Treason doth not prosper

So my (vaxxed, boosted, very-careful-about-masking-in-crowds) friend has the 'rona.

Most likely because someone in the group they met with last weekend had "just a sniffle", didn't mask, didn't stay home, and now has succeeded in dosing them and two others in the group (and probably more who will come back hot in the next couple of days).

Which is a reminder, in case the current U.S. House majority, and the previous Administration, aren't vivid enough warnings, of what my old drill sergeant used to tell us; that the success of our mission depended on the competence of the stupidest person in our unit.

In any group, or any nation, success depends on either those people being 1) willing to learn how to be minimally functional, or 2) being safely sidelined so their incompetence is immaterial to the mission, or 3) being shitcanned entirely. 

The sort of people who infected my friend are and are not likely to be either 1 or 2, and we've given up on number 3.

And I have no idea how we can change that short of an extinction-level crisis like the Great Depression, or a global war that either 1) pulls the general public's collective head out of it's collective ass, or 2) makes the douchenozzles like Republicans (in the Thirties) or fascists (in the Forties) so loathsome that even the morons refuse to touch them and confine their moronity to stuff like pro wrestling.

Especially now, now that Republicans ARE fascists and antivaxxers and QANuts, too?

And some forty percent of the public and the mass media refuses to be honest about that or call them what they are, or despise and shun them for it?

I'm kind of worried about how we move on from there.

And speaking of people doing fucked up things...

I didn't write anything on the second anniversary of January Treason

Mostly because that fucking ship has sailed, hit a sunken rock, capsized, caught fire, exploded, and sank.

The traitors are now a majority in one house of Congress. They - the leaders of the betrayal - paid no price for their treason. 

The goon squads that actually did their dirty work ran off afterwards and had to be slowly, imperfectly tracked down (and largely - to the extent they were - only because some of them took videos and posted to Twitter of them doing a criminal fuckin' conspiracy. Stupid people, right..?)

While in Brazil...

...their own home-grown traitors tried the same shit just now.

It's worth noting that in Brasilia hundreds of these gomers left, not rolling their coal or waving their treason flags but in zip-ties and police vans. The Brazilian Supreme Court has issued warrants for several higher-ups, including a police colonel, who were part of the inside job.

This is Brazil, a barely-Second-World nation without the sort of massive police organization that exists here in the U.S., that managed to put the collar on these dirtbags. 

We'll see if they follow through with crushing the head of the Bolsonario snake, as we should have done with the MAGAts on January 7, 2021.

But We the People already look pathetic in that Brazil, with its long and woeful history of dictatorships and coups, has been harder on their present traitors that we have been on ours, on every level from vaccination to drag queens to actual rebellion.

Whether it's as big as treason against the nation or as small as giving other people your fucking disease, I can only say this again:

"If this is not crushed with brutal force we will rue this as the day we made these traitors our masters."

Toes, again

I have this friend. She's a sort of epistolary friend, seeing that she lives in Colorado, so I've never actually met her. But she and I correspond through our Facebooks, and share the commonality of having a daughter who was born of another mother.

But here's something my friend does that's kind of a chuckle. She posts pictures of her toes.

Seriously.

Wherever she goes, or sometimes just for her own amusement, she posts a shot of her feet standing on, or in, whatever or whereever she's going. I call these things "Where In The World Are Maia's Toes?" pictures.

Well, at the moment Maia's toes, the rest of Maia, her loving inamorato, and her adorable little girl, are in sunny Nayarit, Mexico.

And whenever she posts her "Where Are Maia's Toes" photo it will undoubtedly be delightfully warm and sunny.

Now. Here's where MY toes were this morning:

My in-laws have this game they play. Well, it's not an actual "game", it's more of a sort of contest they enter into whenever they get together. It's called "My Life SUCKS!" and the object is to lay down such an irrefutably wretched whine that nobody else in the family group can top it. Ideally your story is so jaw-droppingly awful that it's like a mike drop and you win walking away. You got cancer? Well, my cancer had a tumor. You got laid off work? Well I got laid off, then my unemployment got denied.

Then I got cancer.

You see how this works. And you can't win by coming directly out and saying "My life sucks." You have to present your little tale of woe so artfully, so passively, as to seem to be simply telling the story of your past week, or month, or your prospects or lack of same. You can't be seen as actively thumping the tub for your life-suckage. You just have to lay some tracks down and hope that your sucky life is more sucky than anyone elses. Then you win.

I ask my Bride, so, what do you win? and she looks at me like I just coughed up a hairball. You win because your life sucks the most, duh! Nobody else can top you, you are the King (or Queen) of Suckulation and everyone else has to pity you and feel for you because of the massive suck your life is.

Anyway, the point is that, based on the whole toes thing; neener, neener, Maia. MY life sucks worse than yours at the moment.

Gee. That didn't feel nearly as good at it's supposed to.

Maybe I need to talk to my Bride. There must be some sort of in-law thing here that I'm just not getting.

Radio Check

Still here, though still without much to say. Same issues; the things that matter to me just aren't that interesting to anyone else; home, work, family, and as for the soccer I work out over at my daytime gig at Slide Rule Pass. I did enjoy the hell out of the Women's World Cup, but I know better than to try and write that one up; a lot of work and you'd get better value for your money over at The Equalizer or All White Kit...

As far as blogging goes, I'm farkling about gearing up to writing up the Battle of the Philippine Sea as a sort of send-off to my "Imperial Japan, WTF?" series. Yeah, Leyte gets all the press, but it was the Turkey Shoot that was the USN at the top of its game, that meant Game Over for the Kito Budai. I'll try and get that in later this month.

Part of the blogging roadblock is just Real Life; I've found that I don't have the burning desire to write so badly as to put off everything else I've got going on. Tonight the kiddos are upstairs playing Goat Simulator (don't ask. Seriously, there are some things that, once seen, can never be unseen...) and The Bride is reading the new Shadow Campaigns novel I bagged for her at the county library so I found some time to come downstairs - my computer is back in its old place at the basement worktable - and write.

But the other big part is just the notion of trying to talk about politics or military affairs has just really lost its grip on me. I don't know enough about the politics of places beyond the strandlines to speak sensibly and the politics of my country are, at the moment, loathsome. To me the perfect poster child for American politics is The Donald.

And even here I can't really better the Rude One in his summation of the shitshow that is Trump:

"He's like most of the other candidates rolled into one: a blithering, idiotic, climate change-denying loudmouth xenophobe who wants endless war, Christian "values" (whatever the fuck those are anymore), an economic and health care system that benefits the rich, and a big fuckin' fence with alligators or some such shit to keep out the Mexican rapists. He doesn't need to pander to the baser instincts of the primary voters. He is the living embodiment of the baser instincts of GOP primary voters. That's why he's wiping the floor with virtually every other candidate."

