Meanwhile, 140 miles away, in Kendallville, IN, a petition is being circulated to stop a proposed $7.9 million library building. Once the opposing signatures are submitted, the library will have 30 days to gather competing signatures. Whoever gets the most signatures wins. The new building is being opposed for the usual reasons. [Story courtesy LISNews.]

On Tuesday night, Frisinger Park was jam-packed with cars and trucks and a girls’ softball team and their parents and boosters. Passing through the park, which I normally do on my way home as a shortcut, was inadvisable. Wednesday night was less of a zoo, although there were a handful of boys and their dads engaged in softball practice. Last night, the park was deserted, except for a few starlings and sparrows and robins poking in the grass, along with the odd squirrel. The park is full of dandelions in full bloom. When you walk or drive past and there’s a wind, a blizzard of seed-bearing dandelion pods explodes all around you. Fortunately, the dandelion is probably one of the few flora I’m not allergic to.

It was virtually impossible for me to sleep last night. The heat is upon us, and it definitely rises to the top in our house. It was only 65 degrees outside last night but it felt like a Dutch oven indoors, even with two high-powered fans at full blast in the bedroom, except in the basement, which actually did feel 65 degrees.

The TCF Bank clock at the corner of Division and Liberty said 74 degrees this afternoon around 1.00. It felt at least 10 degrees hotter, and with the humidity, who knows what the “real” temperature was. I wouldn’t mind the heat so much without the humidity. I’m a heavy sweater and what days like this do to me is best left undescribed.

Fortunately, there have been winds and breezes all day, along with a freakish burst of torrential rainfall at 3.15 this afternoon that lasted about 10 minutes and vanished with almost as little warning as it started, followed by another more substantial torrent at around 6.15 that left the area around Liberty and William virtually deserted.

I’m told that the rest of the season and summer will be much like this, humid and unbearable for a couple of days and then a break, followed by another torrrid day or two and then another break (except for a time in July and/or August when it will be hellish for several days in a row).

In between thoroughly (and devastatingly, I might add) trashing the new Wolfgang Petersen “Troy” movie and bemoaning the scariness of having just graduated, two women in Ambrosia were discussing this afternoon why it was that a mutual friend always suffered from the affliction of people developing crushes on him. “It’s because he’s hot but non-threatening,” theorized one. “I’ve always found that the ‘non-threatening’ angle attracts a lot of bisexual women,” chimed in a guy friend who was sitting nearby.

It just doesn’t get any more Fascist FunDumbMentalist than this:

‘The Roman Catholic bishop of Colorado Springs has issued a pastoral letter saying that Catholic Americans should not receive Communion if they vote for politicians who defy church teaching by supporting abortion rights, same-sex marriage, euthanasia or stem-cell research. Several bishops in the United States have warned that they will deny Communion to Catholic politicians who fail to stand with the church, but Bishop Michael Sheridan of Colorado Springs is believed to be the first to announce that he would extend the ban to Catholic voters. “Anyone who professes the Catholic faith with his lips while at the same time publicly supporting legislation or candidates that defy God’s law makes a mockery of that faith and belies his identity as a Catholic,” Sheridan wrote. In a telephone interview, Sheridan said: “I’m not making a political statement. I’m making a statement about church teaching.”’

Of course, there’s no word from these pathetic types about rightwing fascist catholic politicians who support the death penalty in defiance of the Vatican. No siree.

Nope, it’s just a jibe at John Kerry and other ‘pro-choicers’ like him, and their supporters, as long as they are on the left side of the aisle.

How stomach-churning.

Three girls coming into the ‘Media Center’ for Career Day presentations on cosmetology today:

‘See, this say media center, but a media center where you go to use computers and stuff. And this ain’t no media center. This a LIBRARY. It full of books.’

Yeah. What she said.

I guess I was grossly mistaken when we moved here; I thought we would be paying much less for gas per gallon than we did in San Francisco.

A week ago, I was waiting for the interminable light at Packard and Stadium to change and the price at one station on the corner was raised from $1.88 to $1.95 while I sat waiting for the green.

Today, going home for lunch, the station on the southeast corner of that intersection advertises its new gas price: $2.08 a gallon. 20 cent a gallon increase in just over a week.

Good golly.

Still, I suppose it could be worse. According to Gas Price Watch.com, the station where I usually filled up in San Francisco is $2.25. Ouch.

Since my good bike is still in San Francisco, my feet may be getting a lot more use in the near future.

Ann Arbor isn’t the liberal bastion I thought it was; while ‘guest teaching’ today at a central AA middle school during a Career Day assembly, I passed a science classroom which was empty except for the teacher.

She had the radio blaring out with full throated and ‘kill all the liberals in the colleges and universities’ passion, none other than the Hillbilly Heroin addict himself, Mr. Rush Limbaugh.

I guess the fascists have at least one loyal listener in ASquared.

Yesterday I was riding one of the Hatcher elevators with an undergrad who was helping a co-worker cart some ficuses somewhere (aren’t ficuses always either standing in a corner of an office or being carted somewhere?). The co-worker asked him what he was planning on doing after graduation. “Oh, I don’t know, go to law school, I guess,” he said. “I thought about going to grad school, but I’m not that interested in history. So I don’t know what else to do other than law school.”

I wanted to shake him by the shoulders and say, “Don’t do it!” But each of us has to walk his or her own path. I was making the same misguided decision at almost exactly his age. I’m not saying law school is a bad thing, if it’s what you know you want to pursue. But how many of us know anything like that at that age?

I sure didn’t. I got into a law school senior year, not my top choice but by no means a poor school (American University). I had flown out to Washington DC and had almost put a deposit down on a nice apartment in a beautiful brick building in Friendship Heights. And it turned out I hadn’t finished all of my undergrad credits on time. (Long story.) But the crushing doom of not being able to go to law school that September was probably one of the best things that ever happened to me. It forced me to spend a long, hot, crappy LA summer looking at myself in the mirror and figuring out what I really wanted out of life (not that I figured it out, but at least I was compelled to think about it). It gave me the chance to come out to one of my best friends from college, and although we’re no longer friends, it was a major step on the road to self-acceptance. And it saved me tens of thousands of dollars and three years of almost certain misery and failure. Because I might have gotten a JD, I might have even been hired at a law firm, but I would not have become a successful lawyer. Not because I couldn’t hack it (although at the time I probably would have had a very hard time hacking it), but because my heart was not in the law. If your heart isn’t in it, it’s hard to succeed in a career as demanding as the law.

