert at the local high school that evening. It was a big deal, too, because it was a big name group - The Grass Roots. You might not know the name, but if you listen to Classic Rock stations you've probably heard some of their music: "Midnight Confessions", "Let's Live For Today", "Sooner or Later". Anyway, it was around the time of their biggest popularity, yet they were playing a show in the gym of the high school, a benefit for the district's PTA's. I know how it came about...the drummer had grown up in town, and someone had used their connections. It was a big thing for me, as they were my favorite band that year. And how often does your favorite band play a show in what will be your high school gym? I still listen to their music on a fairly regular basis.

All that is an aside, though, important now simply because it is the reason I remember Debbie Sparks's birthday. Not long after that, Debbie and her family moved to Oklahoma. We wrote letters back and forth for awhile, and I talked to her on the phone a couple of times after she moved, but it wasn't that long before we lost touch. But still, on May 9 every year I wonder what has happened to her. The last time I heard from her, I think, she was in college, seeing some guy - fairly seriously, it seemed - and simply living her life. I don't know if they ever married, but I assume she got married at some point. Had kids. Most people do. There's a fairly good chance that she's a grandmother by now.

So...there's next to no chance Debbie will read this. But still, Happy Birthday Debbie Sparks. Hope it was a good one. Hope you're having a good life.

Boys behaving badly...

I don’t want to be in the position of promoting or perpetuating stereotypes…of males or anyone else. I certainly don’t like it when other folks do that with stereotypes of females. So I’ll say this right up front: Most men mature right on schedule, while some women never grow up. On the other hand, sometimes I just have to wonder…

Is it testosterone? Is it something on the Y-chromosome?

Yesterday evening, on the way to the bank and the library, I got stuck at a traffic light next to a car full of boys. I use that word - “boys” - deliberately, even though I never looked over at the car and so I have no way of knowing how old they were. You’ll understand why I didn’t look in just a minute. However, from their voices, I would imagine that they were all - it sounded like three or four of them - somewhere in their mid to late teens.

As soon as they realized that there were women in the next car (mine) and that our windows were down (at around six p.m. it was still around 90 degrees F, and gas is much too expensive to use the car’s air conditioning), they started in, very loud. At least every other word was an F-bomb. There were disgustingly graphic descriptions of sex acts and cannibalism. It was a very long light, and they went on and on and on.

I refused to even acknowledge that I heard them, since that was what they so obviously wanted. To shock and to provoke a reaction. Sorry boys; I wasn’t shocked, and you had just proved how infantile you can act. I did wonder if their parents have any idea exactly how rude and vile their sons can be (not likely, and I doubt they would believe it if someone told them). I had a fantasy of washing their mouths out with soap - I’m not a prude, and I’d be lying if I tried to claim that I never use the word “fuck” - but what was coming out of their mouths was particularly vile. The light changed, finally. I suppose they went on to annoy someone else at the next light.

Fast forward five minutes, as I turned into the parking lot at the bank. The bank was, of course, closed by that time, and the parking lot was empty. Just as I was approaching the parking spaces closest to the ATMs, a car turned into another driveway into the lot, sped up to beat me, and made a tire-screeching u-turn into the spot I was about to take. It was an obviously expensive car…I want to say a Jag, but I’m not very good at identifying makes and models…and the man who emerged was in his mid-forties and dressed as if he belongs to the country club set, or aspires to it. I guess he felt it would be an affront to his manhood or something if he let another driver take the closest parking space or something. Surely it couldn’t have been the whole step or two more he would have had to walk had he parked in the space I ended up taking. The parking space isn’t even the issue here. As I said, the difference was a matter of a couple of steps. Not a big deal as far as I was concerned. The issue, rather, is how willing he was to take the chance of a collision - if I hadn’t been paying attention, I would have hit him - just to get his way.

It isn’t merely a question of chronological age, as these two examples show. I don’t know what it is a question of, to be honest. A need to be acknowledged as dominant? Sheer selfishness? Just a bid for attention? The anthropologist in me wonders if anyone has studied this, has established if men in our culture here in the US really do have an ingrained need to act in these sorts of ways at a greater rate than women. Or was I just in a position twice within five minutes to witness these various little male tantrums? Because that’s what they were in both cases, I think, when it comes right down to it.

Review: "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus", Charles C. Mann

I just finished reading 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann (Vintage Books, 2006; Knopf hardback edition, 2005). If you have any interest at all in anthropology or archaeology, or in the history of the Western Hemisphere, especially that period before the Europeans arrived, you will probably find this book fascinating.

Mann addresses several topics here. One is the idea that the Western Hemisphere was much more populous at European contact than was previously believed. It is possible, he writes, that there were more people in the Western Hemisphere in 1491 than there were in Europe, and that at the city of Tenochtitlan - the Aztec capital - had more inhabitants at contact than did any European city of the time. Mann also looks at the ongoing arguments over when the first inhabitants of the hemisphere arrived and how and when - and how fast - they spread out over the land. In addition, he presents new evidence that, far from being an untouched land on which the native inhabitants made no mark, the Western Hemisphere had been extensively transformed by those who lived here. The reason the land appeared so pristine when settlers arrived after the initial 100 to 200 year period of conquest was that so many of the inhabitants had been killed off, mostly by the spread of diseases carried by the first Europeans to arrive, perhaps as much as 90 to 95 percent of the population in some areas.

Previous to European contact, Mann writes, the high population of the hemisphere had turned the land into a “managed” environment. However, by the time settlers arrived so much of the population had died that there were not enough people left to keep the environment under control. Farmed land was overgrown by forest, for example on the east coast of what is now the United States. Populations of species such as bison and passenger pigeons, which had been kept to manageable numbers by the Indians, exploded when hunting declined along with the human population. He even presents new evidence that the Amazon region, long thought to have been sparsely settled by small and unsophisticated groups, never extensively farmed due to the unsuitability of the soil, was actually was one of those highly managed areas that for thousands of years supported large, fairly advanced cultures that subsisted mostly by farming rather than by hunting and gathering. Some of this information has not been welcomed, especially by environmentalists, including the idea that part of the management of the Amazon was done through what he calls a “slash and char” process that allowed the inhabitants to add charcoal to the soil and enhanced its suitability for farming. But, Mann writes, this wasn’t the wholesale burning that modern developers have practiced to their own economic gain and showing evidence that the process was used is not the same thing as supporting what has gone on in the region more recently.

While Mann writes that more and more anthropologists and archaeologists are coming to accept the new evidence he reports and the new picture of conditions in the Western Hemisphere before European contact that this evidence supports, there is still significant dissent to these new views. He presents both sides of the debate even though it is fairly clear that he favors the new paradigm. He also proposes that there are political reasons why some individuals, both in and out of the anthropological community, cling to the old view that there were few people here when the Europeans arrived, and that most of them were unsophisticated both culturally and technologically. This old view, he argues, makes the European occupation of the hemisphere more palatable than having to face the possibility that they came and took over land that was already possessed by large and sophisticated civilizations that were in some cases different only in detail and not in substance from those in the Eastern Hemisphere.

Mann, a science writer for such publications as Science and The Atlantic Monthly is a good writer who presents the stories he tells with wit and humanity. The arguments he presents for his premises are quite convincing, for the most part. He has documented his research extensively - the book contains 52 pages of endnotes and the bibliography runs to 58 pages. Obviously, he does not expect the reader to take his word for the evidence he presents, and in fact in the Afterword to the paperback edition of the book he explicitly states that he “wanted to have a fuller bibliography than is usual in popular works - I wanted to point people to the original sources, so that readers who were interested could find out more.” There is clearly more to be said on these subjects, and newer and even more extensive evidence could modify or overturn some of the ideas Mann presents and advocates for. Such is the nature of science, and of history. Still, this overview of the subject as it stands is interesting, valuable, and a very good read.

Thanks to Bored in Vernal, I get to pretend that I'm famous

I've always wanted to be interviewed. In fact, I used to lay in bed at night and imagine being the subject of one of Rolling Stone magazine's famous (or perhaps infamous) interviews. Yeah, even though I have no discernable musical talent. Ah, well...they interview writers too. So, when the opportunity came up on Bored in Vernal's blog, requesting requests to be interviewed, I couldn't quite help myself. So...

1) Britney Spears recently "acted out" by shaving her head. What would you do publicly to "act out?"

