Monthly Archives: December 2005

Welcome Knottyboy

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Added to the blogroll tonight: « Knottyboy », aka I Bet After Sex He Smokes a Ham. All the way from Etna, Wyoming, ladies and gentlemen.

A sample:

‘I saw it. After months of hoopla I saw it…Brokeback Mountain. Now don’t get me wrong, the sexually charged scenes were intense, raw and beautiful. And Ang Lee did a great job of filming and the scenery [wasn’t Wyoming except for a few bits, Canada mostly] was breathtaking and set the tone of this outdoorsy flik. But for the love of god let’s not produce another pathetic-closeted-fag movie. I mean really! Some say that’s how it was in the 70’s for gays. Well pardon me my dear but the calendar I have next to my desk says 2005.
For the sake of your mother’s eyes won’t you please stop drudging up the past in a way that shows just how fucked up the identity of gays were. Oh, and this doesn’t even cover the 5 women’s lives these two mentally fucked up. You like dick? Yeah? OK you’re what we like to call gay. Now go off find some cock of your own, buy a fixer-upper and turn around and sell it for oodles of cash. In the mean time have a couple of dogs and read the Theater section of the New York Times. THE END. END OF STORY. No blood, no one has to get bashed, no one has to watch these two “confused”, albeit muscly men rifle in their trousers for each others willie, knowing full well that they’ll be going home to their chain smoking, booze binging wives.
‘I thought gay used to mean happy? Well let’s try to do our parts please.’
—Knottyboy

Breath of fresh air. And check out his profile. There’s hope for Wyoming yet.

Notes on Caribou Coffee

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Caribou Coffee (corporate headquarters in Minneapolis) about a month and a half ago opened a franchise on the corner of Packard and East Stadium, a somewhat curious place for a coffee house except for the fact that it’s a one of the busiest intersections in town and will attract, presumably, plenty of vehicular traffic. The same spot used to be an independent market that didn’t get a lot of business and had dust on the shelves. Now the building has been subdivided into the Caribou franchise, a liquor store, and a smoke shop. It’ll be interesting to see how long the Caribou survives on this corner. The other corners of the intersection are occupied by a gas station, another gas station (and Circle K), and a branch of Bank One.

Caribou has an interesting setup. Apparently, the corporate founders’ “‘aha’ moment” was achieved at the summit of Sable Mountain in Alaska, which is the first time I’ve ever heard of a spectacular mountain view being the inspiration for the founding of a coffee shop chain (“the breathtaking panoramic view became the entrepreneurial vision for Caribou Coffee”). The insides of each store are set up to resemble a mountain lodge, although the resemblance is strictly incidental in the case of this particular store, since it’s so small and cramped that it’s more like an apartment done up in corporate-lodge decor. The shop looks deceptively spacious from the outside but when you get inside you realize that most of the space is taken up by the counter and everything behind it. There are several cutsomer tables at the front of the store, smashed up as close to the windows as they’ll go. It’s hard to determine if the idea is to attract sitting customers or to-go customers; there’s not really enough room for more than a dozen sitters, but the room for people to stand in line to order and get their fare is ridiculously inadequate, and there’s lots of awkward cutting through spaces in line and bumping into people who are waiting to pick up their carry-out items.

On the plus side, although the aggressive faux-friendliness of the baristas is similar to that of Starbucks baristas (though not quite as steroidal), and the Caribou slogan is somewhat obnoxious (“Life is short — stay awake for it”), the tea is very tasty, and there’s the nice touch of the barista handing you a small cup along with your order, presumably so you can dump excess and make room for milk/cream if you wish. Not something that Starbucks ever does.

Lost in 2005

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There were some remarkable people who left us in 2005:

‘When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom profit that loses.’
—Shirley Chisholm, who died 1-Jan-05

‘“We went through the top of the head, I think she was awake. She had a mild tranquilizer. I made a surgical incision in the brain through the skull. It was near the front. It was on both sides. We just made a small incision, no more than an inch.” The instrument Dr. Watts used looked like a butter knife. He swung it up and down to cut brain tissue. “We put an instrument inside,” he said. As Dr. Watts cut, Dr. Freeman put questions to Rosemary. For example, he asked her to recite the Lord’s Prayer or sing “God Bless America” or count backwards. … “We made an estimate on how far to cut based on how she responded.” … When she began to become incoherent, they stopped’
—Dr. James W. Watts and Dr. Walter Freeman, report on frontal lobotomy on Rosemary Kennedy, who died 7-Jan-05

‘I had a happy marriage and a nice wife. I accomplished everything you can. What more can you want?’
—Max Schmeling, who died 2-Feb-05

‘Without alienation, there can be no politics.’
—Arthur Miller, who died10-Feb-05

‘America… just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.’
—Hunter S. Thompson, who died 20-Feb-05

‘Me, I’m good at nothing but walking on the set with a pretty dress.’
—Sandra Dee, who died 20-Feb-05

