AirBeagle

The sun seems to be making a reappearance the past two days. It’s in and out, but it’s definitely there. I would say I guess the worst of the rainy weather is over, but I know better anymore than to hazard any guesses about Michigan weather.

One of the State Theater’s recent offerings was “Latter Days.” It was not a great movie, but after seeing it, it’s difficult for me to suppress a chuckle watching those duos and trios of schlumpy, black-suited, backpacked Mormon missionaries who traipse around campus handing out their proselytizing flyers. I saw a group of them hand out their literature this morning to an amused-looking student who smelled as if he’d just smoked a couple of joints. I wonder if the Church gives them debriefings on what to say if any of their interlocutors brings up the movie. My father, who was raised a Mormon, must be spinning in his grave.

From an introduction to an otherwise typically dry BBC story tonight about an international NGO conference:

Host: Hello, Francis.

Reporter: Hello, Max, how are you?

Host: I’m well, thank you. Do carry on.

I know that they’re the coming evil mark of the beast destroyer of privacy hand in glove with the USAPATRIOT Act, but after spending the morning doing inventory for my favorite AA middle school library, I’m beginning to wonder if San Francisco’s position about the joys of RFID technology in library books isn’t so bad after all.

I’m having a great deal of problems this week with my old nemesis, tendonitis (for which I had surgery in 2001), and the repetitive motions of pulling a book out, holding the bar code scanner in my right hand (the bad arm) and pushing the scan button for all of the 800 and 900 classifications of the school’s library is playing hell with me today.

Wouldn’t it be easier to have RFID chips in the books that could be read without such physical pain? Bar codes were a wonderful invention; I can’t imagine having to do this inventory the old fashioned paper way. But I’ll be paying a painful price for this all night long.

Surely there’s a way to moderate the wonderful aspect of the RFID technology and completely protect the privacy of patrons. But we live in extremist times and I’m not holding my breath. Give Johnny Reb Asscroft another four years and the spectre of FBI agents using USAP to drive in front of your house and read the RFID chips in your library books and build a damning reading list just isn’t all that far-fetched, no matter how tinfoil-hattish it sounds.

Speaking of the 800 and 900 classifications … call me an elitist snob but I just still have problems with the biographies. Come on, professional librarians, can’t we have a ‘sports, entertainment and worthless flavor of the minute’ section in biographies? I mean, I HATE shelving that volume of Refrigerator Perry next to Admiral Perry. Dennis Rodman really shouldn’t be keeping company with Eleanor Roosevelt. And oh the indignity of forcing Thomas Jefferson to share shelf space with the likes Michael Jordan and Michael Jackson.

Okay, I’ll shut up now.

Flooding in St. Clair County ….. a tornado watch in 15 southeastern Michigan counties till 11.00 ….. over a dozen tornadoes swept through southern and southeastern Nebraska and nearly wiped out the town of Hallam overnight. So far it’s been quiet here except for a few showers and a brief rush of torrential rain earlier this afternoon.

Weather has been much calmer in the past 24 hours. There were a few scattered raindrops when I took the dog out a few minutes ago, but nothing beyond that other than the sight (which I love) of a sky full of gray rainclouds tumbling overhead in a dark night framed by the lonesome-looking telephone poles on the side streets beyond our house. A tornado devastated the small town of Bradgate in north-central Iowa Friday night, and the recent storms were blamed for three deaths in Berrien and St. Joseph Counties. Although there was very little in the way of rain here Saturday, the Free Press says that four tornadoes were reported between Flint and Saginaw. I guess we’ve been fairly lucky here.

… And then there’s a whole discussion thread (same site) about libraries in which someone says she never goes to libraries because the thought of touching books that someone else has handled freaks her out, which is about the strangest reason not to go to a library I’ve ever heard.

She writes, seeming to think she’s got it all figured out: “In the end, I buy my own books and add them to my personal library.”

What, so people don’t handle books in bookstores? Even your nicely-boxed Amazon delivery has been handled by a stock person. Guaranteed.