Three weeks ago, NPR’s Barbara Bradley Hagerty recently did a report on Catholics and John Kerry that has raised some temperatures in the blogopshere. I won’t go into all that, but one blog quotes the reporter as telling American Libraries in February 2000, “Reporters should be thinking about big ideas and can get bogged down in detail. I write stories with blanks and let the library staff fill them in.”

Sounds kind of a strange admission to make, and it’s possible that Bradley Hagerty may be, shall we say, over-reliant on librarians, but the context is still interesting.

The article (not apparently freely available online, so no link, my apologies) is about NPR’s library staff. NPR’s library has 2700 books, 125 serials, news database subscriptions, and tons of clippings, according to the article. There are actually 2 NPR libraries (a research library and a program library, which sounds more like an archive). The main NPR librarian has been there since 1974. The other two librarians are more recent. One of them keeps an updated pronunciation guide that she sends around the offices during election season so the on-air talent don’t mispronounce candidates’ names. The same librarian has a Rolodex (now an online database, I suppose?) of the contact info for every press secretary on Capitol Hill. An assistant managing editor says the librarian can “find anyone on the face of the earth, even on weekends.” From the sounds of the article, the librarians at NPR face a lot of the same issues that most librarians face. For instance, how do you preserve or transform the tapes of old NPR broadcasts, many of which are reel-to-reel? How do you preserve material while also accommodating user needs (reporters needing to use the tape for dubbing copies?).

The paragraph above the Bradley Hagerty quote is full of praise from an NPR editor and producer for the librarians and acknowledgment of the fact that they do the “heavy lifting of research.” True enough.

It’s an absolutely lovely night outside. Humid, but a perfect temp, with the Big Dipper directly overhead, night sounds all around—it would be a great night to camp out, if my tent wasn’t in Oklahoma.

And yes, I heard more cicada sounds while I was out there with the beagle. The vanguard of Brood X is out there, staring at us from the branches with their glowing, evil red eyes.

It’s all so exciting.

Frank pointed out the cover of Section E ‘Connection’ of tonight’s Ann Arbor News (Motto: ‘Still the World’s Worst Website). Headlined Highs and Lows of Clothes (ain’t that alliterative?), it’s a discussion of how, for today’s teen girl, ‘less is more.’ I think he regrets bringing it home. It provoked a longish rant, which you’re now going to have to suffer through like him.

Having spent yesterday at a southwest AA high school, I can attest that, for the girls anyway, less is indeed the style. One class had female students who made the denizens of the Blue Moon Brothel of Winnemucca, Nevada, look overdressed, and I had the passing thought: ‘Do your mothers know you dress like cheap whores?’

Okay, it may not be nice or PC or appropriate or whatever, but, quite frankly, neither was the way these kids were dressed.

Now, I’m no prude (as Frank will tell you); wear what you want. I’ve always guffawed when principals and superintendents tried to battle miniskirts and anti-Bush t-shirts by saying they ‘disrupt the educational process.’ No, the educational process is disrupted by collections for Ronald McDonald House and please let these students out of class to go on the field trip to Cedar Point and religious fundamentalist fooling with textbooks and No Child Left Behind and so on and so on and so on.

I saw nothing wrong with miniskirts back in my day; being of a different … orientation … they did nothing for me, or to me, even though they drove the parents and administrators of the 60s and 70s nuts. And now, well, as long as I don’t have to see anybody’s … nether regions, I don’t much care.

My angle, then as now, is just that it shows a complete lack of respect for self, as well as a great deal of ignorance about a whole host of things, not least of which is how they’re manipulated by the industry.

In other words, you wanna dress like the two-bit whores I saw near DuPont Circle my first time in Washington, DC, many years ago, well, go ahead, but … well, you’re gonna look like a two-bit DuPont Circle whore, who’s a slave to fashionistas who seem to enjoy the heroin-wasted, anorexic … whore look.

Is that the image you want to project? Particularly when you’re just 16 and still in high school? Better question: Is that the image you want your daughter to project if you’re a parent?

A mother quoted in the News article says:

‘I struggle with that all the time. How do I get her to feel good about herself? Boys are a focus for them at that age … How do I make her understand … that dressing quote unquote ‘hot’ doesn’t always give you what you want?’

Pause to reach for the Pepto. Excuse me? How do you get her to feel good about herself? How about by not allowing her to go to school dressed like one of Seymour Butts’ actresses?

And dressing ‘hot’ doesn’t give you what you want?! Sorry, sweetie, but it gives you exactly what you want … and more. And the latter half of that is the problem.

Interesting that this mother’s daughter attends … of course, the very high school I guest taught at yesterday. And mommy, who asks the clueless question above, not only lets her kid go to school dressed in short skirts and sometimes midrif-baring skimpy shirts, also has allowed her to be photographed and splashed big-as-life in the News.

But apparently, she’s the soul of discretion; she doesn’t show her belly every day. And her mother says she terms her dress on the ‘conservative side.’

Of course, the News puts the teenager from Ypsilanti on the inside of the section and in a much smaller photo; that’ll put them Ypsi people in their place. Still, the Ypsi entry is showing more cleavage than the Grand Canyon and wearing hip-hugging jeans that I last saw at my sister’s high school graduation ceremony in 1974, looking just as scruffy and dirty as they did back then.

Let me hasten to be clear here: I’m not calling any of these girls whores or questioning their virtue. Just their judgment and self-respect. Not to mention the cluelessness and lack of judgment of their mothers.

I’ve been saying a lot lately (and I’m sure Frank will get tired of hearing it over the next year of grad school) that I as a teacher will have no problem being held accountable for how my students perform on standardized testing when parents in the American empire start being held accountable for how their students dress, act, treat each other and their teachers and whether or not they come to school well-fed, well-clothed, having been kissed good bye, told they are loved and given every opportunity possible to come to school ready to learn.

When we can institute a system of parental accountability, I’ll be more than happy as a teacher to take personal responsibility for my students.

Until then, at least teach your kids to respect their elders (especially substitute teachers) and don’t dress your daughters like Las Vegas hookers.

