Caylee

The child's mother
The child's father
The child's brother
The child's nanny
The child's gra'mother
The child's car
The corpse sniffing dog
The sense that she is near
The child's nother

Helium flight

Not for children: Take a bic lighter. Grasp a party balloon helium tank between your thighs, and put a black garbage back over your lap, and thumb the nozzle open. Use only non-flammable helium or even plain "air." When the bag inflates, grasp the edges tightly with your outer feet and twist the top part into a Higgs funnel. Now make a small spout at the top for the air in the bag to escape and enter the vortex. Light the lighter and hold up to the "spout." The excess air will "burn upward" with the helium, creating a brief but intense upward drag all around the perimeter of the bag. Careful not to light the bag or anything else and let go the bag with your feet: It will rise with a force of about 75 psi. Anything attached to it will rip away, including light furniture or picnic supplies.

Personal VTOL reappears

Glenn Martin's "Jetpack" is actually a retread of a design bruited about in the 1990s called "SoloTrek," which reached the point of untethered brief hovers close to the ground, just as Martin's does. If Martin solved a significant problem afflicting SoloTrek, one does not discover this from the NYT piece,

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/29/science/29jetpack.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin#

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/07/29/us/29jetpack.600.jpg

To see the stalled Springtail (the Solotrek signature craft), which is obviously being hawked to the military, check out:

http://www.trekaero.com/Trek_VTOL_Springtail_EFV4B_Specifications.htm

Carolina Back Country

I have an ancestor who fought with Tarleton's Raiders, Loyalists who massacred women and children in their beds in the worst fighting of the Revolutionary War in those parts, stimulating American patriots to comb through the ruins screaming "Tarleton's quarter, Tarleton's quarter," killing. (I.e. no quarter at all.) It was Indian country and filled with outlaw militias so the killing came easier.

NBC Brian Williams interviews Ahmadinejad

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25884020/

(Cut and paste it in another window for Chrissakes)

Ahmadinejad says, in the teaser to Brian Williams' interview, "Did Nuclear weapons help Israel prevail in Lebanon? No. Did nuclear weapons prevent the Soviet Union from collapsing? No. For that matter, did nuclear weapons lead the United States to prevail inside Iraq? Or Afghanistan for that matter? No. Nuclear weapons are twentieth century, we are in a new century." (approx. quotation).

1. Israel did not prevail in Lebanon using nuclear weapons because Israel's existence was not threatened by Lebanon. Nuclear weapons are for giving your country impugnity to act more freely, for instance, in Lebanon.

2. Nuclear weapons permitted the Eastern Europeans Russians and others to free themselves of dictatorship without suffering invasion.

3. Nuclear weapons did not facilitate victory in Iraq because the United States invaded Iraq to liberate Iraqis from a dictator, but it is true that nukes could not help Americans bring peace or stability to the country.

Ahmadinejad's message is: nuclear weapons would permit Iran to withstand threats and internal division without being occupied, but would not allow Iran to successfully pacify or dominate its neighbors, so don't worry. Isn't that Ahmadinejad's real meaning?

So basically, "Yes, we want nukes"

Makapan's Cave

Can Bosman's short story be used in a History Course? That's not a question I usually ask since tenure, but the start of the story has to be seen as ironic (it is) in order not to be verboten: Oom Schalk Laurens, Bosman's (b. 1905) alter-ego old man character (born ca. 1850?) is about to reminisce about something that happened to his brother and him. He says something like, "All Kafirs are the same," and then that while the Hottentoten steals only the biltong, the kafir steals the biltong and the line it is hung on. But some kafirs, Oom Schalk says, are okay and it is wrong to shoot them, and so . . .

This is the highly deceptive, very well planned out beginning of an amazing story premised, ultimately, on grasping power and violence in a very intimate way. It is also set squarely within genuine political events (naming Paul Kruger and Piet Potgeiter) again in a subversive and believable way. It is kind of like a "Brokeback Mountain" told doubly ironically, where the reader and the teller are kept from full disclosure, and the emotional center is left intact, and explodes only in retrospect, when looking back over what's been read. It is a perfectly structured story, and it is as heartbreaking as Doris Lessing's in telling of the damage racism does to human relationships. The brutality of the story is like a slow burn. I love it.

But to use it I have to have all the class first hear me talk about it. Because many of them will not know what to make of it especially its beginning. They will not find it accessible to them. It would be like reading, with no warning, a story by a German 1930s author:

"Oh, I know the Jew," Old Hans began, knocking his pipe on his pantleg. "All the Jews are the same. They are all misers, cheapskates who will swindle you blind and must be shot." . . .

People compare Bosman to Twain, so perhaps that's where I'll have to find the angle in: Huck Finn and Jim on the Riverboat. Boy that scene has done a lot of work over the years!