Someone wrote in to I Love Books asking what it was like to work in a bookstore. Here’s one answer:

You don’t sit around and read and discuss literature all the time when you work in a bookshop. You do tell customers where the latest Mitch Albom book is a million times a day. You learn to identify bestsellers by cover color. People insist they have just seen a certain book in paperback at another shop and your explanation that the book has only been out in hardcover for a month and will likely be in paper within a year is listened to with disbelief and an insulting air indicating you are a moron AND a liar. You listen to people tell you they could get every title in your shop more cheaply at Sam’s Club. You learn the inner significance of the deep philosophy in science fiction and fantasy titles. You get lectures about why a certain author is or is not fantasy or science fiction and how only feeble minded idiots would mis-shelve them as dismally as you and your colleagues have. You sometimes get to handsell a book you believe in to a person who might actually enjoy it. You watch terrific books languish on the shelves and eventually get sent back to the publisher while Nicholas Sparks titles must be reordered bimonthly. You become expert at finding the most popular TV talk and news show sites on the web instantly because customers want “this book they were talking about on the Today Show, it was written by a general? Someone in the military anyway.” You become accustomed to being called a liar when you tell someone a certain book is out of print. “It can’t be out of print, (you are informed.) It was only published 5 years ago!” You learn every single day that (1) Amazon has it cheaper and (2) Amazon doesn’t charge sales tax.

From Tuesday’s Ann Arbor News:

A 34-year-old man admitted he punched a pedestrian in the face in Liberty Plaza Park in downtown Ann Arbor Monday because he didn’t like the look on his face, city police said.

The 53-year-old victim said he was walking through the plaza at 7:40 a.m. when he was suddenly punched by a man who didn’t say a word. A passerby called police, and the victim pointed out the man who struck him, reports said.

The suspect told police that he didn’t like the look on the man’s face and he felt intimidated, so he punched him. The man was arrested on assault charges.

From yesterday’s Ann Arbor News:

A 19-year-old Ypsilanti man told several people waiting for a city bus that he planned to rob them, then ran from police when they tried to question him, Ann Arbor Police said.

The incident occurred at the Blake Transit Center in the 300 block of South Fourth Avenue at about 8:30 p.m. Thursday. An officer stationed there said he was approached by several people who pointed out the suspect and said he was telling people waiting for an AATA bus that he would rob them, reports said.

There’s an article in today’s Ann Arbor News about cafes that you may have seen. I’m happy to say Ambrosia wasn’t mentioned in it once, not because I don’t wish Ambrosia long luck and much prosperity, but because it’s nice to know there’s a cool cafe that somehow manages to slip under the radar of whatever is supposed to be cool and hip in Ann Arbor.

There’s a new Starbucks opening soon on Liberty and Main, which is kind of bewildering. There’s already a Starbucks on Liberty and State (a huge-ass one, by the way; the News informs us that this Starbucks is the sixth largest Starbucks in the country), just seven blocks away. The News says that with the addition of the new store there are five Starbucks in town, but if you count the two at Briarwood Mall and the two within the Maple and Plymouth Road Kroger, that makes eight. (That’s still nowhere near as many as San Francisco, which at last count has a whopping 68 Starbucks, with a new one opening any day now at King and Fourth in China Basin.)

Anyway, I’m all for coffee shops, and I want to try out some of the places mentioned in the News article that I’d not heard of before, but I’ll probably stick with Ambrosia (and occasional visits to Espresso Royale). If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

What gets me is that the town boosters quoted in the article seem to think that that ineffable quality of coolness that Ann Arbor is eternally chasing like the fabled holy grail is synonymous with being “rich with coffee shops,” as though that represented some sort of bragging rights over Ypsilanti or Dexter. It is to laugh.

A quote from his new book, On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) In the Future Tense (quote courtesy New York Times):

In America, it is acceptable to cut off any driver in a vehicle that costs a third more than yours. That’s called democracy.

If that’s democracy, then Michigan has democracy (or, I guess, reverse democracy, since the cutting off usually comes from the vehicles that “cost a third more than yours”) in spades.

But David Brooks never makes any sense, so never mind.

Where to begin?

• The Pixies are back together for a reunion tour, are not apparently tearing each other limb from limb, and are like a breath of fresh air.

• Morrissey has relased a new album (with a sadly ironic cover photograph of himself holding a Tommy gun), You Are the Quarry, of which the Guardian observes acidly, “And who could have guessed that Morrissey’s seventh solo album would open with a hip-hop breakbeat?”