If I had a teenage daughter, we would SO be having a fight right now …

A bicyclist and I came to the same narrow passageway in the sidewalk on Maynard in front of Ambrosia and Madras Masala at exactly the same moment today. (There were people at the outddors tables in front of Ambrosia, making the sidewalk even more crowded.) Should I have yielded, or should he have? Neither of us did, and he almost ran into me as he barreled past.

On a related subject, it still surprises me when people cuss on the AATA buses here and the bus drivers yell out, “Watch the language!” Tonight a tough-looking guy used a relatively common cuss word (you might hear it on TV, definitely not network but assuredly cable), not one of George Carlin’s seven dirty words, and the bus driver scolded him and blared the bus’s automated profanity warning message (I didn’t even know there was one).

Mister Tough was surprisingly apologetic (even cowed). One of his pals chuckled and said that in California the inappropriateness of the profanity wouldn’t have even been an issue. He was right.

There are signs posted on buses in Oakland’s transit system warning against profanity, but any bus driver who risked enforcing the ban would court bodily harm. There aren’t any anti-profanity signs on San Francisco’s MUNI system, period. I’ve heard profanity on AATA buses, to be sure, but I think I would have heard more swear words on a single day in the Bay Area transit system than I’ve heard on AATA in six months. I still remember the morning I was sitting on MUNI on the way to work and being forced to overhear an entire conversation between two crackheads, carried out in graphic language (they were in some sort of dysfunctional relationship), about their sexual difficulties.

All of the energy that’s spent on trying to stamp out profanity and “wardrobe malfunctions,” it seems to me, could be much better spent on far more egregious breaches—road rage, for example. Some would say it’s all part of a continuum, and I would find it hard to disagree with that argument. But the “no profanity” rule on buses seems an awful lot like using a submachine gun to try to kill a gnat.

Speaking of the local election story, the front page article on the subject mentions that Ann Arbor mayor John Hieftje has a Republican challenger in this year’s election—former City Council member Jane Lumm. It would be nice to know what Hieftje and Lumm’s positions are on local issues. The article doesn’t go into that. Neither does another article on the same subject in the Local section. The Local article quotes Lumm as saying that she knows it will be an “uphill battle” to unseat Hieftje, but other than that, nothing about Lumm, nothing about her positions, nothing about why she’s running other than because—well, who knows? Because the sky is blue? Did the reporter even bother to ask?

In today’s Ann Arbor News, there was a huge (why so huge, I don’t know, but it obliterated a far more important story about upcoming local elections) front-page article about high school kids and their midriff-baring and short-skirt fashions and the “tensions” that said fashions are creating. Apropos of not much, in the midst of the article, one student complains that a school media librarian pulled her aside one day last year and chastised her for wearing a too-short skirt. Whether it was appropriate for a librarian to be giving a high school student sartorial tips is neither here nor there. But what does the librarian’s librarianship have to do with the focus of the article? Is it that only a teacher or a principal should have been scolding the student, if someone was to be doing the scolding? Or is it a way of subtly reinforcing the stereotype that librarians are all shushers and scolders and fussbudgets and nags at heart, no matter where they’re employed or what year it is?

On tonight’s broadcast of The Connection (an NPR-affiliated radio show):

Blogs offer a constant rush of political opinion: the gloating, the jeering, and those knockout punches. But not everyone thinks bringing punditry to the people is a good thing. New Yorker writer George Packer argues that by blurring the line between journalism and pure rant, blogs may not be the best thing for democracy …. George Packer feels that blogs are a culture of people commenting on other people’s comments.

And what are newspapers and magazines? A culture of ….. anonymous sources and power-wielding officials feeding tomorrow’s pre-approved tripe to profit-driven news sharks. The calm, cool, and collected Connection host, Dick Gordon, bless his heart, sounded as though he’d never read a blog until his producer told him he’d have to prepare for tonight’s broadcast.

Apparently George Packer thinks that bloggers should get off their butts and “be reporters” and go out and “talk to people.” True enough. But they already do! I would love it if reporters like Packer actually bothered to read blogs. But no, that would be too much work.

Oops—I mean, that would be reporting !!!!!

From this morning’s Free Press:

Historically, Brood X has sidestepped Wayne, Macomb and most of Oakland counties. They were, however, spotted in Bloomfield Hills the last time they came out in 1987.

Go a little west, though, to Washtenaw, Lenawee and southern Livingston counties and you’ll run into them. Millions of them. Hundreds of millions.

I was at work this afternoon and thought I heard the first wave, but it was just someone in the office with some headphones on. When I got home, Steve pointed to a series of definite holes in the dirt near the back patio. Then we stood outside and listened, for several minutes, straining to hear over the blare of a lawnmower: and there it was, off in the distance, a definite cicada song on the breeze.

Nancy Pearl was on NPR this morning, recommending older political novels to serve as an antidote to all of those scary partisan election-year non-fiction diatribe-tomes on sale at your favorite bookstore. (Some of her recommendations: Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, Ward Just’s A Dangerous Friend, and Henry Adams’ Democracy).

She’s got a really appealing presence, she has a sense of humor, she’s charming, she knows her books, and she makes looking for new stuff to read sound fun.

She’s also got a great gig. Librarian, book reviewer, writer, and semi-Oprah rolled into one: how much fun must that be? Plus, she’s fantastic PR for the profession and for the library itself. More power to her.

My only (minor, minor, minor) quibble: Why was the story taped in a bookstore (in this case, Washington DC’s Politics and Prose) rather than inside a library?

No offense—I’m sure P&P is an awesome bookstore—but I’m sure there would have been plenty of libraries willing to open their doors and let Steve Inskeep and Nancy Pearl tape a segment about libraries and summer reading inside their premises. [NPR link courtesy LISNews.]

We’re having regular thunderstorms and thunderstorm forecasts this time of year. Having never experienced thunderstorm season in the Midwest, I find it fascinating. Last night, for example, a fairly rambunctious storm rumbled through at about 11. Tonight, on the other hand, while I was at work, there was a brief burst of rain and thunder, making me kick myself for having not brought an umbrella. It lasted about 10 minutes, then nothing; in fact, the sky cleared up. I’m used to rain and storms being a days-long, miserable, unpleasant event, as they are in the Bay Area during the intermittent rain seasons they have there. The thunderstorms here are actually (thus far, anyway) a pleasant interlude. I’m sure, as with most of my weather expectations, something will eventually come along to change my outlook, but so far I’m enjoying the rain, fleeting though its presence may be.

