meet george jetson

...more commonly known as Will Whitehorn, one of the wranglers at Virgin Galactic, a posse of nutjobs planning on making space tourism a reality.

I do love that the windows up front are shaped like hearts (and check out the fins—eat your heart out, Dodge Dart!).

Let's go. I think I have enough just pennies in my piggy bank.

jonny justice superstar

I'm just back from the press conference re: the dogs rescued from Michael Vick's property. Five of the Vick dogs and their handlers did cool and calm meet-and-greets, while BAD RAP reps Donna Reynolds and Tim Racer, Oakland Raider Jarrod Cooper, and Oakland Animal Services Director Adam Parascandola described the dogs' progress and the animal-welfare state of the nation to a room packed to the walls with reporters.

Round about June in The East Bay Monthly, I'll publish a story tracking these dogs in their foster homes. And we'll get to see how everyone's doing and maybe get an invitation to the full-adoption party for these long-haul survivors.

BAD RAP
Dogtime
San Jose Mercury News
KRON News
CBS5
CNN
SFGate
The Californian
Inside Bay Area
NPR
AP in Washington Post
AP story also picked up by Guardian UK

got a second?

The PEN Campaign for Core Freedoms has been working with several other organizations to restore privacy protections that were stripped in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

This week, PEN, ACLU, and a large coalition of other organizations plan to press Congress to require the government to obtain warrants from a judge before engaging in telephone and internet surveillance of Americans and to remove a proposed amnesty for telecommunications companies from pending legislation.

You can sign the petition at:
http://action.aclu.org/reidpetition

i took the midnight train going anywhere

**Update to this post: Steven Kurutz at NYTimes obviously read this blog post and was inspired to write a follow-up story. Good job, Steve-O.**

Just finished my eighteen-mile run. If you're needing music for your cardio routine or if you have a pressurized deadline that needs some adrenalizing musical wallpaper, here's what I listened to out there. Songs in bold are pretty varied—some silly, some strong and sexy—but all recommended for any of your fortifying solo expeditions.

The Blower's Daughter, Damien Rice
Random, Lady Sovereign
Snap Yo Fingers, Pina Colada, Jimmy Buffett v. T. Pain
URA QT, MIA
It's On, Hollerback Girl, Beastie Boys v. Gwen Stefani
Don't Stop, Brazilian Girls
My Other Car Is a Beatle, L'Trimm v. Gary Neuman v. Beatles
Don't Stop Believin', Journey
Mr. Brightside, The Killers, Lu Cont's Thin White Duke remix
You Shook Me All Night Long, AC/DC
There's More To Life Than This, Björk
Fly with the Bongo, Safri Duo v. Gigi D'Agostino
Wishful Thinking, Ditty Bops
Electro Funk 21, Propellerheads v. Jakatta
Rockin Rum & Coca Cola, Andrews Sisters vs MI 7
Yeah, Country, John Denver v. Usher
There's Gonna Be a Riot, Dub Pistols
Loose Caboose, The Electroliners
Clumsy, Fergie
Superhero, Garrison Starr
Not In Our Name, Lorin Bassnectar
Somewhere Over The Rainbow, Israel Kamakawiwo'ole
Lust For My Adidas, Iggy Popp v. Run DMC
Lovin, Joss Stone
What Goes Around...Comes Around, Justin Timberlake
SexyBack (Dirty), Justin Timberlake
Drive, Melissa Ferrick
Scared, Slacker
Little Chief, Xavier Rudd
Heavy Metal Drummer, Wilco

fischer, king's down

Okay, enough emails about Bobby Fischer. Yes, I taught chess for a while. Truth is I was raised in a chess playing household and I knew just enough to get by, really—never was particularly mathematical. But true, Fischer has long been one of those anomalous figures that captivated me, yes. So I heard it from all angles when he died. I guess I've had lots of death in my life the last few years; I wonder if I'm finally inured.

Because aside from the spark it ignited in a particular scene for my novel, I haven't got much to say about it. A dear friend of mine from Reykjavik tells me he died of kidney failure because he refused medical care. Well then best to let him go without much fuss, isn't it? When a person makes it clear the game's over, I think we're obliged to take the word for it.

gender essentialism for smarties

Pinker, Susan. The Sexual Paradox: Men, Women, and the Real Gender Gap. March 2008. Scribner. 336p. b&w charts and illustrations throughout. ISBN: 978-0-7432-8470-7. $25.00.