• Prince has a new post-Jehovah’s-Witness-conversion album out called Musicology that is doing well on the charts (for Prince these days, peaking at #3 for 3 weeks is doing amazingly well) and sounds about as weak as instant coffee tastes. The lead single (and title single) is basically Prince rewriting the themes of Stevie Wonder’s 1977 hits “I Wish” and “Sir Duke” and rolling them together into one song, and not doing a very good job of it. (Nobody could touch those songs, though, so I guess you could say that Prince has cojones for trying.)

• Teena Marie has released an album (La Dona) that has debuted in the top ten. She has never had an album in the top ten. The last time she had an album anywhere near the top ten (let alone debut there) was 1984, the winter of “Lover Girl” and “Help Youngblood Get to the Freaky Party.” Unfortunately, the powers that be have decided that it would be cool to tart Teena up on the CD cover to look like Lil’ Kim. It doesn’t work.

• The Cure are touring the United States this summer for, what, the 4378th time, coinciding with the release of their 13th studio album.

Ref Grunt has closed its doors. Long live Refgrunt.com, although its posts appear to be dismayingly intermittent.

There are many cool things about Michigan weather, I’ve discovered. One is that it’s so unpredictable (within reason). Another is the months of snow, which I have to say I’ve missed. And another is that when severe weather happens, it reminds you that Mother Nature really is still in charge, not us puny humans.

That aspect is not always as evident in California, where, although weather is obviously a fact of life, in some regions it’s not as much a fact of life as a publicity brochure selling point. You don’t usually move to Los Angeles unless you have family or friends there, adore (or are obsessed with slaving for) the entertainment industry, have a well-paying job somewhere in that or another LA industry, or, a good enough reason for most people, you’re in dire need of constant great weather with no surprises.

Same goes with the Bay Area, with some slight alterations. Like: you don’t move to SF unless you know something about SF weather first. For example: Weather in SF is not like weather in LA. Not even remotely. Nor, actually, is it like weather across the bay in Marin or Alameda Counties. Not even remotely. Nor, actually, is weather on the west side of the city like weather on the east side. Not even remotely. You can be in the Sunset or the Richmond on any given day and be completely socked in with the most glorious, comforting fog (or, depending on your point of view, the most odious, hateful, depressing fog) and take a bus or drive over to the other end of the city—or even just a walk over to the Haight—and have sunlight galore. Or, you can be in one part of Nob Hill or Telegraph Hill, walk a few blocks, and have wind and chill where a few blocks back there had been warmth. That’s one of the great things about SF, but it can drive you crazy if you’re not prepared for it.

What you get in place of dramatic storms and blusters in California are earthquakes and fires. Which, in its own way, is somewhat scarier, because neither of these is subject to prediction. There are days when you live in certain parts of the state that you utter silent prayers before you get out of bed in the morning that a quake doesn’t hit or a fire doesn’t erupt.

Ambrosia, which is staffed by a bunch of avid, amiable fishing enthusiasts who would probably be much, much happier in Berkeley if it weren’t for the lack of walleye and lake trout, was all abuzz this afternoon about the near-tornado. “You could feel the hair raise on your arms and you could smell the copper in the air,” one of them marveled. The buzz was either about the tornado or the CD on the stereo, which made me feel like I was being cast back to a lazy afternoon in some hippie SF cafe (the cafe would not be in the Haight, where the Dead are now disdained as way too obvious and touristy and you’re more likely to hear Detroit techno or world music, but probably some lonely, underpopulated spot in the Outer Sunset, where the owner is struggling to keep the place open because of the high rent and there’s a bunch of anti-Bush and anti-imperialism flyers on the bulletin board and an aloof tabby cat is sunning herself on the bay window facing the sidewalk) listening to KFOG—because the CD was the Grateful Dead, of course, and, of course, one of the regulars came in and pounded on the counter and excitedly asked what the twenty-minute jam was on the CD. “That is some really long jam! Sounds like Europe ‘72, man! Is it ‘Dark Star’?” “No,” the counter guy replied. “It’s actually San Francisco ‘69, and it’s ‘Morning Dew.’” Somebody will probably write to correct me that the Dead never played “Morning Dew” in 1969.

