Pray for Something Good for Christ's Sake!

There was an article about this wall street pentecostal preacher guy and his wife in the New York Times Sunday Magazine this week - complete with scary pictures of these people. The wife used to "pray to God to send her a husband." And HE sent her one! Good-oh! One up for GOD.

Then the beloved C came home and told me that her boss had told her that the beloved C was the answer to her prayers and that the boss knew that God had sent her (beloved C) to UCLA so that she (the boss) could give her (C) another department currently being run by a nimrod.

So here are two examples of GOD actively intervening in the lives of prayerful christians. And here's my question for GOD. Why is GOD interested in someones marital status? Or UCLA's alumni fundraising? Is GOD a BRUIN? With so much going on in the world, why is GOD listening to someones pray for a good data processing manager? Hello, GOD, I don't care about Margaret's period, I care about the fact that people, actual people are being raped and killed in Darfour. Triage? Priorities? Get GOD a damn PDA and a prioritized to do list before it's too late!

And here's my question for those who pray. What's Christian about praying to GOD to fix your SEX LIFE? Or to solve a little work issue? What kind of solipsistic, dumb-ass, personal, itty bitty kind of thing to pray for. Pray to stop civil war in Iraq.

Reviews: The Coronation of Poppea

Well, yes, I know that there was no PBGV action happening when Monetverdi was around, but still, Beso is adorable and happy.

So we, the beloved C and I, went to see Monteverdi's Coronation of Poppea by the L.A. Opera at the music center.

The Coronation of Poppea is a very long opera, 3 acts, two intermissions, 4 hours, one murder suicide, one attempted murder, three exiles and some royal adultery. A lot happens.

The Coronation of Poppea is one of the earliest operas and is a baroque opera. The orchestra was not a modern one, but one filled with a disarming lack of wind and percussion instruments. There were violins and a viola, harps, harpsichords, baroque cello, baroque guitar and best of all three, count 'em three theorbos. They were like lutes for Atlas-sized giants. I'll just let you google them, but dear me they were large - and we could see them big as ever from our outpost at the top of the balcony.

Anyway, it's a very long opera and it is not a "classic" opera, the music is baroque, the narrative arc is odd. It's about Nero and his girlfriend Poppea, who wants to be empresses so they need to get rid of the current legal empress who wants to get rid of Poppea.

Often in Operas the wronged wife is this noble character - like the Marchande in der Rosenkavalier, though obviously this was not a trope in Opera when Poppea was composed since it is one of the first operas, but Octavia, the empress, she sings sweetly about love and how her husband, Emperor Nero, is her one true love and how heartbroken she is that he's cheating on her, etc., etc.

And I thought, you know, if my husband was Nero - I might have a few other issues with him. Like the poisonings, murders, assassinations, thefts and the horse in the bedroom. Sleeping around is nothing.

Poppea and Nero arrange to murder Seneca, the stoic philosopher. He kills himself after the villagers sing to him asking him not to die. There are a few goddesses running around quarrelling. Mercury pops down and hovers around to tell Seneca that he's going to go. Seneca, being a stoic is a baritone and is glad to leave handling Nero to go take his chances with the gods. Nero and Seneca's nephew sing about love and feel each other up. (STOIC=BARITONE)

And that's just part of the first two acts!!!! The song where the villagers ask Nero not to die is absolutely gorgeous as is the duet between Nero and the nephew.

So (we're going to go faster now) Poppea's jilted boyfriend, Otho is told by Occtavia, Nero's wife, that he has to kill Poppea by dressing as a woman. He asks Drusilla, the woman who loves him to borrow her clothes and declares his love for her. She is stupid, so she believes this and gives him her outfit. Otho goes to kill Poppea who lies asleep in her garden but Amore, the goddess of love, stops him from killing Poppea, he is discovered and escapes though all can say that it was Drusilla who tried to kill Poppea. Did I mention that Otho is a counter tenor? That means he sings higher than I do. Love duets between men and women where they are both in the same vocal range are rare.