It amuses me, I’m not sure why, that there are more articles on the upcoming cicada infestation in the Washington Post (a search of the Post website shows 17 separate articles on cicadas in the last week alone) than I’ve seen in the local papers, although I suppose the Post’s cicada watch amounts almost to a case of hysteria. There’s this from a May 6 article, a brief mention of the Kensington Park Library in Kensington, MD, and its cicada plans:

To help preschoolers deal with the invasion, children’s librarian Linda Swanson has scheduled an earlier program featuring insects as positive creatures. Come picnic day, “we’ll take a look around at 10 in the morning and see how these cicadas are doing. If there are five of them per square inch, we really don’t have a choice. It’s hard to eat a sandwich if a cicada’s sitting on it.”

My god I didn’t think it was possible, but it’s true; the Boy Emperor is incable of learning from his mistakes and « is beginning the march of war on Syria »:

’[The Boy Emperor] will order economic sanctions against Syria this week for supporting terrorism and not doing enough to prevent militant fighters from entering neighboring Iraq, congressional and administration sources said Monday. The sanctions, which the White House will impose as early as Tuesday, are being ordered because the administration believes Syria has aggravated tensions in the Middle East by supporting militant groups. “We have talked previously about our concerns when it comes to Syria’s continued development of weapons of mass destruction, when it comes to their support for terrorism and when it comes to their failure to adequately police its border with Iraq,” [Imperial Minister of Agit-Prop] Scott McClellan said.’
—SFGate.com

We’ll leave aside, for the moment, the laugh- and vomit-inducing arrogant and clueless accusation that Syria is aggravating tensions in the Middle East. I think Abu Ghraib and the West Bank have more to do with that than Damascus.

But if this hollowed-out and moral derelict man is re-coronated next January, look for the wingnuts to be screaming about WMDs in the spring, followed by cheering bloodlustily as the Big Red One enters Damascus triumphantly.

We have just one opportunity in November to attempt to restore sanity to the government. After that, well, it’s not gonna be pretty around here.

« Delta Air Lines says pay cuts or bankruptcy »; in other words, pilots should screw themselves out of a third of their paychecks or we’ll take our marbles and go home:

‘Delta Air Lines said Monday that it may have to file for bankruptcy if its pilots union doesn’t agree to significant wage cuts, the first time the struggling carrier has publicly linked the two issues in a regulatory filing. The nation’s third-largest airline has been cautious about discussing the possibility of bankruptcy. But Delta said Monday in a quarterly report with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it might pursue Chapter 11 unless it achieves a “competitive cost structure” for pilot wages. A spokesman for Delta acknowledged that it’s the first time such language has been used in a public filing. “It’s an option,” the spokesman, Anthony Black, said of bankruptcy. “It’s not anything we see in the foreseeable future, but it’s out there.”’
—SFGate.com

An Atlanta Journal-Constitution article reports the airline had over $2 billion in liquid cash at the end of the first quarter, but it’s bond rating is ‘deep in the junk range,’ it’s borrowed to the hilt and facing a billion in debt payments in the next year, and so on.

But the real meat of the matter is, as The Chronicle noted, USAirways and United used Chapter 11 to secure deep pay cuts from employees, and American used the threat of Chapter 11 to the same effect.

And that’s what it’s really about … while the executives badly mismanage their airlines, they take home millions and millions of dollars in cash and bonuses and stock. That mismanagement and greed puts the airline into an unwinnable financial situation and the same executives then blame it on the workers salaries and threaten to send the company into Chapter 11 or ground the planes forever if the workers don’t pony up. It’s not that difficult to figure it all out.

I noticed that no one in any of these Chapter 11 articles questioned these executives about the financially stupid venture that is Delta’s ‘low-fare airline within an airline,’ ‘Song,’ or United’s equally stupid ‘Ted,’ or compared their management with that of perenially profitable Southwest. And when the comparison is made, they focus exclusively on worker salaries. Typical crappy and clueless journalism.

Seems a little lazier, a little more mellow here than last week (well, except for the freeways, but that’s another story). There were a few people sitting on porches along State Street Row, but less in a party posture than a relaxation posture. Campus was alive and breathing, but not all that hectic: a few classes in summer circles on the lawn, a few Frisbee tossers, a lot of students in shorts and flip-flops. The heat was on: it got up to the mid-80s and it felt hotter and more humid than I can recall it feeling all year. I was grateful for the air-conditioned library today, that’s for sure.

Just woke up from another spectacularly weird dream … this one was a first, since it was just like watching a TV show and I wasn’t in it.

In fact, it was a TV show … Dallas, of all things. I don’t recall ever watching a single episode of Dallas ever. Not even the ‘Who Shot J.R.’ series. But it was in my dreams this morning.

Bobby (who I think was supposed to be J.R., but was called Bobby in my dream) was played by Jack Nicholson. His wife, Susannah, was played by Angie Dickinson. And yes, I know that Bobby’s wife was Pam and that there was know Susannah, but a Sue Ellen. Hey, it was a dream.

Anyway, Susannah went out to the oilfield in her Cadillac convertible to see Bobby. They talked for awhile and then he stabbed her. She was surprised. He walked away and while he was gone, she took out a pen and wrote, ‘Bobby Ewing did this to me,’ and signed it ‘Susannah Ewing,’ which is how I know how to spell her name.

She managed to put up the roof of the convertible while he was gone. When he came back, she took a gun from under the seat and shot at him and then put the car in gear and chased him around the pasture, finally cornering him and forcing him to fall backwards into a sunken concrete box, where he sat with only his head showing.

But suddenly somehow, the tables were turned and she ended up in the box. I woke up as he was dragging a hose from a gasoline pump over to the box so he could fill it up and set her on fire.

Yeesh. Pretty much the weirdest one I’ve had in a very long time.