I walked through the connector between the undergraduate and graduate libraries yesterday and today on my way to work. Late yesterday afternoon, an impressive storm was brewing that turned out to be the near-tornado of last night. This afternoon, a similar storm was brewing as I walked through. I stopped to look out the window at it, at the way it rolled and broiled across the sky, the way it made the birds scatter for cover, and got a couple of glares from passing students, as though I were somehow not supposed to stop in the middle of the connector to look out the window, but also got a little conversation out of a passing library worker, or maybe a person visiting from out of town—she was surprised when I told her about the storm last night and expressed the opinion that the one brewing right now looked pretty substantial as well. Five minutes later, I was walking with everyone else in the undergrad library to the basement after an announcement over the PA system that DPS had ordered everyone to take cover until further notice. We all herded down to the windowless basement—everyone in the building, evidently, amounting to about 55 or 60 of us—and waited out the tornado warning.

The students seemed more annoyed and inconvenienced by the enforced confinement than anyone else. The library workers and the visitors stood around and chatted. The students, many wearing shorts and flip-flops, sullenly stomped around the basement, looking aimless and unhappy, as though the weather were some sort of unfair adult imposition. Some of them eventually sat down and started reading or doing work. Others just continued wandering around the perimeter of the basement, as though it were a track.

One of my co-workers recalled a tornado that had hit Ann Arbor 15 or so years ago and downed power in parts of the city for 3 days. One of my SI cohorts came over and said hi and we had a brief and somewhat humorous conversation about the weather, during which it became clear that not only had I never had to “duck and cover” as a kid for any reason, but I still couldn’t keep straight the distinction between a tornado watch and a tornado warning even though Steve has reminded me of the distinction, oh, maybe 50 times. An undergrad wandered over and started chattering about his brother in San Diego and the hellish firestorms they had out there last October. Finally, and anticlimactically, the PA system came back on and the announcer said, with more than a note of tentativeness, “DPS has given the all-clear signal. You can now go back to ….. your various library locations.”

All in all, it was a combination of nervous energy and random conversation that would never have happened without the tornado warning and all of us being forced to spend a half hour in the basement of the library.

Acording to Atlas of Michigan (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1977), which places this paragraph above a path map of an apparently really nasty tornado that hit southeastern Michigan on 12 April 1965:

Tornadoes are usually spawned by an advance of a strong cold front into a mass of warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico, the presence of dry air over the frontal zone of middle levels of the atmosphere, and high-speed winds aloft fostered by the jet stream. Such conditions, although they combine relatively infrequently in Michigan, have resulted in some devastating tornadoes in the state.

The atlas is useful for lots of things, though it’s obviously somewhat out of date (its color photograph of a grinning and youthful-looking William Milliken being the most obvious indication). Among its interesting factoids: the Washtenaw County area usually gets its first snowfall of an inch or over between November 22-29 or shortly thereafter, which pretty much jibes with our experience this past autumn.

Before Ann Arbor became Storm Central in the past 48 hours, birds were everywhere. One reader (and someone who knows her avians), Dorothea of the fantastic Caveat Lector, wrote to tell me that the bird I was mystfied about the other day was a yellow-shafted flicker, otherwise known as a Northern flicker, or by its Linnaean designation, Colaptes auratus.

Inevitably, according to North American Bird Folknames and Names (Foster City, CA: Bottlebrush Press, 1996), the flicker has something on the order of 100 other nicknames as well. I’ll just settle on “flicker” and leave it at that.

Some other interesting factoids about the flicker: It’s the only member of the woodpecker order to regularly feed on the ground, perferring ants and beetles (the flicker’s anti-acidic saliva neutralizes the acid defense of the ant). According to Birds of Michigan Field Guide (Cambridge, MN: Adventure Publications, 1999), the flicker “undulates deeply in flight while giving a loud ‘wacka-wacka’ call.” I like that: Wacka wacka! Birds of Washtenaw County, Michigan (University of Michigan Press, 1992), says, in a triumph of understatement, “The Northern flicker is a conspicuous bird.”

The other cool-looking bird I’ve seen recently has got to be a common grackle (Quiscalus quiscula). I say this because it resembles the European starling from a distance, it has an unmistakable glow to its head and neck plumage that sets it apart. The sources differ on the exact color of this glow. The USGS site I linked to above says the plumage is of a “purple and greenish iridescence.” One book said the plumage was blue. Another said black-blue. Who knows? Whatever the color is, it’s incredibly beautiful.

Okay, Yankees, when the sky turns as dark and ugly GREEN as it did at 2:30 this afternoon, that means you’ve got yourself a tornado somewhere VERY. CLOSE. BY. This means get in the cellar, fool, ‘fore you get sucked up like Helen Hunt’s daddy in that Twister movie.