‘I’m just not the glamour type. Glamour girls are born, not made. And the real ones can be glamorous even if they don’t wear magnificent clothes. I’ll bet Lana Turner would look glamorous in anything.’
—Teresa Wright, who died 6-Mar-05

‘It’s inevitable that the company come back.’
—John DeLorean, who died 19-Mar-05

‘War is a defeat for humanity.’
—Pope John Paul II, who died 2-Apr-05

‘There are evils that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever… money, for instance, or war.’
—Saul Bellow, who died 5-Apr-05

‘I work hard in social work, public relations, and raising the Grimaldi heirs.’
—Princess Grace about her life with Prince Rainier Grimaldi of Monaco, who died 6-Apr-05

‘Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice. Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture. Marriage meant the taking was to extend in time, to be not only use of but possession of, or ownership.’
—Andrea Dworkin, who died 9-Apr-05

‘Well, the musicals give emphasis to love, longing, melancholy, sadness. All of that is always there.’
—Ismail Merchant, who died 25-May-05

‘I don’t really care how I am remembered as long as I bring happiness and joy to people.’
—Eddie Albert, who died 26-May-05

‘I’d like to be remembered as a premier singer of songs, not just a popular act of a given period.’
—Luther Vandross, who died 1-Jul-05

‘There’s nothing more irresistible to a man than a woman who’s in love with him.’
—Ernest Lehman, who died 2-Jul-05

‘Abhorrence of apartheid is a moral attitude, not a policy.’
—Edward Heath, who died 17-Jul-05

‘Vietnam was the first war ever fought without any censorship. Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.’
—William C. Westmoreland, who died 18-Jul-05

‘I’m not tired of [beam me up Scotty] at all. Good gracious, it’s been said to me for just about 31 years. It’s been said to me at 70 miles an hour across four lanes on the freeway. I hear it from just about everybody. It’s been fun.’
—James Doohan, who died 20-Jul-05

‘I will be father to the young, brother to the elderly. I am but one of you; whatever troubles you, troubles me; whatever pleases you, pleases me.’
—King Fahd Bin Abdul Aziz, who died 1-Aug-05

‘There were no international terrorists in Iraq until we went in. It was we who gave the perfect conditions in which Al Qaeda could thrive.’
—Robin Cook, who died 6-Aug-05

‘It’s a brassiere! You know about those things, you’re a big boy now. … It’s brand new. Revolutionary up-lift: No shoulder straps, no back straps, but it does everything a brassiere should do. Works on the principle of the cantilevered bridge. … An aircraft engineer down the penninsula designed it; he worked it out in his spare time.’ [from Vertigo]
—Barbara Bel Geddes, who died 8-Aug-05

‘I think Alexander Hamilton has received a little bit of short shrift from history, and I think Jefferson has been treated a little bit too generously. I admire them both, but I admire them both about equally.’
—William Rehnquist, who died 3-Sep-05

‘I’ve often wondered if maybe I tried to tell too many stories in The Sand Pebbles.’
—Robert Wise, who died 14-Sep-05

‘Sid Luft was no gentleman. He was a weight lifter. He was a former test pilot. He was a gambler. He’s still one of those old-time Hollywood guys.’
—Lorna Luft about her father, Sidney Luft, who died 15-Sep-05

‘The history of man is the history of crimes, and history can repeat. So information is a defence. Through this we can build, we must build, a defence against repetition.’
—Simon Wiesenthal, who died 20-Sep-05

‘I said to myself, where are we living? In the United States of America where you’re innocent until proven guilty, or Nazi Germany with the Gestapo calling?’
—Tommy Bond during the Robert Blake trial. Bond died 24-Sep-05

‘All I was doing was trying to get home from work.’
—Rosa Parks, who died 24-Sep-05

‘I- I- I watched him for fifteen years, sitting in a room, staring at a wall, not seeing the wall, looking past the wall – looking at this night, inhumanly patient, waiting for some secret, silent alarm to trigger him off. Death has come to your little town, Sheriff. Now you can either ignore it, or you can help me to stop it.’
—Donald Pleasance in 1978’s Halloween, produced by Moustapha Akkad, who died 11-Nov-05

‘The changes in both radio and television are mind-boggling.’
—Ralph Edwards, who died 16-Nov-05

‘Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it’s important.’
—Eugene McCarthy, who died 10-Dec-05

‘There’s a thin line between to laugh with and to laugh at.’
—Richard Pryor, who died 10-Dec-05

‘Power always has to be kept in check; power exercised in secret, especially under the cloak of national security, is doubly dangerous.’
—William Proxmire, who died 14-Dec-05

Lost in '05: Hunter S. Thompson

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The year that was: « Goodbye Hunter S. Thompson »:

‘‘Politics is the art of controlling your environment.’ That is one of the key things I learned in these years, and I learned it the hard way. Anybody who thinks that ‘it doesn’t matter who’s President’ has never been Drafted and sent off to fight and die in a vicious, stupid War on the other side of the World — or been beaten and gassed by Police for trespassing on public property — or been hounded by the IRS for purely political reasons — or locked up in the Cook County Jail with a broken nose and no phone access and twelve perverts wanting to stomp your ass in the shower. That is when it matters who is President or Governor or Police Chief. That is when you will wish you had voted.’
—Hunter S. Thompson via John Cusack in the Huffington Post

Blogs?