So Otho escapes, but Drusilla is easily caught and Nero threatens her with torture so she admits to wanting to kill Poppea and she is sentenced to death. But wait! Lo! There is Otho, striding forward and declaring that it was he who tried to kill Poppea! At the request of Ottavia! So Otho is exiled, Drusilla goes with him, and Ottavia is exiled. Now is Poppea's chance to be empress, Ottavia is gone and the way is clear!

The opera notes made a great deal of the fact that there is no moral compass for the audience to root for. Seneca the stoic baritone is killed off in the begining of the second act and didn't do to good of a job teaching Nero ethics. Ottavia wants to kill her rival but isnt' appalled at a husband who routinely murders his relatives and former teachers. Drusilla is willing to sacrifice herself for her lover, but she is also quite happy to help her lover kill her rival. Otho is totally willing to point the finger at the Empress, there goes loyalty. Nero is an adulterer and murderer. Ditto Poppea.

But my word, the closing duet between Poppea and Nero, declaring their love; gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous!

Show Dogs

Here are the heebiegeebies all lined up in a row at the Eukanuba Invitational Dog Show in Long Beach last week. We took the our pbgvs and did a stint of oh, about 30 seconds at the Meet the Breed booth and then looked at the pbgv competition. Which was thrilling. Our Host, the wonderfully knowledgable pbgv breeder who was responsible for our irrepressible Beso knew a lot about hounds and competition. Her guy, Champion Janvan Gandalf, is pictured here, is a totally gorgeous, well-put together peeb, with beautiful movement. So we had a great time and it was so fun to go to the dog show with your dogs. That was totally fun.

Well I have to walk the dogs and get ready to go to the Opera, so I'll check in later this week.

Okay I Project Managed this site: http://www.myroboreptile.discovery.com So go and take a look, play the game, watch the video and let me know how you like it.

Oh yeah, it keeps the number up. So thanks for checking it out.

Things I Wonder About: Holiday Decorations

So you know that I am against overdone privacy plantings, this is because they are antithetical to new urbanism, discourage pedestrians and also because I like to look into other people's windows. Our neighborhood is an old one, with "spanish style" houses set back and front yards that are grass. Very sweet. (Well don't get me started on GRASS in Southern California that's another rant!) But some people, like the house above, have done a few privacy plantings. This house is a drag to walk by because you can't tell what's behind it, and the dogs bark but you don't know if they're outside or not and the plants are taking over the sidewalk.

But from the street, as you can see, there is no way to see the house. So what's up with the holiday decorations gone crazy? It started the first week of October with this extravagant Halloween display that no one can see. That was then re-done with stuffed chickens and turkeys for the thanksgiving holiday. Now of course it is a winter wonderland with christmas elves and trees. Stuck behind the privacy plantings. It is odd to think of this outpouring of public civic mindedness in decorating for the holidays and hiding it. An even odder note is that our neighborhood is predominantly and rather pointedly orthodox jewish and so the happy secular christmas theme hidden behind the privacy plantings takes on this subversive tone.

I don't get it. Going to all this decor galore "public" work and keeping it hidden.

Things I wonder about

So day after day I read the LA Times and there are terrible stories about gang members pulling up to people's houses and firing shots at families and killing young children, teens and people who are either in or not in gangs. Just last August, while Mayor Villaregosa was down the street comforting a family of a young boy shot in a drive by killing, a teenage girl who was going to the memorial service was shot to death - on the two blocks from the Mayor of Los Angeles.

Now, I don't know, but I wonder. Why are these things called "gang" related and not militia related? How come we have "gangs" and Iraq has "militias?" Both have guns and ammo. Both have economic means of survival through black market activities. Both have support among some members of the community who are willing to shelter members and are willing to buy the goods controlled by the militia. The people who are randomly dead from their activities are all really dead. So when is a gang a militia? When is a militia a gang?