But the sirens didn’t even sound today. Meanwhile, just a block away, the mayhem you see in the pictures above happened; one of the beautiful, tall and stately pine trees toppled over during the swirling green blowby. Fortunately, somebody with sense at the UM libraries herded everybody including Frank into the basement for awhile, so he was okay.

Now, I’m sorry to be such a Nervous Nellie. But my Okie heritage … well, it’s just hardwired in my genes.

I remember the aftermath of the tornado that hit Duncan 22-Feb-75, killing a woman. Some cousins were living in a trailer house temporarily next door to my great-aunt’s house. The twister hit and they barely escaped as the trailer whirled into the air … only to be beaten to a pulp by hail as they hightailed it for my great-aunt’s cellar. We saw them the next day; they looked like they had been beaten with two-by-fours.

Still, Michigan storms seem to be pretty dang benign by Okie standards, so I’m not diving into the hole yet. I’m actually greatly enjoying the show. For the last seven years in San Francisco, the most exciting weather feature was, well, nothing really. This is more like home.

And yes, the Beagle slept through this afternoon’s storm (and the one going on right now too). With the sky so dark and green, I strongly requested that he come downstairs with me, poised to hit the basement. He woke up briefly, gave me an extremely dirty look as if to say, ‘This ain’t no storm. Why, in Texas, it’d just be a lil’ ol’ rain shower, son! Chill out …’

Good advice.

[BTW: USAToday has more on ‘Going Green’]

The title of a paper given by MIT meterology professor and chaos theorist Edward Lorenz at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Washington DC on 29 December 1979:

Predictability: Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?

From Anton Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” (1900):

The time’s come: there’s a terrific thunderstorm advancing upon us, a mighty storm is coming to freshen us up ….

And, last but certainly not least, the inimitable Dorothy Parker (from “Fair Weather” in Sunset Gun [1928]):

They sicken of the calm, who know the storm.

We had a ‘possible-tornado-producing’ storm last night with blowing sirens and one-inch hail and minor flooding in Ypsi and a house burned after a lightning strike. It was all higgledy-piggledy for awhile around midnight.

The native Californian was in denial about it all for at least a few minutes, lying in bed as the sirens blew before getting up, while the (somewhat) native Okie opened the window to get a better listen and then got into some shoes and grabbed flashlights and prepared to hit the basement.

We Okies don’t mess with tornadoes; when the sirens blow, that usually means bidness and bidness means getting into the cellar and tying the kids down with the rope so they don’t get all sucked out the door.

The frustrating thing about being up here with Yankees who don’t understand tornadoes is the absolute dearth of information. You know, call me weird, but once warning sirens blow I like to have as much information as possible … such as, what’s about to descend from on high, where’s it coming from and when, things like that. There’s a write-up in today’s AA News (Motto: ‘Absolutely Still the World’s Worst Website’), but, ya know, I kinda like to know where the tornado is BEFORE it blows me away, not reading about it 12 hours later.

I slam my ancestral state where I lived for 20 years often about its politics and general cluelessness, but on weather forecasting and information, it has no peer anywhere in the world. Even in that god-awful movie Twister, starring that actress that Frank likens to broken glass being scraped across a chalkboard, the only realistic parts were those starring Oklahoma’s TV weathermen, such as the legendary Gary England of KWTV 9, Oklahoma City.

Gary has been the Storm King of Oklahoma since God was a boy; he’s chased tornadoes and been the target of a few as well, including the May 1999 F-5 monster that ripped up the city. Now THERE’S weather information; channel 9 (and others) have equipment so sophisticated that it can tell you what city block the tornado will be at at what time. Heck, not even United Airlines can tell you when their planes will arrive with as much accuracy.

And so, last night with the sirens blowing and local radio playing the BBC and Dr. Laura as if cricket match scores in Pakistan and Fascist FunDumbMentalist ranting were more important than the wall cloud bearing down on a city of 110,000, I missed, for awhile, Oklahoma, I must admit.

As for the beagle, well, he’s a Texas beagle (loathe I am to admit it); he was born in a double-wide trailer house in Kemp, TX, and thunderstorms make him yawn. During the storm, I had to entice him with treats to get him to come downstairs in reasonable proximity to the basement in case things began to look dicey. Thunder, lightning, wind, hail, floods … these things don’t phase Bayley. But try to clip his nails … now, THAT’S scary.