Batman's mark as line of death 9/11

The Dark Knight was a great comic. I remember reading it in San Francisco in 1984, and thinking, "Well, this is new."

Now here is the Dark Knight in the "original" form, but there is Batman in front of an image we know as "the World Trade Center coming down in flames," with the Bat of Batman marking the flaming part, above which, we all know, are doomed management and trader people, about to die.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8a/Dark_Knight.jpg

The chaining of this knowledge to something else. The morbid fascination and excitement it causes in the Batman ad.

UPDATE, July 28th, 2008

This ad is now hard to find. Downplayed. Too "on the nose."

Now the papers are saying Dark Knight captures the current "national mood."

Or is it that Barack Obama is the Dark Knight?

More likely than either: the ad agency wanted to use the most powerful images in the national memory and did it by replacing the fire of the jet fusilages ripping through the mens' rooms and lounges and offices and cubicles and coffee rooms, with the sign of the Batman.

I want to live in another country sometimes.

Ugly battle continues

I teach my History of Africa class (precolonial) that humanity developed in Africa, so we are all Africans. I tell them that the difference between me and an eskimo (inuit) is less, genetics-wise, than the distance between some east and west Africans; and yet, that Africanness makes as much sense genetically as Europeaness and Asianness: not very much, but a bit. They all nod their heads.

Then I tell them we all developed in Africa FROM AN ANIMAL THAT LOOKS VERY MUCH LIKE A RAT.

In the National Geographic devoted to current thinking about evolution, a terrific series showing how genetics has challenged biologists' view of the "tree of life," they showed a reconstruction of this being.

It is called "Earth Mother" or something in Latin. It is colored orangish, which is wishful thinking. The snout is a tiny bit shrewish. This is the "Placental Mammal" ancestor. It LOOKS JUST LIKE A RAT.

IT IS A RAT.

A rat is unchanged from that time, tens of millions of years ago. It has existed in some form in that exact shape and size for millions of years. It has adapted of late in its city form to surviving off human detritus.

I killed another light grey, almost white-bellied big fella today. I'd like to film the next "catch," and put it on Youtube. Maybe I will.

Obama's skid

As usual Pat Buchanan is correct in his commentary on Obama. It is like vertigo watching him on MS-NBC, relishing his role as advocate for "Barack."

Obama is in trouble (note: I got this right: see below prediction re McCain).

It is because he is too good at countering. Everything that happens he has a comment on. Even when Wes Clark said something true, Obama bounced. All the right moves.

But in a candidate who had many people thinking, "this one is different."

How different can you be, and get elected president? On the other hand, the FISA thing is just pro-executive branch. It's like Bill Clinton and Bush wanting a "line item veto."

DC Rat Abatement

DC.gov Rat Abatement consists of a set of web menus that malfunction and leave the wrong address in if you live in Capitol Hill with numbered and lettered streets. But you get a number to track the progress of your complaint, so we will see. ( My text corrected the malfunction in CAPITAL LETTERS.)

Caught a large, gray rat in one of the traps. The grease is what attracts them. How much do I want to attract them? I must calibrate this . . . Is there a medium attractiveness?

Message to Historians

Prominent series offshoot editor instructed his authors to treat the "Select Bibliography" and the footnote references as equal in value, and to choose between representing an important work in one section or the other. Contributors supplied an initial 10,000 word ms. (in some cases, culled carefully from a 12,000 word draft). Then, this was further compressed to 8,000 words on the unexpected command of the editor -- including notes and bibliography!

The au.s complied by again paring away any footnote-select bibl. overlap. I recognized one particular historian of Baptists in India, therefore, severally, and two of his publications. The historian then wrote a very ill-natured book review of the compendium, calling attention to defects in the very same pages that directly showcased his work, and the only reason I can think of is . . . not being in the . . . Select Bibliography.

Nerdy Widget

My speech to the Academy

Ladies and gentlemen, what does it take to write a perfect book? Despite the fact that it looks easy?

Ignoring sudden noises in the house, pretending "that was nothing."

Not eating: skipping eating during the day is good for work habits.

Permament damage to your relationships with others, because you have been possessed by a monomania.

You have to have false courage, because there is no other kind. This makes you generally unreasonable. It is impossible to have judgement about anything while mustering up courage.

Who am I to read the tea leaves in this way, as opposed to that? must be answered by, "GODDAMMIT!" spoken internally, in optimum circumstances, but sometimes out loud, "GODDAMIT!, I CAN DO AS I PLEASE!" There is no other way.

David Owens related remarks, 2nd try

The flood did not come.