Car thoughts

The Insurance Institute comes out with Auto Safety ratings every year and they make their criteria known in advance. So last year they said that no car that didn't have ECS technology, electronic control systems reduce skids, slides and roll overs.

No American cars made the safety list this year. Why? Because they didn't have ECS. GM, Ford have been having terrible years financially, they have made money on trucks for years but high gas prices have had sales plummeting. Lack of good design has made Americans buy hondas and toyotas and vws. Ford and GM are laying off workers and going to Washington for handouts and bailouts.

But isn't it telling, that with an entire year to install already existing technology, technology that would actually make their products safer, the American car industry could not CHANGE ONE SINGLE assembly line to insure that one of their makes of cars were on that safety list.

Shouldn't these corporations stop paying their execs huge salaries and start actually firing the CEOs and not the workers?

National Gluttony Day

So the beloved C and I were going to have people (actual family) over for national gluttony day. Because I'm just having issues or I'm contrary, I decided that we would not have a "groaning board" for the holidays, that we would have a reasonable feast. That I would not make gazillions of dishes. That I would be freed from the tyranny of hor d'ouevre. Just say no to excess, to greed, to gluttony, to Americans using all of the resources!

So we decided to have a first course of butternut squash soup, a turkey breast, cornbread dressing, green beans. A friend who grows her veggies was bringing the salad. Desert a little apple pie. A lot of food, actually, but missing a few dishes from the traditional thanksgiving holiday overload. No biscuits, no potatoes, no mashed veggies.

Of course, we didn't have enough soup bowls for eight, so we bought little 1 cup bowls for the soup - actual chinese rice bowls. Little. But that was okay, since you just needed a little bit of soup, there was more food coming. It would just be a little taste. And so that weekend I made butternut squash soup and while I doubled the recipe, we ate it that Sunday for dinner and saved the rest. C spent the Sunday sorting through linens and ironing them, just like women were doing all over the nation. A little pre-cooking, a little ironing before the festivities.

I had been intending to make a free-form apple pie with puff pastry, and to use the left over pastry to make little cheese sticks. An hor d'ouevre! But don't tell anyone. Of course I couldn't find any puff pastry. Well I could find stuff masquerading as puff pastry. But, having made puff pastry, I know that puff pastry is made of flour and butter. Not transfat loaded salt flour with ingredients that no one can pronounce. So a little change in plan, I made pie dough pastry, and gave up the idea of little cheese sticks.

I had gone to Whole Paycheck and ordered a free range organic turkey breast, on bone, 8 to 10 pounds. I was scheduled to pick it up between 9:00 and 9:30 on Wed. Notice that if there was a problem I wasn't going to be giving myself a whole lot of time to fix the problem. To salt or brine a turkey I needed a couple days lead time. Obviously I didn't have time to defrost anything by then either. C came back and said, turkey breasts don't come in 8 to 10 pound increments, 6 pounds is the biggest that they come. So now I have a turkey that is less than one pound per person before cooking, when it shrinks. But that's okay, because there was going to be enough food. And people could fill up on dressing.

C asked how much ice cream I had bought for the ala mode aspect of the pie. 2 pints I said. I don't think that's enough she said as we were blocks from Whole Paycheck on Wed. But we didn't want to go back. Just a little drop of ice cream on the pie, we don't want to over do it.

So on Thursday I start making the dinner. I roll out the pastry dough into a tart pan and pour in the caramelized apples and realize that the apples don't fill the tart shell as abundantly as I had imagined. There are bare patches. A pie with negative space.

I start to make the dressing. I had made a loaf of cornbread on Sunday and another one on Tuesday. One of the loaves had mold on it. So I had half the amount of stuffing that I had planned.

And teeny, tiny soup bowls.

And a negative space pie.

And two to four pounds less turkey than planned.

And no hor d'ouevre.

We're the only people who spent hundreds of dollars on a Thanksgiving meal with not enough food.

