Just one of those days...weeks...months...years....

Ever had times when you felt like a total waste of oxygen? Pretty much sucks, doesn't it?

Yet more evidence that the world has gotten to be a much smaller place....

.... and yet, at the same time we are farther away from each other than ever.

I am sitting in a Starbucks in Palo Alto, California, IMing with the Rocket Scientist, who is thousands of miles away on Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic. Among other things, we were comparing weather: 74 and sunny versus cold and foggy with occasional snow. I win!

The Internet makes this possible, of course.  It makes a sea change from fourteen years ago when they had no wireless access, and the only time I heard from him was on an Iridium satellite phone (at $7 a minute) halfway through the field season to let all of us at home know how he was doing.  Now I can talk to him cheaply in real time (at least once the communications got set up, thanks to the Fabulous Sarah Huffman) as easily as if he were simply at work in his office or in a hotel room at a conference site.

Yet when it comes to other people in my life, the connections are more tenuous.  Mom lives three time zones away, and I talk to her more infrequently than I should. She does not have -- nor does she want -- Internet access, so IM is out of the question.  She gets her news from television and the newspaper, I get mine from the Internet.

I was thinking about all this from a larger societal perspective last night.  When I was growing up, there were pretty much five news sources available to my family and community: The St. Petersburg Times, NBC, ABC, CBS, and for the more cerebral, PBS.  The fairness doctrine meant that media spin could be called out and addressed.  People had a diversity of opinions, but at least we were getting our facts from similar sources.

Now people have hundreds -- thousands -- of outlets from which to get their news: online editions of newspapers, blogs, cable networks, and yes, broadcast television stations. (Not to mention Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.)  Not only are there a variety of opinions available, but the facts that each individual is exposed to vary widely and selectively.  People more and more seem to pick the facts (in some case, "facts") that support what they want to believe, instead of letting their beliefs be grounded in some common notion of reality. I wish I could be sure that I am not guilty of this, but I can't. I try, but I know given the tsunami of information I am exposed to on a daily basis that trying to sift through it will require some selective culling in which my personal biases (I believe MSNBC but not Fox News, for example), and those of my friends who tend to point me towards news stories, will impact what facts I latch onto.  For someone who believes in the importance of factual accuracy, this is deeply troubling.

This is not something new -- it's been the case for years, at least through the past two Presidential election cycles. It just seems to be getting more pronounced all the time. It's not often I yearn for "the good old days" (they were rarely as good as memory serves), but lately....

Oh, for it to be 1996* again...

Maybe I would be more sure that what I think is right really is.

*Not to mention the whole healthy American economy thing. Life before most of us had heard of credit default swaps seems a little more idyllic now.  Even if we had to live through the Monica Lewinsky scandal all over again.

There is a reason that the quote by Don Marquis is on my sidebar. Dan Savage, founder of the "It Gets Better" project, is a prime exhibit of ideas not being responsible for the people who believe in them.

I have often really disliked Savage for his hypocrisy in regards to fat people -- bullying gay people is wrong, bullying fat people is okay since it's their own damn fault they're fat, disregarding what a complicated issue weight really is -- but mocking disabled people? That's simply despicable.

July 20th.

Today is the 43d anniversary of the first time that -- as far as we know -- the species of one object in our solar system set foot upon another.  The first time where humans became the alien invaders, even if there were no other beings there to see that invasion.

It is one of those days I feel compelled to commemorate, just as I feel compelled to commemorate what one friend calls "Dead Astronaut Week," those horrible several days at the end of January and the beginning of February that mark the greatest failures of our space program.  You have to applaud the successes as well as mourn and memorialize the disasters, and this was the success to top all of the others.

We are, as a species, still looking towards the heavens with an eye towards exploration. The Rocket Scientist left today for his annual pilgrimage in support of that objective, to Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic.  December 29th he leaves for the other end of the globe, on his way to Antarctica.  In both places he will be testing a drill design hopefully destined for some other planet.  

It's more of an international effort, now, than it was in 1969.  Not just the U.S. and the Russians, but the Europeans and the Canadians and the Chinese and many other countries have space agencies, and scientists all over the globe are working on the roadblocks that arise when people or objects leave terra firma.  (Many of those scientists are in private industry or universities.)  There are international conferences on a lot of these issues.  And each time we figure out how to overcome one obstacle, we inevitably end up finding a use for that knowledge here on earth, in everything from textiles to medicine to firefighting. Reaching for the stars helps us live better lives down here on the ground.

So, yes, we went to the moon and haven't been back since 1972. We have not yet been to Mars. Or Europa. But we will.  We have to.

As a species, we can not let that "one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind" be in vain.

Dignity. Always dignity.

"Cosmo, call me a cab!" "Ok, you're a cab." Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) and Cosmo Brown (Donald O'Connor), Singin' In the Rain.

The Red-Headed Menace and I caught one of my favorite movies on the big screen tonight. And it was even better than I remembered it to be.

"Well, if it isn't Ethel Barrymore." Don Lockwood to Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds).

Singin' In the Rain is pure genius. It's not only a great musical -- the dance numbers bring joy to my heart -- but sparklingly witty. The story is stellar and the dialogue is sharp. It is the third most quotable movie ever, behind The Godfather and Casablanca. It is so well written that you could cut the musical numbers completely and still have a good movie.

"I make more money than Calvin Coolidge... put together!" Lina Lamont (Jean Hagan).

The supporting players make this movie. It may have starred Gene Kelly and made a star of Debbie Reynolds, but Jean Hagen and Donald O'Connor steal every scene they're in. Kelly may be a god of cinematic dance, but when they're side by side, O'Connor is simply more fun to watch. He has a fluidity to his movement that I find just dead-sexy. And "Make 'Em Laugh" makes me laugh -- and made RHM gasp when he saw it.

"You have to show a movie at a party.  It's a Hollywood law." Cosmo Brown.

Watching an old movie that you love with your kid -- and having him come away from the theater raving about how wonderful it is -- is one of the joys of parenting.  Both of us agreed that seeing it on in a theater made a difference, especially in watching the dance numbers -- "Singin' in the Rain" morphs from fun to soaring when you move from the small screen to the large.  RHM observed how the "Broadway Melody" segment -- which I still find too long, one of the movie's few flaws -- slyly references Kathy Selden's assertion in her first conversation with Don Lockwood that the only true actors are stage actors. It was a point that had never occurred to me before.

This was a one-night showing celebrating Singin' In the Rain's 60th anniversary.  Pity.  I want to go back and see it -- larger than life -- tomorrow.

There's always a downside.

I really want to support the Not-So-Little Drummer Boy's interest in cooking, not the least because it means I don't have to make dinner for the next week.  But having had my coffee mill appropriated to grind spices means my Decaf Sumatran now tastes faintly like garam marsala, even though he supposedly cleaned it out afterwards.  It's not bad, per se, just... odd.

The samosas were killer, though.

So, I have just started a very part time freelance gig doing research and writing for the nonprofit I volunteer for.  And thus far I have two pertinent observations:

I hate Open Office with a passion that grows deeper every day.  Whatever my issues with Microsoft are, Word is a breeze compared to O.O. Today's glitches involved trying to format several paragraphs with bullet points.  The program decided that there was no need for the sets of bullet points to actually line up.  I had to manually whip them into shape, which I most decidedly should not have had to. Yes, I know, you get what you pay for.

Speaking of paying for things -- when you are earning roughly the same as the baristas, it behooves you not to spend too much on drinks at Starbucks, lest this freelance gig end up costing you money after taxes. Maybe working in the public library would be a better idea.

Still -- it's a writing gig, of sorts.

Food for thought.

I have learned a new expression recently: "Stairway to Heaven syndrome."

The Not-So-Little Drummer Boy  (my artist-in-residence for the summer) and I were talking about impostor syndrome and dealing with self-doubt.  He claimed that he generally accepted that all creative types were full of B.S., and in some cases your best accepted work was that which had been an afterthought. 

The NSLDB told me of the time  he had drawn several sketches of where the ball went during a Foosball game that his friends were playing. He was planning to turn them into actual drawings for an advanced design class.

"Then I got lazy and decided to put them in as they were and throw up some conceptual bullshit around them.  [The class] loved them.  In fact, they pointed to the two drawings I had actually finished as being the weakest and undermining the entire strength of the piece."

The song written in ten minutes to finish out an album which becomes one of the most beloved rock anthems of all time.* The quick sketches you make which get you praise. The dashed-off email to the professor which ends up being published.  