But I can't even find any entertainment in the idiocracy that has become the Republican Party.

Because the way our political system works we get two parties. You can try and come up with another system that produces another outcome, but the bottom line is that the U.S. first-past-the-post election setup produces two big parties instead of the lots of little ones you get in a parliamentary system.

So, given two parties it'd be nice to think that we'd have two, you know, actual parties. Organizations with smart people and thought-out policies that wanted to run a sane and healthy country.

Instead we have a bunch of fairly conservative corporatists who prefer a sort of elite, oligarchic control over the dusky masses...and a Monster Fucking Raving Loony Party of which Trump is not the ravingest fucking looney by a looooong chalk.

It's a fucking fuckstory, and what more can I say other than that..?

I've included a whole bunch of family pictures to give you an idea of what we've been doing that has kept me away from the keyboard; you get the whole spectacle of work and play, house, and kids, and pets. I've also been volunteering to help sell merch for our women's soccer team supporters group the Rose City Riveters, and help out with our friends' project to clean and paint and sell their house; here we are after a long, hot day of exterior painting:

Or pitching in at the local watering hole for soccer, Bazi Bierbrasserie. With my temporary Oregon Liquor Control Commission volunteer server credentials in hand here I am, ready to start pouring for the Women's National Team supporters...

Busy, busy, busy, that's me.

Just not here. I'm sorry.

But if you stick around I can promise you Marianas and Turkeys. This is no shit.

I will tell you one more story before I have to go.

So I go to the Thorns match on the Friday before the Fourth of July. Good match, Portland win, if you give a shit you can read all about it here. Anyway, I get in late as in late-late, nearly midnight. It's hot, damn hot as it was for nearly the entire month of June. But not hot enough to explain the expended kitchen fire extinquisher sitting on the dark front steps. Interesting, I think, and go inside.

Everyone is sleeping in the Little House. The only creatures stirring are the two expended Roman candle launchers sitting silently in the kitchen trash. Interesting, I think, before heading into the shower and the bed.

So it's not until the next morning that I find this:

My Bride explains that my son and his pal were playing in the street with the pair of fireworks they were allowed the night before the tradition of Expending All Rounds (of illegal fireworks smuggled in from Vancouver) in the paved "playground" of Astor School at the east end of Amherst Street. She wasn't sure how the fireball landed in the city strip, but she thought that one of the boys might have aimed it down and it skipped off the pavement into the grass.

Which, explosive as flash-paper after weeks of drought and days in the nineties, ignited.

This little inferno took a shovel and the extinguisher and the neighbor's hose - the lighted section was in front of the house two doors down from ours - to kill. I think my Inamorata realized that the fault was not so much in her stars or in her son but in herself for not insisting that the boyish pranks be shifted to the inflammable asphalt of the elementary school.

Missy was properly disgusted.

"I had nothing to do with this." she sniffed. "It was those boys!"

I smiled and agreed and felt thankful that all that had burned was some dead grass. And climbed into the Honda and drove away.

Liebster Award - Graphic Firing Table Edition

So those winsome fashionistas (and connoisseurs of fine food, travel, and Korean culture, pop and otherwise) at The Hidden Thimble have tagged me for something called a "Liebster" Award. This thing is (as Talyssa and Siree describe it) an "...award is given to bloggers by bloggers like a chain to encourage and support the discovery of other upcoming blogs out there."

Anyway, there are some rules for this. According to the Thimblers, I need to; 1) thank the person who nominated me, 2) answer the questions from my nominator, 3) nominate bloggers who have less than 500 followers. (Basing this on Bloglovin, if not then Instagram “microblog”) 4) Create 11 new questions, 5) notify my nominees through social media.

So, okay - first, thanks, Siree and Talyssa!

Then...questions? Sure. I can do questions.

1. What’s the story behind your blog name?

well...the slogan up at the header of the blog reads "...firing unobserved rounds at anything moving." I was an artillery fire direction chief when I was in the Army, and I still write a lot about military issues. A "graphic firing table" is a sort of slide rule the gunners use to adjust fire. In one of my first posts I described it as: "...a simple but useful tool that helps you to commit broadcast mayhem. Kinda like a blog." So, there.

2. What does a normal day in your life look like?

Wake up before daybreak. Make coffee, feed cats. Drive to work. Drive to job site. Explain to contractor the this isn't fucking Burger King and he doesn't get to do it his way, he has to do it the way he's supposed to (which is my job - I'm the dirt nanny). Drive back to shop, write up field report. Do lab test, set up drilling exploration for tomorrow. Drive home. Cook dinner. Read to kid(s). Cuddle with wife. Blog. Sleep. Repeat.

3. Tea or coffee?

Coffee, cream. Something dark and earthy; Sumatran is good.

4. Why did you start your blog?

I love the sound of my own voice and I'm an opinionated sonofabitch. It was that or stand on a box in the park ranting at strangers. This way is less degrading.

5. What’s the best advice you have ever gotten?

In blogging, or in life? In life, probably "You're not nearly as important as you think you are." and "Why are you afraid of doing/saying/trying that? What's the worst that could happen?" In blogging, probably "If you write what interests you you will interest others."

6. What is your favorite post that you’ve written? (Please provide link!)

I think maybe the one about the great Ice Age floods in the Pacific Northwest called "When Da Levee Bruk".

"...dissolve into hopeless panic before the wall of water sweeps you all away into chaos and the darkness of the vanished years. Or perhaps you can only stand there, transfixed, staring at the long white line across the black horizon, as the first cold puff of wind racing out before the waters shivers your cheek like a lover’s last caress."

Sometime I can flat-ass write.

7. What is the most exciting thing about blogging for you?

The nature of it as epistolary friendship; meeting and talking to people - like the Thimblers, and you readers - from very different places and with very different mindsets. That's why I like comments; it takes this whole thing a step further, from me talking to us having a conversation. Letting my inner curmudgeon out for a walk.

8. What’s your favourite social media platform?

The only SMing I do is Facebook, and that only because I have a number of geographically distant friends that migrated over from blogging.

9. Do you think of yourself as an introvert or an extrovert?

Very much an extrovert.

10. What or who is your current obsession?

For some reason I've been fascinated with religion, at least, the variety on display in these various "Religious Freedom" laws being passed in the redder parts of the United States.

Soccer, of course.

So. Blogs...who else should you go read?

Well...Goblinbooks, of course.