How fun to get something like this in your e-mail box at midnight:

‘On Monday, May 17, the University of Michigan Administrative Information Services determined that a small selection of personal student data elements may have been exposed to some individuals within the University community through the Wolverine Access Web site. The data elements that may have been viewed include UMID, Social Security number or National ID, and home address information. It has been determined that this situation may have existed between February 9 and May 17, 2004.

‘We are notifying you as a precaution because there is a slight possibility that your personal data may have been accessible to someone within the University community who was not authorized to see this information. Because of the obscure nature of the vulnerability, we believe it is highly unlikely there was unauthorized access of student information during this time. However, as a precaution, we encourage you to observe practices like monitoring billing statements for accuracy, checking credit reports, etc. Identity theft has become a growing concern in our country and these are good practices to follow as a matter of course.

‘If you believe your Social Security number has been used fraudulently, file a police report …’

That’s a laugh. Been there, done that; a friend had his i.d. compromised 10 years ago this month. The official police line: ‘It ain’t defrauding you if someone gets your SS# and gets credit cards and runs up debt; they’ve defrauded the companies involved not you, so dry up and blow away.’ So, he was forced to declare bankruptcy. He’ll finally be free of said 10-year bankruptcy next Dec. 24.

And people wonder why I have a cow when some outsourced, offshored corporate lackey in the Philippines or India asks me for my date of birth or ID when I call MCI to correct this month’s phone bill screwup.

Thanks, UM! (Ain’t computers and technology and the internet grand sometimes?)

More stuff on the Seattle Public Library from LISNews:

The New Yorker calls the new central library “the most important new library to be built in a generation, and the most exhilarating.” The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has been trumpeting the new library, with an overview and groovy QuickTime panoramas of various of the library’s floors. The new library will have 65% of its material available in open stacks (the old library had 35%). City Librarian Deborah Jacobs has been working it, clearly; the publicity is unlike anything I’ve ever seen for any library, public or otherwise.

I know that the Internet was not such a huge part of our lives back then, but this makes the “publicity” attending the opening of the San Francisco Public Library’s new main building in 1996 look like the opening of a chicken coop. (The SF could have taken lessons from Jacobs’ leading high school journalists on a tour of the library and joking with them that you could use the fifth floor to look down four floors below to see if your blind date was worth pursuing. The SF has a similar birds’-eye view, but nobody seems much interested in it, or if they are, they immediately draw suspicion fromn security guards afraid that there’s going to be a jumper.)

The best part, for me, though, was this:

And don’t ever expect to hear this new building called the Starbucks Library or Microsoft Library. Unlike other Seattle buildings that bear the name of big donors, this will be the Seattle Public Library.

“We’d never allow the building to be named,” said Jacobs. “This is the people’s library.”

There’s also another appearance by Nancy Pearl, in another Post-Intelligencer article. She teels the story of how she once was accosted by a homeless man holding an iron (he was trying to find an outlet to plug in his iron so he could prepare for a job interview, he said). Not a few people would have flinched or called the cops. Nancy Pearl led the man to her office so he could iron his shirt.

Her point was that the public library should not be a substitute for shelter, or even for a hygiene station where the homeless could spruce themselves up. But she didn’t waggle her finger at the man and say “Tsk tsk.”

Great story.

Today’s LISNews links to a New York Times article about Fundrace.org, an intriguing site that allows you to track campaign contributions by neighborhood. This is information you can go down to any registrar’s office and legally view; nothing unusual except in the presentation and the speed of access to the information. One Ohio woman was interviewed who objected to her privacy being violated in this way, because she’s a Democrat and lives in a predominantly Republican town, yet not only did she allow her name to be used in the article, she posed for a photograph in the middle of what was presumably her street (with a row of houses identifiable behind her) and a big Kerry for President button on her lapel. I’m scratching my head here. If you think the site is an invasion of privacy, you go and perform perhaps the most publicity-seeking display imaginable (short of jumping up and down and screaming “Kerry for President!” in front of a Fox News crew)? In any event, the story’s made Fundrace.org quite popular. I tried to do a search on some San Francisco data just now and the site is overwhelmed.