Maybe when you are not bogged down by your own thought-processes you can do your best work. Maybe if you are working on a deadline to finish an album you don't over think things and manage to capture the spontaneity and energy which rock music is supposed to be all about. Maybe the simple line sketches best capture the excitement of what you are watching.   Maybe if you are concentrating on getting your point across to one person you don't worry about what a lot of different people will think of you.  

Maybe it's all about not getting in your own way.

*That said, not beloved by me. As someone who listens to lyrics, I think it sounds like it was written in ten minutes.

Oh, my God, I've created a monster.

The Not-So-Little Drummer boy is working at a new Starbucks in an adjacent city this summer.  Perhaps in response, he has taken to viewing our Saturday morning family outings to the neighborhood Starbucks as an opportunity to exercise some misplaced creativity.

It started last week when he told a (fortunately experienced) barista to simply surprise him:  "Make me something new and delicious." The barista rose to the challenge, and produced a drink that tasted much better than the NSLDB's usual white chocolate mocha.  This morning, he upped the ante, requesting a drink with three different flavored syrups (and specifying the number of shots of each) as well as five shots of espresso. And chocolate whipped cream, which I didn't even know they carried. He can't recall exactly what he ordered now, which is a shame because we all tasted it and agreed it tasted great.

He has a cunning plan for next week. Flushed with success, and inspired by the music of John Cage (who apparently composed some pieces of music using coin flips to determine the notes), he wants to bring a spinner into the Starbucks, and base the elements of his drink order on what shows up when he spins, as well as the barista's birth-month.

I have explained how obnoxious this all is for the baristas and the other patrons in the cafe.  He doesn't care. He believes it will bring some excitement and interest into people's lives. It certainly will to his.  He claims that there will be no downside, that at Starbucks the customer is always right.

The Resident Shrink was no help here -- she was laughing, and suggested a flash mob.  He's considering it.

I am still not quite sure whether this is simply an elaborate story told to freak me out. With anybody else, I would strongly suspect so, but then other people are not as ... unique ... as my eldest son.

He once told me he viewed his entire life as performance art. I didn't dream that he meant that literally.

My favorite July 4th post.

Because of the ongoing Charles Carreon v. The Oatmeal circus (which is the source of a blog post I need to write about the brokenness of the legal system, except that there are so many others writing far more cogent posts on the subject than I ever could -- not that that has ever stopped me before), I was pointed at and have begun reading Ken White's posts at Popehat. He's funny, smart, and writes well, and is a fierce proponent of protecting free speech. (He also has a legion of adoring fans based on a response to a cease-and-desist-letter he wrote that was posted on the website Regretsy. Be sure and read the comments.)

This may be my favorite post by him yet.  It is the perfect way to celebrate Independence Day, by recognizing those who choose to become citizens of this country, in spite of its imperfections, rather than having been blessed by being born here.

Amid the political back and forth about the health care mandate on my Facebook a few days ago, someone slipped in a piece about how conservatives give more to charity than liberals. I made myself read the article, even though I distrust the site it was on, because I believe in being even-handed about things.  And right away, I see a large problem with the study in the book it cites.

Conservatives are more likely to be religious.  They are also likely to give to churches, specifically churches they attend. Sorry, but as far as I am concerned whether or not giving to a church constitutes charity depends upon the extent to which said church has active ministries giving to the poor and destitute.

This is not a knock on churches.  They are great institutions.  But churches in many ways are mutual aid societies, where the large bulk of contributions go to buildings, staff and amenities that exist for the benefit of the churches' members. In most churches, anyone can join, provided you want to sign on to whatever beliefs that they promulgate.  Nonetheless, churches for the most part do not exist to take care of people who don't believe, or those who don't attend.  They take care of the spiritual needs of the members; they may or may not take care of the physical needs either of those members or the needy at large.

Some -- I daresay a majority -- of churches do have social service programs, but not all. But even for those that do, most of what they spend stays onsite.  I have been a member of churches that actively participated in local charities that took care of the needy.  And it was still only a fraction of their budgets.

So my suggestion to anyone looking at this issue, is to reduce the weight given to contributions to churches by at three quarters.  Or half, at least.  It may be that conservatives really do take better care of their fellow man than liberals (according to the story, they also donate more time and give more blood*), but I'd bet it's a lot closer than it would look at first blush.**

*About that giving more blood... I would ask what percentage of the liberals polled were gay or bisexual men who are automatically deferred from donating.  
**This is ignoring the entire issue of whether the care of the poor should be left to the mercy (in all senses of the word) of donors who have no obligation to continue donating.  We give to several human services charities -- Second Harvest Food Bank and Habitat for Humanity, to name two -- and I firmly believe that as vital as these charities are, making sure that people are fed and housed should be the responsibility of a strong social safety net.

Even stormtroopers have mothers.

It's been a hard year.  Part of the pain thus far has been the death of two people in my circle of acquaintances, friends and relatives.  They were not people I was really close to, and I know as I get older there will be more and more years where the death of someone plays a part, but it has been nonetheless troubling.  I find myself grappling with a fear of death in a way I can't remember facing before, both for others and for myself.  The thought of non-existence wakes me up trembling and sweating some nights.

As a result, perhaps, I find it hard to watch movies or television shows which have death in them.  Not merely a painful or tragic death of the protagonists -- those have always been hard.  No, I have trouble watching movies where anyone dies.

Last night I was trying to watch The Incredibles on television.  It is in its own way a violent film, and the violence and death are casual and celebrated.  The evil-doers chasing Dash and Violet explode as they crash into trees or cliffs, creating very pretty fireballs.  The death of Syndrome, the head baddie, by being sucked into a jet turbine by his cape, is played for thrills and yes, laughs, referencing as it does the lecture designer Edna la Mode gave on the dangers of capes on superhero outfits.

I know it is just a cartoon. And yes, the bad guys "had it coming to them" by trying to kill children.  Still, I found myself wondering if those guys had friends who worried about them, or wives and families.  What sort of letter was sent to their mothers?

The Incredibles was just a cartoon, but what about Return of the Jedi, which is the referent for the jungle chase scenes in The Incredibles? Did some of those stormtroopers killed by Luke and Leia have partners? They were just soldiers in a war they didn't start. And even bad guys have friends and relations.

We are a culture that is so uptight about depictions of human sexuality in our media, and so incredibly blasé about violence. A movie like Clerks gets the same rating for (admittedly extreme) off-color language that Kill Bill (either part -- take your pick) gets for bloodlust. I find it incomprehensible that we live in a country where simple frontal male nudity will most likely result in an NC-17, yet the works of Quentin Tarantino, gore-drenched as they are, escape such a fate.

There are violent movies that I don't find off-putting.  But those movies, such as The Godfather or Schindler's List, use acts of violence as inverted sacraments -- outward and visible signs of inward and invisible corruption. "Sleeping with the fishes" from The Godfather may be sort of a joke, now, but when the line "Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes" was uttered onscreen, no one was smiling.

Death comes to us all, eventually. I know this, and when I have died I won't be worrying about it anymore.  In the meantime, I think I would rather not watch media which makes light of the fragility of human lives.

Follow up.

Everybody is all a-Twitter (and Facebook) about the SCOTUS decision in the Affordable Care Act case, so I feel no urge to write about it, other than to say I'm relieved. There is enough commentary whizzing around the fluorosphere without me putting my two cents in. I am amused most of all by the people who have tweeted that they are moving to Canada because the Court upheld the individual mandate. *  Some people were not paying attention during the debate, methinks.  I hope they like the universal healthcare that they have up north.  I know I would love it.

The Court also announced its decision in United States v. Alvarez, the Stolen Valor Act case.  I have written before about how I wanted this case to turn out; the decision striking down the Act leaves me with mixed emotions.  In spite of my feelings on the matter, I do understand  the plurality's opinion that the law was an infringement on free speech:"[f]undamental constitutional principles require that laws enacted to honor the brave must be consistent with the precepts of the Constitution for which they fought."  I guess lying about military service must now be considered a constitutionally protected activity.

 In spite of sympathy for the free speech issues, I simply think the dissent made the more compelling argument, likening lying about military honors to fraud and trademark dilution. At least the concurrences seemed to indicate that a more narrowly tailored law -- such as one recent bill aimed specifically at punishing false claims of military honors which are made for material gain -- would pass constitutional muster.

Passing this bill would be a good thing.  Our veterans deserve it.

 *Any conservative wanting to leave the U.S. because of the ACA will need to look to developing countries or Belarus: pretty much all of Europe, as well as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Costa Rica (to which I have heard Rush Limbaugh has threatened to move), Brazil, Argentina and Chile have some form of publicly-provided universal healthcare.

