Yesterday I saw a campus tour guide leading a large group through the Diag, attempting to make her comments about the Physics Building heard over the monologue of a preaching regular who was standing on one of the short stone walls surrounding the Diag and delivering a sermon to thin air about how you can be the biggest winner and the brightest person in the world but it doesn’t matter if you’ve sinned against God.

I don’t know why, but in addition to the lazier-than-usual vibe around town, these all feel like signs that summer is starting to enter its waning stage (even though the season’s only been here five weeks, it’s been here much longer in terms of the academic calendar):

• Lots of students gradually making their way back to campus and settling in for the coming year; some students are even using the libraries.

• Lots of guys wearing tank tops and women wearing belly shirts even on days when it’s not particularly that hot outside.

• Lots of feverish clean-up work going on around the student flophouses along State below Packard.

• Lots of For Rent signs.

There’s another thing I don’t understand. I freely admit I’m not yet with it when it comes to cell phones. I use them when they’re necessary, but not much otherwise. And I just don’t get why people use them in places like theaters and libraries.

A security guard apparently maced a couple of kids who were using their cell phones on Saturday night while “Catwoman” was showing at a movie theater in St. Petersburg, FL. I don’t think the couple should have been maced, but I think they should have turned their cell phones off. I was doing some research at Hatcher this afternoon and a woman sat at a desk in front of me carrying on a conversation on her cell. She was positively quiet compared to the jock who stood in front of the reading room nearly shouting into his cell.

If you’re in an emergency, I can see pulling out your cell phone and making a call in a library. But otherwise, why? Other than the fact that it’s quiet there and you just don’t care about anyone else around you overhearing your loud conversation. The library staff has probably become resigned to cell phone breaching the library space at this point; I have never seen any librarian (or anyone anywhere else, for that matter) pull aside a cell phone user and ask him or her to stop, because doing so would probably risk an incident of cell phone rage.

Okay, I’ve lost the ability to understand what it ws that I’m supposed to do in an elevator when it stops on a floor and there are people waiting to get in and I’m waiting to get out. It used to be that the normal behavior was for the people outside to wait to get in until the people inside got out. That’s gone by the wayside. I was in an elevator in Hatcher the other day and a whole troop of people started pouring onto the elevator before I could get out. I’m honestly clueless here. Do I just barge out and rudely shove the people waiting to get on? Do I stay on and push through the wall of people after they’ve already boarded? I don’t get it.

« President Al Gore spoke to the Democratic National Convention this evening »:

’”I sincerely ask those watching at home who supported [The Boy Emperor] four years ago: Did you really get what you expected from the candidate you voted for?” Gore said. “Is our country more united today? Or more divided?” Gore asked. “Has the promise of compassionate conservatism been fulfilled? Or do those words now ring hollow?” Joking that he was the first American laid off during the Bush administration, Gore said Bush’s economic policies drove up deficits and cost millions of jobs. … “To those of you who felt disappointed or angry with the outcome in 2000, I want you to remember all of those feelings,” he said. “But then I want you to do with them what I have done: Focus them fully and completely on putting John Kerry and John Edwards in the White House.” … “Are you troubled by the erosion of some of America’s most basic civil liberties?” he said. “Are you worried that our environmental laws are being weakened and dismantled to allow vast increases in pollution that are contributing to a global climate crisis?” “No matter how you voted in the last election, these are profound problems that all voters must take into account this Nov. 2.”’

You tell ‘em, Mr. President!

« Gay bicyclists camp torched in northern Michigan »:

’ Dozens of sleeping gay cyclists scrambled for their lives as an arsonist set fire to their campsite. About 75 members of Friends North were on a summer bike outing. Twenty in the group set up camp near the town of Honor and bedded down for the night Sunday. About 12:30 a.m. a member of the group awoke to find a portable toilet on fire and flames spreading to nearby belongings. The cyclist woke up the others fearing the fire would spread to the dry grass and encircle them. Flames were shooting 20 feet in the air a member of the group said. Later, about two dozen hate messages were found scattered throughout the area.

“We’re all very devastated,” Friends North member Rose Clement of Grawntold the Record-Eagle. “If that fire would’ve spread into the field, this could’ve been horrific.” “There was some very foul, very mean-spirited stuff,” said Kirk Mallow, a Friends North board member who also had a rainbow flag taken in the incident. “It was pretty scary.”’

Lovely.

A driver on Stadium honks impatiently at a car in front of him/her who was trying to turn right onto a side street.

It was rush hour, but so what? I mean, I can understand honking in certain limited circumstances. Someone cuts you off. Someone jams on his or her brakes abruptly. But this?

Ridiculous.

I don’t normally quote politicians in this blog, but I have to say amen to these words from John Kerry, spoken in the Columbus neighborhood of Park Ridge Village today:

I’m proud to hear the voices of democracy. Sometimes they’re a little loud, but that’s the nature of democracy and we welcome that. What we really need to do in America, frankly, is stop shouting at each other and start listening to each other.