An old and peculiar favorite of mine: D.D. Tinzeroes

The Snarky Penguin; Badtux

Labrys, The Experiential Pagan

And Lisa Jakub's blog...tho I have no idea whether it's a "micro" blog or not, she's a fine writer and she swears like a trooper.

Now I need to go put ice on my rotator cuff - I think I sprained something patting myself on the back.

Ruby the Church Lady

Sometimes I can't resist the urge. It isn't nice, it isn't pretty, and it usually strikes me at the worst of wrong moments.

But I'm like Pavlov's dog whenever I run across someone using religion as a blanket excuse for Being an Asshole Whilst Assuming the Mantle of Righteousness.

I'm not big on religion in general, as you know. But when I run across someone using it to justify assholery, whether it's being mean to a gay couple or engineering a sectarian massacre, it makes me all kinds of stabby.

Yesterday it was that idiotic Indiana "Jesus Sez It's Okay to be Hatin' on Homos" law, and a friend's Facebook feed.

Another FB pal posted this link to some sort of anti-anti-gay-law protest and it drew the ire of someone I'll call Ruby the Church Lady.

This is a summary of what Ruby the Church Lady had to say:

"This is not an anti- gay law but a freedom of religion law. Why do people insist others go against their religious beliefs just because they don't agree? What about the rights of the ones on the religious side. I suppose they don't count, they're not important, because there are those who think they're wrong. They are protected by the Bill of Rights. This law is redundant. Are they suppose to go against their beliefs because someone doesn't like what they are doing?...I'm not saying they are right or wrong. However, what good is freedom of religion if the gov't makes you go against your beliefs? You can't have it both ways. You are either free to follow your convictions or you're not. I doubt very seriously that these people, (bakers, photogs, florists) ever refused an African American. Because of all the uproar about this these people are losing their businesses. Is that right? It's not as tho they are the only ones in town who do these services. Instead of raising a stink about it, go to a different business. That's what I would do... If I had to choose who I would answer to it would be God, hands down...I am NOT openly against the rights of the LGBT community. I have a gay granddaughter and I support her completely and love her partner."

Of course you do, Ruby! Of course you do!

Anyway, let's see what else you have to say on the subject...

"...This is not a matter of discrimination against them. It is a matter of the free exercise of religious beliefs. Either you have that freedom or you don''t. If you are made to go against your beliefs you do not have free exercise of that belief. You and the Supreme Court can spin it anyway you want but that is a fact. Like I said., it is not as tho they have no where else to go, they do. The only reason you or anyone else would insist that they do not have the right to refuse service is because you want everyone to think as you do. and will cause trouble for anyone who doesn't. They do NOT have to do that. That is what FREEDOM is. They have as much right to their beliefs as you do and the free exercise thereof..."

Of course you see the problem here.

Ruby is, not to mince words, being a pig-ignorant, hypocritical, theocratic Bible-banger on this issue.

She completely misses the point where her Crusade - or jihad - stops at the end of my nose. And, of course, part of that is the part where if she opens a shoe shop and sells shoes to the public then she's gotta sell shoes to, you know, the Public. Every spotty ill-washed rube, every drooling gomer with money in his, her, or its wallet.

Every homo.

Doesn't mean she can't enforce some rules. No shirt, no service (can't really go with the "no shoes" in this case since, gudDAMN, she's sellin' shoes and if they had shoes they wouldn't be coming to ol' Honest Ruby's Shoe Emporium, right?).

No profanity. No show tunes.

But she can't hang up a sign that says "no blacks" or "no queers". Why not? Because let's say she's the ONLY shoe store in town. And she doesn't want to serve me because I'm black. Or queer. Or, hell, a left-handed atheist pan-flute-playing goatherd. So no Ruby shoes for me and how the hell do I get anything on my damn feet, then?

So. Bottom line - in this country, anyway, where Equal Justice Under Law is written on the fucking front door of the Supreme Court - is that I'm the Public, and you're serving the Public, you gotta serve me the same as anyone else providing I'm within the law.

Then you can then go pester Jesus, or Allah, or Buddha, on your own dime and on your own time...AND you don't get to be the "good guy" here. You may claim dot you vere chust vollowing Gott's orders but someone, either you or your God, is being an asshole. The hypocrisy of pretending to be the Noble and Upright Christian pisses me off far beyond the mere assholery of being cruel and unreasonable to other people for who they are and not for what they're doing.

In other words, Ruby the Church Lady pushed nearly every one of my buttons and I drooled on cue. To wit:

"Actually, no, it's not that simple.

I may worship Moloch, but the damn state law prevents me from sacrificing babies. I may worship Tir, but intrusive and unreasonable state law prevents me from strangling my king and throwing his body in a peat bog (actually, I suspect that state law has something to say about the whole "king" thing, but, whatev...). I may follow Jainism but the rigid and oppressive state law forbids me from walking into my kids' daycare sky-clad.

Sucks to be me, but, there it is. There's all kinds of things that your religion says you have to do - or can't do - that the law forces you to refrain from, or to perform. So this isn't a "controversy, got it? The people who want to run a public business have to leave their racial, sexual, religious, etc. exclusionary beliefs at home and serve the public. If you insist that your religion should let you discriminate based on things that people are and not things that people do then either you or your religion are effed up and wrong."

Now Ruby didn't like this at all. She replied:

"You are really comparing not wanting to provide your services on religious grounds to sacrificing babies or strangling a king etc? That doesn't even deserve a response!"

Yep, I said, and is the comparison so inapt?

Tir, Moloch, Satan, Ayn Rand, Communism...all have their "religions". Human and animal sacrifice were a respected part of most religions for millenia. The reasons for sacrificing kings, babies, and goats seemed perfectly good at the time. So did the reasons for stoning adulterers. So, frankly, do these contemporary "reasons" refusing to admit homosexuals to the common lot of humanity.

It's just a whole lot of lovin' or hatin' on things for no real "reasons" at all; just what your or their or his or her invisible sky-wizard or Earth spirit or inner voice tells you is good or bad. Or that YOU tink is bad and icky and wriggle around trying to find something in your religion to justify, so you won't feel like a self-righteous asshole.

And in a nation like ours, where citizenship is a matter of believing not in a God, or a flag, or a race, or a language, but in a couple of pieces of paper that boil down to "Equal Justice Under Law" that law must, must, require you to park your prejudice at the door of your public accommodation.

You don't have to love me.

You just have to work for me if I hire you, same as you do for Pastor Jenkins.

It seems to me - and pisses me off no end - that instead of admitting that they're being assholes, that they're indulging themselves and cherry-picking their beliefs that people like Ruby the Church Lady and her pals just want to have it all. They want to be "cafeteria Christian" - pick the parts of their religion they want - like not baking a cake for a couple of gay guys - but still want to wear mixed fabrics, eat shellfish, and go golfing on Sunday...and be considered sweet, wholesome, corn-fed, upstanding pillars of the community and all around Good People of the Earth.