Hysteria.

On Saturday I saw the movie "Hysteria," which was ostensibly about the invention of the electric vibrator in Victorian England. It was a cute, slight, and rather obvious little movie, with the ending inevitable after the first ten minutes.  But any movie with both Rupert Everett and Maggie Gyllenhaal in it cannot be all bad.

I know enough about the era to wonder at the extent to which the writers played fast and loose with events and the characters, especially of the female heroine.  She was too modern, too emancipated.  Nonetheless, it was an amusing movie about what was in fact seen as a serious problem at the time. It makes me wonder what deadly serious issue will be laughed at by our descendants in a century or so.

The movie also suffered from a minor pet peeve of mine: it proclaimed at the beginning to be based on true events, ("Really.") but at the end carried the standard libel disclaimer: "any resemblance to any persons living or dead is purely coincidental."  It is a small thing, but the illogic of it drives me nuts.

All in all, though, a fun little movie. I give it a solid B.

Being out and about.

The parade went well, at least from where I was sitting, er, riding. I did some walking today, not the parade route but probably a half mile before and after the parade while going to various BART stations, and a lot of standing, and stairs up and down.  No pain to speak of afterwards, other than slightly sore feet and a dehydration headache. Considering that in March and April I was having days where I would stand in my kitchen sobbing from systemic pain, I find this very heartening.  Better living through chemistry, indeed.  Next year, I want to be strong enough to march.

A few observations:

While we were looking for our contingent, we had to walk past where the opening groups were lined up, many of whom were crowding the sidewalk.  Life takes on a slightly surreal quality when you are faced with running a gauntlet a full half-block long of people in costumes consisting mostly of balloons.   It is rather like fighting through very colorful and somewhat squeaky forest undergrowth. The muffled roar of the Dykes on Bikes waiting to start off the parade sounded like an angry metal bear.

The Glide Float was blaring "O Happy Day!" from its speakers. I found it made me happy to hear gospel music in this setting.  Later on, I did see a few "Jesus Loves You" signs, which I thought rather sweet, although the intentions of the sign-holders may not have been.

I  saw only two totally naked men.  They were applying sunscreen -- a very wise thing to do. The sun was blazing, and it seemed much warmer than the 64 degrees forecast. And there are places you simply do not want to get sunburned.

The best t-shirt of the day: "San Francisco Public Defender's Office - Getting you off since 1921." Nice Constitution float, too, guys.

I spent most of the parade riding herd on the wheel monitors on my side of the car, who had a tendency to stray beyond the designated distance to the car. I felt perfectly okay doing this for one of them because he was my son. Instead of marching, next year I should simply go all the way and become a safety monitor.  You get a t-shirt and everything! Instead of a button, which none of the contingent monitors in our group got because the parade organizers ran out. 

Market Street in San Francisco is very pretty when taken at a leisurely 1.5 miles per hour, and when you are not sitting in traffic fuming about the lack of places to make left turns.

Based solely on its exterior architecture, the Hotel Palomar joins the itinerary on the tour of luxury hotels I fully intend to undertake after I win the lottery.

The one sad moment of the day was discovering that I had dropped my cashmere purple scarf somewhere after disembarking from the car after we were through the parade. Somewhere in the vicinity of Mission and Ninth someone now has a nice purple scarf.  I hope they enjoy it as much as I did.

We didn't go to the festival area around the Civic Center Plaza, so among other things, we missed the Occupy Pride people.  I can understand their point: we're all fooling ourselves if we believe that anything other than a chance to gain filthy lucre is moving Bud Light and Virgin America to sponsor the parade.  It is an advertising opportunity. And no, I do not view Wells Fargo, or other corporate sponsors, as working towards "Global Equality" (the theme for this year's parade) -- in the case of Clear Channel, radio home to Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage and others, they are working actively against equality at home and abroad. 

But large free public festivals like this are extremely expensive to put on.  Just the insurance carries a hefty price tag. Having corporate sponsors means more fun for more people -- and this is supposed to be a celebration. And while I would wish that the event was less corporate, the involvement of corporate America means that LGBT folks are now a market to be paid attention to.  That's huge. And all those Wells Fargo employees on that float next to us when we were getting set up are going to be able to go to work and probably not worry about losing their jobs because they were in the parade.  Maybe it will be okay for them to keep a picture of their partner on their desk, or bring them to the next company party.

Things change so fast these days, and it becomes easy to forget how far we have come.  If you had asked me when I graduated college if we would ever seen legalization of same-sex marriage, I would have answered "not that I can see."  But here I am, twenty-nine years later, and I am far more sanguine about the march towards gay rights than I am about holding on to protections for women's reproductive rights, something which seemed so much more secure back then. There is a lesson in there, of course, about not taking your gains for granted.

Taking a day once a year to celebrate that progress, and remember all those who came before, even while we recognize there is a long way to go, seems right. Even if we let corporations help pay for it.

But then what do I know? It was my first Pride.

It won't be my last.

There is a lot not to like about living in the suburban Bay Area: the insane cost of living, the lack of really good public transit, rush hour, a lack of social cohesion (at least in my neck of the woods). On the other side of the ledger is...

The weather.

It is June 22.  In St. Petersburg, Florida, it is only 84.5, but it feels like it is ten degrees warmer because of the humidity. There is an 80% chance of thunderstorms today, and a better than 50% chance of thunderstorms for the next five days.  I love thunderstorms... occasionally.

In Atlanta, it is 90. In Boston, it is 94, with scattered thundershowers. All of this is quite normal for June in these places. Northern Virginia is not bad today: it's only 85, with thundershowers expected this evening.

Right this second outside my house  it is a clear 68.4 degrees (according to Weather Underground, the expected high is 72), with 56% humidity. There is a small breeze which feels quite nice. Over the next five days the highest temperature forecast is a whopping 73.

It is so easy to get spoiled, here. I just need to bookmark this post for the days coming in August and September when it gets up to 100 degrees and everybody is wilting.

Movie snippets for the attentionally challenged.

I just finished watching Henry V (the Kenneth Branagh version) on Netflix.  It contains one deeply moving long scene when the sides are gathering up their dead after the Battle of Agincourt.  That, along with the wonderful St. Crispin's Day speech, are why I watch this movie.  It got me thinking, though, of the sequences in movies that have come to mean more to me than the movies they are part of, the scenes I am sure to run into the room for if they are being shown on television:

The baptism scene in The Godfather. One of the most riveting five minutes in film. Period.

The lighting of the beacons of Gondor in The Return of the King. This loses some of its effectiveness on the small screen; nonetheless, it is my favorite two minutes in the entire trilogy.

The presentation of Romeo and Juliet in Shakespeare in Love. I simply defy you not to cry at the end.  You can't help yourself.

"El Tango de Roxanne" in Moulin Rouge! Dark and dangerous, and full of pain and fury. You'll never listen to Sting sing this song the same way again.

The shower scene in Psycho, natch.

The passage south from Master and Commander. Russell Crowe as Jack Aubrey is hanging off the side of the ship, smiling -- and it looks like such fun, until it becomes clear that it is sleeting sideways.


The love story in Up. There is an Internet meme going around about how Pixar made a better love story in eight minutes than the makers of the Twilight series did in three films.  What the meme ignores is that the love story from Up was better than most of the romantic movies -- comedies and otherwise -- made in the past several years.

The "horse of a different color" sequence from The Wizard of Oz. I always wanted to have a horse like that -- although if you look closely, it involves at least three different horses.  The horses don't just change color, they change conformation, as well.

"Dance of the Hours" from Fantasia and "The Carnival of the Animals" from Fantasia 2000. You can never go wrong with dancing elephants and alligators or with flamingos and yo-yos.

The breakfast montage from Citizen Kane.  Years collapsed into minutes, capturing how people grow apart. Brilliant, and in its way heartbreaking.

Casablanca.... Okay, I admit. I can't watch only part of Casablanca. There is just too much good stuff there -- Rick helping the young couple, the first time he sees Ilsa in the bar, the conversations with Major Strasser, "I'm shocked, shocked! to find gambling going on here..." The Paris interlude, The airport scene, "I'm no good at being noble...", "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship..."; all of it. The American Film Institute got it backwards: Casablanca (rated second) is a better movie than Citizen Kane, because it engages the heart as well as the mind.

So what are your favorite movie scenes?

My aunt died yesterday. Mom called me with the news this afternoon. I am not quite sure how to feel.