Anyway. After painting the entire house, and moving in all the furniture, I built the back area up with about a dozen 80 lb. bags of concrete. I built a flimsy mold around the cracked, concrete-mortared brick retaining wall at the back of the house, outside the kitchen, and poured about eight of the gravelly concrete tubfuls all over it. The mold finally broke, and the wall bulged out. I propped it back and waited til the concrete was almost dry, and carved out a nice dip, a sort of scoop, more a pair of lips, really, from the semi-dry wall, and then ordered tiles, and managed to mosaic the wall with this leaning-back area (if you are under four feet tall) in black, and the majority of the wall in "straw" coloured tiles.

Then I built an amateurish-looking concrete wall to the right, over the Montauk green slate tiles we got as extras with the kitchen. I laid these up on a built-up surface out back with now-cracked mortar.

Turns out you have to stuff a towel in the drain AT ALL TIMES when working with concrete and cementitious products in these ways. "Enough said."

So, I had to rip out some of the platform and concrete work I did, and tear up the tiles, in order to re-route the drainage to avoid flooding the kitchen. That nearly happened in the winter. Anyway, I put in an angled gutter pipe from the same drain-hole-punched piece of slate, over to the stairs, exhausting with a hole set into the first step. So the back-of-kitchen now drains down the stairs. The bottom of the stairs is thus more important than ever, and has to be kept swept and clean. This is a job best done on a Sunday afternoon, wearing leather work gloves and armed with a wire brush and a beer, not frenetically, at three a.m. in the morning, in the dark, in a downpour, without work gloves so that the chicken wire there punctured my hand.

All that lugging of concrete and stirring it by hand did something to my right knee. Nothing arthroscopic surgery and some rehabilitation couldn't bring back, close to normal, however.

Grow up and get wings

My almost-three year old daughter on my lap for "book on the lap," followed by a "book in bed," and then "a N -- s story," at least one "the following day," and then a promise to check back in on her in five minutes.

I asked her whether she'd like angels' wings made out of cloth, because Emily had seen a toddler wearing such at a party we went to outdoors on Capitol Hill on Saturday.

She said, "Yes, because when I grow up I'm going to have wings, because I'm going to be an angel."

I said, "You think you are going to be an angel when you grow up?"

She said, "Yes, when I grow up."

Sheetrock and Shellac and Fear

I am a fan of David Owen, a guilty pleasure! One thing Owen does very well is to convey the anxiety of being a homeowner acutely. I am right now nervously glancing out our basement-kitchen doorway/window perched over the only working drain at that deep level of the perimeter of the house. Were it to clog, all the water would have to drain through a hole underneath my tool chest in the center closet in the basement here, something that has in fact happened. My rube goldberg apparatus to route the rain away from the house dates from that point, but it is vulnerable to debris and overflowing.

It is raining hard now.

Taking out the trash I see the central drain for the alley is backed up. A huge pool has formed, blocking access to our city-named "Court." It is only a matter of time before the water reaches me from the other side of my drains. My papers and such are still arranged all over my floor. The electrical equipment is all still "on," wires all over the place. I just heard thunder approaching. Happy 5th of July!

Rats live next to my head

My office space faces the front of the house — a townhouse, attached, facing north, the shade, and the open sewer on an alphabet street on Capitol Hill. I have heard them in the wall.

A lot of construction recently in the neighborhood. Holes and then the animals themselves appear on the ground beside the front path. It's a warren underneath the path. I put in smoke bombs, approved for use everywhere in the United States for a long list of animal varmints, including "skunks," except — the insert says — in Arkansas, where "skunks" are really another sort of animal protected by the Arkansas wildlife department.

They scampered across behind my wall, very delayed reaction. I have poison in closed trays, I have traps . . . but they set them off and then eat the peanut butter. The stoop smells freshly of ammonia, their urine, then I wash it away with bleach and water. I smell the bleach from my desk, facing the inset basement window, my eyes below street level, directly facing a rat highway connected to the main water intake.

They live near there. They eat elsewhere, they are careful with poison and traps. I will kill them with traps baited with cotton and vanilla nailed to a board, lowered into place.

I'll deliver an update. Get my Hefty trash bag ready.

Viewing Bill Buckley from the far, far Right

Consipiracy theory "reasoning" lies close to historical reasoning, like a crazy uncle sleeping in the next room. If you hold on tight to any unprovable — i.e. consipiracy — explanation, you find connections . . .