According to the radio, not only are cicadas on the way (though so far the hype has exceeded the reality), but gypsy moths, European chafers, Asian longhorn beetles, Japanese beetles, mosquitoes, and of course the pervasive emerald ash bore are also about to make their presence known. (According to the Michigan State University Extension entomologist they interviewed, the gypsy moth caterpillar is something that “most people are allergic to.” Great.)

I’ve seen wasps, bumblebees, carpenter ants, and a lot of oddly-shaped beetles crawling and/or flying around the house. (Forget about the spiders; they’re around all the time.) The massive infestation of Harmonia axyridis that happened when the temps first started warming up a couple of months ago appears to have largely dissipated, though.

Still no cicadas to speak of. Steve says it’s not been consistently warm enough for them to want to come out.

I have, however, seen lots of birds, including a number I can’t identify (I’m waiting for a field guide on hold at the University library to help with that). One of them I’ve seen twice in the yard this week, pecking at the ground looking for food. It’s a large-ish bird for the type of bird it is—about 7 or 8 inches long, with a long black beak. It’s mainly brown in color, with spots on the tail feathers, but it has a striking black band across its chest and an even more striking stripe of bright red across its nape. I’m really curious to find out what this bird is.

Tony Randall passed on Monday, followed yesterday by Elvin Jones, probably the greatest drummer (never mind greatest “jazz drummer”) who ever lived.

Jones was born in Pontiac and got his start in the Detroit jazz scene in 1949. He played on some of the greatest jazz albums ever recorded, including Charles Mingus’s Pithecanthropus Erectus, Sonny Rollins’s A Night at the Village Vanguard, Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain, and Wayne Shorter’s Speak No Evil. He also played on what some consider the greatest jazz album bar none, John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme (he appeared on most of Coltrane’s recordings from 1960-1966). Jones also recorded many classic albums as leader of his own combos.

But no mention of Jones in the local papers. Go figure.

No titillating “overheards” from Ambrosia today; just a bunch of employees meeting over cheesecake and listening to their benefits person yack about how awesome Blue Shield of Michigan’s health coverage is.

Why this company’s HR meeting was being held in a sidewalk cafe I don’t think I want to know.

In a mere 25 minutes or so, the first homo marriages in the United By-God States of Amurrica will take place in Massachusetts.

[sarcasm] We’ll be hiding in the basement so that the Angel of Death and Divine Retribution ‘Gainst the Homos and Homo-Loving will pass us by as this cataclysmic event foisted upon us by Activist Judges occurs and God gets really, really angry. [/sarcasm]

Actually, the ADDRGHHL will probably concentrate his efforts just on Masschusetts tonight, so we’ll be quite safe right here in God-Fearing-and-Respecting Michigan, where they treat us homos like we’re supposed to be treated: Denied medical care if a ‘christian’ doesn’t want to treat us.

‘Si Quaeris Peninsulam Amoenam Circumspice‘ indeed. (And yes, I’m a bit jealous of Massachusetts gay and lesbian couples tonight. Oh well, it could be worse … we could be in [shudder] Oklahoma.)

Before the dandelion adventure, we paid a brief visit to the University of Michigan Museum of Art. (We were thinking of doing part of the 16-site Wander Washtenaw event sponsored by the Washtenaw County Historical Consortium this weekend, but I didn’t get my act together enough to realize that it went on all day yesterday but only three hours today, which wouldn’t have been enough time to do much.) I have passed by the museum almost every day on my way to class or work for the past nine months and today was the first time I’d been inside (pretty pathetic, I know).

They had a fantastic exhibition called “The Changing Garden: Four Centuries of European and American Art” (it goes on through next Sunday), with fantastic engravings, paintings, lithographs, and photos of places like Vauxhall and Versailles, including a fantastic seventeenth-century allegorical drawing depicting the sense of smell, with a couple of French nobles descending an estate staircase with flowers held up to their nostrils and their hounds beating a path in front of them, plus some unexpected stuff: a photograph of the San Gabriel Sanatorium, a place I hadn’t known existed; a photograph of San Francisco’s own Crissy Field; and a photograph of the gardens at the Huntington Library, a treasure in the backyard of my hometown which I’m ashamed to say I’ve never been to.