« Lawrence Ferlinghetti is still beating ‘em »:

’… The first plane to hit the first Twin Tower
The last plane to hit the last Twin Tower
The only plane to ever hit the Pentagon
The birth of a vast national paranoia
The beginning of the Third World War
(the War Against the Third World)
The first trip abroad by an ignorant president
The last free-running river
The last gas and oil on earth
The last general strike
The last Fidelista the last Sandinista the last Zapatista
The last political prisoner
The last virgin and the last of the champagne
The last train to leave the station
The last and only great nation
The last Great Depression
The last will & testament
The last welfare check for rent
The end of the old New Deal
The new Committee on Unamerican Activities
…’

And so on.

Thomas Jefferson wasn’t perfect, but he was on to a good thing when he wrote that separation of church and state was a good and desirable thing.

Case in point is Colorado, an increasingly Fascist FunDumbMentalist state where « a judge and lawmakers are being threatened and harassed by nuts from the Springs »:

‘Colorado lawmakers who voted against impeaching a judge who made a gay-positive ruling in a child custody case are being swamped with demands from the conservative lobby group Focus on the Family to turn over all of their files, letters, documents, emails, phone records and notes. FOC, one of the most vocal opponents of gay issues, had sought the removal of Denver District Judge John Coughlin after he ruled last November that a woman could not subject her child to homophobic teachings at her church. … Judge Coughlin in awarding custody ordered [the woman] to prevent the child from receiving any homophobic religious teachings.’

That one really stirred up the FFs:

’”This is a judge who has put the word ‘homophobia’ into a court decision,” said Tom Minnery, Focus on the Family’s vice president for public policy. “That is very alarming to us. We want to know everything we can about this case and the reason why our elected officials did nothing to look into this matter.”’

But even the Fascist-leaning Colorado legislature refused to play ball:

‘When the impeachment measure reached the House Judiciary Committee a majority of members, including some conservative Republicans, found that Coughlin had done nothing to warrant impeachment. Even Gov. Bill Owens, who opposes same-sex marriage, advised against impeaching Coughlin. Now, FOC is using Freedom of Information Laws to see if lawmakers were “unduly influenced”. Some members of the committee call the action political blackmail and other accuse the FOC of harassment. One member, Rep. Anne McGihon (D-Denver) who refused to vote for impeachment, and who calls FOC’s actions harassment, said she would comply.’

Yup, she’ll comply. And FOC will continue to grow in power and influence in the state. Having lived there for a year, I can attest to its character and the curious paradox that, in spite of being so hyper-religious and praise-Jeebus, it’s one of the most unfriendly and aggressive and violent places I’ve ever visited (and that includes Oakland and Detroit). I’ve said many times that the Columbine HS massacre was no surprise.

And stuff like this just continues to bolster my impression. And to make me think that Thomas Jefferson knew what he was talking about.

The Torture Roundup for tonight:

« A pregnant Lynddie England gets hung out to dry ». She’s been turned into the face of American torture by the media and the military, her family is angry at the military, angry at Bush and in denial and she herself is back home and pregnant. The New York Times goes into exhaustive detail here about her personal life; detail which I haven’t seen on any of the male participants. Coming at the same time as Ann-thrax Coulter and other Fascist pundits’ blaming the torture and abuse of Iraqis on women in the military specifically and feminism generally, it’s an interesting phenomenon.

« A different view of Private England » and the place where she hailed from:

‘Lynndie England, 21, a rail worker’s daughter, comes from a trailer park in Fort Ashby, West Virginia, which locals proudly call “a backwoods world”. She faces a court martial, but at home she is toasted as a hero. At the dingy Corner Club Saloon they think she has done nothing wrong. “A lot of people here think they ought to just blow up the whole of Iraq,” Colleen Kesner said. “To the country boys here, if you’re a different nationality, a different race, you’re sub-human. That’s the way girls like Lynndie are raised. “Tormenting Iraqis, in her mind, would be no different from shooting a turkey. Every season here you’re hunting something. Over there, they’re hunting Iraqis.” In Fort Ashby, in the isolated Appalachian mountains 260km west of Washington, the poor, barely-educated and almost all-white population talk openly about an active Ku Klux Klan presence.’
—The Daily Telegraph

Which brings up a rather interesting and disturbing point; in George W. Bush’s Amurrican Empire, despite his protestations to contrary, it is not at all unAmerican to support torture and eye-for-an-eye. The entire rightwing Fascist chorus doesn’t think this is a big deal at all; their attitude was summed up thusly:

‘A colleague of Lynndie’s father said people in Fort Ashby were sick of the whingeing. “We just had an 18-year-old from round here killed by the Iraqis,” he said. “We went there to help the jackasses and they started blowing us up. Lynndie didn’t kill ‘em, she didn’t cut ‘em up. She should have shot some of the suckers.”’

That’s a pretty succinct summation. And of course, torture and prisoner abuse is not only not unAmerican, it’s long been very much the American Way all over the world and in the heart of the Empire itself, in places like Parchman and Angola and San Quentin and McAlester and Huntsville, etc. While the Boy Emperor was the provincial governor of the Republic of Texas, the prison system spent most of his time in office under judicial consent decrees, a situation replicated in 39 other state prison systems. A judge wrote about the Texas system:

‘Many inmates credibly testified to the existence of violence, rape and extortion in the prison system and about their own suffering from such abysmal conditions.’

The judge imposed the decree after learning that Texas prison guards were allowing inmate gangs to buy and sell other inmates as sex slaves.

It’s simply a fact that this kind of thing is a very American as The New York Times article (from which the quote above comes) noted:

‘Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has been uncovered in Iraq, takes place in American prisons with little public knowledge or concern, according to corrections officials, inmates and human rights advocates. In Pennsylvania and some other states, inmates are routinely stripped in front of other inmates before being moved to a new prison or a new unit within their prison. In Arizona, male inmates at the Maricopa County jail in Phoenix are made to wear women’s pink underwear as a form of humiliation. At Virginia’s Wallens Ridge maximum security prison, new inmates have reported being forced to wear black hoods, in theory to keep them from spitting on guards, and said they were often beaten and cursed at by guards and made to crawl.’

In fact, America’s penal system can be directly connected to Abu Ghraib:

‘The experts also point out that the man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time. The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an executive of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild the country’s criminal justice system. Mr. McCotter, 63, is director of business development for Management & Training Corporation, a Utah-based firm that says it is the third-largest private prison company, operating 13 prisons. In 2003, the company’s operation of the Santa Fe jail was criticized by the Justice Department and the New Mexico Department of Corrections for unsafe conditions and lack of medical care for inmates. No further action was taken.’