I have to admit, with a great deal of embarassment, that I have acted out at least once in public. In my defense, this happened nearly twenty years ago. It had to do with a broken daisywheel for a typewriter (yeah, I'm old) and an assignment due early the next morning in a class where the instructor did not accept late papers. It was after closing time for places like typewriter repair stores, and so I started calling around to the big chain office supply stores, which stay open somewhat later. I finally found one that had the particular daisywheel (for those of you who only know computers, the typeface for the typewriter I owned was mounted on a daisywheel...broken wheel meant no typing) and confirmed that they would still be open by the time I drove the thirty miles to that store. By the time I got there it was nearly nine p.m. I walked in and looked for the the thing on the shelves. They didn't have the one I wanted. So I asked one of the clerks about it. She didn't know, so I asked to talk to the manager. "Oh, she said, "we don't carry those. Never have." I explained that I had called first and that I had been assured that they did carry that particular item and that it was in stock before I drove the thirty miles to purchase it. I would have been fine if the manager hadn't laughed; I would probably have been fine even with the laughter if she had bothered to apologize. But she didn't; she just thought it was really funny. I lost it at that point; and threw a little fit...no, a big fit...right there in the store. My poor mother was so embarassed; she just walked off as if she didn't know me, and I don't blame her a bit.

But, to answer the specific question, I actually thought that Britney chose perhaps the best way a woman can possibly act out. It is dramatic, because in our culture women - especially young, famous women - just do not shave their head unless they're doing it for a role in a film or are undergoing chemotherapy. It really makes the point that "I am not happy." Yet it isn't a permanent commitment. Yeah, you'll be bald for awhile, but hair does grow back and in a few months you'll be well on your way back to those long, flowing locks that represent femininity in most Western cultures. So, if I felt the need to act out in a really dramatic way, I think I might do exactly what Britney did. Minus the drugs and the underwearless partying, of course.

2) Which of the First Ladies do you most admire, and why?

That's a difficult one, BiV. I don't actually know much about historical first ladies, so I'll have to confine my answer to the first ladies I remember. I think I have to say that Betty Ford gets the most of my admiration. While her husband was president, she was so up-front about her attitudes about her children and about the various problems she had at a time when first ladies were pretty much still expected to be seen and not heard. And she held her own even when she came in for a great deal of criticism for some of the things she said. I also need to go on record that while I didn't have much admiration at all for Nancy Reagan when she was First Lady (I'm still convinced that she drove people to drugs with that "Just Say No" campaign), I had to revise my opinion of her to an extent as I watched the quiet dignity which she maintained through the nearly interminable activities after her husband died. She showed a great deal of class at a very difficult time.

3) What is the perfect age for a woman?

This might be a weasly way of answering this one, but I think whatever age a woman is, is perfect. I don't think we "lose value", as some would have us believe we do, when we start to show outward signs of aging, or when we leave our child-bearing years (I'm getting pretty close to that one now), or when we reach the point where we might have to have some help getting around and doing things on our own. I think we are perfect just the way we are, no matter where we are in our individual life journeys.

4) What is in your purse at this moment?

Just a sec. I'm going to have to go look. Okay, there's my wallet, which pretty much holds the ususal things. A bottle of Tylenol. Hairbrush and comb. Calculator. Several receipts from various places; most of them are still from my recent trip to Southern California. Two scrunchies, one yellow and one red. Several paper condiment cups from Long John Silver's. I picked up a few more than I needed and then just threw them in the purse rather than throwing them away or leaving them to be cleaned up by the staff. A partially empty back of Luden's wild cherry throat drops. Receipt from my most recent payment for car insurance. Reservation confirmation for my motel from the trip to SoCal. Nine thirty-nine cent stamps with Ella Fitzgerald on them, still unused. Proof that I paid my car registration, because the postal service never bothered to deliver the sticker that goes on my license plate (just in case I get stopped). One random piece of yellow paper with an old shopping list on it. One unused (still wrapped in cellophane) toothpick. Shoulder strap that can attach to my wallet in case I want to carry just that rather than my whole purse. A spare feminine napkin, just in case. Earpiece and mic for my cell phone. Empty aspirin bottle (to put my mother's meds in if we are going to be away from home when its time for her to take them).

That's it. However, whenever I leave to go somewhere, my cell phone goes into the purse, along with my journal, which I bought just for the fact that it fits in my purse, and - if it fits - my current carry-around book.

5) Describe your best friend in high school. Would you still be best friends today?

My best friend in high school, Debbie, has actually been one of my best friends since we were both three years old. Additionally, her father and my father grew up together, so we are really second-generation friends. She is tall (6 feet in her stocking feet), funny, extremely talented artistically and musically, bright, a wonderful photographer, and a loving mother. Although she lives in the English Midlands now, having married an Englishman in the early 1980s, we are still in contact and I still consider her to be one of my best friends...one of the few people who know the real me and who I would not hesitate to tell anything to and who I trust completely.

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Now it's your turn. If you would like to be interviewed by me (littlemissattitude) and pass this meme along, here's what you need to do:

1) Leave me a comment telling me you want to be interviewed. Either leave your e-mail address in the comment or e-mail me at ElnFrei at aol dot com with your addy.

2) I will respond by e-mailing you five questions of my choice.

3) You answer the questions in your blog.

4) When you post your answers, include this explanation in the post and offer to interview someone else.

5) You send five questions of your choice to those who ask to be interviewed.

I think I've aged...

It has just come to my attention that my profile here claims that I'm 250 years old. LOL. And while I'll admit that I feel about that old some days, when I've been fighting with my computer at work, I haven't been around quite that long.

But it occurs to me to ask...what would you do if you found out that you would live forever, no matter what? Would you be elated? Would you try to find a way out of it? Would you suddenly start living far more dangerously than you ever would knowing that your time on earth is finite? Would being immortal be a good thing or a bad thing, in your opinion? And, would you tell anyone?

Also, what would you do if you found out that someone you know is immortal and in fact had been around for thousands of years? If someone told you that, would you believe them? Would ask them to prove it? How could they prove it to your satisfaction?

Well, I think that's enough questions for a Saturday morning. Let me know if you have any thoughts on immortality and its implications.

The Art of the Nap

I took a nap this afternoon. It was a lovely thing, at least an hour and a half long. I felt sort of like a cat stretched out in a pool of sunlight, a slight breeze wafting in through the open window keeping me from being too warm to be comfortable.

Yeah, there were other things I could have been - should have been - doing, but it was the perfect afternoon for it. I had struggled with work, not being able to find the updated information that I needed for an article I was writing, which left me feeling stressed and frustrated. I needed to relax and a nice, late lunch hadn't done the trick. I was trying to do some reading after lunch, but I couldn't settle to it and laying there in the sun my eyes just kept shutting of their own accord. I could have gotten up and done something productive...I have a load of laundry sitting waiting to be done...but the nap seemed like the thing I needed most.

I don't usually give in and take naps. As it is, I often complain that I need to figure out a way to live without sleep, because they aren't going to shoehorn any more hours in the day. There's all that stuff to do, all those books to read, all that writing to do, after all. But I got spoiled last week. I was on vacation, out of town, and felt no guilt at all about laying down every afternoon for at least a short nap. So, now that I'm back on my regular schedule...up at 7 am, if not earlier...I find myself wanting to sleep for awhile in the afternoon.

I'm really beginning to think that the cultures who practice the siesta have the right idea. Rest a little in the middle of the day, stay up a little later at night. I get more done late, anyway, but it's difficult to function late when I have to get up so early. Maybe I'll have to schedule a nap...even if not one of epic length as today's was...more afternoons a week. After all, summer is coming. Around here, it's too hot to do anything in the middle of the afternoon anyway.

Holiday silliness...

Holidays make me do strange things sometimes. Things like actually posting the results of silly online quizes. Like this one:

You Are Jelly Beans

For you, Easter is all about fun and sweet treats. None of that Jesus dying on a cross stuff!

What Easter Candy Are You?

The scary thing about this one is that it is completely accurate. Jelly beans are, in fact, my favorite thing about Easter. Used to be chocolate Easter bunnies, but since I can't eat chocolate any more (a long story for another time) jelly beans are it, as far as I'm concerned.