My aunt was my mother's sister. She had had several strokes over the past few years, and had been living in a nursing home near her daughter. As I recall, she was having trouble recognizing people. Her death was no shock.

My aunt and I were never close. We saw each other at odd family gatherings, and never exchanged more than the most general of banalities.  That said, her death is leaving me feeling fretful and unsettled. It means that Mom is the last of that generation still alive in our family. I worry about her a great deal, even though she is in many ways more healthy than I am. She may well live another ten years.

I find myself wondering odd things, like who lives in the house in Sarasota now.  Or where Mom will evacuate to if there is a hurricane -- the last time she had to evacuate was in the horrible season of '05, and she went to Sarasota to be with my aunt and my then-living uncle.

I wonder if the people living in the house have an aluminum Christmas tree with a rotating light stand and red glass globes on it. As a girl I would sit and watch the tree turn red (pink really) to blue to green to yellow. The globes would be red or orange or black, depending upon the light. It is one of my clearest memories of my aunt and uncle's house, along with watching the 1984 game between Miami and Boston College.

I wonder how I will cope when Mom dies.

I should stop thinking about these things, turn off the computer and go to bed, but I am afraid of the nightmares about dying that have been haunting me occasionally over the past few months.  So many reminders this year of how fragile life and how fleeting time are. So many things to tell me how old I am, and how limited my time or that of people in my life may be.

Sic transit gloria mundi. 

Brrr.

The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. Origin unknown, often falsely attributed to Mark Twain.

I attended a Giants game at ATT Park this evening, and I gotta say, of all the American major league cities I have been in, having a baseball team in San Francisco makes less sense than in any other.  It was 57F when I and my companion for the evening drove away from the ball park, and that's not even counting the wind chill up in the stands.

When a Polar Fleece pullover is not warm enough for a game two months into the season, something's not quite right.

Self-Help movies?

The Bible for mothers-to-be for over the past two decades (I used it for all three of my pregnancies), What to Expect When You're Expecting, was recently made into a "heartwarming" and critically-panned romantic comedy. It's not the first time that a comedy has been made from such material: Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* *But Were Afraid To Ask was a much earlier and far superior effort in that vein.  But the mere existence of What to Expect... simply invites the question,* "What other non-fiction or self-help books** are amenable to being made into full-length feature films?"

How about...

The Interpretation of Dreams, by Sigmund Freud. Viggo Mortensen could reprise his role as Sigmund Freud from A Dangerous Method.  Maybe at the premier they could hand out Freud finger-puppets.***

On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin. That might be a bad idea, though: a scary number of people running around on the earth believe evolution was a figment of Darwin's imagination anyway.  On the Origin of Species: The Movie might just confuse them further.

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen J. Covey, starring someone highly effective, such as John Cleese.

Our Bodies, Ourselves. This would be an animated feature by Pixar.  The potential for 3D here just staggers the imagination, doesn't it?

What Color is Your Parachute? by Richard Nelson Bolles. Great possibilities for audience participation. 

Who Moved My Cheese?: An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life by Spencer Johnson. Made by Aardman Studios, the good people behind Wallace & Gromit.

And finally...

The Ethical Slut, by Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy. The casting possibilities are rife: Charlie Sheen, Ashton Kutcher, Tiger Woods...

Oh, wait. Ethical. Back to the casting couch, then. None of those guys would be remotely believable.

*Not begs the question.  Sorry, I couldn't help myself, but the misuse of "begs the question" is a rant for another day.

**Self-help books are not always non-fiction, depending upon how deluded the author and/or purchasers are.
***A child psychologist I know has a set of these: they come with Sigmund, Anna, Jung, and ... a couch.

Notes from an exhibition: the limits of Aestheticism.

Today I undertook the field trip I meant to have on my birthday but missed due to illness.  I went to the Palace of the Legion on Honor in San Francisco to see The Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde 1860–1900. Other than a couple of significant missteps on my part (it is a long, expensive cab ride from the museum to the train station, and leaving my phone in said cab means another long slog up to the city tomorrow to retrieve it), it was an enjoyable outing. Herewith, some brief notes from my outing -- a bit on the incoherent side, scribbled down in very bad handwriting on the train home:

I have been a fan of the Pre-Raphaelites for years, mainly because their works are so pretty. But I think that may have been a phase I am outgrowing.  Today, some of the prettiness began to wear thin, and I spent a lot of time on the way home on the train mulling over prettiness versus beauty and what appealed and didn't in the show.  There are times, such as this one, when I wish I were an art  historian so I could place what I see in a larger historical and social framework, beyond just what I read at the exhibit.

I find it interesting that the place where the Aesthetic movement succeeded, for me at least, was in what were traditionally crafts, rather than in painting.  The most appealing pieces were the work of E. W. Godwin and Christopher Dresser, which tended to have clean lines and be strong rather than simply pretty. And when it came to painting, the only painter in the bunch that truly engaged me was James McNeil Whistler.  (Whistler had an advantage going in: his Symphony in White #1, one of my favorite pieces of art  in the world, was in this exhibit. In addition, there was a piece I was unfamiliar with beforehand but nonetheless love,  Harmony in Gray and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander.)

In general I walked away from the paintings thinking "they were on the wrong track." Beauty in and of itself does not make great paintings. Take Dante Gabriel Rossetti's work, for example: his paintings of his  mistress (and William Morris's wife) Jane are idealized to the point of blandness -- and as can be seen by photographs of her in the exhibit, Jane Morris was not a pretty woman. Striking, yes, but bordering on ugly. Edward Burne-Jones's work is populated with ghosts: pale-skinned and perfectly proportioned, with faces as empty and smooth as marble, seemingly portentous but signifying nothing.

Inauthenticity was the hallmark of so much of the painting I saw today. There were a lot of pictures of beautiful women dressed in classical or medieval clothes, at odds with their period. It's pretty, but it's all surface.  I suppose that was the entire point of the  movement, but I like things to have a little more depth than that.

Whistler, though, painted real people. He did not tell their stories -- you can make them up for yourself -- but I got the sense that they had stories. His art encompassed life, not merely decoration. His work had a sense of connection to what we experience in the real world, even if it is only the experience of looking at a pretty girl. I've never seen people like those that Edward Burne-Jones painted; Whistler's subjects look like you could go out to lunch with them.

I can picture the Girl in White (dressed differently, of course) riding on Caltrain, texting her boyfriend. The sulky Miss Cicely Alexander could be the pre-teen at the next table at Hobee's. Burne-Jones's maidens, on the other hand, could be funerary statuary.

Maybe it's an uncanny valley problem: abstract forms engage the intellect and emotions, but since they are abstract they do not invite personalization the way that human forms do. Burne-Jones's people fall into a gray area: concrete enough to demand personalization, abstract enough to defy it. They come across as simply eerie and flat, in much the same way that Gauguin's Tahitian women do. Yet Gauguin's women nonetheless feel authentic in ways that Burne-Jones's people, with their classical or medieval dress, do not.

I think as I am getting older, beauty that is only skin-deep, lacking in other interest or personality, is beginning to pall for me. Maybe as pretty as Rossetti's pictures of Jane Morris are, it would be so much more arresting and moving to see her painted as she was, bug eyes, metaphorical warts and all.

I suppose, in the end, I keep feeling that life is not pretty, and the notion that we can lift ourselves to a higher plane by mere aesthetics seems naive.

I don't have a lot of time here right now, but I did want to post a reminder to all my California friends to VOTE today.

 It's especially important given the way that the primary has been restructured: the top two vote getter advanced regardless of party affiliation.

Justice is a difficult thing, sometimes

The New Jersey judge in the case of the Rutgers' student who Tweeted his roommate having sex with another man has had to speak out in defense of his sentencing the defendant to 30 days in jail, 300 hours of community service time and a $10,000 fine.  It's a shame he felt he had to do so, but it is also totally unsurprising.

It's a shame because Judge Glenn Berman did the right thing, in a case that was so fraught with emotion, and resisted mistaking justice for vengeance. He showed wisdom and discretion, which is what we want from a judge.

Don't get me wrong, what Rutgers' student Darhun Ravi did was evil; Judge Berman called his actions "unconscionable."  Ravi's callous disregard for the well being of his roommate, Tyler Clementi, and his willingness to expose Clementi's personal life to ridicule for his own amusement speaks volumes about his character, and none of it good. The fact that Clementi committed suicide moves the entire incident from sordid to tragic.