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Apparently, one of the words to make the annual Lake Superior State Banished Words List is “blog” (and, according to the list, all of “its variations, including blogger, blogged, blogging, blogosphere”). The reasoning behind the banishment is unclear — except that, again according to the list, “[m]any who nominated it were unsure of the meaning,” which of course is always an excellent reason to banish a word.

The continued disjuncture between the “blogosphere” and the majority of the American “peoplesphere” is no laughing matter, though. A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll in March found that 48% of its respondents never read blogs.

The “blogosphere” has been seduced, partly by the mass media’s combination of anxiety and fascination with it, and partly by its own echo chamber, into believing it has far more influence and importance than it does. It’d be great if blogs could change the world, or even the political landscape, but although you can marshal some evidence that political and cultural elites (and certain specialized readers) care about the effect of blogs, if not their content, when you come across cultural mileposts such as the Banished Words List, you start to wonder whether blogs are much more than a tempest in a teapot. It’s not a question I have the pretense to an answer to. I’m a certified blog addict, and I would feel very de-oxygenated without my daily diet of blog reading (which is perhaps a problem in itself), but when I step back and look at the attention paid by the “blogosphere” to certain events and stories (for example, the revelations that Bush has been authorizing wiretaps of American citizens since October 2001) in contrast with the attention paid the same stories by the mass media, I wonder what blogs actually do, in the larger scheme of things.

I don’t think the response is to sneer at people who don’t read blogs (though I can see the “blogosphere” reacting in such a way). Increasing numbers of Americans get their information online, but is there a corresponding increase in the numbers who get that information from blogs? If not, why not? And would the answer to that question only matter to a blogger?

Reg Dwight Gets Hitched

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High-profile celebrity civil commitment ceremony: check. Quaint British setting (the same location as Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles’ ceremony in April): check. Crowds of paparazzi: check. Almost as many everyday well-wishers: check.

Only, the couple is Elton John and David Furnish, and for some reason, in the UK (and in Canada, and in a number of other Western countries) it just really isn’t that big of a deal. “He’s a queen, but he’s our queen,” one Brit cracked, as she held aloft a banner congratulating the couple. When the first ceremonies were held in Belfast (Belfast! ! !) on Monday, there were a number of protesters, to be sure. But I didn’t see a single torch, pitchfork, or gibbet.

Meanwhile, politicians in this country do everything in their power to make sure that not only gay weddings, but any law or resolution that sanctions same-sex relationships, is a crime against the state. You are made to feel like a felon (or worse, as though you are un-American) for wanting to visit your partner if he’s incapacitated and winds up in a hospital bed.

There was a long article in last Sunday’s Washington Post Magazine about a two-woman couple from Fredericksburg, Virginia who left the state for Maryland because of that state’s restrictive laws against same-sex couples. The reporter had an online exchange with readers after the story appeared, and along with the expected rage from those who questioned why so much space and time was wasted on a same-sex couple (and, as well, the surprising numbers of Virginians who expressed their regret that the couple left the state) were a few messages from readers who said that they knew gay people and thought they were “nice” but didn’t see why they should be making such a fuss.

I can actually muster more comprehension for the messages from the people who said that all gays currently living in Virginia should pack their bags and leave the commonwealth (with good riddance).

Another Ann Arbor Winter

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Winter has settled in with a vengeance and the solstice isn’t even until tomorrow (at 1.30pm, to be exact). The storms began well before Thanksgiving and there have been at least three or four of them since then. The temps have been getting steadily chillier and chillier, and the snow on the ground, since it’s never completely melting, is semi-deliquescing and then re-solidifying into unfriendly slates of sometimes invisible gray snow-and-ice. The ice that forms on the back steps makes it hard for the dog to go out and do his routine.

There have been nights when I’ve walked home from the bus stop and heard absolutely nothing in the air except the sound of my own feet crunching in the snow on the pavement — one night in particular, it was so eerily silent that I could hear the whoosh of the wind pushing mini-drifts off the surface of the snow that was already on the ground. There’s something to be said for that kind of stillness — you can almost feel the earth turning beneath your feet.

Breaking the Quiet

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It’s been a long month ….. working on various projects at the library, including a set of pages about the 2005 election cycle, fighting asthma, hibernating with the onset of what was an earlier onslaught of winter weather than usual. Steve has been fighting asthma and bronchitis, and he’s been snowed under with a heavy ELMAC workload. Coming up for some air now — and hopefully to post a little more regularly than I have been.