He claims to have left Iraq after Abu Ghraib was reopened and has washed his hands of more recent events. But it really doesn’t matter. Instead of exporting freedom, liberty, democracy and our traditions of civil rights, Constitutional due process of law, respect for justice and so on, we’ve exported our arrogance, our violence and our prison system.

But that’s okay. The Cabal is circling the wagons. Fascist pundits are on the case, and « now a soldier has been trotted out to say ‘it ain’t that bigga deal »:

‘Arevalo said he was angered by the reports of prisoner abuse because he felt that soldiers at his compound were doing a good job. Arevalo said he even made a point of being friendly and talking to the prisoners, including one Iranian prisoner who used to tell soldiers off in English and Arabic. “We prided ourselves on keeping prisoners in control, and after that came out, I was somewhat disappointed,” he said. “It’s not the whole army’s fault. It’s two people who were bored or something. Just a few bad apples.”’

Yeah, he’s one of the good Germans, er, I mean Americans. Maybe some Iraqis will send him some rose petals …

Publicly, the NeoCons want us to think everything is a-okay and hunky-dory. Privately, « as the Washington Post reports », military officials are unhappy with the Dr. Strangerummy/Wolf-of-Dimwitz lunacy:

‘Deep divisions are emerging at the top of the U.S. military over the course of the occupation of Iraq, with some senior officers beginning to say that the United States faces the prospect of casualties for years without achieving its goal of establishing a free and democratic Iraq. Their major worry is that the United States is prevailing militarily but failing to win the support of the Iraqi people. That view is far from universal, but it is spreading, and being voiced publicly for the first time. Army Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, who spent much of the year in western Iraq, said he believes that at the tactical level at which fighting occurs, the U.S. military is still winning. But when asked whether he believes the United States is losing, he said, “I think strategically, we are.”

Army Col. Paul Hughes, who last year was the first director of strategic planning for the U.S. occupation authority in Baghdad, said he agrees with that view and noted that a pattern of winning battles while losing a war characterized the U.S. failure in Vietnam. “Unless we ensure that we have coherency in our policy, we will lose strategically,” he said in an interview Friday. “I lost my brother in Vietnam,” added Hughes, a veteran Army strategist who is involved in formulating Iraq policy. “I promised myself, when I came on active duty, that I would do everything in my power to prevent that [sort of strategic loss] from happening again. Here I am, 30 years later, thinking we will win every fight and lose the war, because we don’t understand the war we’re in.”’
—The Washington Post

Wolfie, of course, disagrees with all this and has his head planted firmly in his arse:

‘Wolfowitz, the Pentagon’s No. 2 official, said that he does not think the United States is losing in Iraq, and said no senior officer has expressed that thought to him, either. “I am sure that there are some out there” who think that, he said in an interview yesterday afternoon. “There’s no question that we’re facing some difficulties,” Wolfowitz said. “I don’t mean to sound Pollyannaish—we all know that we’re facing a tough problem.” But, he said, “I think the course we’ve set is the right one, which is moving as rapidly as possible to Iraqi self-government and Iraqi self-defense.”’

But the Army has Wolfie’s number:

‘A senior general at the Pentagon said he believes the United States is already on the road to defeat. “It is doubtful we can go on much longer like this,” he said. “The American people may not stand for it—and they should not.” Asked who was to blame, this general pointed directly at Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz. “I do not believe we had a clearly defined war strategy, end state and exit strategy before we commenced our invasion,” he said. “Had someone like Colin Powell been the chairman [of the Joint Chiefs of Staff], he would not have agreed to send troops without a clear exit strategy. The current OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] refused to listen or adhere to military advice.”’

Of course they didn’t. ‘Cause the Cabal is always right, the Cabal is always omniscient, praise the Cabal.

The article quotes senior military officials as saying we’re going to be in Iraq for at least five years (for the rest of the Boy Emperor’s ‘term’ wink wink?) and we will be taking casualities throughout that period. Interesting.

Downtown was (if possible) more packed today than usual. Must have been the nice weather and lots of out-of-towners. We saw a couple of movies at the State (“Latter Days” and “Good Bye Lenin!”—the latter for the second time), poked around at Kaleidoscope (a great, albeit cramped, store just down State from the theater, packed with used books, pulp paperbacks, old magazines, old toys and games, and all kinds of other cool stuff—like every great find you’ve ever seen at a garage sale crammed into one spot) and had dinner at Full Moon, which has taken over the business of Don Carlos, formerly a block south on Main. (Apparently closed—that’s the second Mexican restuarant to shut its doors since we moved here.) A nice evening out.

I don’t think it’s a particularly uncommon thing to want to eat out at a restaurant and (if you’re a non-smoker, or if tobacco smoke makes you physically nauseated or you’re allergic to smoke) ask to be seated in an appropriate section. The restaurant we ate at last night made a pretense of seating us in non-smoking and then the server proceeded to get huffy and pissy when we complained that smoke from the smoking section was wafting over and interfering with our meal. She then proceeded to deep-six us and ring up our order only after we’d sat waiting for her to return with our check for fifteen minutes and we’d gotten up and walked up to the cash register. Along with that, she gave us this treacly, sing-songy little sarcastic number about how “oh, sorry,” she’d conveniently “forgotten” our check. Yeah, a really memorable dining experience, for all the wrong reasons. I’d love to have seen what Larry David would’ve done in a situation like that.

On another subject: yes, this blog is full of rants, kvetches, complaints, gripes, invectives, and questions. The point is, we do have that tendency, as do many blogs, partly because ranting is somehow definitionally part of what it is to be a blog (check out other blogs if you don’t believe me). Yet we also have many moments of wonderment, moments of reflection, moments of joy, and moments of beagleness.

So if you are reading us regularly (or even if you just stumbled upon us), and you’re okay with the fact that we sometimes gripe a little more than maybe we should, we’d like to say that we greatly appreciate your patience, your calm, and your support. Thank you.

Here’s a familiar one.