But ridicule and invasion of privacy, as awful as they are, are not physical abuse. Ravi did not beat, rape, torture or murder Clementi.   While there was a probability of emotional harm in his actions, there was no inevitability of physical harm. There is a big difference between sending out Tweets urging others to make fun of someone and beating them senseless.  To conflate the two minimizes the horror of the physical attacks that gay men and lesbians are sometimes subject to.

Furthermore, it minimizes the autonomy of Tyler Clementi himself.

Suicide is a choice.  Someone else might well have been angry, humiliated, or hurt, but might not have turned that destructive horror in on himself.  To ignore that his suicide was a choice is to deprive Tyler of the dignity of selfhood. Ravi may have made his life hellish, but he did not kill him: Clementi did that on his own.  And while Ravi's outrageous conduct may have been the last straw, it cannot have been the only straw.  It becomes too easy to fixate on that final, galvanizing incident, and ignore whatever went before.

Judge Berman was right: prison is not the answer here.  Sending Ravi to prison for five years as the prosecution requested would have done nothing but make him a martyr of sorts for homophobes everywhere.  Prison needs to be reserved for the worst offenders, those whose crime cannot be adequately punished any other way. That we so often fail to do so -- witness the number of people in prison for nonviolent drug-related offenses -- doesn't mean we should throw just anyone in a prison cell because we abhor what they did. It is too easy to rename our desire for retribution as a demand for justice.

The system worked well here.  I hope Darhun Ravi understands how fortunate he is that it did.

Wii woes.

I am trying to change my habits.  Really. Truly.

Part of this change is actually engaging in physical activity.  As my doctors and I get the dosages of the pain meds into something that vaguely provides an acceptable balance between pain relief and intrusive side effects, I have been able to do more.

So, in addition to small things -- taking the stairs up one flight or parking farther away from the front of the store -- I have pulled out the Wii balance board from where it sat collecting dust under the entertainment center.  Once again, I am confronted with the most annoying animated creature in existence.

The Wii Fit board character.

The Wii Fit board character is an animated rendering of the rectangular Wii balance board used to exercise.  It greets you when you start the program and walks you through the weighing in process.  When you switch between exercise categories, it is there in the background, running on a treadmill.  You would think that Nintendo could have figured out something better for these purposes.  Or at least more interesting.

Yes, I know what you're going to say. It cannot be as annoying as the Microsoft Office paperclip.  Oh, but it is. It nags.

It has a little chirpy voice -- not that it says much.  Most of its comments come in the form of condescending little onscreen captions.  It will ask why you haven't shown up in a few days -- or ask about other members of the family who haven't shown up in months -- or remind you that their birthday is coming up and telling you that you need to buy them presents or throw them a party. If you gain weight, it will ask if you know the reason -- and "How the &*%$ should I know?" is not an option.

When you are training, it shows up in the background running on a treadmill.  When you decide to use your preplanned fitness routine, if you don't finish it will question why you stopped too soon.

It's just creepy.

I am not sure why this bothers me so much: it's not like this thing even remotely approaches the uncanny valley, unlike the animated human trainers who walk you through yoga and strength exercises.  (Although to be honest they don't remotely approach the uncanny valley either, being about as realistic as circa 1992 Pixar renderings of humans. Think "Andy" in Toy Story.)  It does not look or sound even vaguely human.

Excepts it reads human. As someone who has a large amount of her social life revolve around people's typed words rather than those they speak, I have become very accustomed to thinking of sentient, responsive comments as being from an actual person, even when whatever it is would fail any remotely rigorous Turing Test.  I find myself talking to it -- which makes me simply annoyed at myself.

It's enough to discourage me from using the program, but then... how would I ever top my "666" ranking in Advanced Step?  Sigh. Maybe I should give up and just do something more natural to begin with, like walking.

At least my shoes won't nag me, then.

I can't believe I never caught that.

The things you learn from Cracked.com:  The Monkees' "Last Train to Clarksville" was a Vietnam War protest song. According to the songwriters Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, they had to be subtle about their anti-war beliefs because, well, it was The Monkees we're talking about. Their fan base would probably not have gone for it -- not to mention the producers of the television show.  (Sort of like how the fans didn't really go for Jimi Hendrix opening for the band, either.)

The lines  "We'll have one last night together, 'Til the morning brings my train and I must go.... And I don't know if I'm ever coming home" should have been a dead giveaway, though.

Railfan graduated this evening. Both of us are in shock.

I just want to take this opportunity to say how very proud I am of him.

Love you, kid.

Pomp and circumstance.

Odd musings from the cheap seats at a high school graduation:

Am I weird that I would love to go back to school just to be able to wear a doctoral hood?*

Mr. B. clearly got the memo about going casual under the robes: he seems to be wearing khaki shorts and flip-flops. It goes well with the shaved head, the multiple ear piercings, and the hood from Stanford.

Miss E., the world's hardest and best math teacher, got her doctorate from Harvard. Not surprising, really. She is not wearing flip-flops.

I can't take these guys anywhere: my husband and other two sons are critiquing the trend of graduates decorating their caps with the name of the college where they are bound. Loudly. Ignoring the hostile backward glances from the couple in front of us, whom I know from having heard conversations between them earlier have a daughter sporting "UC Davis" on hers.

Cute quip from the student MCs about theirs being the last class to graduate from the High School.  Take that, Mayans.

I wonder how many times across the country Steve Jobs will be quoted in high school commencement speeches.  There have been two quotes here this evening, both from Jobs's Stanford Commencement speech. Hey, people at the school are clearly into recycling.**

They must have sent a memo around saying "short speeches!" I don't think one has topped five minutes yet.

It's cool that they let the kids sit with their friends rather than alphabetically. Makes it harder to tell how far along they are, however -- you have to actually pay attention.

Aaaannnnnddd.... there he goes. Another kid graduated.  I feel old.
Aaaannnnnddd.... that's the lot of them. The Class of 2012 is out. Time to head to the quad for free food.

Next year, the eldest graduates from college.  Then I'll feel really old.

Sufficient unto the day the commencement thereof, however.


*I guess I wore a doctoral hood at my law school graduation; I don't really remember it at all.  I was four months pregnant, throwing up frequently, and severely dehydrated.  I was down in the basement of the law school throwing up in the women's room when I heard two little old ladies out in the hall complaining about graduates being drunk midday.  They decided to complain to the very nice woman in Alumni Relations, who poked her head in the bathroom and asked, "Pat? Is that you?" I groaned in affirmation, and I heard her telling the old biddies "She's not drunk, she's pregnant," and then urging them to go away and leave me alone. Later that afternoon, I went to the E.R. (for neither the first nor the last time during that pregnancy) and was admitted for a four-day hospital stay. So yes, I really wish I could  have a do-over on that graduation.


**They are, actually.  The school's "Green Team" won an award for their environmental efforts.

Memorial Day.

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

The Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln. 

To those of all wars who gave that last full measure of devotion, thank you.

Bookmarking meta-post.

This post is really just for me.  I am under the probably delusional belief that if I actually say I am going to write about something, I will. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary.

I have written about several cases that were pending before the Supreme Court.  I have been remiss in reading SCOTUSBLOG the past several months, and have not written about the outcome of those cases (or other just as interesting cases).

I need to read and write about the outcome of the Stolen Valor Act case (if the decision came down, I didn't catch it in my haphazard scanning), Golan v. Holder (zombie copyrights -- the Court decided rights can be revived by Congress), the Montana navigable waters case (Montana lost), and one more case I have not written on, Blueford v. Arkansas.  This last was a recent decision, which I know only from the New York Times' article on the case.

The Court decided in Blueford that a person can be retried on all charges even if the jury has has decided to acquit on the most serious if the jury hangs on lesser charges. I need to read the case to see if my immediate and visceral outrage over this is warranted. It was a 6-3 decision, with Sotomayor, Ginsburg and Kagan dissenting. I find it interesting that the ideological break in this case coincided with a break along gender lines as well.  I wonder how many times that has happened since Kagan joined the court.

On its surface -- and an online news article is almost definitionally superficial -- it seems basically unfair.  It reads like the majority was bending over backwards to give the prosecutors what they wanted. Why was it so important that the defendant be convicted on murder charges -- as opposed to negligent homicide?

Was it a technical matter? Does it imply a devotion on the Court to technicalities that favor prosecutors regardless of the impact on fairness or justice? If so, how do I feel about that?  I can see ways in which this might be far less of a major deal than it seems on the surface (other than to Alex Blueford, of course).