One of my favorite parts of the summer so far has been the way the light looks at dusk, especially when the fireflies come out and start lighting up the backyard with their silent fireworks. That and the very noisy small group of cicadas that has set up shop somewhere in many trees behind the house and over the fence in the yards of the houses on the other side of us.

There weren’t any out-of-the-ordinary explanations for the temperature drop late last week. According to the Ann Arbor News, a cold front made it way through southeastern Michigan on Friday. The low temperature on Saturday morning matched a record set in 1904 (the temperature got down to 49 degrees both days).

We were walking the dog in a completely deserted Frisinger Park this afternoon when I looked up into a tree and saw what must have been a downy woodpecker (Picoides pubescens) doing a strange little woodpecker dance as it hung onto one of the branches of the tree with its feet and circled the branch 360 degrees, stopping to quietly drill every few seconds. First time I’d ever seen a woodpecker up close. It really didn’t seem at all alarmed by our presence, completely ignoring us for a minute or more before it finally winged off to a higher branch on the tree. Amazing.

I’ve started reading the new book, The Anatomy of Facism, by Robert O. Paxton, so I’ll probably have plenty to add to my entry on Fascism below. So far, it’s a good overview of fascism as a phenomenon and takes a better approach; namely, that merely defining fascism (if that’s even possible) isn’t enough to fully understand it. [I’ll post a review over in the Print section at some point.]

Reading ahead, I see that Paxton lists several ‘mobilizing passions’ behind fascism:

’• A sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of traditional solutions;

• The primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it;

• The belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;

• Dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;

• The need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;

• The need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s historical destiny;

• The superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason;

• The beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success;

• The right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess within a Darwinian struggle.’

Interesting. More on this after I finish reading the book. In the meantime, I shall continue to call the ruling right-wing Republican hegemony in this country the Fascist FunDumbMentalists, until Paxton shows me where I’m wrong. And I’ll do so unapologetically.

While helping a (female) friend shop at the mall last night, I witnessed something rather odd for the midwest: two early twenty-something guys (with 70s hair and tattoos and sunglasses) in the women’s department of a store trying on size 4 women’s jeans. Inexplicably. And they seemed to be having a pretty good time. And no, they weren’t obviously gay or transvestites or anything … they apparently just wanted some tight-fitting jeans.

It prompted one of the salesgirls to say, ‘You sure have to be secure in your masculinity to carry this off!’

Metrosexuals in Ann Arbor?

There’s a lot of debate these days about how “polarized” the country is. If you were to base your conclusions simply on perusing the list of new non-fiction titles at the Ann Arbor District Library (or any other good-sized library, for that matter), you would have enough fuel to argue about the phenomenon (and isn’t that another sign that we’re polarized—that we have to argue about whether we are?) for weeks.

Just a sampler:

Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and Stifling of Democracy [Lewis Lapham]

A Hole in the World: A Story of War, Protest and the New American Order [Jonathan Schell]

Michael Moore Is A Big Fat Stupid White Man [David Hardy and Jason Clarke]

American Evita: Hillary Clinton’s Path to Power [Christopher Anderson]

How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office: The Anti-Politics, Un-Boring Guide to Power [Adrienne Brown, William Upski Wimsatt, and Davey D]

Inside the Asylum: Why the United Nations and Old Europe Are Worse Than You Think [Jed Babbin]

The Real Jimmy Carter: How Our Worst Ex-President Undermines American Foreign Policy, Coddles Dictators and Created the Party of Clinton and Kerry [Steven Hayward]

I guess as the titles get longer, the content gets more strident, shrill, and asinine.

As a followup to the post below about a white woman’s encounter with a group of suspicious swarthy men on a flight to L.A., « the truth is finally coming out »:

‘Undercover federal air marshals on board a June 29 Northwest airlines flight from Detroit to LAX identified themselves after a passenger, overreacted, to a group of middle-eastern men on board, federal officials and sources have told KFI NEWS. The passenger, later identified as Annie Jacobsen, was in danger of panicking other passengers and creating a larger problem on the plane, according to a source close to the secretive federal protective service. Jacobsen, a self-described freelance writer, has published two stories about her experience at womenswallstreet.com, a business advice web site designed for women. The lady was overreacting, said the source. A flight attendant was told to tell the passenger to calm down; that there were air marshals on the plane.

The source said the air marshals on the flight were partially concerned Jacobsens actions could have been an effort by terrorists or attackers to create a disturbance on the plane to force the agents to identify themselves. Air marshals only tactical advantage on a flight is their anonymity, the source said, and Jacobsen could have put the entire flight in danger. They have to be very cognizant of their surroundings, spokesman Adams confirmed, to make sure it isn’t a ruse to try and pull them out of their cover.’

Ain’t it grand? I’m keeping an eye on Women’s Wall Street to see if they post a followup or retreat from the story. So far, they’re only linking to followups on fascist websites.

What fun the Fair was! Lots of good food … crowds of strangers carrying artsy things on sticks … fiddling boys playing for tips … an earnest young woman pressing a brochure into my hand that proclaimed that ‘Jesus was the greatest Artist of all time.’