A newspaper (in this case, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune) interviews a handful of undergrads (in this case, at the University of Minnesota) about their research practices. One student says that she goes to the library and uses it as a kind of away-from-home study hall, but uses it for nothing else. She complains that the library website is hard to navigate and that the library charges fines if a book is a day late.

Other common undergrad library use perceptions: The library system is too big and too daunting. Students want one answer and they want it now (“gimme gimme gimme”). Students like studying at Borders or Barnes and Noble; they can browse, find items quickly without having to memorize LC or Dewey Decimal numbers, take books off shelves and put them back when they’re done, don’t have to check anything out, and all of the books have new covers and attractive dust jackets. (All of the books in the library have had their jackets removed and are therefore “old” to the students.) They can bring food and beverages into the chain bookstore and not get yelled at or told to leave.

And of course, the big one: Everything you want to find out, you can find out on the Internet.

The one librarian interviewed for this article had exactly the right approach: “The question we are asking is what kind of library does the millennial generation need, not what do we want to give them.” She adds: “Faculty members are so annoyed by the low-quality research students do. I don’t want to let that happen. So what do we do to entice them here and make it welcoming and easy to use the library?”

But who knows how many libraries actually have the resources and the determination to put that mode of thinking into hard practice? Almost any of the remarks undergrads make in this article could be made about the University of Michigan’s library system (or, I imagine, most university library systems). The UM library system intimidated me when I first started using it, and I love libraries and everything about libraries, including the rows upon rows of LC-numbered books without dust jackets. It must have taken me at least a month or two of regular use before I shook the feeling that I wasn’t really supposed to know how to negotiate the library. And I forced myself to use the library for some reason almost every day. How, I wonder, would a freshman on a tight class deadline who’s not used the library extensively before feel upon encountering the vast UM morass?

It’s a tough question, and there are no easy answers, but the implications of finding a set of implementable answers are crucial to the survival of the library as we know it.

[Link courtesy LISNews.]

Repetitive stress injury workers’-comp costs as a justification for implementing RFID ….. hmmmmm. That’s a new one on me.

I can’t say (as a public library patron) that I wouldn’t check out books that are fitted with RFID, but it sure would make me think twice. On the other hand, since RFIDs are clearly the wave of the future, no matter how loudly the ACLU and the EFF protest, why groan and moan about it?

But will RFIDs answer this perennial SFPL user question: “When the online catalog says a book is ‘missing,’ does that mean it’s checked out?” [EFF link courtesy Librarian.net.]

As usual, Librarian.net puts it way better (and way more succinctly) than I ever could:

Of course, any librarian knows that the best thing to do is to call your librarian [who is at the library already] and then have her [or him] find the answer which might involve using Google but might not.

Nicholson Baker has announced that Duke University Libraries has agreed to house his American Newspaper Repository collection. To make a long story short, Baker saved a lot of old newspapers in their original runs by organizing a corporation and purchasing the newspapers from various libraries (most of the collection was from the British Library) that were allegedly getting ready to consign them to the Dumpster. He then wrote a book-length diatribe about the ordeal, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, that, among other things, claimed that vicious, short-sighted librarians were all but deliberately destroying the cultural heritage that newspapers embody. As the originator of the post about this story on LISNews wryly observed, “Maybe now old St. Nich will quit bashing librarians and stick to writing novels.”

Humidity was fairly high today (now yesterday). I brought a sweater, but the library complex was strangely warmer. It felt like the first really humid, warm day of the year (though I’m sure there have to have been a couple of others). A couple of middle-school girls spent the whole time on the bus home singing some tunes deliberately off-key, setting everyone’s teeth on edge. I went outside around 11.00 and the air was spookily still, then five minutes later, lightning flashed, a warm breeze picked up, and a thunderstorm raced swiftly through the county north and east of Ann Arbor, causing a little rumbling and noise and a strange tension in the air.

There’s an attention-grabbing Library Journal article about “NextGen” users (born between 1982 and 2002) and their attributes. (Courtesy Creative Librarian.) They’re “format agnostic,” they’re “nomadic,” they multitask, they prefer web sites with content richness rather than table-of-contents-centered navigation, and they “find no need to beg for good service.”

Why does it take the publicized photos of humiliated and abused and tortured Iraqi prisoners (which has arguably further ruined our tattered image and made the nation even more vulnerable to terrorist attack) to get the Boy Emperor to, as the BBC put it, ‘make an unprecedented public apology’?

After all, he won’t apologize for the five arrests, the cocaine use, the alcoholism, the DWIs, the casual attitude toward military service to his country during time of war, and the rape of workers, the environment, gays and lesbians, the elderly, retirees, etc., etc., etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseum …

There is a website devoted to the infamous 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, at which you can view a slide show and order a video of the episode. The originator of the experiment, Philip Zimbardo (whose Psych 101 course I took as a freshman), told the New York Times (also reprinted on the front page of today’s Ann Arbor News) that he was “not surprised” that the Iraq prisoner abuse occurred.

Although it’s obvious that Zimbardo isn’t a prison booster (indeed, his whole point is that prisons are by definition inhumane), using the aborted experiment for financial gain (especially when the experiment, originally supposed to last two weeks, had to be terminated after six days because of its effect on some of the subjects) seems to me kind of misguided. Not only that, the potential for his remarks to be taken out of context seems immense.

For instance, the crux of the Times article is not that prisons are inhumane and that the penal system needs to be examined, though Zimbardo is quoted as saying something to that effect, but that the Iraq prisoner abuse was no big deal, no significant failure, because these things happen in prisons all the time. That’s a great message to carry away from this whole sordid affair—that it’s just one more grisly event to which to numb ourselves and for which to make allowances and excuses.

You know, I’m sorry, but I’m on an our-culture-is-crappy kick tonight.

While at that notorious southeast AA middle school, I served a couple of hours in the ‘media center.’ It was fine, I always enjoy that.

But am I a complete old crotchety s.o.b. because I think it should still be called the library, damnit!?

And further crotchetiness ensued when I was shelving returned books for the 900s and came up to the biography section. I had to shelve just-read and returned bios on Steven Spielberg and [gag] Britney Spears between bios of Bessie Smith and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, which hadn’t been checked out in a very long time.

Now, I’m sorry again, but I admit to having a bit of hard time lately living in a society/culture which has plunged from the heights of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Bessie Smith to the likes of Mr. E.T. and that trashy blond singer/slut thing in a mere 100 years.