And, no I don't mean all those fancy Jelly Belly beans in their plethora of exotic flavors. Give me yellow (lemon), orange, and white generic jelly beans and you can have the rest. The red ones are too spicy, non-vegetable green food in general doesn't thrill me (won't catch me eating green pancakes on St. Patrick's Day), and the black licorice ones are just nasty...although I have a friend who loves those, so when we worked together, I would just give those to her. In addition, the idea of bubblegum or popcorn flavored jelly beans...eewwww. Just, eewwwww.

As far as the other, more serious part of the result of the quiz, I really try to remain respectful of my observant, more traditional Christian brothers and sisters and their beliefs surrounding Easter. However, I have to admit that I just don't understand the whole concept behind blood sacrifice. I guess I can't grasp why God couldn't think of a less gruesome way to save his children. I've given the whole idea a lot of thought over the years, a lot, and so far I just can't make it make any sense for me. I don't mean that to sound disrespectful, honestly. It just hasn't ever made any sense to me.

Be that as it may, I hope all of you had a wonderful Easter holiday, observed in the manner which you feel is most appropriate.

And I hope it involved lots of jelly beans.

By the way, I found this on Sr. Susan Rose's Musings of Discerning Woman, which you can reach via my links.

Just a little personal aside...

Maybe it's just me. It's been a long week.

So, maybe I was just in a bad mood when I walked into the minimart this evening to use the ATM (I was on my way out to dinner and I prefer not to use cards in restaurants if I can avoid it). But this really bugged the crap out of me.

I was trying to get to the ATM, which is the far corner of the store, and as I walked past the counter a woman, not looking where she was going as she backed up, nearly stepped on me. I tried to be polite. I said, "Excuse me," and waited for her to move so I could get through. She looked around and said, in a semi-nasty tone, "Well, I didn't see you." But she did move, just enough so that I could get by her. Which was fine. Maybe she'd had a bad day, too. But, after I had moved far enough away from her so that she had to say it loudly enough that everyone in the store could hear, she said, "Maybe you should wear a bell." Slightly nastier tone that time.

Excuse me?

I held my peace. Not that I didn't think of about five other things that I could have said back, all of which would have taken me right down to her level. But I didn't say them because it would have been rude, provocation aside. I went ahead, waited for my turn at the machine, used it, and left.

What I don't understand is why some people feel that they have to be needlessly rude to people they don't even know, and who haven't done anything to them. Maybe it goes back to upbringing. Maybe we're all like those rats in experiments where they put too many rats together in too small a space and they started, after awhile, to tear each other up, and we just do it verbally sometimes instead of physically. I don't know.

I do know that it seems that, more and more, being polite seems to be considered a sign of weakness...the moral equivalent of a "Kick me" sign, in neon, on top of one's head. Whatever the causes of it, I think it's a shame.

Anyway, if you've got any answers to why this is so, drop a comment.

Book review: "Hotel California" by Barney Hoskyns

I just finished reading Hotel California: The True-life Adventures of Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young, Browne, Ronstadt, Geffen, the Eagles, and Their Many Friends, (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2006), by British music critic and writer Barney Hoskyns. And I mean I just finished it, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes ago. And I have to recommend it to anyone with any interest in the Los Angeles folk/country rock/singer-songwriter movement of the 1960s and early 1970s.

This is a very good book. It’s quite gossipy, and no one here comes out looking like an angel. However, it also looks at this group of musicians, most of whom lived in L.A.’s Laurel Canyon for at least part of the period covered, and the various managers, producers, record executives, and hangers-on surrounding them, in a comprehensive and appreciative manner. Hoskyns talked to just about everyone involved (the list of those he interviewed runs to nearly a solid page) and relied on interviews by others of those who were inaccessible or not interested in talking. From the looks of the list, which appears in the preface, almost everyone who was still alive at the time was willing to talk.

The amazing thing…the most amazing, I should say, because there were a few amazing things here…to me was the sheer amount of cross-fertilization there was during the time covered, musically speaking. (There were other forms of cross-fertilization - and a lot of it - going on as well, but that is in the realm of that gossip I wrote about, above). At some point, it seems, everyone worked with everyone, even if they didn’t exactly get along that well all the time. I grew up during that time, listening to some of that music, and I knew about some of the collaborations that took place, but I had no idea of the extent of it. For a little while, it was a real community, making a lot of very good music.

One of the things I like best about Hoskyns’s book is that it doesn’t just cover the headliners. All the folks you’ve heard of and whose music you know are in here…CSNY, Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, Don Henley, Glenn Frey, Jackson Browne. But so are the ones you might have heard of but whose music you might not know, or might not know you know…Gram Parsons, J. D. Souther, Chris Hillman, Van Dyke Parks, and a host of others. There are guest appearances by none other than Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and a few others. And there are the ones who you’ve probably never heard of but who were, according to the information here, integral members of the community. They all have to be here, to make the story complete.

There were even things I could connect to personally in the book. When I attended the March 25, 1973 performance of Neil Young’s Time Fades Away tour at the Fourm in Inglewood (34 years ago tonight, as I write this, I just now realized) I had no idea of the drama that had accompanied the tour. That is covered briefly here, and made me sit up and take notice as a place where my own experience crossed, however briefly and on the surface, with the events of the book. It was a hell of a show, by the way, with Linda Ronstadt as the opening act and guest appearances by David Crosby and Graham Nash. I’ll forever remember the idiot in the audience shouting out a request at one point between songs. Young’s answer: “It’s my concert, and I’ll sing whatever I damn well please.” The audience, myself included, cheered the answer.

The book is bittersweet, especially as Hoskyns covers the casualties of the period, writing about the ones who didn’t survive the excesses of the era. But it is also heartening to realize that the relationships that seemed at times during that era to be irretrievably broken, didn’t really mean the end of the music that some of those folks made together. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, who certainly had their ups and downs both individually and in terms of their interpersonal relationships, have toured as recently as last year. The same with the Eagles.

At the end of the book, there is some coverage of how the music industry has changed since the time covered here. That got me to thinking. At that time, if an artist didn’t hit right away, their label might well stick with them, let their music mature into something that could be really successful. Today, on the other hand, the industry is just that: a corporate enterprise that only considers the bottom line and has to issue a profits statement every quarter. It is an environment where there are very few second chances, and where what gets heard is not necessarily what is good but simply what makes money, even though it might only make money because millions of prepubescent girls buy the music because, as in the case of the boy bands, the singers are “cute”. Well, even back in the 60s and 70s, not everything that was good got heard and being “cute” definitely helped a singer or group get heard. But the very good point is made that in the singer-songwriter era there was still some room for conscience in the industry; it doesn’t seem to be the case much now.

At the very least, Hotel California is a good enough book that I’ve already got an earlier Hoskins book, Waiting for the Sun: Strange Days, Weird Scenes, and the Sound of Los Angeles, which takes a wider look at the L.A. music scene, already on request at the library.

And then there's the other reason I haven't been posting...

My lack of posts here recently doesn't have anything to do with a lack of things to write about, but rather with a proliferation of important issues and the fact that when I start to write about them I tend to get upset, stressed, and more than a little bent out of shape.

I guess it isn't much of a secret that I'm not really that happy with some of the directions I see my country, the good old US of A, going these days. Or, should I say, the way it is being led down a dangerous path by the current administration. I have some very strong views about some of the things that have been going on...Iraq and Afghanistan, an administration that leaks like a sieve when it thinks it will serve its ends, the efforts to pack government agencies with a bunch of ideologues, and more. I want to address these issues, but I want to do so from a logical, coherent point of view.

Unfortunately, lately, I just haven't been able to remain calm enough to write sensibly about it all. Not that I think there is anything wrong with getting upset about what has been going on in my government. Actually, I think distress is probably a healthy response to the dysfunction going on in Washington. But I prefer to write from logic rather from emotion, simply because arguments from emotion are not nearly as effective as arguments from logic. And so I've just refrained from writing about these issues at all.

I'm getting there, though. I'm working through the distress and frustration, and I think I'll have some things to say on the state of the world fairly soon.

Meanwhile, I've been reading some really good books, some of which have only been adding to my distress. But they've been adding to my store of knowledge from which to write from logic as well. Two books I've finished recently and would like to recommend are The Republican Noise Machine, by David Brock, and The Republican War on Science, by Chris Mooney.