Instead of a mob of selfish, hypocritical, bilious old bitches and bastards with a hate-on for stuff they find icky.

I'd respect them more if they just came out and said honestly that they hate what they hate and stood up honestly as the hate-filled skinsacks they are instead of hiding behind "God".

It's not the hate.

It's the hypocrisy that really gets my goat.

Acta est fabula

I was saddened to read not long ago that a blogging sister has decided to hang 'em up.

"I really feel I’ve lost heart for it." she concluded.

I know how she feels.

I've tried to interest myself in posting about the rampant idiocy of the Paleolithic Right, of the profound indifference of my "fellow Americans" as the blunt reality of torture and secret policemen and oligarchs make the fine words on the 18th Century parchments more and more ridiculous and even louche. Of the seemingly endless concatenation of ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision that constitutes the public "news" (the World's Worst Newspaper just downshifted itself yet again, going to a tabloid format that contains less than a page or two of actual local "news" with the remainder the usual wire stories and sports or "entertainment" filler) sources.

I've tried to work up the ire I felt when the idiot Bushies were sending my Army brothers to fight, die, and return in bags or forever marked from a pointless land war in Asia about the idiot farkling about in the lesser-paved parts of the world by the Obamites.

I've tried to regain my antipathy towards the elites whose rapacity and blind greed have helped put us in this handbasket, at the Cliven Bundy sorts of greedy, grifting morons whose blind hatred of the Commons has blinded them to the fact that they themselves are the cows, culled, outsourced, downsized, laid off, crammed down, and eventually ground down by their masters, the very "job creators" they idolize.

I've tried to work myself into a spitting fury over what may well be the single biggest disaster of the Human Era, our own unwillingness to accept that we are changing our very climate. As Chesterton said about Christianity; it is not that trying to restrain climate change has been tried and found difficult, it has been found difficult and never tried.

And after all that trying I keep coming back to the realization...what's the point?

If you're here reading about that you know about it; I can't tell you anything about it you can't find better expressed over at Charlie Pierce's place. I can match Driftglass' incisive spleen, or Krugman's clinical exactitude.

If not politics, then what?

I can turn this into some sort of Daddy-blog, writing about home and family. And don't get me wrong; those things are important. Vastly important. Top-gallant delights and keelson depths, but both utterly central to my life.

But yours? Why should you care whether the Boy is being happy and cooperative or (as is the case at the moment) a sulky young mandrill in desperate need of some corrective action. If he was eight years older I'd be on the verge of wall-to-wall counseling, myself, but you can't do that with ten and expect good results. Or not going to jail.

I could write about what I love. Soccer? You guys hate that and, besides, I already have a place where I can write about soccer amid the applause of dozens.

Well, a couple of people, anyway, then.

Military history. Poetry. Some of the more topical, funny, or curious family stuff. Random musings about men and women, people in general, places.

In short, I haven't come to where my friend Labrys is.

I still like the sound of my own voice enough to continue writing and posting here. But I suspect that I, too, will spend less time on the rostrum shouting at the crowd that passes by deaf to the sound of my most impassioned oratory.

Father-Daughter Bonding: How Not To Do It

I have NO idea why the hell this popped into my mind, but it did, and now I can't get it out of my head until I tell you the story. Feel free to blame me afterwards, then.

Ok - first - let's get this out of the way.

There's some pictures of naked people in this one. If you don't like naked people, don't read it.

Are we good?

Okay, then.

So. When I lived in southeastern Pennsylvania right after I got off active service my then-girlfriend-soon-to-be-bride-quondam-wife-now-ex had a very sweet friend let's call Gina. Gina was a nice Italian-American girl with a nice Italian-American family that lived in a nice little Italian-American community in someplace like Coatesville, I think.

She was a terrific gal; hell of a hard worker, friendly, smart, loved her friends and family, had just about everything going for her in her life you can think of except for one teensy little thing.

Gina was a lesbian. Probably still is, for that matter.

Anyway, that was a huuuuge big fat hairy deal for her Papa. Let's call him Gino, and Papa Gino was everything you'd expect a traditional Italian-American Papa born in south Philly the early 1930's to be; this swarthy sort of lumpy guy with a thick Philadelphia accent, a "diamond in the rough" kind of papa with big hands and a big heart that was filled with love for his family, his community, the Iggles, spaghetti bolognese, and cold Budweiser.

But not for lesbian daughters who weren't going to get married in Church and produce a dozen adorable grandkids for him.

Apparently Papa Gino and Gina had fought like hell about that when she came out - and, trust me, in 1985 this was something families would fight about and fight hard. Especially if you were an Italian-American kid in a small town in southeastern Pennsylvania. There was lots of stereotypical Italian-American drama involved, and it took a while for things to settle into a sort of armed truce. Gina didn't bring her girlfriends home or dress real butch and Papa Gino didn't rag on her about her sexuality. They stuck to neutral topics and kept up a tough veneer of civility.

But things were definitely tense.

So, anyway, here one Friday Gina is coming home after work and she's had a tough week, so has Papa Gino, and she wants to make nice to him so that she can have, just for a little while, the uncomplicated love for and from her daddy like when she was little.

So - she buys a half-rack of Budweiser and the fixin's for spaghetti bolognese and she figures she'll rent a movie and they can have a nice father-daughter dinner and watch a movie on the VCR together.

Well, you can imagine Gina's Papa Gino's taste in movies, right? Godfather films, Westerns, and war movies...that was pretty much the A to Z in movies for Gino Zepporelli.

Now Gina hates "Italian" films and can't stand Westerns, but war flicks? She can deal.

She wanders down the "Action" movie aisle of the local video rental store and finds a flick that looks kind of World War Two-ish. GIs fighting Nazis? That's a Papa Gino Slam-dunk.

So off she goes with the meat sauce and the videotape and Gina and Papa Gino had a nice dinner and some Buds and settled on the couch to watch the film she rented, a Seventies flick titled:

"Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS"

Ilsa who? I hear you ask.

That Ilsa:

The Ilsa with the big jahoobs in this half-assed WW2 story is supposedly based on this Ilsa: Ilse Koch, Die Hexe von Buchenwald, the Witch of Buchenwald, a real-life Nazi who seems to have been a very twisted sister, indeed but this is what the real Ilsa looked like:

Which, as you can see, is not anything what the Ilsa of the movie looks like. But you knew that already, right.