Just call me Grandpa and be thankful I don’t get a t.v. reception.

While subbing today at the city’s notorious southeast-side middle school, I noticed one thing during a geography class viewing of a movie about South Africa and apartheid during the 1980s: The kids were talking and laughing and not paying the slightest attention during the parts where the characters were laughing and having fun. But when conflict came on the screen (a loud argument between two girls), the room suddenly got very quiet and everyone watched in rapt attention. Shortly thereafter, when one girl was crying and being consoled by another character, they laughed at her and called her a crybaby and then resumed their chatter.

Like it or not, our society is in enthrall to violence and conflict. Kinder and gentler is an unattainable myth. It’s all downhill from here. Especially since these kids will be added to the ranks of Ann Arbor’s homicidal drivers in just two years.

I just woke up from two very weird dreams.

In the first, Frank died and I started dating Julia Roberts. Yes, really. And after a month, she proposed. And her mother was talking to me about stuff and saying that I was the one Julia had been waiting on for so long. (The trigger: I read in People yesterday that a 17-year-old kid saw Julia on location and hastily scribbled a sign asking her to the prom. She declined because she’s already married.)

The second dream was just as strange. Back-to-back dreams. My sister was driving her Suburban, I was in a Cherokee and Frank in the Wrangler. We were in Oklahoma City and going back to Duncan. She had a young Asian couple with her. The man rode with Frank, but my sister said this would be a good time for the woman to drive me in the Cherokee. We got in and she proceeded to be unable to make turns and drove through a field, laughing and having a good time, with me trying to turn the wheel back to the road and explaining that she has to take it slow and easy because of the Cherokee’s higher center of gravity. As we were about to get on I-40, the alarm rang and woke me up.

Yeesh.

“Friends” and “Frasier” are broadcasting their final episodes this week and next, respectively. “Friends” I watched occasionally but never really got the point of. Tina Brown has written a scintillating column in the Washington Post about its cultural significance, so I suppose I’ll re-read that and try to absorb the Zeitgeist. (There’s also an interesting story over at The Smoking Gun about allegations of harassment and other generally inappropriate and over-the-top behavior by the overwhelmingly male scriptwriters for the series.) I guess the hype and the nostalgia are more about the “lifestyle” (imaginary though it may have been) that the show represented, as well as the pre-reign-of-terrorism time that the show harked back to, than the show itself and its soon-to-be-fading-celebrity multimillionaire stars.

“Frasier” I watched a lot more. I enjoyed some episodes, found Kelsey Grammer sometimes sublimely funny but generally irritating beyond description, and lost interest once Niles and Daphne got together after, oh, seven years of mooning and pining and Shakespearean intrigue. Now “Everybody Loves Raymond” is the sole surviving veteran sitcom (unless you count “The Simpsons,” still going strong, more or less, after almost 14 years).

It’s supposed to be over 80 outdoors today. No problem, right? Well, in the past two weeks or so, the huge turn-on-the-air-conditioning project has taken place all over campus (I presume); Scott tells me that they have to schedule months in advance and bring in these vast teams of union workers to manipulate the age-old gears and wheels and cogs to bring the air-conditioning apparatus online. No, it’s not all connected to a mainframe somewhere, and I don’t know anything beyond that. It’s COLD in the libraries now after months and months of endless and uncontrollable heat. I dressed in short sleeves yesterday and didn’t bring anything else and regretted it. So, the dilemma is: bring layers or not? I’m thinking a sweater will suffice.

According to this account, seven students from Kalamazoo College were banned from entering Bush’s campaign rally at Wings Stadium on Monday. So much for inclusiveness. If you’re not a verifiable Bush supporter (and reading this, I don’t know what you would have to do to prove that you were a supporter in order to gain entry to one of Bush’s events), forget about ever seeing the man in the flesh.

I’m a little late on this, but here goes.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

“But this is to anticipate the end, rather than to find a serviceable beginning.” [The Third Reich: A New History, Michael Burleigh (2000, New York: Hill & Wang).]

Without going into details, my grades this past term were either as good as or better than I expected. So I came off all right (not perfect, not even close, but better than I expected) in 503, the Search and Retrieval class that had me up until 5 in the morning a couple of weeks ago struggling to pump out the final paragraphs of my take-home final. So, I made it, at least this far. We’ll see how I do in the coming year, when I’ll be shouldering 14 units each term, but at least I have reason to believe that I’ll be able to pull this thing off, and that’s for the good.

It’s too disgusting to even link to, but Major League DumbBall is putting ads on the freakin’ bases, for cryin’ out loud. And they’re for a stupid, ignorant and inevitably crappy sequel to a crappy Hollywood movie version of a crappy comic book about an freaky arachnid weirdo superhero. Gosh, just when you thought they couldn’t go much lower in our culture, they find new depths.

Meanwhile, one of the game’s heroes, who may be on track to break Hank Aaron’s homerun record, the penultimate baseball stat, petulantly tells the media to either prove he’s on steroids or shut up about it, even as federal investigators were told on 2-Mar that the hero was among six major-league players who received steroids from a California lab through the hero’s boyhood friend and longtime weight trainer. A corroborating source told a newspaper that steroids and human growth hormone had been obtained for the hero for three years.

I’m not exactly sure how much worse the Majors can get; I’m sure it won’t be too long before they dig up Lou Gehrig and put Disney animatronics in him and trot him around to each ballpark in the system so he can do ads for Propecia and Diet Coke.

Or it could be even worse than that. Kevin Costner could make Field of Dreams II (‘If you build it, they will buy Budweiser’).

Much more bustling downtown today. Still not like a typical school day, but Steve says the traffic getting around town, especially around State, was actually worse than during the school year. A mixed bag, I think. I found a table in Ambrosia easily. Campus (the outdoors parts) seemed fairly busy. The libraries were fairly dead. As I walked home after work tonight (first time I’ve walked all the way from campus home in a long time) there were a couple of parties going on out on front lawns on South State, including a volleyball game in front of one of the frats; not sure if these were just stragglers or what. I was able to cross South State without getting killed, which would not have happened on a typical day during the year. So, I’m not sure. Like I said, a mixed bag. It definitely doesn’t feel as though the town has emptied out, though.