Apart from the exhibition, there were some astoundingly beautiful pieces of art, including Dirck Baburen’s “Christ on the Mount of Olives” (1620), Bertholet Flémalle’s “The Illness and Cure of Hezekiah” (1614-1675), Daniel Huntington’s “In the Mountain Fastness” (1850), Charles Wimar’s “The Attack on an Emigrant Train” (1856), Eastman Johnson’s “Boyhood of Lincoln” (1868), Christian Adolf Schreyer’s “The Retreat” (1860-1899), and John Stanley’s “Mount Hood from the Dalles” (1871). The only slightly annoying aspect of the collection are the patronizing curatorial descriptions affixed near some of the paintings to alert you to their horrifying political incorrectness.

Haven’t seen this many dandelions in a town ever. Like with the squirrels, AA believes in plenty of something.

Opus Bayley took a much-needed dandelion break in the park next to the Jewish Community Center. It’s been a fabulous day …

Looks like « someone wrote a really good letter to the editor of the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal », right there in full red-meated Dubya country. Congratulations and keep your head down; those Texas fascists will be gunning for ya now:

‘Bush Priorities Questioned
‘Where did I go wrong? I’m a registered Republican because I believe in fiscal integrity, fiscal responsibility. Well, we all know what happened to that.
‘So, we wound up with a president who is in office by virtue of one vote in the Supreme Court—and thinks he has a mandate.
‘As governor of Texas, he blew the $2 billion surplus Ann Richards left him, and we’ve had a deficit ever since. As president, he took a $2 trillion surplus and, in two years, turned it into a several trillion dollar deficit. And this “borrow and spend” administration is spending at a record clip. And that’s fiscal integrity.
‘And about the war. Retired Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf recently made a remark with which I heartily agree. “Stormin’ Norman” said he’d noticed that the only people anxious to go to war are, for the most part, those who have never been shot at—like the four musketeers Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove and Bush.
‘Ross Perot said there are three reasons for the first Gulf War: oil, oil and oil. The same reasoning, it seems to me, applies to the current war.
‘I think Mr. Cheney knows where they’re hiding the weapons of mass destruction; he just won’t tell anybody. Hans Blix and David Kay couldn’t find them. So our military is protecting us from what?
‘Dubya has two priorities—pay back the people who financed his “landslide” election and get re-elected. We may survive such short-term thinking, but it’ll take awhile.’
‘RONALD PRESTON/Lubbock’

Now THAT’s guts, folks. Telling the truth in Texas always takes mucho bravery. Thank you, Ronald Preston.

I had this conversation with a friend not too long ago: If you have a ton of books to choose from to read, what’s your strategy? I am myself addicted to having way more books around than I’ll possibly have time to read. This entails choices. Some books you’ll never get to. Some you can weed out by reading reviews, flipping through and gauging whether you really think you’re going to read the book cover to cover, or starting and seeing how you feel once you’ve gotten through a chapter or two.

But what if the book is okay, but not great? Something you feel as though you should finish because you’ve already committed time to it, but are not feeling compelled enough to complete? I used to be of the mind that I had to finish everything I started, but no more.

Elizabeth George, author of the recent Write Away: One Novelist’s Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life [HarperCollins 2004], had a great way of putting it on BBC Radio:

I always tell my students to read up. Always read people whose work you admire. And if you start reading a book and you realize that it’s not good enough and not something that you would aspire to, then just don’t finish the book.

We went to the downtown area today and did some window shopping. West Side Book Shop was one of our stops. I’d never been there, and it’s a cozy, well-stocked store, if a little crowded and tilted more to the antique side than to the standard used-book trade. (There were some fantastic rare books on hand.) We also dropped in at Books in General, which I could spend hours browsing at. There are all kinds of finds there, including a wide selection of rare books that I think might be better than the selection at West Side. This store has a small but thoughtfully gathered British history section, including an amazingly exhaustive (and very Anglo-typical in its compulsiveness) chronology of British historical figures that was unfortunately priced beyond my reach, along with two copies (?) of The Oxford Book of Royal Anecdotes. I also saw a reproduction of the original 1726 edition of Gulliver’s Travels (which I am currently obsessed with; Jonathan Swift is working some sort of spell on me). We played a while with the owner’s dog, a rambunctious and friendly 3-year-old Lab/Chesapeake mix named Lucas who seemed absolutely convinced that my arm was a chew toy (I haven’t been gnawed on like that since I lived with another Lab named Rudy Doogle), and the owner convinced me to buy a used (2004, but not “new”) copy of The Almanac of American Politics [National Journal Group, annually], which no political junkie can (or should) be without.

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?