As you can tell, there's a definite theme running through the two volumes. Brock takes as his subject the media which, he shows, is not biased toward the liberal end of the spectrum but to the conservative end. He points out that while reporters might be a bit more liberal socially than the US population at large, they are more conservative economically. And, despite that liberal bent on social issues, the reporters are not the ones who decide what gets reported on the air and printed in the papers...the job of deciding and approving editorial stances goes to management and ownership. And the owners of newspapers and broadcast media outlets are clearly conservative, both economically and socially. Added to that, the repeitition over the past few decades from the conservative media that the media is liberal has resulted in people actually starting to believe that, all evidence to the contrary. Brock points out the number of conservative pundits who get heard and published regularly as opposed to the number of liberal or progressive pundits who have a regular outlet for their opinions. The balance isn't even close to even, with the preponderance of domination going to the conservatives. And, as Brock shows, even some of the "liberal" commentators in the media aren't really all that liberal at all.

I think Brock's most important point is that the conservative media has succeeded in pushing the center so far to the right that what was considered conservative not so long ago is now seen as moderate. And those who were once considered liberal are now looked at as raging leftists, all without changing their views at all. I know that to be the truth. I have long considered myself to be quite moderate in my political views, but I find my opinions (which haven't changed all that much) now pushed farther and farther to the left. What is seen as liberal here in the US would be squarely in the conservative portion of the spectrum in most European nations.

Mooney's book is more narrowly focused on the steps that Republicans have taken in Congress and among the regulatory agencies to discredit and disenfranchise objective science as a force in governmental decision-making. By calling anything that doesn't favor corporate deregulation "junk science", by insisting on "equal time" in public school classrooms for so-called Intelligent Design, by arguing every point made by the scientific establishment on issues such as global warming, by editing scientific reports to conform with administration prejudices and forbidding scientists from speaking either to the press or to colleagues about scientific issues, the Republicans have endeavored to remove science as a component of the decision-making process within the government. Mooney goes into detail about how this has happened in relation to a number of issues. I recommend The Republican War on Science as an essential book for anyone who is concerned about how decisions get made in Washington, D.C. in regards to science and technology issues.

Too many blogs to read, too little time...

And I'm about to point you to a couple more.

It has been a month since I've posted here. I've come to the conclusion that I've been reading too many other blogs and not giving enough time to writing my own. Which is bad for this place, but actually pretty good for me, because I've been reading some pretty interesting stuff. So, I've added a couple of links that I think you all should check out.

First of all, there's The Brad Blog. Brad Friedman and his guest bloggers cover news about voting issues as well as other developments in the political world. Recently, there has been a lot of good coverage of the Libby trial and the issues arising from that, but his top issue continues to be issues concerning voting machines and the struggle to make sure that elections in the United States remain fair and protected from tampering.

The other new link will take you to Mind on Fire, which covers a variety of fascinating issues. That's one of the places where I've been spending a lot of time lately, not only reading their observations on faith, post-faith, and spirituality issues, but responding to these ideas as well. It's a small but active community that encourages an intelligent conversation on those and other issues.

Weekend Edition or, I spend Sunday morning with the headlines

I suppose most people look at the weekend as a slow time for news. Well, except for politicians who are trying to slip something through and issue their press releases so late on Friday that they don't hit the media in a meaningful way until Saturday. But sometimes I think that the most interesting news emerges on the weekend, when it has time come through all the weekday political news.

For instance, there's this: A new study presented Saturday before the American Assoication for the Advancement of Science claims that people in the United States know more about basic science than they did 20 years ago. The research, by Michigan State University professor Jon D. Miller, says that only 10 percent of the population knew enough about science to understand news articles reporting on scientific topics, but that by 2005 that number had reached 28 percent. That's still not a lot, but it definitely represents an advance. The study attributes most of that advance to the fact that college students are now required to take at least some science classes, no matter what their major.

Of course, a panel of researchers still expressed concern that more college students say now that they are "unsure" whether the theory of evolution or creationism represents the truth about how life has developed on the planet, and that more people believe in things like astrology and UFOs. They passed off the higher belief in "space aliens" on television shows such as The Twilight Zone and Star Trek that "endorsed a link between UFOs and alien spacecraft". This according to Carol Susan Losh, an associate professor at Florida State University.

Well, that last is kind of a conventient rationalization in my humble and nonprofessional opinion, especially considering the fact that establishment science hasn't really bothered to look into the issue of UFOs based on their perception that they couldn't possibly exist anyway. The last mainstream scientific study on UFOs, after all, was conducted by the Condon Committee, and by all accounts that I've ever seen that study wasn't really all that unbiased. But never mind. The major points of the new study are well taken.

Especially in light of another story I found, also reported by AP via Yahoo! News. It seems that a state representative in Georgia circulated a memo which claimed that the teaching of evolution should be banned from the schools because it is a myth that originated in Kabbalah, a system of Jewish mysticism. State Representative Ben Bridges says he didn't write the memo, but the Anti-Defamation League is demanding that he apologize anyway.

Apparently Bridges didn't write the memo himself, but Marshall Hall, the president of something called the Fair Education Foundation, says that Bridges asked him to write the memo, which was then distributed to state legislators in several states. Hall is a retired teacher who maintains an anti-evolution website that advances the theory that the Big Bang originated in Kabbalah centuries ago.

The Yahoo story provided a link to Hall's website. Following that link was an interesting experience. Not only was Darwin wrong, according to Hall, but so was Copernicus. In his world, the earth does not revolve around the sun, nor does it rotate. It just hangs in space, unmoving. Oh, and the universe is not as big (or as old, of course) as billed. All that is what he calls a "religious conspiracy".

Hall claims, of course, that his site is not anti-Semitic. But on one page of his site, he claims (as near as I can tell; his writing, and his logic, is a bit circular) that the Big Bang theory and the idea of an old universe come from kaballah. He claims that idea is wrong, and he calls it a "conspiracy". Sounds fairly "anti" to me.

The scientific panel at the AAAS meeting was complaining about pseudoscience. Well, as far as I can see, there's plenty of that on Hall's site.

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

And now, for something completely different...Unless you've been living in a cave since Friday night (or just have a life, which I clearly don't), you know that Britney Spears has shaved her head. This disturbs people for some reason.

Well, yeah. Spears has been acting out a bit recently, if you believe the reports. But, really. The press is acting like she...oh, I don't know, dangled the baby over a balcony railing or something. There has been lots of pontificating about how her life is "spiralling out of control."

Come on, people. It's hair. It's very likely to grow back. And, honestly, I think it may be the most healthy thing she's done in awhile. I'm not the only one, either. I saw one story where a psychologist said that the act could be her way of trying to take control of her own life after having been told for so many years what to do, how to look, how to be a model little pop star. Of course, everyone else seems to be calling for Spears's mother to ride to the rescue, take her daughter in hand, and make her behave. Turn her back into a little pop princess.

Sheesh, people. Leave the woman alone. Perhaps if she hadn't had the world press passing judgment on every move she's made for the past few years, maybe should wouldn't be acting out like she reportedly has been. I'm not a fan of Spears's in any way, shape, or form. But I know it would drive me crazy if people were doing that to me.

I Catch Keith Olbermann in an error...

I was sitting here, as I often do at this time of day, minding my own business and watching Countdown on MSNBC. And before I gloat, I have to say that I think Keith Olbermann is a pretty smart guy. But I caught him in a mistake. Not a big mistake, but a mistake nonetheless.

He was referencing the fact that today was Hugh Beaumont's birthday. If you are very young and/or never watch TV Land, Beaumont is probably best known for portraying Beaver Cleaver's dad on Leave it to Beaver between 1967 and 1963. Which has nothing to do with Olbermann's error.

Olbermann said that Beaumont was one of the stars of a 1950s B-movie, The Mole Men. Oops. The movie was actually called The Mole People and was made in 1956. I know this because it is one of my favorite bad movies.

Well, I thought, maybe that was an alternate title. Could have been. Olbermann doesn't make that many mistakes on his show. So I checked. The closest I could find on IMDB was Superman and the Mole Men (1951). Checked the cast list. No Hugh Beaumont. Instead, Superman and the Mole Men starred George Reeves, Phyllis Coates, and Jeff Corey and, while it was released in theatres, was the pilot for the 1950s series Superman and was Reeves's first appearance as the Man of Steel.