for Library Journal

Psychologist and Globe and Mail columnist Susan Pinker’s first book The Sexual Paradox makes a well-constructed case for interpreting workplace trends through a vintage lens of gender-based sex differences. Equally conversant in clinical psychology, neurobiology, linguistics, and social science, Pinker engineers a dichotomy between “apparent opposites—fragile men [and] gifted women,” proposing that gendered biological wiring—and not discrimination—is at the root of workplace inequities. Pinker offers evidence showing young males to be more vulnerable to everything from premature birth to behavioral problems, ADHD to chronic illness. Considering then why women aren't running more board meetings, Pinker likens men and women to two “software programs that run at different speeds,” arguing that subsequent hormonal changes females experience at puberty lead women along separate professional trajectories. Generalizations throughout the book weaken the credibility of this rigorous research, as when Pinker concludes a section on women opting out of high-powered business roles for more people-oriented jobs by asserting that women demonstrate “a capacity to be attuned to others,” a tendency “that makes women feel pretty good.” Recommended to reignite debate in all libraries. Elizabeth Kennedy, Oakland, CA

make your own stamps

Oh, Björk. You are one crazy lady. I would so love to put on my Red Cross uniform, my white Reeboks, and my WWII helmet and be a part of the stomping crowd in your latest total-weirdo production.

well, mtv

Okay. So soon I am going to stop posting my own thoughts altogether and just start reposting everything the good folks at icanhascheezburger.com post because it is so much funnier and better than anything I could say. I mean, look at this:

file under omg

Honk, honk! Hop on board, kids. One quick stop to get us a hooker and we'll be on our way to the schoolyard in no time! Amazing any children make it through to adulthood. Really.

i

... am in love. True, I've only seen her online, but watch Stella wiggle and you'll understand.

let each man exercise the art he knows

I was in yoga class yesterday and reflecting upon the fact that my muscles are as limber as plate glass when it occurred to me that there may not be any coffee table books on ordinary people beginning extraordinary practices—sweaty folks in shaky Ashtanga pretzels, tense kids screeching bow against fiddle string with pained moms in the background, or even smoking, indulgent "writers" sitting glazed before their monitors.

We are, as our president often evinces, in the era of the subpar. Why not create a folio of beginners who may or may not ever amount to anything? It will be like Arbus, only without the fascination factor ... or Dorothea Lange free of historical substance. Yes! I'll get on that. I'll call it Be Minus: Inept but Alive in Late-Stage America.

against rainy-day refugees

I love rain as much as any moody Irishwoman worth her stout. But with the rain come the ants. I'm sure some among you (bless the vegans and Buddhists, every one) might argue pity for the bugs, what with their homes being flooded out and their anty up-from-microbootstraps ability to (as it were) rise to the occasion. It's some athletic ambition, after all, to find higher ground in a second-floor place when you're a mite bigger than a dust particle. But to be real, I never once indicated I would foster any such rubber tree aspirations.

These monsoon ants, in my opinion, made two mistakes. One is they tried to eat my KitKat. But no big whatever. I can always go get another KitKat and just eat the whole thing without ever once putting it down before their god-blasted feelers. No, that was not really the problem.

The real offense was their orderly proletarian efforts to settle all their gross little displaced antennae, heads, torsos, and abdomens into my orchids. No! Out, out damn infiltrators! My orchids need their space and are not the kind of flora to brook colonists. So, dear vegans, cover your eyes. They're all gone. The ants are dead. But they really should have stayed out of the orchids. And well, if they wanted a piece of my KitKat, the least they could have done was ask.

"those winter sundays"

Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

—Robert Hayden

inventory in a poem

"Te Deum"
by Charles Reznikoff

Not because of victories
I sing,
having none,
but for the common sunshine,
the breeze,
the largess of the spring.

Not for victory
but for the day's work done
as well as I was able;
not for a seat upon the dais
but at the common table.



Happy New Year, dear friends close to me and dappled readers one shade beyond.

new year reality check

Reading the morning paper and feeling emotionally hungover over Bhutto's death (and entertaining once again the financially impossible idea of up and moving to either Firenze or Paris before the Apocalypse Blitz hits New York or San Francisco), I switched to a fluffy number in the NYT on how Americans are ringing in the new New Year. And I started reading the comments. Love this guy:

"I intend to drink my mortgage industry sorrows and await the next crisis to hit the financial world, the credit card debacle. Maybe I can charge a bunch of stuff and Bush will lower my interest rate since we Americans certainly don't know that a house worth 500K will not be at 1000 dollar payments a month no matter how may brokers tell you that."

— Rahim, Dallas, Texas

gifted

All my life, I have lacked two things: a camera and a sense of direction. This year, both deficits have been resolved.