And as I was walking east on Liberty at the Fair yesterday, a thirtyish guy, definitely not from Ann Arbor, kept up a running commentary behind me (for the benefit of his silent and bored girlfriend) as we passed all the political booths.

‘Howard Dean?! Yeah, right. You people are crazy. Pppptttttt.’

and the prizewinner:

‘I’m gettin’ really tired of all this peace crap.’

Yeah? Well, just stick around if the Boy Emperor regains the throne in November, buddy. You won’t have to put up with any ‘peace crap’ for at least four more years.

Still and all, it was a fun event and the weather was wonderful.

The one really enjoyable part of yesterday’s Fair was the weather. After five days or so of high-80s temps and punishing humidity, the temperature and the humidity both just suddenly dropped into the cellar (the cellar for July, anyway). It was probably no higher than 72 degrees and the humidity never got near 50%. There was a light breeze and everything was bright and blue and sunny but it was all somehow a lot more manageable. There were even a few instances of civility and politeness: people holding doors open for each other, saying “Sorry” and “Excuse me” when they bumped into you, etc. The weather’s continued that way today: right now it’s 72 degrees and the humidity is only 22%. This is summer weather I can heartily endorse.

Well ….. the Friday crowds were definitely way bigger than the first two days. It was a little overwhelming at times, actually. Not completely claustrophobic; if you wanted to get away you could still move to the areas beyond the booths and find some open space. But very difficult to take photographs or do much of anything else; Steve and I and our friend Scott grabbed some lunch and found an out-of-the-way spot to eat. So, no observations to make about the second two days of the Fair (I suspect it’s even more packed today; our entire complex is deserted today, and I have a feeling a lot of people have gone to the festivities). But I did enjoy the first two days. It was well worth experiencing; I wish I’d made time to see more. Maybe next year.

The most frequent conversation I overheard at the Fair was along the lines of the following:

TEENAGER: I wanna go hooooome!

MOM: No, we’re not going home.

Or:

KID: I don’t wanna waaaaalk anymore!

MOM: We’re gonna keep walking.

Just three pics today … « Ann Arbor Art Fair ‘04: Day Three »

First, it started with a first-person account of a « white woman’s scary encounter with swarthy scary Ay-rabs »: It seems that 14 scary swarthy men did mighty suspicious things on a flight to L.A. The incident apparently was scary enough that she thinks we should chuck civil liberties out the window (as evidenced in the very first paragraph of her story:

‘On June 29, 2004, at 12:28 p.m., I flew on Northwest Airlines flight #327 from Detroit to Los Angeles with my husband and our young son. Also on our flight were 14 Middle Eastern men between the ages of approximately 20 and 50 years old. What I experienced during that flight has caused me to question whether the United States of America can realistically uphold the civil liberties of every individual, even non-citizens, and protect its citizens from terrorist threats.’

—Women’s Wall Street Journal

It’s quite a tale (and goes on and on and on for pages). And if it happened the way she describes, well, it’s a matter for concern, of course.

But she completely undermines her credibility by turning the report into a right-wing polemic/agitprop piece, quoting Ann Coulter, of all people, which alone pops up red flags all over the place.

Fortunately, there are a few (very few) people left in journalism willing to do a little investigating, and the National Review Online’s « Clinton W. Taylor did a follow-up »:

‘Columnist and blogger Michelle Malkin confirmed some of the details of Jacobsen’s story with the Federal Air Marshal’s service, but the identity of the band remained the subject of much speculation. … Nour Mehana (a.k.a. Noor Mehanna, or Nour Mhanna, plus various permutations of those spellings) is, in fact, Syrian. He performs both “new-agey” hits and old sentimental Middle Eastern classics in a style called Tarab. In this catchy ten-minute video of Mehana on stage, (scroll down; the name is rendered Noor Mhanan this time ) you can see he has a rather large backup band helping him out. (The resolution is low, but Jacobsen might recognize some of the band members Mehanna is interacting with.) Followers of news from Iraq may have heard about the U.S. tour of the “Iraqi Elvis.” Well, Mehana comes across not as an angry jihadi, but rather more like the Syrian Wayne Newton. …

‘Anyway, this is good news. Nour Mehana’s band might have acted like jerks on the plane, but it appears safe to say they were not casing Northwest Airlines for a suicidal assault, and we can quit worrying about this being a “dry run” or an aborted attack. And if Jacobsen was wondering why one man in a dark suit and sunglasses sat in first class while everyone else flew coach, well, it seems pretty clear that this was the Big Mehana himself.’

Taylor then strikes a more moderate tone, with which I pretty much agree, and notes where the true concern should be:

‘Liberals will likely decry the suspicion and interrogation the musicians faced on Flight 327. And the principled Right will regret that that was necessary. If the band’s English wasn’t very good they might not have understood the instructions. But a polite word and some helpful gestures earlier on, rather than a guilty PC silence, might have saved them some embarrassment. In any case, the police-state parallels fade quickly: In a real police state, like, oh, Syria, you are not even allowed inside the country with an Israeli stamp in your passport. June 29 was no ordinary day in the skies. That day, Department of Homeland Security officials issued an “unusually specific internal warning,” urging customs officials to watch out for Pakistanis with physical signs of rough training in the al Qaeda training camps. The warning specifically mentioned Detroit and Los Angeles’s LAX airports, the origin and terminus of NWA flight 327.