Okay. Maybe I shouldn't gloat. I make mistakes all the time. And many times, when I think someone else has made a mistake I end up being wrong. So, when I think I'm right and I discovere that I am right, I can't help but enjoy it. Kind of like when I saw Jurassic Park when it was first released. One of the characters references Disneyland's opening, which he says occurred in 1956. No. It was 1955. I didn't even need to look that one up to make sure. I was a little disappointed in that case that Steven Spielberg hadn't done his homework.

I'm not as disappointed in Olbermann's error. It's a natural mistake. People. Men. It's a cultural thing. I don't care how enlightened you are, the two get used interchangeably.

I'm what?

I do these quizzes from time to time, but I've never posted the results from one before. But I thought this one was, well, interesting.

Your Animal Personality

Your Power Animal: Shark Animal You Were in a Past Life: Polar Bear You have a strong character - you are an aggressive, ambitious, go-getter. You were born to lead.

The Animal Personality Test

I can buy the shark. I can buy the polar bear...there has to be a reason that I like the cold so much more than the heat. And I do have a pretty strong personality, I'm fairly ambitious in my own way, and if I want something I definitely go out and try to get it.

But aggressive? I can think of a lot of words to describe myself, some good and some bad, but aggressive is definitely not one of them.

The most interesting thing, though, is that "born to lead" thing. It seems like I often end up in leadership positions, always have. But I've never stood up and raised my hand and said, "Me, me...I want to be the leader." I don't particularly like being the leader. Too much responsibility. Finding myself in those sorts of situations has a lot more to do with my seeming inability to say, "No." That's something I'm better at now than I used to be. But still.

Oh, well, maybe what it means is that it's my destiny to lead, whether I want to or not, whether I like it or not.

Two gifts of wonderful writing...

I've added two links that I really want to call your attention to, dear readers.

As you've probably noticed if you have read very many of my posts here, I am not always that happy with organized religion. On the other hand, I greatly admire spirutual individuals...in and out of organized traditions...who live out their convictions in compassionate ways. And, so I've added two links to blogs written by spiritual women in two traditions who are living their convictions and blogging about their lives and beliefs with great eloquence.

In alphabetical order, then:

Musings of a Discerning Woman follows the journey of a Catholic sister who is currently a novice in an order active in social justice issues.

The Velveteen Rabbi offers the on-line meditations of a Jewish woman in the middle of her studies to become a rabbi.

Both women are wonderful, thoughtful, insightful writers. I thought that this was the perfect day to share their blogs with you. So, please...I hope you'll read and enjoy the offerings they are kind enough to share with us in the blogosphere.

There's no place like home for the holidays...

I'm not much of a holiday person. I admit that. But there are some holiday memories that just stick with me, make me laugh and make me mist up a bit.

There was the time when I was very little, probably four or five years old, and was in the Christmas pageant at the Methodist Church, where I went to Sunday School at the time. I remember very little of the pageant, but I remember that we almost didn't get there. When it was time to go to the church for the program, it was so foggy that we nearly couldn't see past the hood of the car. It wasn't typical southern California fog, but more like San Joaquin Valley tule fog, the kind that everyone thinks of when you compare fog to pea soup. When we stopped off to pick up my grandmother, we waited at the end of her long driveway and my dad walked up to the house to bring her to the car; he was afraid that if he drove in, he wouldn't be able to back out again without hitting a tree.

Still, we perservered and made it to the church. As we were going inside, my dad said, "Wouldn't it be funny if were clear as a bell when we come back outside later?" We all laughed and said the early 1960s equivalent of "Yeah, right." We all went inside, the program went well, I guess, since I don't remember any big mistakes being made. I think there were cookies and punch afterward. And when it was time to go, we went outside...and it was clear as a bell. The east wind (you might have heard of it as the Santa Ana wind) had come up and sent the fog back out to sea. Not that my dad was a prophet or anything...he had just lived in the valley long enough that all he usually had to do was go out and take a look at the sky, see which way the wind was blowing from, and he could usually give an accurate weather forecast.

But that's not my favorite Christmas season story. My favorite is from the Christmas about five years after that.

That was the year we were living in Blythe. In a motel room. The thing was, my dad was a produce inspector for the state of California. Sometimes he got sent away from home to work for as long as a month or six weeks at a time. Since it was just my dad, my mother, and myself, we always went along with him when he would work out of town. A few times we lived in apartments, but most of the time we would live in a motel room with a kitchenette attached. This went on for the whole time I was in elementary school; at least a couple of years during that time, we were away from home for at least six months out of the year.

That year, we happened to be in Blythe over the Christmas holidays. Down in the desert there are a number of crops to inspect at that time of the year. I think it was the only time we were actually away from home that time of year. We would have rather been at home, but we got a small tree to sit on the dresser in the room and there were the full complement of presents underneath it. But we didn't know if my dad would have the day off or not; he had had to work on holidays before, so we didn't plan anything.

When he got home after work on Christmas Eve, though, he had news. He had Christmas Day off. Then he asked if we'd like to go home for Christmas, spend the holiday in our own house. Well, of course, my mother and I both said. And so we packed up the car and off we went. Thing was, it was a Volkswagen bug...the old, traditional kind. So I shared the back seat for the more than 260 miles from Blythe to Simi Valley with the Christmas tree and all the gifts. It was a good thing I like the smell of Christmas trees.

We drove a good part of the night, got home very, very late, slept a few hours, had Christmas morning at home. Then, of course, we had to pack back up and head back to Blythe since my dad had to be at work bright and early the next morning. We stopped off at a Denny's restaurant or somewhere like that for Christmas dinner along the way, I think. But we were home for the holidays, and that was a wonderful thing.

And so, for those of you who are home for Christmas this year, treasure the opportunity. And for those who aren't able to be at home this year, treasure the memories of the times you were home and I'll send good thoughts that you are able to be home...wherever you consider home to be...next year.

Happy Holidays.

I knew there was a reason why science wouldn't make the cut either...

At dinner this evening a friend and I were discussing the whole Harry Potter situation and what it would do to the curriculum at a school that couldn't discuss murder, greed, or violence at all. I was going through the list of things that probably could and couldn't be taught, and when I mentioned science she reminded me about all of the violence in the animal world. It's inherent in the food chain, after all. So, at least zoology would be a no-go, and probably biology generally. I'm pretty sure that physics and geology would still be okay to teach, though.

The Censors Lose a Round

I see where the Georgia Board of Education has decided that Harry Potter is legal for the kids of their state. This, after a woman named Laura Mallory has spent at least a year trying to oust the boy wizard from the state’s public school libraries on the theory that J. K. Rowling’s wildly popular books are “mainstreaming witchcraft in a subtle and deceptive manner, in a children-friendly format.”

Uh-huh.

It occurs to me that some adults in this country have much more trouble telling the difference between fantasy and reality than do most children. But Ms. Mallory’s witchcraft delusions don’t worry me nearly as much as do other statements she has made. In arguing that the books are not suitable for children, she was quoted as saying that the books are full of “murder, greed, and violence. Why do they have to read them in school?”

Excuse me while I roll my eyes.

Okay. I’m back. I’d be interested in how Ms. Mallory feels about children reading the Bible, which contains a bumper crop of all three. Let’s see. Murder first appears in the fourth chapter of Genesis. That’s six pages in, in the Bible translation I have on my shelf. Now, granted I’ve only read the first couple of Harry Potter novels, but neither one of those have a murder six pages in, as far as I can recall. Greed plays its part before Genesis is over as well, and violence is fairly common all through the Good Book.

But let’s lay that aside. I’m assuming that Ms. Mallory is Christian when the article I read does not give any evidence of that. There are still other questions that are more intimately related to the school curriculum in light of her assessment: which subjects are the schools going to have to omit if there is to be no mention of murder, greed or violence in our national schoolrooms?

History would definitely be out. All those wars, you know, not to mention palace intrigue and other historical activities. Lots of violence there. Greed, too, when you stop to think about it. Economics would be eliminated simply on the greed factor. Couldn’t teach literature, either. Honestly, how many works of fiction can you think of that don’t have any violence at all, either physical or otherwise? Murder? You bet. Lots of greed in some literature, as well. The schools couldn’t teach anything about current events, as under Ms. Mallory’s theory there would be no place for the daily newspaper in school libraries, either. What about civics, aka government? Right. Gotta get rid of that, too, or at least severely restrict what is taught. The arts? Have to be very careful there, too. Math and science might make the cut, but I’m not even sure about that.