But instead of reading and researching these posts (or working on the six other posts from the past month that lie around waiting to be finished) I am sitting at my Starbucks of choice, listening to Latin music, reading Facebook and contemplating .... nothing, really.  I thought of writing a post about the color of the sea to go with "Sky Blue," but am currently being too lazy. I did the research, however, with a little jaunt out to Pescadero State Beach this afternoon.

Time to pack up and go home.

Have a good Memorial Day, everybody.

Sky blue.

I have often proclaimed that I am not a Californian.  That said, I know that I would be loathe to leave the Bay Area.  It's the weather, it's the politics, it's the tolerance of the odd and unusual, it's the proximity to the ocean ...

And it's the sky.

In Florida, where I grew up, sky blue was a pale, hazy color. The light was strong, but diffuse, the blue often crowded with clouds.  Winter was the best time of year, because the humidity -- and therefore the haziness -- would diminish, leaving a clear strong blue sky behind. I loved it.

I have that sky much of the time here.

That crisp blue sky is the main reason summers here are at least bearable.  The length of days is overwhelming, and the strong light of summer afternoons floods into my brain causing sensory overload, regardless of the temperature.  The blue sky which emerges from the frequent morning gray marine layer soothes and helps calm my tortured synapses.  Those days when the sky is blue first thing in the  morning are more problematic, since no marine layer often means much heat, but at least some part of my psyche is happy for the sky.

Best of all is the early fall.  The days have not yet turned gray and rainy, and yet are shorter, the light more oblique. The afternoons are gold and cornflower, just made for football and late season baseball games.  The leaves often don't turn until after the rain starts, but days when it clears out and the leaves have changed red and gold are nirvana.

In the evenings the sky deepens, cornflower through royal blue through navy into midnight as the stars come out.  It can be almost too beautiful for words.

Plenty of reason to stay.

I am watching Animal Planet's Cats 101 with Penwiper.  They are showing a piece on "klepto-cats."

I wonder if I should change the channel.  I don't want her to get any ideas.

Do you know where your towel is?

Sing! Sing! Sing!

I have had one singing lesson in my life, and enjoyed it immensely.  I often regret not having taken more, since I do enjoy singing, but the commute to see my voice teacher would have required a trip completely across the country.*

Elissa Weiss is a good friend; she is also a professional musician and a good teacher. If you live in or around NYC, and have yearned to learn to sing, but have been too bashful or fearful, she can help you discover your voice: her latest  "Everybody Can Sing!" workshop starts next week. (She also gives individual singing lessons. She's great -- as I said, I would love to take more lessons from her.)

C'mon, you know you want to...

*Yes, Elissa, I know I was supposed to find a local singing teacher and I didn't.  My loss. 

John Scalzi once again nails it.

In 2005, in the wake of Katrina, writer John Scalzi wrote a piece called "Being Poor" on his blog.  It hit a resounding chord in a lot of folks -- even people who have never been truly poor, like myself. I made all my kids read it.

A week or so ago, Scalzi wrote a piece called "Lowest Difficulty Setting," about how privilege in our society can be analogized to video game settings.  It's brilliant.  If you are one of the few people who have not run across this on your Facebook or Twitter feeds, I strongly encourage you to read it.

I can tell how widespread this has become: two days ago The Red-Headed Menace came into the kitchen and said he had seen something I needed to read -- and showed me Scalzi's piece.  He had found it all on his own; it was making the rounds among his friends.

Scalzi has made explaining what can be a difficult concept a lot easier. I'm glad his brilliant analogy is getting out there, especially to young men.

Sometimes, you get what you need.

This has not been a good year, on a lot of different fronts, and I keep thinking about how completely self-indulgent all of this blogging ... stuff... strikes me as being. It takes up too much of my time, and I am not even really writing much lately.  The work -- which brings in no income into the house, and will not in the foreseeable future -- seems harder, and slower, and less... artful. I am less and less enamored of the sound of my own voice than I have ever been, and I have not really been all that in love with it for a fair while now, any possible appearance to the contrary. Discipline -- write something every day, at least -- has been harder and harder to come by, and frequently disappears altogether.

These feelings of self-indulgent inadequacy have been deepened by me looking over a partial rough draft of a project I have been working on for years -- a partial rough draft I sent out to several people, which received minimal feedback -- and being struck by the typos and other problems it contained.

In the  midst of all this self doubt, I happened to turn to my most overused resource these days, Facebook. And there, among shares of funny pictures and links to liberal leaning news stories, I found Neil Gaiman's speech at the University of Arts commencement. The entire twenty-minute speech is well worth listening to, but one section in the middle struck me particularly hard:

And remember that whatever discipline you are in, whether you are a musician or a photographer, a fine artist or a cartoonist, a writer, a dancer, a designer, whatever you do you have one thing that's unique. 

You have the ability to make art. 

 And for me, and for so many of the people I have known, that's been a lifesaver. The ultimate lifesaver. It gets you through good times and it gets you through the other ones. 

 Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do. I'm serious. 

Make good art. 

Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art. Somebody on the Internet thinks what you do is stupid or evil or it's all been done before? Make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, and eventually time will take the sting away, but that doesn't matter. Do what only you do best. 

Make good art. 

Make it on the good days too. 

And ... while you are at it, make your art. Do the stuff that only you can do.
...[T]he one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can. 

The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you're walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That's the moment you may be starting to get it right. 

The things I've done that worked the best were the things I was the least certain about, the stories where I was sure they would either work, or more likely be the kinds of embarrassing failures people would gather together and talk about  until the end of time. They always had that in common: looking back at them, people explain why they were inevitable successes. While I was doing them, I had no idea. 

I still don't. And where would be the fun in making something you knew was going to work? 

And sometimes the things I did really didn't work. There are stories of mine that have never been reprinted. Some of them never even left the house. But I learned as much from them as I did from the things that worked.

So there it is.  I have heard this message before, and failed to internalize it, but maybe this time it will stick.

I don't know to what extent this blog (or either of my other couple of projects) is good art, but I am pretty sure it is art, somehow. Maybe it is art only in the most general sense, just as making sweaters from cat hair is art, but it is art nonetheless.  I have a responsibility to make it as good as possible. I also have a responsibility to myself to get the other projects into good enough shape that I can do something with them. Telling myself that they will never be good enough for the world to see is unfair -- especially given how much drivel ends up out there in the world.

I do feel like I am walking down the street naked, sometimes, but who knows? Maybe that's what I am supposed to do.

Now, about that mutated boa constrictor...

From the sublime to the ridiculous.

On my Facebook page, I passed along a link to The Pubic Domain Review that a friend had posted, commenting "[Red-Headed Menace], this is the chance you have been waiting for to see The Battleship Potemkin."  He responded, "This is the chance I have been waiting for to see Plan 9 From Outer Space."

Sigh. Teenagers.

I can't go anywhere with these guys.

Today, the two younger boys, the Resident Shrink and I were on the way to see The Avengers, when we passed a beautiful vintage red Volkswagon Beetle stranded by the side of the road.  I hear "Ow" coming from the back of the car.

Me: "I hope you guys aren't playing 'Punch buggy'*. You know how I hate that game."

The Red-Headed Menace: "Railfan hit me! I want a retribution vehicle!"

Railfan: "What do you want, a Honda Civic bitch-slap?"

*For those of you who grew up civilized, "punch buggy" is a game where the first person to spot and identify a Beetle punches the person next to them on the upper arm. Among purists, there is some question whether newer generation Beetles count, but that did not come into play today because the car was clearly of an earlier era -- the early 1960s would be my guess.

There are some people not worth listening to.

Recently, on one of the public television channels, I ran across the last five minutes of a Frontline episode on "the vaccination controversy." It's not really fair to judge a program on five minutes, and I recognize that, but I am going to do this anyway.

The portion that I saw had a political scientist talk to a panel of women -- not one man in the bunch -- about whether they thought that vaccination was presented as a choice.  After these women complained that they felt that had no choice but to vaccinate, the political scientist explained that parents needed to be allowed to feel that they were making the decision. And the voice over explained that it was a battle between pediatricians and public health officials and the need for parents to control what risks their children face.

Should parents make the decision to vaccinate or not? No.

Oh, wrong, that "no" is not appropriate.

 It should be "hell no."

Having a child is a choice. Vaccinating -- at least with the big ones, the MMR, DPT and polio vaccines -- should not be.  Any more than having a license should be optional for driving.

You may own a car, but before you can sit behind the wheel you need to prove that you can actually drive.  The exceptions are for vehicles driven totally on private property.  Anything else risks the life of everyone who happens to be on the road.