‘That means that our air-traffic system was expecting trouble. But rather than land the plane in Las Vegas or Omaha, it was allowed to continue on to Los Angeles without interruption, as if everything were hunky-dory on board. It certainly wasn’t. If this had been the real thing, and the musicians had instead been terrorists, nothing was stopping them from taking control of the plane or assembling a bomb in the restroom. Given the information they were working with at the time, almost everyone should have reacted differently than they did. Jacobsen’s fear was quite natural under these circumstances, and she has done us a service by pointing out some egregious shortfalls in our airline security. Danke Schoen, Darling. Let’s hope the right people are listening.’

—National Review Online

The story has been all over the ‘blogosphere, and « some wags are having fun with it »:

’… although now pretty much discredited, Annie has managed to be on at least a couple cable news shows, several talk radio programs, has been mentioned in the NY Times, and has become something of a hero to the whiny right. She will probably be invited to address Congress, and will end up getting a book deal out of all this. So, I figure it’s time to tell MY scary air travel stories, in the hopes that I too can cash in. … About ten years ago I was traveling for work. One flight (an inter-European one) was on a small prop plane that held about 20 people; most of the other passengers were Arabic men wearing traditional Arabic attire. They had Saudi diplomatic passports. They all seemed to know each other, and spoke amongst themselves. In ARABIC! Instead of a ham sandwich and an apple, they were giving a snack which accorded with Islamic dietary laws. But I saw one of the men reading a Playboy on the flight. Since this violated his religious beliefs, Allah could have punished him (and everybody else) by making the plane crash. While we didn’t actually have any trouble on the flight, I was really scared, if it will get me on TV.’

—World O’ Crap

Funny stuff. But I pretty much agree with Taylor. We don’t need racial profiling and the wholesale scrapping of civil liberties like Jacobsen calls for, nor do we need to be completely clueless either. We need to be alert and focus on and challenge behavior, whether it’s by an 80-year-old white grandma or 14 Arabs. The debate over race is just a distraction.

After all, who committed the second-worst terrorist attack on American soil? A white male rightwing extremist. And who was planning a massive terrorist attack within the last year? A couple of white rightwing extremists.

It’s the behavior, stupid.

The second day of the Fair(s) was more crowded than the first, but there was still plenty of elbow room. I started out at the area around Fifth and Liberty and made my way east and south to campus, taking a few photos as I went along and getting rapidly done in by the humidity. By the time I reached Hatcher Library I was done for; the cool building was a blessing. (The Ann Arbor News said that two people were treated for “heat-related illnesses” during yesterday’s festivities.) Of course, this is nothing compared to the South, or so I’m told, so I consider myself lucky.

I hope to take a closer look at the booths tomorrow. Today was mostly trying to get some decent atmosphere shots; I didn’t have much time to do anything else. I didn’t buy anything—just gawked and took photos. The constant “JOBS NOT WAR” signs everywhere (along with other similar insignia) were reminders that for the Midwest, Ann Arbor’s a pretty liberal place to be. (I read in the Free Press today that the mayor and the Common Council of Madison nixed the idea of Madison doing a “sister city” arrangement with a Palestinian town in the Gaza Strip because the act was too political or radical or controversial or something. I don’t know the full story, but that seems kind of odd coming from Madison, which already has sister cities in Cuba and Vietnam.)

I see that « some local reporters have more chutzpah than the national press »:

’… as reporters in Omaha, Neb., proved last week. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz visited the area, where he observed a military ceremony and gave a July 9 speech sponsored by the Omaha Chamber of Commerce. Wolfowitz’s office invited several regional reporters for a post-speech discussion with the deputy secretary. … Wolfowitz’s public affairs officer, Bill Turenne, began by asking that Wolfowitz’s comments be attributed to a “senior Defense Department official.” The Kansas City Star’s Canon took immediate issue with these ground rules. “I was less heroic than you might imagine,” he says in a telephone interview. Canon politely explained to Wolfowitz and Turenne that the conversation would be of no professional value to him if he couldn’t name Wolfowitz as the source of the remarks. There just wouldn’t be much use at his paper for such blind quotery. “My complaint was less about the practice in general than that it would be a waste of [Wolfowitz’s] time.”
…
‘The moral here isn’t that reporters can eliminate the scourge of background and anonymous sourcing with a wave of the hand. Omaha ain’t Washington. But it does illustrate 1) how background sourcing has become the default setting for many government sources and their handlers—they request it even when they don’t need it!; 2) that the smaller the group of reporters, the greater their leverage in getting information on the record; and 3) a reporter never knows what resistance to authority will get him unless he resists.’

I think the moral here is that the national press is shirking its responsibility and needs to grow a [collective] spine.