I’d be interested in knowing if Ms. Mallory shields her own children from the evening news on television; from newsstands displaying the day’s headlines; from, well, the whole world.

Now, I’m not going to argue for making kids grow up any faster than necessary. In fact, I’m a firm believer in letting kids be kids for as long as they can be. Goodness knows, that is a precious short time as it is these days. On the other hand, I also believe it is a mistake to overprotect children from the realities of the world or to give them a mistakenly benign view of how the world works. It’s a very fine line to walk, and all too easy to step off to one side or the other. But letting kids think that the world is a nice, sweet, safe place where no one will ever be mean or try to hurt them is doing them just as much a disservice as turning them into little miniature adults with all the cares and worries that implies before it is necessary.

Keeping kids from reading harmless fantasy like that found in Harry Potter is, I think, probably a good way to ease them into a knowledge of the reality that there are bad people as well as good in the world and that not everything turns out right in the end all the time, all without unduly traumatizing them.

As far as I can see, people like Ms. Mallory are much more of a hazard to children than J. K. Rowling and the books that she writes.

Happy Turkey Day...

The time has just flown by. I think of coming over here and commenting on something almost every day...goodness knows there have been more than enough things to comment on in the news in the past little while. I mean, we've had a whole election, among other things. But that pesky real-life stuff just keeps getting in the way and keeping me busier than any three people really need to be. And so I think about writing, but then I don't do it.

I've also been sick for the past couple of weeks, preceded by a week of trying not to get sick...which, shall we say, was a waste of time and energy. That means I've had about enough energy to do the work I get paid for, keep my place tolerably clean, and not much else.

But, hey...it's Thanksgiving, my cold is almost gone, and the sun is shining, which it hasn't done much of around here in several days. I don't have to cook, which means I won't have to clean up. So Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Eat big, take a good nap, and get all prepared for the Christmas shopping season that starts tomorrow. I'll be thinking of you when I'm avoiding the stores tomorrow, because I never, ever shop on Black Friday if I can possibly get out of it.

Can I just say that this has me, oh, a little upset...

Sometimes, you know, you see a headline and you just know you shouldn’t click on it but you do anyway. Inevitably, you realize that you should have followed your first instinct.

Well, I saw this one: “Nuclear meltdown may have caused cancers”, and I knew…I just knew…what it was about, and I knew I shouldn’t even look. But, of course I did. And this is what I found:

A 1959 nuclear reactor meltdown at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory may have caused hundreds of cases of cancer in the community, and chemicals threaten to contaminate ground and water, according to a report released Thursday.

The report by an independent advisory panel estimated it was likely that radiation released during the meltdown caused about 260 cases of cancer within a 60-square-mile area around the reactor.

The lab's former owner, Rocketdyne, has said for years that no significant radiation was released. But the independent advisory panel said the incident released nearly 459 times more radiation than a similar one at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island in 1979.

You can read the whole report on the KTLA website.

This is one of the main reasons why I don’t trust my government to tell me the truth, and tell it in a timely manner. The meltdown in question took place on July 26, 1959. The public didn’t find out that there was any contamination, really didn’t find out that there had even been a meltdown, until the release of an Energy Department report that said widespread radioactive and chemical contamination had been found around the site. The owners of the Lab, past and present, have been fighting tooth and nail to say that there wasn’t’ really any contamination, and that if there was it wasn’t really harmful. Well, guess what, folks? It was harmful.

You might be wondering at this point why this report has got me so upset, why the continuing revelations since 1989 have gotten me angry. Well, on July 26, 1959 I was a little less than a month away from turning three years old, and the lab in question was what I saw from my bedroom window, up on the mountain two, maybe three, miles as the crow flies from my house. In other words, I was in just about the perfect location to be contaminated by radioactivity released into the atmosphere from that meltdown.

No, I haven’t got cancer, so far as I know. Not yet. But I have got reduced thyroid function, which could very well have resulted from that contamination, or from the rocket fuel leaks during the time they were testing rocket engines for the space program (including the rockets that took Apollo - and men - to the moon). Both, apparently can cause that, as well as some very nasty kinds of cancer.

So, yeah. I’m not happy right now. Nice to know that my government (and the corporations it protects) is, and for decades has been, perfectly fine with using me and my family and friends as guinea pigs. It’s nothing new, of course. Ask all the soldiers who were marched out into the Nevada desert to witness atmospheric nuclear tests with virtually no protection or shielding whatsoever. As the military men who were exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam, and the ones who have been sick since their participation in the first Gulf War and who the Pentagon are still telling that there’s really nothing wrong with them. And ask the people who lived at Love Canal and all the other place where the government dumped, or allowed to be dumped, or released into the air, land, and water, substances that they knew to be toxic.

But, somehow, it is different when it’s you who were the guinea pig. Just call it the government’s personal touch, I guess.

Short Subjects: Because There's Just Too Much Going On...

...and I've been way too busy.

First of all...It's banned books week. Celebrate. Go out and read a book that someone says you shouldn't. Read a Harry Potter book. Read To Kill a Mockingbird. Read Catcher in the Rye (you read it...I've had to read it three different times for classes, and I hated it worse every single time, but you might like it, so read it).

This is the week that libraries promote all of the books that people complain about because they're too politically correct, or not politically correct enough, or that they're took explicit, or have too many "bad" words. The flyer I got at the library refers you to www.ala.org/bbooks, so I will, too. If that link doesn't work for you, try Googling "American Library Association". That'll probably get you there.

Next.

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Over at the United Nations the other day Hugo Chavez, the President of Venezuela, called George Bush "el diablo"...that's "The Devil" for all you non-Spanish speakers.

Now, I'm not a big Dubya fan. You'll know that if you've read this blog. Didn't vote for him. Don't trust him as far as I could throw a piano. But that "el diablo" stuff didn't set well with me. I thought about that for awhile, because it bothers me when I feel like I'm siding with him. But if finally occurred to me. It's like family. You can insult your own family all you want, but when someone outside the family does it, well, them's fightin' words. He's our president, part of our national family, and those of us who don't like him and don't agree with his policies criticize him liberally. (Get it? Liberally?...Ah, sheesh. I know it was bad. Never mind.) But when someone from outside the family starts in, it just doesn't sit right.

Anyway, Hugo was wrong. George Bush isn't the Devil.

As we all know, Dick Cheney is "el diablo".

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And then there's the Pope.

First, a disclaimer. I'm not Catholic. I don't have any interested "side" in this one. But...

I don't think that anyone who hasn't read the full speech that Benedict XVI gave in Germany on Septebmer 12 has much of a place commenting on it, much less criticizing it. I've read the full text. And, yeah, you can argue, I suppose, that he could have used another example to make his point. But he did use that example. He didn't say it was what he believed. He just used it as a "for instance".

The thing is, he was arguing what I think is a really good point: that violence doesn't have any place in religion, but that reason does. In this day and age, when few enough people subject their faith to any serious reasoning and when way, way too many people think that the first thing they should do when they feel that any of their deeply held beliefs...religious or secular...has been insulted, is to go out and blow up a few buildings and kill a few people, this is a very important message that everyone needs to hear, no matter what side of the God thing you come down on.

So, you know, leave the Pope alone, on this one at least.

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Oh, and one personal thing.

Some slimeball tried to steal my car the other night. Didn't get away with it, but they managed to jam the ignition all to hell and I'm going to have to have it replaced. And I've had to rent a car to get around in because the parts have to be flown in from Ohio or somewhere, and the guy who's doing the work won't be able to have it fixed until Wednesday or Thursday. Which is fine. He got out to look at it when he said he would, he's charging me a reasonable price for doing it, and I didn't have the car towed because he has a mobile service.

But it is costing me money to get it fixed, and to rent the car for several days. Just because some idiot doesn't understand the concept of "if it isn't yours, don't freaking touch it." And I've thought about it seriously. An academic exercise...the very nice police officer didn't dust my car for prints, but another car parked within feet of mine was also broken into, and Slimeball was wearing gloves, so they won't be catching him, at least for this caper...but I've decided what his punishment should be. No, not jail. Not flogging. Not having his right hand chopped off.