"What all of this means is that in the early 1950s, Buckley and a clique of associates appointed themselves the new conservative leaders—pompously calling themselves “responsible conservatives”— and loudly announced (with enthusiastic media support) that all who dared to advocate old-fashioned America First nationalism or to oppose U.S. meddling in endless wars abroad were no longer even to be considered “conservative” at all.
The “Buckleyites” pronounced themselves boldly internationalist, intent on “winning” the Cold War, even at the expense of a hot war. They had no desire to bring American troops home to protect America. Instead, they were venturing out on a global imperium, and old-style conservative concerns about big government. That socialism (big government) must be the inevitable consequence of military adventurism was pushed aside.
Buckley acknowledged on Jan. 25, 1952 when he wrote in Commonweal, a liberal journal, that he was willing to support what he called “Big Government” for “the duration [of the Cold War]” because—he said—only “a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores” could ensure total victory over the communist menace.
The new conservatism was not new at all. In fact, Buckley’s “contribution” to conservatism was introduction of a host of longtime Trotskyite (Marxist) communists as voices for “modern conservative thought.”
Foremost among them, James Burnham, only 20 years earlier, had been Jewish Bolshevik Leon Trotsky’s “chief spokesman” in American “intellectual” circles. Then, during World War II, Burnham worked for the Zionist- and Trotskyite-infested Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA . . ."

More sludge on http://www.mikepiperreport.com/Articles_Archive/AmericanFreePress/AFP2008_01-06/Michael_Collins_Piper_AFP20080317_So_Long_Bill_Buckley;_Bill_Buckley's_Strange_History_Revealed.html, a contributor to David Duke's website . . .

Unpatriotic

General Wesley I'm-tone-deaf Clark says truthfully enuf that McCain was a pilot, and never commanded groups of men in battle nor strategized in wartime, but was shot down and imprisoned . . . This is true, no doubt, but having been softened up by the arseholic Swift Boat ads, we are all so confused . . . The Right in lockstep portrays the episode as one in which McCain's patriotism was questioned, implicitly supported by Obama, and even more, that Gen. Clark was making an "unpatriotic" remark about McCain! . . . What does that mean?

Like saying, So and So said "F*** you" to So and So.

As Daniel Schorr showed on NPR, McCain said, "I have served my country," as if he had been told he had not, but was vaguely unsettled. McCain talks in that "I'm an old guy and I've learned to say this" way. I'm going to end up feeling for him.

Obama has to be careful here.

Banged up abroad

On Ms. Betancourt's release and offering coverage of former Columbia hostages being interviewed, CNN runs a special, "Locked up abroad," which handsome John Whatshisname says as, "Banged up a broad." The picture is of a chair with straps on it.

Zimbabwe Dance

The dance on the ashes of the defamed, bruised, maimed and murdered.

Past authenticity, some justice done, left lying around as if it would keep fresh. Bring them together over a crime, and what do they make? Frightening, absurd, unbelieved words, --

a unity government, to save lives, or for "Zimbabweans to sit down together" and work out Zim's "problems."

Now the USA is involved -- Goody! That's sure to help.

Old 96th St. West Side

Preteen and teen years on 96th street, black kids my age were either

a. known to me, in school, as friends or aquaintances or
b. were in school uniforms, or
c. were with their parents, or

. . . they became an immediate object suspicious fear, since the possibility remained that they were going to f* with me . . .

I got threatened, lost my wallet to a knifepoint, chased, a lot. Never by a white kid, although one stayed away from Horace Mann. Some black hispanics, and then, from the age of 8 or 9 on, increasingly commonly, Puerto Rican youths one had to watch out for, too . . . two of my friends tied up and beaten by PRs, me pushed against a wall on B'way and 96th wit a "lookout" and a PR teen with a pony tail punching me in the gut as hard as he could. (Age 13?) And I haven't mentioned the Zulu Nation.

My own identity was uncertain: My father was taunted in Astoria for being a Jew, and Irish boys threatened to beat the crap out of him, knocked him down and said, "Hitler is doing a good job killing the Jews." (Hard to remember that Father Coughlin was tied to the "Christian Front" which had weapons and said very similar things . . .)

Children can learn what it is like to be mortal, to fear for their lives. By the time I started paying attention to books in college, there either was or was not an abstract right in the world, a good that could be accomplished, and South Africa seemed to offer that clarity inside and out.

I wanted to undertand the hostility. I knew enough to suspect there was a reason for it.

Mugabe Sworn In

At the moment that the sanctity of the state is most in question --

the commencement of patently unjustified rule

(only imagine if the internet and digital photos had been around in 1986 in Matabeleland!) --

at that precise moment, the "judge" re-installing Mugabe is wearing an 18th-c. British judicial white wig, sacralized by the British Empire --

an attempt to legitimate Mugabe so obvious that the sign flashes "off" for a moment, becoming only itself, a Caucasian haircut

Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Send Message

Do not kill cop. Do not run down cop with vehicle. We will kill you if you do, motherf*er. Not, "my lawyer will get me a deal." We'll kill you.

Message received.