« Dear America »,

‘On November 2nd, please elect a new government.
Signed, Your Friends in Canada …’

Frank took more really great pics of day two of the Ann Arbor Art Fair:

« Ann Arbor Art Fair ‘04: Day Two »

Again … so very Ann Arbor!

Thanks to Steve for posting the photos. The one of the spray-painted “ART NOT WAR” sign was actually not “technically” part of the fair(s); it’s been in that bus shelter on South U for weeks. But I thought it captured the zeitgeist well.

I biked to campus. It took all of 15-18 minutes, discounting time spent at the long light at Packard and Stadium. It was perhaps not the pleasantest day in the world to be biking in work clothes, though I doubt I’d have been any less affected by the humidity if I’d taken the bus. I’m getting used to the humidity by now, though that doesn’t mean I don’t long for it to be gone. Biking home was a slightly lengthier proposition, because I stopped at Kroger, but I didn’t find the ride difficult at all, and I rode along streets I would have never discovered if I had been hoofing it.

The fair’s first day was surprisingly tame, crowd-wise; I’m told the most hectic days are Friday and Saturday. Even with the crowds, and there were definitely lots of people, there was room to breathe, with the milling fairgoers limiting themselves very closely to where the stalls were positioned on South U and State and not venturing far off the beaten path. The long pathway running from the northwest to the southeast edge of central campus didn’t look all that much more trafficked than it has on other summer weekdays.

I even found a deserted corner of a brick wall off to the side of the entrance to the Fine Arts Library where I was able to eat a snack from the stands without anyone passing by—except one of the hungry (yet surprisingly finicky) campus squirrels, who was evidently not a connoisseur of pita bread.

Contrasted with the street fairs during the summer and fall months in San Francisco, I’d sum up the Ann Arbor experience thus far as follows:

• Far less claustrophobic, if not in numbers of people then in terms of the space in which they are moving; the narrow confines of Union Street and Castro Street in SF are enough to make you swear off fairs forever if you’re not inclined to enjoy being trapped in a crowd and not being able to move more than a foot forward at a time.
• The food’s definitely better, by a long shot (though no less expensive; at $3 for a cup of lemonade, it’s called highway robbery). In SF you get crappy junk and watery beverages (or, if you prefer the alternative, watery beer). Here at least the junk food is satisfying. And the lemonade is great: not too tart, but not sickly sweet either.
• The crowds here are not as catty, snippy, snotty, or snooty. Lots of families and kids. Quite a number of dogs too, though the heat seemed a little excessive to be dragging a pooch along in. One typically eager beagle straining at his master’s leash was an amusing sight.
• As far as what’s being sold in the booths themselves, not all that much difference, though I haven’t really lingered at any of the booths for very long yet.

More photos tomorrow, I hope.

Frank took some pics of the first day of Art Fair around campus today:

« Ann Arbor Art Fair ‘04: Day One »

Love that first one … so very Ann Arbor.

For the average child born in 1999, the department estimates it will cost $160,140 for food, shelter and other necessities in the first 17 years of life. For you sticklers out there, the department estimates that the inflation-adjusted amount will be $237,000.??

I guess I’m still shaking my head over the blurb in the Ann Arbor News police blotter yesterday:

A motorist who stopped to allow ducks to cross the road in Ann Arbor Saturday evening said a passenger of a nearby vehicle became enraged and began striking his vehicle and spitting at him, Ann Arbor Police said.

The 33-year-old Ann Arbor driver said he was in the 700 block of East Eisenhower Parkway at 6:30 p.m. when a group of ducks began crossing the road, reports said. He said he stopped, then honked and pointed at the ducks as a small white car drove toward them, reports said.

The man said the driver of the other vehicle then cut off his car as they began driving again, so he pulled to the other lane as they approached a red light, reports said. The victim said the passenger in the white car got out, punched and scratched his window, yelled that he would kill him, and spit at him through the window, reports said.

The victim said the man tried to open his door, but it was locked, and he simply smiled at the enraged man as it was occurring, reports said. He also said the female driver of the white car got out and was encouraging the passenger to fight him, reports said.

The creatures the first motorist was trying to save were actually probably geese, not ducks. I’ve seen a ton of Canadian geese in that area for at least a couple of months now. I’ve seen maybe a handful of ducks.

Just so there’s no risk of misunderstanding or causing offense, I’m not making any sort of know-it-all cynical grand statement about Ann Arbor. I don’t doubt that this sort of thing happens everywhere nowadays. That doesn’t make it less appalling. Maybe I don’t know the full story. Maybe the first motorist shouldn’t have honked. Maybe he should have just run over the crossing goslings. Maybe the enraged motorist would have still charged after him at the next stoplight. Who knows?

Today, I took the longest ride yet: 10 miles roundtrip on the Bobcat. We won’t talk about what it did to my hands, even though my splints took most of the shock and I really haven’t had much trouble, post-ride. We won’t talk about the right knee, either, which seems to be stiffening somewhat as I age.

I am proud I took the long trip, though, even though I’ll pay a price later with my very sore, tenosynovitis-plagued hands.