No. If they ever were to catch him, and let me assign punishment, I know exactly what I'd do. I'd make him write, "If it is not mine, I will not touch it" one million times. And the whole time, he'd have to listen to a continuous loop recording of Whitney Houston singing "I Will Always Love You", Celine Dion singing that horrible song from Titanic, and Britney Spears singing anything.

That'd teach him.

Apology? What Apology?

There has been a hue and cry among the conservative media that "someone" owes an apology to Karl Rove because it has apparently turned out that it wasn't Rove, but Richard Armitage, who outed Valerie Plame to the media as a CIA operative.

All I can ask is, "Why?" Republicans have been telling lies about opponents ever since before I can remember. They never apologize. In fact, they often repeat the same lies over and over, long after it has been conclusively settled that they have lied. They do this, presumably, because they think that if they same something often enough it will magically become true. Some of the pundits are still trying to make us believe that Al Gore somehow claimed that he "invented the Internet," years after that was shown to be a gross and deliberate misrepresentation of what was said and what was meant. Which makes that assertion, oh, a lie. And that is far from the only example.

So, no. Nobody owes Rove an apology.

Isn't there some, oh, real news to report?

When I logged on to AOL today, I was met with the headline that Jessica Lynch is pregnant. You remember her. The was the soldier who was held as a prisoner of war for a period of time at the beginning of the Iraq war, suffering severe injuries int he course of being captured.

Well, apparently she and her boyfriend are going to be parents. I'm happy for her. I really am. I'm glad she's got good things going on in her life now, after having to go through all of that courtesy of George and Dick and the boys and their little adventure in misdirection. But her pregnancy is not news. Surely there are many more important things going on in the world.

And by important, I don't mean the landing in Colorado of the plane carrying that Karr guy who says he's the one who killed Jon Benet Ramsey. But, apparently, MSNBC, which carried the landing live this afternoon, did. It was under the category of "Breaking News", and I guess they thought it was absolutely vital for us all to know that his plane had landed the very moment it happened.

It is very possible that this guy is simply a raving nutjob who is looking for publicity, or is playing out some perverse fantasy, or even just getting some kind of private jollies out of confessing to an infamous crime. In that case, the media is playing right into his...whatever it is that he's doing. Even if he did murder that little girl (something I'm still more than a little skeptical about, honestly), his plane landing is not breaking news. If they find his DNA on crime scene materials, that might be breaking news. Maybe. Personally, I can wait until the next scheduled newscast to find that out.

Then again, I've never seen an adequate explanation as to why the media is so obsessed with this particular killing. Lots of kids get murdered, but the media doesn't spend day and night on the story. Hell, just over two years ago right here in Fresno a man murdered nine of his children and grandchildren (some of the victims were both) one spring afternoon. After an inital spate of publicity, there was very little said about the whole thing in the national media, despite the sensational aspects of the case - incest, polygamy, weird religion, antique coffins, and an apparent obsession with vampires. When the perpetrator was convicted, there was mention in the national press, but just barely. The difference? The victims here, some of them younger than Jon Benet Ramsey, were of mixed race, not especially photogenic, didn't have much money.

I'm not saying that the murder of one child isn't a horrible thing. Of course it is. But the idea that one murder is more horrible, or more important, or just more worth covering because the victim's parents were rich and the victim herself was pretty, is disgusting. And I'm not advocating not reporting any of the cases just because they can't all be covered in depth. All I'm saying is that there is reporting and then there is obsession...and the Jon Benet story long ago reached the level of obsession on the part of the media.

Evolution: it isn't just dissed in the United States anymore...

Most people, at least here in the United States, think that this is the only place where the theory of evolution doesn't get any respect. But I ran across a couple of stories this week that show this isn't the case at all.

First up, in Nairobi, Kenya, according to the Telegraph, evangelical churches in that nation are lobbying the national museum there to put its collection of hominid fossils in a "back room" because evolution is "just one theory". Dr. Richard Leakey, whose team discovered many of the fossils in the museum called the churches' plan to force the museum to downplay anything that looks like evidence for evolution "the most outrageous comments I have ever heard", and that the museum should "be extremely strong in presenting a very forceful case for the evolutionary theory in the origins of mankind". He called the Pentecostal churches in question "fundamentalist" and said that their view of human origins "far from the mainstream".

The public relations manager of the museum was less forceful in his statement, saying that the museum has a responsibility to show the fossils in a way that gives the public "a full understanding of their significance", but that doing so can "get tricky when you have religious beliefs on one side, and intellectuals, scientists or researchers on the other, saying the opposite."

The thing that I don't understand is why people with religion think that they have a right force others to present their viewpoints. I doubt that Richard Leakey has any intention of going into their churches and lecturing them on evolution; they don't have any more right to march into a museum and expect the curators to mount exhibits that cater to their particular beliefs.

In another report, meanwhile, this time from Yahoo news, Greek scientists are calling on their nation's education ministry to begin teaching evolution, which they say is almost unheard of in the country's schools. They say that while information on evolution appears in the textbooks the schools use, it is situated at the end of the books, and most teachers never get to that material before the end of the school eyar. Two hundred scientists signed a petition setting out their request to the ministry. Evidently the influential Greek Orthodox church, which favors creationism, didn't have any comment on the appeal from scientists.

NOTE: Unfortunately, the Yahoo news report has apparently expired, so I've removed the link.

Ready, set, jump...to conclusions...

I was on vacation last week. It was nice - didn't have to work, didn't have to cook, didn't have to do dishes. I had plenty of time to just sit and veg. That was good; I needed the relaxation. It's been a fairly stressful couple of years since I was last able to get out of town. But it was bad, too, becasue there was plenty of time to read the papers and watch the television, including the news.

Lots of strange stuff going on in the world, and I heard all about it. Even broke my usual rules and watched a high-speed chase...I'm not sure why they cover those things live in Los Angeles, but they do. I would hope that anyone affected by the chase wouldn't be actually watching the reports of it while they are driving. I think maybe I watched because earlier in the week, as I neared my destination, I managed to inadvertently drive into the middle of some kind of police action and almost got hit head-on by a police car. No lights, no siren, no nothing...just pedal to the metal driving down the wrong side of the street. So, my perceptions of such chases are a little different now. Also, they were chasing someone who was very ambitious. He didn't just weave around the surface streets or go freeway hopping. Instead, he headed north, over the Grapevine into the San Joaquin Valley. At night, with all the truck traffic, on Interstate 5, which has one stretch that is so severly downhill that they provide escape ramps for trucks that lose their brakes, because that's the only way to get them stopped if there is any traffic in the way at all.


Anyway, strange was the byword of the week in the news. Should have figured it would be...it was full moon during that period of time. There were two stories, both of which had started earlier but which still had what the news business calls legs. One was the drunk-driving arrest of actor Mel Gibson and his ensuing tirade, which allegedly included both sexist and anti-Semitic rantings. The other was the ongoing controversy over Tour de France winner Floyd Landis's alleged doping during this year's competition. When those stories first entered the news, I figured neither one of them would be more than a three-day wonder. We should have been so lucky. The ongoing nature of both show more than anything, I think, how eager most people are to jump to conclusions in the absence of any sure knowledge of the circumstances of a particular event.

I don't know if Floyd Landis took synthetic testosterone before his big comback day near the end of the Tour. I wasn't there. Two tests of that day's urine sample say that he did. He says he didn't. I think that the jury is still out. But it amazed me how often I heard comments that he must be guilty, because the tests don't lie. Well...maybe they do and maybe they don't. But it doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone that there were other ways for that substance to get into his urine sample than for him to have deliberately taken a banned substance. Someone could have slipped it in something he ate or drank. Someone could have slipped it into the samples after they were taken. I'm sure there is security around the samples the riders are required to give, but security, as we all know in this age of terrorism, can be gotten around. In any case, as I understand it the substance that was found in the samples is something that must be taken for a period of time in order to have any effect on performance, and as far as I've heard, his earlier samples did not test positive. So, I can't quite figure out why he would have taken it then. He doesn't strike me as an excessively stupid person. Still, much of the commentary I've heard just jumps to the conclusion that Landis is a cheater. Not sure I understand that, either.

And then there's Mel Gibson.