According to Gina the VCR tape box had "...a picture of Ilsa kinda bustin' out of her SS-outfit and some people shootin' and barbed wire an' stuff..." so not surprisingly she figured it was some sort of WW2 prison picture, The Great Escape only with tits.

She liked tits, and her dad liked The Great Escape so win-win, right?

At any rate, here's Papa Gino settled into his comfy Barcalounger with his fourth Bud with the opening credits rolling all prepared to enjoy a good Axis-and-Allies shoot-'em-up movie, a comfy Combat-episode sort of flick where the Nazis are all hissing and evil and the GIs all ingenious and heroic and the Good Guys win in the end...when he's suddenly confronted with this;

Yeah. It's a soft-core porn film.

So you have to picture the scene; here's Papa Gino frozen in his chair watching this Hogan's-Heroes-gone-horribly-wrong skin flick trying desperately not to go ballistic on his daughter who is sitting on the couch next to him completely mortified but at the same time possessed by the horrible compulsion to burst out laughing hysterically at the whole awful predicament.

So nobody says anything; both of them stare fixated at the awful film rolling past on-screen.

She says that this went on for what seemed like forever, the two of them too stunned to do or say anything, until the famous "electric dildo scene"...

...at which point Papa Gino bolted out of his lounge chair spewing Budweiser all over the knick-knacks on the coffee table and roaring "Whadda fuggin' hell is dis, some sorta fuggin' fug film!", and Gina collapsed on the couch snorting with laughter and wailing "I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I had no idea! I had no idea!" until the tears ran down her cheeks.

As they did ours as she told us afterward.

I guess things were kind of touchy around the Zepporelli household for a couple of weeks after that. Gina camped out on our couch for a night or two while her girlfriend was out of town and then with her girlfriend for the rest of the time.

Papa Gino eventually calmed down, although according to Gina it took several months for him to be able to watch any sort of video or television with his family without referring to his middle daughter as "Fuggin' Ilsa de Fuggin' Queen of Da Fug Film Business"

And that was pretty much that.

I never did find out much more about the story of Gino, Gina, and Ilsa. Shortly afterwards my ex got hired at the Catholic hospital out here in Portland and we moved out West. We weren't good enough friend for Gina and my ex to say in touch, so we never heard from them again. All that remains is my memory of this one disastrous dad-daughter evening.

I guess the one last bit about this story I wanted to pass on was culled from the one of the websites I linked to (you guys know I am sleepless in acquiring this sort of fascinating trivia, right) well, here's the most bizarre bit of information I found about this goofy war-porn film. Remember how I called it "Hogan's Heroes Gone Horribly Wrong"?

Well...Ilsa was filmed on the original set of the Hogan's Heroes TV show.

Supposedly at the end of Ilsa a whole bunch of the set got blown up during the big prison break scene (which I think we can assume that Papa Gino didn't keep on going to see).

So not only did his crazy lesbo daughter rent a sadistic WW2 porno film for their dad-daughter evening, it was a sadistic WW2 porno film that blew the hell out of the set of one of his beloved Sixties sitcoms.

I'll bet Papa Gino would have really had a kitten fit if he'd known that

Skeptical Inquirer

For some reason my Facebook page has been overrun lately with people posting me things about how eeeeevil Monsanto is.

Now let me say for the record; I'll be the first to suspect Monsanto of any and all of the sorts of corporate malfeasance that corporations have got up to since the first couple of Sumerians got together to lowball the other guys in the Tigris Co-op.

But a lot of this stuff just seems...insensate.

For example, one person posted a link to some beekeeper who had his colonies confiscated by the Illinois Agriculture people. The article stated that this was connected in some nefarious way with corporate Big Ag; Monsanto was mentioned because of a connection between the Roundup pesticide and colony collapse.

"The Illinois Ag Dept. illegally seized privately owned bees from renowned naturalist, Terrence Ingram, without providing him with a search warrant and before the court hearing on the matter, reports Prairie Advocate News. Behind the obvious violations of his Constitutional rights is Monsanto. Ingram was researching Roundup’s effects on bees, which he’s raised for 58 years. “They ruined 15 years of my research,” he told Prairie Advocate, by stealing most of his stock."

Which makes absofuckinglutely no sense at all.

Look, I'll happily convict Monsanto of poisoning wells and sacrificing babies to Moloch. But pollinator and especially honeybee deaths are terrible publicity for the company; every time someone brings up honeybee problems pesticides are one of the major villains.

Why the hell would a company making pesticides want to stop someone from researching how to develop pesticide-resistance in honeybees?

I'm not saying that they didn't. I'm not saying that couldn't.

I'm saying that on its face the charge makes no sense. The saying in geology is "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". If you were trying to prove that Monsanto's Roundup was killing honeybees then it'd make sense for Monsanto to want to shut you down. But the article is quite specific; "...they (the bees) could have been turned over to Monsanto to ascertain why some of his bees are resistant to Roundup." Roundup resistant bees? Whoa! Monsanto for the win!

Why the hell would Monsanto want to stop that kind of research?

I'll buy that they could - but you're going to have to produce a hell of a lot of proof before I do.

Along with this anti-Monsanto agitation there was a general irruption of anti-GMO posts, almost all of them talking about the horror of GM organisms. There was little if any actual biology involved. Here's a typical one: GMO Wheat Found In Oregon Field..How Did It Get There?

Well, duh.

A sensible person would answer "It got there the way any other volunteer plant gets anywhere, probably; bird or animal ate a seed, pooped it out in a corner of the field. Somebody dumped a pocketful of GM seed out on the ground. Wind. Act of God..."

The "why" - which is the breathless center of the whole fevered article - doesn't seem to be the real big issue here.

The bigger question that this article doesn't address is "Is there any evidence - hard, scientific evidence - that this GM wheat is a "problem"; that it endangers the mainstream wheat genome, that it produces harmful effects when ingested, that it has problematic genotypic characteristics that, if allowed to diffuse into the wheat genome, might cause trouble down the road"?

And why?

Well, because that's a goddamn hard question. And it probably doesn't have a quick or easy answer. Or one that lends itself to scary headlines about spooky GM wheat suddenly appearing like Freddy Kruger in a slasher movie.

There's a much, much better article tucked away in Scientific American that asks "What DO we know about GM organisms, what don't we know, and why don't we know it?"

"For a decade their user agreements have explicitly forbidden the use of the seeds for any independent research. Under the threat of litigation, scientists cannot test a seed to explore the different conditions under which it thrives or fails. They cannot compare seeds from one company against those from another company. And perhaps most important, they cannot examine whether the genetically modified crops lead to unintended environmental side effects."