I had to meet a classmate at the UM School of Ed on campus at 4, and we needed a new can opener, so I biked the two miles to campus and then did the four miles during rush hour over to Arborland shopping center … kind of insane of me, but I did it to prove I could.

The bike performed flawlessly and was a joy to ride; Ann Arbor’s gentle hills caused me some huffy-puffy, but nothing major. And Ann Arbor’s nice city sidewalks that stretch the entire two miles from the shopping center here to the apartment meant I didn’t have to deal at all with traffic. It was a very nice ride.

They only slightly annoying moment came on a side street near the shopping center; the street was hard packed dirt with a little gravel. An old Suburban came coasting up behind me, then as he got just ahead of me, he gunned it. Whether intentional or not, I don’t know, but it looked like he was trying to spray me with gravel. I called him a bad name and took another side street.

Other than that, an uneventful ride. There are bike racks at the Bed Bath & Beyond in the shopping center, fortunately, so finding a place to tie up was easy. I did seem to get some patronizing stares from the car people; the location is definitely not bike friendly.

People in Ann Arbor are fairly bike-conscious though; everyone braked nicely for me at intersections and were nice. This is a good thing.

All-in-all, a very good experience.

Say hello to The Hearse, which you’ll enjoy if you also enjoy Six Feet Under.

… except that they’re not in Iraq, but in « North Korea »:

‘North Korea is likely to be producing nuclear bombs even as it conducts negotiations with the United States and four other countries on ending its weapons programs, the senior U.S. official responsible for those talks told Congress yesterday. “Time is certainly a valid factor in this,” said James A. Kelly, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs, during testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “We don’t know the details, but it’s quite possible that North Korea is proceeding along, developing additional fissionable material and possibly additional nuclear weapons.” Although North Korea has asserted that it has produced weapons-grade plutonium since the crisis over Pyongyang’s nuclear programs began 20 months ago—and though U.S. intelligence analysts broadly believe that the number of nuclear weapons held by North Korea has increased from two to at least eight during this period—it is highly unusual for a senior administration official to concede publicly that North Korea’s stockpile may be growing.
…
“The bottom line is that we now confront a much more dangerous adversary than we did in 2001,” said Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.), the ranking Democrat on the panel. He accused the administration of adopting a policy of “benign neglect” even after learning that Pyongyang had a clandestine nuclear effort, and then taking “more than two years to resolve its internal divisions and settle on an approach for dealing with North Korea.”’

Gosh, I feel so much safer with the Boy Emperor’s adults in charge.

I see that Amazon.com has now adopted something called a “plog®.” The “plog” is apparently yet another marketing scheme, although Amazon touts it as:

a diary of events that will enhance your shopping experience, helping you discover products that have just been released, track changes to your orders, and many other things. Just like a blog, your Plog is sorted in reverse chronological order. When we think we have something interesting or important to tell you, we’ll post it to your Plog.

This sort of thing, while inevitable (proving once again the truth that the blog is not going away, though it may mutate into innumerable obnoxious forms and hybrids), is undeniably annoying. For one thing, while the website invites you to go to Your Account to “change Plog settings,” the only option actually available to you is to “hide purchase details” (which doesn’t really seem to “hide” anything at all), not to remove the “plog” from your front page. For another thing, who’s writing this “diary of events,” and what kind of “events” are they? And what does “plog” even stand for? Yuck.

We took a very nice five-mile roundtrip to the library today, the first time we had done a double ride together.

The M30 is rougher and tougher on me than the Bobcat, but performed fine, wonky crank and all. I need to raise the seat. But it’s not bad for a garage sale bike.

The Bobcat performed just fine for Frank. He may need to use it to commute to campus this week, what with Art Fair completely gumming up the works around Ann Arbor. It’ll be easier than dealing with the altered bus routes.

I rode to campus on the Bobcat Friday to meet with a client. That trip was rather nice. Nobody ran me down and the weather was hot, but okay. I changed shirts when I got there. I’m enjoying the biking life.

Not having biked in almost five years (my last bike rides were through rough neighborhoods in East Oakland, and while nothing ever happened to me there, I came to realize that there were probably smarter things to do than to ride through those hard streets on a new bike, not to mention more efficient public transportation-oriented ways of getting to and from my house), the roughly 5-mile round-trip bike ride I took with Steve to the Malletts Creek Library this afternoon was at first a little nerve-wracking, but it was worth it. I think I’ll be biking a lot more often from now on.

Page Six reports on a contest in which 25 celeb-writers were asked by BlackBook Magazine to write a short story in no more than six words. (This was evidently a follow-up on an episode in which Ernest Hemingway, given the same challenge, wrote: “For sale: Baby shoes, never used.”)

Here’s Rick Moody’s response: “Grass, cow, calf, milk, cheese, France.”

Um. I don’t know. Dale Peck says that Rick Moody is “the worst writer of his generation,” and as much as I loathe Dale Peck’s writing, I’m beginning to wonder if he’s not on to something.