You want to have an exception for vaccination, for it to be optional? Fine.  Vaccination is a civic responsibility, the same as being trained and showing that you have been trained to drive is.  So let's have the same conditions apply.

You can choose to not vaccinate your child as long as that child is kept isolated from any human being outside its family.  You cannot send them to public school.  You cannot take them to daycare. You certainly cannot take them to a store.  You cannot take them anywhere where anyone who has not been vaccinated for valid medical reasons may be exposed, or where they may be exposed to disease.

This is not a matter like motorcycle helmets, or even child car seats, where the issue is one of safety for the rider and indirect  costs to society.  Unvaccinated children pose dangers not only to themselves but to others who cannot be vaccinated: those who have immunocompromised systems, those who are too young to vaccinate, and those who have had allergic reactions to vaccines or their constituent parts. The only way for those people to be safe is through herd immunity; as long as a high enough percentage of the population is vaccinated,* the disease cannot get a foothold and it dies out.

For a program like Frontline to allow a voice to the anti-vaccination forces is to give them credibility. It is hard enough to fight against people who still believe falsely that there has been shown a link between vaccines and autism,** who claim that they contain mercury-containing thimerosol (they have not for years, and autism diagnoses have continued to climb well past the time when they did) without  a public television show giving a crackpot like Jenny McCarthy a forum.

I expect better of PBS.

*Also, adults, get your booster shots. Contrary to the popular belief, a single set of vaccinations will not protect forever in all cases;  at least with the DPT the initial shots have to be followed at ten-year intervals. This is especially true of adults who work with children a lot. Given that there have been a lot of cases out west, this  might be especially true of people on the Coast.

**On a personal note, the idea that the the risk of autism equals the possibility of death -- because these diseases can cause long-lasting disability and death -- offends me.  Autism is not a fate worse than death. Rather than go further down that road, I'll just say that generally speaking, I agree with Penn and Teller.

Passing the Test, the sequel.

I was watching Stardust, one of my very favorite movies, and thinking about how it passes the Bechdel Test.  I was wondering how many of my movies (as opposed to those which really belong to the whole household*) do so. I don't have that many movies (as opposed to television shows and DVDs of theatrical performances), and just about half (10 of 22) of them qualify. (Fantasia and Fantasia 2000 are simply unclassifiable, so I left them out.) The movies that I own are the ones that I really truly love.

There are animated features: The Incredibles, Spirited Away, Lilo & Stitch, Chicken Run, Despicable Me.  All of these have very strong women female characters**, and in all cases they are seeking to rescue themselves or ones they love from outside threats and return to or find one their home.

There are live action pictures Shakespeare in Love, Moulin Rouge, Dogma, and the aforementioned Stardust. (Not very many -- but then I don't own very many movies.) In two of these, the lead female characters want to become actresses. In Dogma, she wants to fulfill her mission --- which she only poorly understands -- and get back to her home.  More than that she is searching for God, and trying to find a glimpse of the divine in all the insanity that is happening all around her.

Out of all of the live action films, Stardust probably has the most strong women characters.  (Yes, even above Moulin Rouge.) It's not a chick flick -- I am not really a fan of rom-coms, and even ones that pass the Bechdel test tend not hold my interest: Terms of Endearment and Steel Magnolias are two of the most annoying movies ever made.  (I wish I had seen Bridesmaids -- I keep meaning to rent it.) The women characters in Stardust have a diverse set of agendas -- the most significant being the witches' hunt for the fallen star.***

What interests me is not just the movies I have that pass the Bechdel Test, but how many of them do not in any meaningful way: Master & Commander, Casablanca, Hair (the movie), Young Frankenstein, and Return of the King, Up, A Christmas Story, and a Fish Called Wanda (small interactions between Archie's wife and daughter Portia). Shrek 2 (all the conversations between female characters revolve either around Shrek or Charming), Finding Nemo (there are interactions between the Peach and Flo, but these last a matter of seconds and can't really be called conversations), Toy Story 1 & 2, and Happy Feet, Wall-E. (If I am including the chickens, I really need to include toys, penguins, robots, and fish.)

The lack of no significant female characters makes sense in a lot of them: Master and Commander and Return of the King are war movies, pretty much. Casablanca is emblematic of its time.****  A Christmas Story is centered around a single male character, and A Fish Called Wanda plays heavily upon the sexual relationship between Otto and Wanda, and Ken's infatuation with her, and the balance of the movie would have been thrown off by another woman in the gang.

Then there is Mulan.  In spite of its faults, I think every girl under the age of ten (or over, for that matter), should own this movie.  Mulan is a wonderful story of female empowerment.  But I need to see it again to see if it would pass the Bechdel Test: working from memory, I don't think it does.  The conversations between Mulan and her mother may not be about a specific love interest, but are about the need for her to marry in general, and what she needs to make that happen.

It's not that these are bad movies.  They're good, as far as I am concerned, or I would not own them.  I don't think it is that I prefer male-centered movies, per se.  I think there are honestly fewer good movies that are not romantically centered that revolve around women characters.  Where are the movies about women on the prairie? Where are the movies about the suffrage movement?  Are they out there?

If so, I think I need to seek them out.

*To members of my household: has anyone seen my copy of the deluxe edition of Citizen Kane? I cannot find it, and I want to watch the documentary Battle for Citizen Kane which is also in the set. Also, Mary Poppins has gone missing.
**The hens in Chicken Run count. I am unsure quite whether the girls in Despicable Me and The Incredibles do, but I am opting to throw them in anyway.
***Stardust contains one of my favorite movie quotes: "Nothing says 'romance' like the gift of a kidnapped injured woman!" As far as the witches go, seeking youth after two centuries of decrepitude becomes more understandable as I age. They still seem evil, just more understandably evil.
****Of course, on the other hand, there is Gone With the Wind (a wonderful  movie I cannot stand -- the subject for a post for another day which I have been meaning to write for a while), Rebecca,  and The Wizard of Oz, none of which I own but all of which fall within roughly the same cinematic era as Casablanca.

It's been a while since I did a long, substantive post, let alone one that breathes fire.  I plan to get back to seriousness soon, but in the meantime, this picture needs to be disseminated among intelligent cinemaphiles and science fiction buffs everywhere: a wonderful use of Legos and an iPhone.

I am content. Content is good.

I am in an irrationally good mood.  All in all, the world could be a worse place.

The cats are back home safe and sound.  We will need to get blood work done tomorrow as a precaution, but they seem to be just fine (albeit a little mad at us). We had taken to singing to the cats on in the car to calm them, and on the way home the Red-Headed Menace did a lovely job singing Louis Armstrong style on "What a Wonderful World."

I just watched an exciting Preakness.  I don't think I'll Have Another is a Triple Crown winner, but I'll be cheering him on in the Belmont just the same. It's been thirty-four years since Affirmed. I think it would be good for national morale if he won the Triple Crown.

It is a beautiful day outside.

Yesterday, in between disasters, I did go and get my hair cut.  I like it, which is unusual for me. I took a picture of it so that I could remember how it was cut for the future -- see profile on sidebar. It even looks good the day after getting it cut, which is wonderful.

I will be making dinner tonight: spiral sliced ham, roast potatoes, watermelon salad, homemade French bread. I may go out afterwards to a movie, or maybe not.

So, yes, I spent money on a Clipper card yesterday that I did not use and an ungodly amount on vet bills, but the card will keep and the cats are safe.

For just this moment, I am content.

And then the day went even further downhill.

I have just returned from the emergency vet's office.  Some time ago, I had spilled a bottle of Excedrin Migraine in my backpack.  I had thought I had gotten all of pills out of there, but apparently not. I found two half crushed pills on my floor this evening, and my backpack had been knocked over.

Excedrin contains acetaminophen, aspirin and caffeine.  The latter two are bad for cats, the first is deadly.  Even a half a tablet could kill one.  So both cats had to be hauled to the vets.  They were quite unhappy about this, of course -- Railfan has a couple of very nasty scratches to show for this evening's work.

P&P are stashed tonight at the vets to have fluids (after having had their stomachs pumped, and activated charcoal laid down) and other meds, and we are out 2K in vet bills.  There is no question that we did the right thing, but... ouch.

If Pandora died, I would be very sad. If Penwiper died, I would be devastated. She's my therapy cat.

I can't even get roaring drunk.  Rick's Rather Rich Ice Cream (Chocolate Custard and Peppermint Chip in a waffle cone) is nice, but it is no Red Stag Cherry Bourbon and Coke.

Damn.

All dressed up and no place to go.