One crazy sweet elf gave me a digital camera. Fantastic! I took pictures of snow. I took pictures of prime rib (it is not very photogenic). I took pictures of cookies, my shoes, angels (below), my hands, doorways, window sills, my obliging parents, my sleeping grandmother, of police at the Dunkin' Donuts (Bavarian cream, good call), of passing ambulances, electric snowflakes (also below), inflatable lawn art, the whole god damned Christmas shebang.

I took pictures of pictures, themselves already framed on the wall. I took pictures and deleted them, sent them places, took them four times over just to pick which I liked best. This is tremendous. I am quite sure, in fact, that no one has ever owned or used a camera before. Otherwise, it's all they'd talk about. I do believe I am the first to experience this rapture. What a holiday. All I can say is just wait till you too get to work with this new-fangled invention, this enthralling little box of light; it’s great, good fun—but now onto the showstopping news.

That would be the sense of direction. Brothers and sisters of this new, well-met year, I have received a GPS for the Matrix. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, you have no idea my joy (unless you’ve been in the car with me, in which case, alas, you know how sorely I lack the ability to drive anywhere beyond my own bedroom). The miracle device’s name is Chelsea. (This makes a fine family for my imaginary admin Hillary and my new camera, now named Bill.) This fabulous little Chelsea beast can give me directions anywhere in North America and even covers greater U. S. territories—so if I end up in my own car in Puerto Rico somehow, I'm set!

Chelsea is versatile as all good performers ought to be—she can direct me in Italian (rawr!), with a British accent, whatever my fancy—she’s absolutely bellissima, bloody brilliant. I tell her my destination and off we go, sure on our course. If I overshoot a turn (though it’s quite hard to mess up when she guides me with such sterling confidence and clarity), she patiently says “recalculating” and directs me back to the original destination by way of the next shortest, sensible route. She’s infinitely reliable, thanks to her satellite network. Hillary, you could learn a thing or two from your daughter’s efficient utility.

Look! Electric snowflakes fell (they were HUGE) at 48th and 5th!

Above: After the show at the Jazz Standard, I hung by the Rockefeller tree with the angels—the tree, btw, had blue lights for Hannukah, did you notice? That was a first; better late than never—and anyway, angel and I pretended we were Nicholas Peyton blowin' it out in the horn section. (Though if I had it to do over again, I'd have angled the umbrella down, not up, and stood in as the fella on alto sax, Donald Harrison. As my father, who has become startlingly hip and jazzy in recent years, would say, man, that cat can blow. Check Harrison out. You'll be glad you did.)

somebody's stolen the savior

Christmas, post-dinner. Mom and I had energy to burn. Both fidgety and disinclined to read or otherwise operate productively in the world, we decided to pack up some gifts and bring them up to the baby Jesus at the local church for his big 2012th birthday. Things did not go quite as planned.

First off, our lord baby Jesus had been stolen. Awesome surprise. See for yourself:

But I had walked all that way with my frankincense and myrrh. So someone was going to pose for me in that frickin' manger. Mom, gamey and ever deferent to my bratty pleas, climbed on in. Again, awesome. Awesome, that is until she thought she heard it crack. That's what we've captured very flatteringly here. (For the record, it did not crack. And also for the record, we’d not had a sip of moonshine. Nothing.)

I made several friends along the way, including a nice gay man to whom I gave a holiday bouquet:

And a thirsty lamb:

And a mechanical bull that, to my disappointment, did not take quarters, after all.

Merry Christmas, folks. If you're damned if you do and damned if you don't, well then you might as well. Right? Next up, New Year's.

noted

How about some fun with the scientific method?

Observation Late December, temp in the twenties with wind chill. I am going for a run.

Experiment Marathon training continues, regardless of locale.

Hypothesis No big whoop: Running sixteen miles in New Jersey is not much harder than in California.

Analysis Incorrecto, Doktor Kennedito! I nearly died.

Conclusion I am a lily-livered, pansy-footed West Coaster incapable of exerting myself anywhere but in a Surfin' Safari video set.

Above: Laughing death in the face.

death penalty repeal

Feeling particularly proud of being from New Jersey right now.

(Looking at the map included in the story, I gotta say I think someone on the BBC's cartography team may have been hitting the Maker's Mark because Pennsylvania appears to be eating its way into Jersey's westerly midsection. So much for Trenton.)

beeg dawg, leetle bebe

You have never before in your whole ding-dang life—and I mean guaranteed-with-all-$359.26-in-my-savings-account never—seen cute like this. It could only get better if I got a unicorn in the frame. Happy holidays, errybotty.