Humans have been modifying organisms for millennia. We can now do it in a single generation unlike the previous breeders that had to work in lifetimes. And those changes are and should be daunting; who knows what genetic twist will torque a simple organism into the next Spanish Influenza, a new Potato Blight?

But how is the best way to deal with this to simply fear and forbid them? To demonize and scare-tactic about them, to set up a counter-anti-science in opposition to the GM organizations' anti-science? Is a blanket condemnation any better than the GM companies blanket denial of independent research?

Anyway.

About the same time there was also a flurry of "March Against Monsanto" posts in my in-box, and apparently this past Sunday about one-fourth as many people wandered around downtown Portland marching against Monsanto as turned out to see the Portland Thorns FC play the Washington Spirit a couple of weeks ago.

I didn't go. Neither did this guy, and he has a terrific post explaining why:

"Monsanto isn’t out to poison us or the environment. They are just one part of a system that is meeting demand for plentiful, cheap food. If Monsanto went away tomorrow, our food system would look almost the same, including all the problems. I believe that most people who went to marches today are actually concerned about the same thing I am: how do we produce enough food, fairly, for all with minimal impact on the environment? How do we achieve that? Setting up cartoon villains isn’t the way to do it."

That's kind of the crux of the biscuit, isn't it?

My Facebook friend(s) that post this stuff, and my bride's dear friend who shared her "MILFs Gone Wild" weekend, seem to have the same sort of thing going on. They are concerned. They protest, they agitate about certain causes, they march, the write letters. They do change their own lives; Geochick is a strict vegan and her family is, too.

But for all that they don't seem to be able to go further than "setting up cartoon villains". Wall Street. Monsanto. Obama. FOX News. GM wheat.

But they never seem to be able to actually change the things that power up those villains and their villainy.

A lot of these "villains" are villainous because the world and our society makes their villainy profitable. If it wasn't them it would be someone like them. To change the villain isn't enough. There must be a change in the world that profits the villainy.

But that sort of change?

It won't happen because three thousand of you march around Lloyd Center.

It can happen when tens of thousands of you storm prisons, and palaces. It can happen when you destroy those prisons, those palaces, your life and the lives of those around you. But that sort of change is fearful; it often replaces the bad with the worse, and the Tsar is overthrown only to set Stalin in his place.

The great promise of the U.S. is that it offers the public some of that change without the need to destroy. You can vote. You can woo and threaten and try and influence legislators. Hell, you can even buy one or two; ain't tradition wonderful?

I don't know what the hell to do about GM crops. But I do know that running and hiding in pure fear of them isn't a good option.

And using laws and patents to stifle research on them and prevent skeptical inquiry about them isn't one, either.

And most of all I wish to hell I thought that the U.S. circa 2013 was in any condition to make an intelligent and reasoned decision one way or the other.

Fracture Lines

The Boy and I went to see Oz, the Great and Powerful the other night. And this should warn you; if you haven't seen it yet and want to - there be Spoilers About Oz Ahead.



Anyway, the original plan was to go see the film playing down at our local St. John's theater as Family Movie Night. But the Girl felt poorly (she had been fighting a stubborn cold for the past day) and she begged off, asking her mother to stay home with her.



Had it been her brother I would have suspected that he was sandbagging, using the cold as a face-saving way to avoid seeing a film that (from the trailers we'd seen on television) had some fairly frightening moments.



But Missy is a fearless little soul and she seems to have a much firmer grasp of what is fiction and what is fact; she can view films and stories and television that scare her older brother witless without so much as a shiver. "That's not scary." she will announce in that flat tone that little girls who are dead solid certain of themselves can employ.

So, instead, the Boy and I drove to "downtown" St. Johns in the spitty rain and ran inside the arcade that shelters the doors to the old building.

The moviehouse is a great old place; it has been showing flicks since it was built in 1925 (as "McCreadie's Venetian" - see the picture below) and as we waited in line at the small ticket window I couldn't help imagining that some earlier St. Johns father and son - perhaps even the father and son that had moved into our little house when it built just three years earlier - had waited in line for the original Wizard of Oz back in '39.

I got myself a beer (a nice dry-hopped IPA, too, to celebrate the repeal of the Prohibition of McCredie's day) and a slice of pizza to go with the Boy's popcorn and soda; the joint is now a theater-pub sort of place, very popular here in Portland since the advent of the McMenamin's chain. We settled in with our snacks through the endless previews (although the Boy did like the looks of the upcoming entry in the G.I. Joe franchise so I may be in for another movie night soon, just me and him...)

And then the film began.

Let me say upfront; it's not a "great movie". Frankly, I loves me some Sam Raimi and expected better of him. It's overlong. It drags in stretches, and the opening Kansas sequence is kind of a bust. And I wasn't able to pin down what the hell Michelle Williams was trying to do as Annie/Glinda. Was she trying to seem flirtatious? Mysterious? I have no idea. She's very good at cute and spunky, though, and that went a long way towards making her Glinda likeable.



But that really didn't make a difference. A Wizard of Oz movie isn't about "good" or "bad"; it's about magic.

And flying monkeys. And even MORE bizarre creatures. And little girls made of porcelain. And wizards, munckhins, and spectacle.

And Oz has all that in job lots.

The Boy liked the heck out of it. He was frightened by a couple of the scarier moments - he really is a very gentle little guy for all that he pretends to be rough and tough. He loved that the Head Witch (Evanora, the future-wicked-witch-of-the-East) could throw lightning like Emperor Palpatine in Star Wars,



and (true movie geek - or at least Star Wars geek - that he is) noted that Evanora/Palps both turns her sister into Darth Vader...



...AND has a final throwdown with Glinda/Yoda in the throne room/Senate Chamber complete with lightning sumo.



I enjoyed it, too, for what it was; a sort of simultaneous riff on and tribute to the original. It hit all the canonical nodes (flying monkeys, green witches, munchkins, Winkies marching around chanting "Ore-e-o") while being very much different in spirit. The 1939 Wizard was all about home, and finding your place, and reaffirming the beliefs and loves you'd always had and never appreciated.

The 2013 Oz is about the journey, and exploring new worlds, and finding in them and within yourself new beliefs and loves you hadn't thought you had or ever could have.

But, oddly, the one thing that I really, truly, genuinely loved about the film was China Girl.

I have to stop here and admit something; there's a point in the film where the Wizard and his faithful companion Finley are heading out to the Dark Forest to find and destroy the person that they've been told is the Evil Witch (she isn't, but that's another story). They get to a crossroads, and there's a signpost; one arrow reads "Dark Forest". The other reads "China Town".

And I hate to admit this, but for a moment my mind stopped dead, gibbering.

China Town? In Oz? China Town?