I had  planned to spend the day in San Francisco looking at pretty pictures of beautiful women.  I had dressed, not up, exactly, but certainly more respectably than my regular schlubby self does.  Black corduroy slacks, a black v-neck sweater covered with a deep burgundy velvet shirt, jewelry, lipstick; in other words as  befits hanging around an art museum.* General business casual.  (I am having a bad hair day, but that seems to be the norm the past couple of weeks.  I desperately need to get my hair cut, something which I usually dislike getting done.)    The Rocket Scientist was going to take me up and we were going to lunch and then he was going to drop me off before heading to a weekend workshop further north.  I was going to take Caltrain back home, which I almost always enjoy. (I like riding trains.)

Life happens.  Specifically, defective radiators happen.  The radiator which we had installed in Vincent the sixteen-year-old black convertible a few months ago sprung a leak.  The good news is that it is still under warranty, the bad news is that the time it cost us to determined what was wrong and make alternate transportation arrangements precluded going up to the city.  Rats. We did have a nice lunch locally with the Not-So-Little Drummer Boy, who is home from college and whose company is almost always a delight, but it still is not the same thing as a museum trip that one has been planning for weeks.**

So I am sitting at home in front of my computer.  I feel like I should go out and do something this afternoon, just to make up for missing my museum outing. The house is pretty much clean, and even if it were not, I would want to change before doing housework.

Sigh. I hate having to figure out alternate plans.

*I am actually of the opinion that t-shirts and flip flops are okay for museums, as long as people are there and are really interested in the art. Enthusiasm covers a lot of sartorial sins in my book.
**I originally was supposed to go see this on my birthday, but I was ill and had to punt.

Decisions, decisions.

Along with (spurious statistic alert!) probably 75% of the other mothers in America, I received flowers for Mother's Day.  The florist did a superb job of creating a bouquet to last for days, mixing roses which were in full bloom with not-quite-opened irises and completely closed stargazer lilies. The roses were lovely, and the irises were quite pretty when they opened, but the lilies are spectacular. They're huge and beautiful and incredibly perfumed.

That last is a problem.  Strong fragrances -- even natural ones, such as star jasmine or, in this case, lilies -- can be migraine triggers for me.  I have spent the past two days flirting with a headache.

So, you say, throw them out.  I should.  Most sane people would.  But I can't seem to discard something so lovely.  The need to protect and nurture one's physical self can sometimes conflict with the need to nurture one's psyche, especially when the object which is so soul-satisfying is so very transient.

It's such a dilemma.

An occasional list of things I am grateful for.

For light rail trains with free WiFi.
For pub trivia.
For Veronica, my favorite bartender/waitress.
That Railfan found a date to the prom, and that they had a very nice time..
That The Red-Headed Menace's AP is over so he can stop stressing about it.
That the Not-So-Little Drummer Boy is home for the summer.
For silly movie trailers that make me laugh.
For good friends who point me towards them.
For lemons.
For ice-cold watermelon.
For watermelon-mint salad dressed in balsamic vinegar and olive oil with feta cheese on top.
For baseball season.
For the Tampa Bay Rays.
For knitting.
For the St. Petersburg Times and PolitiFact.
For sunny days, even if they are too long.
For Monty Python and the Spanish Inquisition (theirs, not the real one).
For Netflix.
For Cadfael.
For Ken Burns.
For Jane Austen.
For J.K. Rowling.
For the teachers who taught me to read.
For iced tea.
For the right to vote.
For Cee Lo Green's "F*** You."
For Tony Bennett's Duets II.
For Stardust.

That President Obama actually admitted that same-sex marriage was a good thing.

For nurses.
For Mother's Day flowers with pink lilies that are just blooming.
For chocolate.
For other people.
For Company.
For the color of pine trees against a clear blue sky.
For caffeine, my drug of choice.
For search engines, which allow me to access my real drug of choice,  information.
For New York City, even if I do not get there but once a decade.
For San Francisco, even if I only go up there a couple of times a year (far too infrequently).
For Paris, even if I never get there again.  The idea of Paris, even.
For the Musee d'Orsay and the exhibit from there currently at the Palace of Fine Arts.

And, because I have to include these every time:
For the ocean.
For the color blue.
For my family, who with all their quirks and insecurities still rock.
For light.
For art.
For love, with its myriad complications and delights.
For life.

Words of wisdom from tonight's fortune cookie*

"If you want it -- take it!"

Maybe I should try that sometimes.


*Da Sichuan Bistro, 3781 El Camino Real, Palo Alto, California,  roughly halfway between Oregon/Page Mill and Charleston/Arastradero.**  Comfy if pedestrian atmosphere, friendly waitstaff, good food. The General's Chicken is great: sweet, but not syrupy or cloying, with heat, saltiness and acidity balancing out the sweetness. I also really like the sizzling steak on iron plate. The wonton dumpling in chili sauce is terrific, and taking the leftover chili oil sauce and drizzling it into your vegetarian hot and sour soup is trés yummy.  They have a good vegetarian menu, which means all the adults  in our house are happy with either eating there or getting takeout from there.  
** I hate intersections where streets change names.  The bistro is on the eastern (I think) side, a.k.a. the Oregon and Charleston side.  If you are familiar with the area, that last sentence makes sense.

The Jedi way.

I have always thought that the process of creating Jedi laid out in the last three Star Wars movies (I always count them from release date) was far from ideal, bordering on child abuse. And now I think I can clearly articulate why.

I was in a discussion yesterday about mindfulness, and the concept of the rational mind v. the emotional mind v. wise mind (which is a combination of the two).  When the discussion turned to rational mind, the example was, as is usually the case, Star Trek's Spock.  One of the participants in the discussion mentioned that she had little experience with Star Trek, that she was really a Star Wars person, and that there was no comparable person in that universe.  When I suggested Yoda, I was immediately shouted down. Yoda exemplified wise mine, everyone said.

No, he doesn't.  And the Jedi ethos doesn't either, going as far as to openly reject emotion.  A Jedi must not fear, a Jedi must not be angry, a Jedi must not care about other individuals except in any but the most abstract and generalized way.  The good of all rather than the good of individuals is what matters.  Children were taken from their homes and mothers at a very young age, an age when attachments to others are very important, so they can grow up without needing love. One of the reasons Yoda gets so exasperated with Luke is that he is so emotional.

This is extremely unhealthy. People need other people.  All healthy people will feel anger sometimes, and will  feel love sometimes; our brains are hard-wired that way. To take children and deliberately make them unhealthy emotionally is abusive.

So I stand by what I said: the only difference between a Vulcan and a Jedi is that Vulcans are born that way, and Jedi are made.

The Wild Things mourn.

I often use Facebook to find things to write about. It has been an active week for my friends, and I have twenty-two open tabs with articles from everywhere – Cracked.com to the New York Times. I also have a post to write on Yoda, and a post to finish on gratitude (a list of fifty things minus the big fifteen I listed in my Meta-Gratitude post). I also want to write on a new thriller I am reading.

All of that has to wait.

Maurice Sendak has died.

I knew he was old. I knew he was in ill health. His frailty was obvious in the interview he did with Stephen Colbert earlier this year.

His brilliant wit was also well in evidence. I am so glad that Colbert gave us a chance to see the tamer of the Wild Things, the architect of the Night Kitchen.

I once gave a therapist who was leaving to go on maternity leave a copy of Where the Wild Things Are. I told her that every shrink's kid needed a copy of this book. I was speaking tongue-in-cheek, of course. I didn't really mean it.

I really think that everybody's child needs a copy of it. No matter what their age.

Sendak was somewhat scornful of the devotion that Where the Wild Things Are has elicited. I tend to think that that was because he was never a parent.

WTWTA was my favorite children's book. It still is. Partly it is what it seems to say: it conveys the “there are people who love you, there is a home for you” message in a way that is not cloying or seriously creepy. (As much as I adore Shel Silverstein's poetry and songs, The Giving Tree is not a healthy book. Even more disturbing is The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown, who also wrote Goodnight Moon.) More than that, the cadence of his prose was both simple and lyrical. It was elegantly straightforward.

In a world where your child may get hooked on a book and not want you to read anything else, reading Sendak's beautiful prose and showing off his pictures that managed to be whimsical without being cutesy is a blessing. This is not true if you are stuck reading Are You My Mother? Even Fox in Sox and Horton Hears a Who pale after a while.

So here's to you, Maurice.  At the risk of echoing a sentimentality which you would no doubt scorn, I hope that wherever your spirit is, a wild rumpus is going on.

You deserve no less.