I don't have any idea whether or not he is anti-Semitic...there doesn't seem to be much discussion of whether he is a sexist or not, based on his other reported statements the night he was arrested, but I guess anti-Semitism trumps sexism or something. I don't think either position is ethically tenable, but that's just me. Apparently, he was raised by an anti-Semitic father, which could predispose him to such attitudes. On the other hand, several people who know him well have insisted publicly that he is not anti-Semitic at all. Still, so many of the commentators have dragged out the old saying "in vino veritas" or however it goes (my Latin is a little rusty at the moment), that statements made while inebriated show the true feelings of the one making them. It has been my experience, however, that a lot of the things that a lot of people say while drunk don't have any relation to that person's real feelings or attitudes. Either way, the fact remains that none of those professional pundits who have been so quick to condemn Gibson are in a position to know his mind or his heart on that or any other subject. Still, they don't have any problem jumping to the conclusion that Gibson is a horrible, evil person who should never be allowed to pursue a living again.

All I can do is sit back and shake my head and wonder why people are so eager to think the worst of people. And why they seem even more eager to believe the worst of someone who is successful at what they do. It is almost as if there is the belief out there that anyone who is successful must have lied, cheated, or stole their way to their success. While I know that such is the case in some instances, even I'm not cynical enough to think that everyone who has ever been successful at anything is an evil human being.

And, God knows I'm pretty cynical...you might have noticed that here before.

Still here...

Just so you'll know, dear readers...I haven't abandoned ship. It's just that, well, there is a real world out here, and it gets hectic sometimes. Also, there are vacations to go on...just finished one of those, which was a nice break. But I'm still here...no thanks to that police car in southern California that tried to hit me head-on...no lights, no siren, no nothing, but charging down the wrong side of the street chasing someone. If you've ever been thinking that it might be fun and exciting to drive into the middle of a police chase...no, it's not.

Speaking Truth to Power - But Watch Out For Your Job

I've been stewing about this for awhile, trying to decide whether to write about it or not. I was going to, and then it seemed like it had become old news, so I thought I probably wouldn't do it. But it is still bugging me, so I suppose I'm going to have to go ahead and get it out of my system.

It all started with a June 4, 2006 opinion piece published in the Salt Lake Tribune. It was written by Brigham Young University philosophy instructor Jeffrey Nielsen. Spurred by a direction from the General Authorities of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (aka Mormons) for members of the church to call their U.S. Senators and urge them to vote in favor of a constitutional amendment that would define marriage as only between a man and a woman and therefore outlaw gay marriage, Nielsen felt constrained to write and submit an essay explaining why he found the amendment, and the call by the church to support it, "troubling", as Nielsen described it. It was a moderate and well-reasoned piece of writing.

Nielsen's piece publicly disagreed with church leaders. Since the LDS church owns BYU, Nielsen soon found himself dismissed from his teaching job there. A university spokesperson said, as quoted in a June 14 story in the Deseret News (also a church-owned concern) that Nielsen was let go because his op-ed piece "publicly contracicted and opposed an official statement by the First Presidency." Nielsen countered, according to a June 14 article on his dismissal in the Salt Lake Tribune, that it was not his intent to attack any religious or theological claims of the church, but simply to comment on a moral issue.

And why is this significant? Employees get let go all the time for saying or doing things their employers don't like. Legally speaking, BYU certainly has its collective butt covered six ways from Sunday on their decision to let Nielsen go. That isn't my concern here, although it puts BYU's claim that it allows its faculty academic freedom. No. My concern here is instead the school's - and the church's - utter disregard for the principle that being able to voice an opinion on a topic about which well-meaning individuals might disagree without fearing job loss is - or should be - a basic human right.

A church is entitled to believe and to teach pretty much whatever they want. That is settled by the free-exercise clause of the First Amendment to the US Constitution. And if people wish to live by even the most draconian strictures of one of thsoe religions, well, I suppose that is their right as well, although I seem to recall that it is against the law to bind someone to a contract that deprives them of their constitutional rights. That's what makes those master/slave contracts illegal.

However, there is another part of the First Amendment - the free speech clasue. While there is legal opinion in existence that those guarantees do not bind private institutions, it seems kind of disingenuous to me for a group to insist on its First Amendment right to worship as they wish and then to refuse to allow their adherents the rights conferred in another clause of the same article in the Bill of Rights. That is exactly what the LDS church seems to be doing here by letting Nielsen go for simply stating a dissenting opinion.

It isn't that any of this surprises me much. The Mormons put a huge premium on obedience and do not brook any public dissent. There have been a number of disfellowshipments and excommunications in years past, as well as firings from BYU, after individuals have expressed opinions contrary to that of the First Presidency of the church. These disciplinary actions have not always been explained as reactions to dissent, and they have not been limited to BYU faculty. Former Australian Bishop (congregational leader) Simon Southerton was excommunicated in 2005, ostensibly for adultery. However, he and his wife had not been active in the church for seven years at that time and from what I understand his behavior had long been known. I suspect that it was not simple coincidence that Southerton had published in 2004 and vocally promoted his book, Losing a Lost Tribe: Native Americans, DNA and the Mormon Church (Signature Books) in 2004. This book discusses the fact that DNA evidence does not support Mormon claims about the peopling of the Western Hemisphere. Similarly Grant Palmer, a long-time employee of the Church Educational System, was disfellowshiped for writing a book, An Insider's View of Mormon Origins, which calls into question the official version of church history.

No. The Mormon hierarchy does not like dissent at all. It wants obedience from its members above all else, and it does not want outsiders interpreting the church and its doctrines and history. That is why it issued such a detailed and emphatic dissent to Jon Krakauer's book, Under the Banner of Heaven, which I've written about here before. That is also why the church's historical archives are largely closed to anyone except those known to be sympathetic to the church and its teachings.

What the church wants more than anything else, and this gets to the crux of what is bugging me so much that I needed to get this out of my system, is unquestioning obedience from its members. And it wants everyone to be associated with the church. That's why they send out all those missionaries. This insistence on obedience is illustrated in a talk by one Mormon official and published on the church's official website after appearing in one of its magazines, the Ensign, in July 2005. The talk, by Elder Robert C. Oaks of the Presidency of the Seventy, is titled "Believe All Things". The gist of the talk is that it is important to belive all the things the church teaches because that belief will leed to obedience to the leadership of the church.

Oaks's talk idealizes what he calls "childlike submissiveness", saying "...we are instructed to be like children, who are willing to be taught and then to act without first demanding full knowledge." In other words, Mormons are expected to do whatever their leaders tell them to do without question and without regard to their own well-being. To illustrate this, Oaks holds out the example set in the Bible by Mary, the motehr of Jesus. He says that she accepted the assignment of bearing a child as an unmarried woman without "reservation or restraint" even thought her culture would demand that she be stoned to death for being an unwed mother.

That's nice. What he is saying here seems to be, do whatever the church tells you to do without question even if it means your very life, which you should sacrifice gladly. Even the US military, a noticeably obedience-based institution, expects its members to evaluate and refuse and illegal order. But not Mormons. No, they are supposed to just bow their heads and say yes (which I understand is something that is required in secret temple rituals, but since I've never been to the temple except to do dunkin' for the dead, I wouldn't know firsthand) to whatever they are asked.

This sort of obedience is not an abstract principle in the church, either. Members, especially temple Mormons who have pledged to give everything to the church, are expected to never, ever say no to any request from their superiors in the church. And one of the cute little things that local leaders like to do from time to time is to go into a meeting of, for instance, the Relief Society (the women's organization) and announce that Salt Lake City (where the chruch is headquartered) has instituted the United Order, just to see how many members will go along with the story without question and how many will raise objections. The United Order is a sort of communalism in which everyone's belognings - including homes - are pooled and then redistributed according to need. If that plan were ever actually to be activated, all the members would be expected to go along with it without a word of dissent.

Anyone who knows me, knows that I was raised to Question Authority. No surprise, then, that I never made a very good Mormon. It honestly frightens me that in 2005 anyone could have given a talk, with as straight a face as church leaders always give their talks, instructing the membership of the church that they are supposed practice "childlike submissiveness" whenever the leadership tells them to do something. The thing that is even more frightening is that a certain proportion of the membership will, indeed, bow their heads and say yes, and do anything these people ask them to do. This sort of authoritarianism is just pernicious, and those who promote it, leaders and followers alike, should be ashamed of themselves.