I had a sudden mental image of a pigtailed, squidgy-eyed, bucktoothed cartoon Chinaman - Chink-ee from Gene Yang's American Born Chinese - bowing and chanting "Me doo-ee washee? Velly good washee! Ah-so, Chinkee Chinaman velly good washee-washee!"

I hate it when I do that.

Remember that I was a kid in the Sixties. The popular memory of that time was the Summer of Love and hippies in sandals and VW Bugs. The reality was very different, and included a lot of vicious, open racism. It wasn't just about whites and blacks. I vividly remember hearing a Chinese friend of mine, a slim quiet girl named Anne Kwong, called a "slope" by one of the drumline thugs my freshman year in high school; to my shame I did or said nothing.

But the worst part of that sort of thing is how insidious it is. A lot of that time, and a lot of those thoughts, and words, and images, still live inside my head and struggle to escape, usually at the very worst moment.

But of course, the "China Town" of Oz isn't "Chinatown". It's just what the words say it is; a China Town.

A town made of china.



The China Town sequence was Raimi at the top of his game, and the main character you meet there - the China Girl - was a creation of absolute magic. While I'm an animation fan and a CGI enthusiast in general I'll be the first to admit its limitations. It is very difficult to get a genuine "performance" out of a CGI character; the essential inhumanity of the pixels always seems to force its way through onto the screen.

But when you meet China Girl there is none of that.



I'm not sure why. Some combination of the character design itself, the voice acting of Joey King as well as the way the other actors play off her, and Raimi's direction. But the overall effect is winning, and winsome, and very poignant. I defy you not to love the little character. She's terrific.

And this is where I link to my friend Maia's blog. Because her little girl QQ was another person who fell in love with China Girl.



QQ is a lucky girl; her mom and China Girl got together to make some real magic happen. Go ahead and read her blog post; it is achingly sweet.

But the thing that makes it as touching as the character herself is the teardrop at the heart of the story of the little girl in Denver who is going to sleep tonight with her new friend. As Maia says;

"I'm sure that it did not escape her that this character is an orphan, left without a family or a country, and that she is desperate for a family. Also that she is fragile and injured, but also stubborn, tough and brave."

And - in very different but very similar ways - both are China Girls, who have to find a way to find a new belief, and a new love, with a new family they never expected or hoped to find.

I won't pretend I didn't tear up reading about little QQ's quest for, and meeting with, her little china doll friend.

The other night, though, there was none of that sweet sentiment.

The Boy and I rode home having a discussion of near-critical geeky mass about the parallels between Star Wars and Oz (we agreed on Palps-Evanora-Yoda-Glinda-Vader-Theodora but never could decide who was the Luke Skywalker character; Boy held out for the Wizard, while I insisted that there was no direct match).

The house was dark and silent; we brushed our teeth together barging against each other quietly. He washed his face and gave me a hug and I breathed in the boy-and-popcorn scent of his hair against my cheek. And he went into his bed to burrow into the immense pile of stuffed friends inside, and I went to the computer to blog-read and wait.

And, surely enough, about an hour later I heard the sound of crying.

At first I wasn't sure whether he was awake or not. He's had "night terrors" before; horrific things that simulate nightmares but are far, far below the dream-layer. This wasn't one of those. Boy was barely asleep, frightened by the afterimage of some frightful moment in the film. He was shaking, and crying, and (unlike the night terror state) scooted quickly over into my arms.

I kissed his forehead, still slightly damp with fear, and told him that I had stayed up to watch over him. I asked him if he was frightened by the scary parts of the movie and he nodded, shrinking deeper into my arms. I suggested that, instead, he might dream about how he could make a place for a puppy we might foster over the summer; how he could build a house for the puppy, and make a place for it to play, and all the ways that he could show the puppy that it was safe and loved and welcomed.

And, whether it was the pleasant thoughts of pets, or the sound of my droning on, or the steadiness of my arms around him, the Boy's eyes started to droop. He roused himself to give me a final hug, and tunneled back below the top layer of stuffed critters.

The bare leg that remained exposed looked very fragile and unprotected, like China Girl's as she lays shattered amid the ruins of her family. For we all have our fractures, don't we? Our planes of weakness, the mend-lines of our old breaks like the patterns of ancient porcelain that run across our limbs, like China Girl's.

Or sometimes across our minds, or our hearts.

I stood in the twilit doorway listening the the sound of the Boy's breathing, peaceful again, gently closed his door until just the faintest pillar of light remained streaming out of the room and turned back into the darkened hallway.

Red Rock Country

My friend Maia has a post up about her family's recent trip to the red rock country of Colorado around Moab. Which reminded me of the time I spent there back in the Nineties. My ex-wife and I went on a Sierra Club "service trip" which involved working as volunteers for the National Park Service. In our case, removing and rebuilding fence along "Dry and Rocky Mesa" in Arches National Park.

In case you were wondering, the guy on the left is me. I loved that old desert night parka. Wish I knew what the hell had happened to it. I wish I knew what the hell had happened to that cocky young guy, too. Well, I know what happened; just wish I'd treated his body a hell of a lot better when it worked like it did when he looked like that.

Anyway, Arches N.P. was a hell of a beautiful place, and I'll have to post about my time there. For now how about just a savor of the dry and rocky silence of the redrock desert on a chilly, raw Northwest day?

Random Runnings

I have a friend whose son is some sort of nuclear-powered attack submarine of a child.

Seriously; this kid has an internal engine that just doesn't quit. His little family - it's just him and his mom and dad - came out to Portland to visit for an insanely brief time. Mom and Dad had concert tickets and flew in just for the show and then back home. We volunteered to sit for their son, let's call him Atomo the Atomic Boy, and quickly found out about the whole Atomo-incredible-drive-motor.

We went to a hockey game, played videogames, built LEGOS, told stories, played tag...and the little guy was still going. He was like an adorable tiny unstoppable force. Even in his sleep he was still going; he self-soothed, singing and rocking and thumping his arms.

I was amazed that the little family got any sleep at all.

Dunno why I wanted to tell you that; maybe just because it points up how individual people can be and the degree to which they are particular. You really have no idea until you slam headfirst into one of these outliers. And only then you know.

What it tells you? I have no idea.

But the point is that Atomo and his mom used to go out to their favorite natural places for walks. Which always seemed to evolve into Atomo racing away at top speed with mom in dogged pursuit. He wasn't trying to hide, or running away from his mom; he just had so much damn energy that he had to just run.

She called this "random runnings".

That's what I'm doing today.

I've just got the urge to babble, and nothing in particular to babble about, so my mind is randomly running about and I don't pretend to know where it's going to go.