John Updike’s response was: “Forgive me!” “What for?” “Never mind.” Meh.

Norman Mailer’s was not bad: “Satan—Jehovah—15 rounds. A draw.”

Irvine Welsh’s was pretty good: “Eyeballed me, killed him. Slight exaggeration.”

Well, nobody topped Hemingway. Of course.

My hands hurt worse than ever. I don’t understand it. They were fine before May and then grew steadily worse in June. And now I’m beyond frustrated with the situation.

I’ve never felt this kind of consistent pain and achiness before. Have appointments with physical therapy and the surgeon in two weeks. Can’t wait, believe it or not.

Much more temperate today than it’s been the past few days. I enjoy the sunlight and the warmth as long as there’s a dip in the humidity and there’s a breeze, or even a wind.

I had lunch at Frank’s today and the waitress/customer chatter was all about the upcoming Fair onslaught. There are actually four separate fairs, not just one—something I don’t think I fully appreciated until now. The university has sent out a twenty-point memo alerting one and all to the varied changes in bus route, street closures, and other attendant craziness and folderol to ensue at the tail end of next week. Some people at my place of work (and at my directed field experience) are thinking of taking vacation days.

I’m not sure whether to prepare myself merely for inconvenience or to give up and hide in the basement with the dog for four days. Steve was already through all of this once before—he was here in Ann Arbor looking for housing at this time last year while I bit my fingernails and wrapped up my job and my Bay Area existence—but I think he’s staying quiet about the enormity of it all.

Bush was today driven in a campaign bus around the UP. The first appearance of a president in that part of the state since Howard Taft visited in 1911, according to the Washington Post. (Fact-checked though that factoid must have been by the researchers at the Post, I wonder ….. Gerald Ford’s never been up there? That’s really, really hard to believe. My semi-librarian senses are tingling.) One more excuse for the Beltway reporters accompanying Bush to crack stupid, condescending jokes and make supposedly trenchant “color” observations about the UP.

Steve Mariucci, currently coach of the Lions and erstwhile coach of the 49ers, opened a Bush rally in Marquette with the words, “Welcome to God’s country,” which he would have been pelted with rocks and garbage for uttering if he’d done it while he was still in the Bay Area.

The announcer deriding the American pronunciation of the word “soccer” (“sah-kuh”), a word which is already in itself apparently an object of derision because the word the rest of the world uses is “football.” (And then he says “George W. Bush played rugby. What on earth was he doing playing that?”)

According to a brief article on the back of the front section of today’s Ann Arbor News, a recent poll by EPIC/MRA found that 61% of Michigan residents favor amending the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage. Such an amendment is under way, since the Lansing-based group that is pushing the issue (after having lost the battle in March to get the amendment passed in the legislature) has presumably collected enough signatures to put the matter on the November ballot.

What the proponents of this amendment prefer that you not know is that the proposed amendment would not just prohibit gay and lesbian couples from getting “married,” which in any case is already illegal in Michigan and across the country (remember the Defense of Marriage Act, which was passed in 1996 and signed into law by Bill Clinton?). DOMA, by the way, also already allows states to refuse to recognize gay “marriages” that have been performed in other states.

Read the language of the proposed amendment. It says:

To secure and preserve the benefits of marriage for our society and for future generations of children, the union of one man and one woman in marriage shall be the only agreement recognized as a marriage or similar union for any purpose.

The key phrase is “similar union for any purpose.” That can mean anything. That’s the way the backers of this horrible amendment want it.

What the proposed amendment will do if put into law, in addition to superfluously “banning” gay “marriage”:

• Make civil unions illegal.

• Wipe domestic partnership registration off the books in Ann Arbor, Lansing, Oakland County, and other Michigan localities.

• Make illegal and void any domestic partnership benefits granted by public institutions like the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, and other government agencies.

Lest I be judged for exercising a partisan bias, you can judge for yourself the differing positions of the proposed amendment’s backers and opponents by clicking on the following links:

• Coalition for a Fair Michigan [in opposition to the proposed amendment]

• Citizens for the Protection of Marriage [in favor of the proposed amendment]

Whoever said that Ann Arbor is deserted in the summer? If anything, it seems more hectic during the summer than it does during the winter, when everybody’s indoors unless they absolutely have to go outdoors. There are all kinds of businessy conferences going on around the area of Michigan Union, there are hordes upon hordes of high school athletes trooping all over campus and up and down State Street almost every day of the week, the buses are almost always full, and there are tourists everywhere. Ambrosia is not packed most days, but it’s seldom empty anymore either, which I suppose is good, since it will probably not be going out of business anytime soon. I don’t even want to think what the days of the art fairs are going to be like.

Like I said, I’ll never understand Michigan drivers, no matter how long I live here.

This afternoon I was waiting to cross the street (at Division and William, I think) and a driver of a sports car stamped his accelerator and sped through the green light as though it had just turned yellow or red. What’s the point? You can use your accelerator! We’re all impressed! Big whoop!