But it starts with this couple.

First, I have to confess; I am a very boring "romantic". Or, ummm..."sexantic". Or whatever you call the part of your life that involves getting intimate with other people in a personal way. Loving them, or making love to them. Whatever, my personal history is deeply, intensely boring, whether you're measuring in an emotional or the physical scale, to any- and everyone outside me (and, I suppose, the other halves of the relationships).

I had the usual sorts of fumbling relationships in high school and college. Platonic, sorta-platonic, hoped-for-carnal, sexual-but-kinda-pathetic. I had several lovers/girlfriends during my time in the service. I got married nearly as soon as I got out and stayed married more than a decade. I got divorced, dated a bit, then found the woman I love, married her and we've been together a touch more than ten years now.

But I have to say; I was fairly stunned at the amount of drama in Laura and Sam's story. Breakups, makeups, cheating, makeups, accidents, incidents, lost parents, lost ears...

It's a hell of a tale and then they get married.

I'm a romantic and so I hope that they've got things figured out, I hope that they are terrific for each other and both grow frail together and compete to see who makes mournful jokes over the other's grave.

But...damn. Just reading about all that drama makes me tired.

Is it just that these two gals are really emo? Or am I just really plodding?

Either way; for all that it sounds like their joys were really joyous I'm sorta glad that I never had a lover put me (or I put a lover) through that.

Speaking of things about me, my employer's HR person sent around a questionairre for our in-house newsletter, and a couple of the questions seemed to provide a certain opportunity for my prose style. For example, here's the one about some particular thing or things that we'd done that we considered "surprising":

What is something you’ve done that would surprise others?

Dunno; (I replied) depends on how easily surprised they are.

I helped another 10,000 people or so “liberate” the Spice Island of Grenada in 1983. I met Sandy Duncan in person and almost asked her which one of her eyes is real. I am one of three people who are credited by the Oregon Birds Record Committee with the first recorded state sighting of a Louisiana Waterthrush (Parkesia motacilla) in Oregon; the other two are my wife and my ex-wife.

And there was another about sense of humor: Do you remember what were you doing the last time you had a really good laugh?

Describing to my wife my daughter’s reaction to the moment that our housecat suddenly became incontinent all over the dining room table this past Saturday evening. We both lost all composure. Mind you, to say that I have a sideways sense of humor is not an exaggeration.

I should add that dinner was not on the table when this occurred, which is why the Little Cat is still with us. I feel wretched about her continuing mortal illness, but not wretched enough to be willing to continue to host a pet that cannot be counted on not to defecate on our food.

Here was a real stunner for anyone incapable of walking and chewing gum at the same time: the woman who made her bones forcing her teachers and administrators to compete for their jobs and pay by teaching others to take tests turns out to have pretty much not bothered to check and see whether those employees were doing the sane thing and ensuring that the duds, gimps, and wheezers were getting pencil-whipped through the goddamn tests.

Gee. I'm shocked. Shocked.

I've said this before; if you test my teaching with nothing more than a test then I will teach to the test. AND I will do my best to ensure that my gomers (and I know I'll have some gomers who are thick as a brick; every class has them) are shoved out of the way or their scores improved if I can possibly manage it.

You can try and blame me for not making a stone into a flower. But don't expect me to buy your interpretation. The gomers' inability to learn has nothing to do with my ability to teach.

Oh. I've got another post up at Slide Rule Pass that talks about one of my recent diversions; the off-season moves by the front office of my Portland Timbers.

I laid my thoughts out thoroughly over there so I won't rehash them here. But the short version is that after two years of treating team-building like a greedy toddler my club seems to have actually developed some discernment.

This would be a good thing, and I'm hopeful for better things in the coming season. Onward, Rose City!

Speaking of Rose City soccer; only a few months separate us from the debut of our newest PTFC; the Portland Thorns of women's pro soccer!

I'm already fired up, looking forward to sharing my passion - soccer - with my passion - Mojolicious - at the friendly confines of Jeld-Wen Field this spring. We'll be comin' down the road!

Mind you, there are those of us already pretty far DOWN the road, and here was one of them, one of our North Portland maniacs who...

Wait, I have to tell the story as it happened.

So a bit more than a week before this past Christmas our Portland firefighters show up at a house on North Hodge Avenue. Said house is on fire; the smoke-eaters are there to put the fire out.

Problem; resident loony grampa is on the front porch doing his Braveheart thing swinging a sword at the fire crew.

Firefighters say; grandpa, your fucking house is on fire. Your starting to smoulder, dummy. Put the damn sword down.

Grandpa says: Freedom! You want it? Come and have a go if you're hard enough, then!

Firefighters say eff that, back off, and wait for Portland PD.

Portland PD arrives. Tasers loony grandpa off porch. Firefighters put out fire. Loony grandpa goes to loony room at hospital to be cooled down. House is a wreck. Firefighters and cops have another great loony story to tell.

North Portland; even our loonies are a trifle naff.

Speaking of loonies.

I want a trillion dollar platinum coin.

But, more than this; I want the fucking government to quit fucking around with the goddamn debt limit. It's idiotic, and it makes us look less competent than goddamn Kazakstan, where at least the critters can do graft and corruption efficiently.

I expect the GOoPers to try and use the damn thing to arm-wrestle my country into whatever Gilded Age plutocracy they're erect about this week. That's what they do; it'd be like complaining about a park flasher showing his dingus.

But the damn Democrats need to get a pair. It's time they accepted that they can't reason with these loonies and start just hoofing them one and moving on. This crap is just getting old.

Not that I think for a moment they'll do it, mind you. Just a thought.

And one last thought, one that occurred to me as the kiddos watched the movie Tangled for the second (well, the third for Missy, but she says she doesn't remember when we went to see it in the theater) time this past Sunday; one of the fun things about any good piece of work is that it stands up well over time and provides a fertile soil for the inspirations of others.

So whether you're working from Bocaccio or the Bible, Les Miserables or the fairy tale of Rapunzel tarted up for modern times it can be tremendously intriguing to see the latest version of, or someone else's riff on, the original.

Like the little cartoon above, from "Katikut" growing out of the remarkably fertile soil of deviantart

What does an artistic princess do when she fulfills her dream of adventure and romance? Shimmies into a pair of skinny jeans and its off with flip-flops, art supplies, and loyal boyfriend to "art school" to put all those years of painting the walls to some use? Why NOT?

What kind of new dream is it if it doesn't include the help of your inamorata to carry your hair around, anyway?

Cute.

Hope you're getting that sort of love and support these days.

As for me...I think my motor's finally run down. Let me know if I've left anywhere unscrambled, okay?

Back soon.