I got off the Wolverine Shuttle bus tonight at a stop on State just before the Stadium underpass. The bus was stopped for about two minutes as I got out and as it waited for cars behind it to pass. The bus pulled away from the curb and a gray Lexus-type sports car (yeah, another sports car) sped furiously around and ahead of the bus, even though there was traffic in the oncoming lane. I guess crap like the concept of “two lanes of traffic” doesn’t matter to people anymore, whether it risks an accident or not. So, Lexus driver, you saved three seconds by cutting in front of a bus. Wow. I bet that made a huge difference in your ridiculous existence.

A list of all posts since April (when we switched from Movable Type to Textpattern) is now up and running. Now if I can salvage all the MT entries from April back through last August, we’ll be in bidness.

RSS and Atom feeds are working again; you can find links to them in the ‘Remember’ section of the navigation list on the left. Let me know if there’s a problem with them.

I’m still working on the ‘Ask’ and ‘Contact’ sections of all the journals, as well as an archives page listing all entries. Hope to have those up soon. Thanks for reading us and leaving your comments … we love to hear from you.

Southeast Michigan seems to have missed most of the Brood X periodical cicada event, but the regular “dog day” Tibicen cicadas, which are apparently more of a loner species than the Magicicada, are now gracing us with their shrill hissing mating song. I’m sorry that we didn’t get to see much of the Magicicada, but Tibicen is the next-best thing.

On the afternoon of the so-called “Marriage Protection Sunday,” Steve and I went out to the Michigan Theater and saw Vincente Minnelli’s “An American in Paris“ (1951), which I’d never seen all the way through before and has got to be one of the all-time great musicals. Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, Oscar Levant, Ira and George Gershwin, Vincente Minnelli, “I Got Rhythm,” and the Montmartre: all good antidotes to the hatemongers and the naysayers. Minnelli’s masterful use of color is almost hallucinatory; it’s absolutely unbelievable on the big screen, and it makes stuff like Baz Luhrmann’s “Moulin Rouge!” look like child’s play, no matter how much “better” the technology that modern filmmakers have access to.

It was also gratifying to see that while the screening room where the film was being shown wasn’t packed, it wasn’t empty either. There were plenty of people there, and they were of many different ages and backgrounds; it wasn’t just a bunch of stereotypical musical aficionados (i.e., gay men). A grandmother behind us in line had two girls with her about 11 or 12 years old; good for her for taking them on a Sunday afternoon to see a classic American movie instead of some teen-tween major-studio crowd-pleaser like “Sleepover” or “Garfield.”

I was over in Ypsilanti today, taking the Michigan Test for Teacher Certification at Willow Run High School, and had almost three hours between the morning and afternoon sessions. So I went to explore Ypsi, where I haven’t spent that much time since we moved here a year ago.

Driving down a street, I noticed a garage sale and a couple of bikes. On a whim, I stopped and saw a dark green Raleigh M30 mountain bike, dusty and a bit worn, but apparently in excellent shape and in the right size and everything.

I asked the nice lady how much and she said, ‘Fifteen dollars.’

I said, ‘Fifty?’

‘No, fifteen. One. Five.’

‘Will you hold it for my while I run to the ATM?’

‘Sure!’

Back in five minutes, I handed over the cash and took the front wheel off and loaded my find into the Jeep. I went to the afternoon session of my test, then went home to rest the arms.

I’ve now had a chance to look over the $15 special and am pleasantly surprised that it’s a pretty good bike. The seat was worn on the edges, but she had a new one in the original package that went with it, and it’s a very nice gel setup. I’ll need to swap it out and it’s ready.

But there is a problem with the crank; I’m not sure I can fix it, thanks to my weak arms. But I took it for a test drive and, with the exception of the wonky crank, it performed beautifully. Tires, brakes, shifters, pedals, chain—everything is good.

I spent the last hour fooling with it and cleaning it up. Other than the crank situation, it’s ready to hit the road. I’ll just have to figure out that problem and Frank and I can bike together, if the mood hits.

So, in the space of a week, we’ve gone from no bikes to two (plus one still marooned in San Francisco). Yay!

The other day I startled myself by referring to a carbonated beverage as “pop” without thinking about it.

Today the heat was in the 80s and the humidity was in the mid-to-high range, weather that would have made me whiny and irritable in California, but I actually said, out loud, “If this is the worst we’re going to get I’d say this is a pretty mild summer.”

The sheer exuberant number of souped-up loud-engined street racing cars, megalithic pickup trucks, SUVs, and other behemoth vehicles of all kinds all over the streets of Ann Arbor no longer surprises me. Michigan is the Motor State, after all. (Some Michiganders’ driving habits, though, I’ll never understand.)

Ignorant and/or moronic letters to the editor that appear in the Ann Arbor News that would have automatically inspired a fired-off scorched-earth acidic response when I was living in San Francisco no longer faze me. Live and let live. Or something like that.

I’ve lived longer in Michigan than I’ve lived anywhere outside of California: as of July 23, it’s now been almost eleven months. (The only other place I’ve lived outside California was England, but that ended after nine months.)

I honestly no longer miss California much. Most days, anyway.