Signs: Universal Pictures

I have added a link to my old friend and professor's site, sharongoldart. I have also deleted the link to the old face city. Things there went sour, one partner executed a senseless coup and in general behaved like a Karl Rove, baseless lies, rumours and innuendo. So I can no longer recommend the site. Which is too bad. But I can recommend that you get a facial from the fabulous Robin, who works at Ole Hendricksen's spa and who was ousted from old face city by an evil partner. (310) 854-7700 is the phone number if you want a fab facial.

Reviews: Wolfgang Tillmans

We went to the Hammer Museum to see the Wolfgang Tillmans exhibit. The photographs are curiously closed down and matter of fact. Like they're pretending to be neutral and devoid of content. But they are queer, odd and emotionally resonant at the same time, they're tilted. One of a man and a deer on a beach, you can't quite reconcile beach, man, deer. Why is the deer that size, who has ever heard of a deer on a beach, why is the man near the deer? It's all very odd.

We saw it a while ago and I haven't mentioned it in my political catatonia and switching jobs and all. But I recommend seeing the exhibit. Go to Westwood and park in the building, they'll validate!

Talking Turkey

This morning, as I made myself bacon and eggs for breakfast, I thought "What did I do in my life before I discovered turkey bacon??????????"

Turkey bacon, good turkey bacon, it's only s few calories per stick, it has a nice salty & smokey flavor, it's great on Turkey Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato sandwiches. BLTs didn't exist in my life prior to turkey bacon. Oh yeah, and eating any form of meat. BLTs wouldn't have been part of my life prior to starting to eat poultry and fish.

I love turkey bacon, and life is just great now that I have discovered turkey bacon. Some turkey bacon is pretty much like cardboard and I don't like that turkey bacon, but Wellshire Farms turkey bacon (I'll give them a plug) is pretty damn good.

You might be thinking, wow, turkey bacon. Or you might be thinking, what the fuck is up with Scott? She's usually a tad more pithy and angry than this. I don't stumble onto her blog to read about turkey friggin' bacon.

And you're right. There's an election coming up, over 100 soldiers have died in Iraq this month, 43 people exploded in a car bomb in Baghdad today, global warming is happening and I don't have air conditioning in my apartment. There's a lot going on. But I can't get into it. I'm happy to just walk my dogs, go to work, eat turkey bacon and shop. I could be doing something other than that. But it's just so hard to get up every morning and be angry. It's so hard to think globally and act locally. It's so hard to read the fucking new york times and Frank Rich's articles which totally rocked this week and have a take away. What's my take away? That the U.S. is being run by a ruthless bunch of motherfuckers who don't know what they're doing and who are too arrogant to take the advice of experts. Give me my bacon, man. I can't think about that. It's easier to think about turkey bacon.

Because how do you ask the last man to die in a war that was a stupid idea to begin with?

And our government has asked that question a hundred times this month.

And Halliburton has posted record second quarter profits this month.

Give .... ME ...... TURKEY ...... BACON

Axis of Stupidity

Does anyone remember that axis of evil speech?

The duly unelected George Jr. gave it. In talking about Iraq, Iran & North Korea he said; "States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. I will not wait on events while dangers (sic) gather. I will not stand by as peril draws closer and closer. The U.S.of A. will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons."

And then he invaded Iraq. A country that was run by a bathist, i.e. pan arab nationalist dictator who didn't like islamist fundamentalists and who didn't train or harbor Queda operatives and who didn't have weapons of mass destruction.

And in invading Iraq he put fear in Iran and North Korea who now have nuclear weapons while U.S. forces are stuck in a no-win quagmire in Iraq - a country that didn't have terrorists or weapons of mass destruction.

Good going George!

And while I'm on the subject of stupidity, the Republican hysteria on homosexuality continues to fuck them over. Yes, Dennis Hastert should resign, he protected an idiot for political purposes. But it ain't homosexuals who are ruining our country. If you're worried about children, then you should be locking up men. After all 95% of pedophiles are strait men.

Reviews: What to Wear

So we went to see "What to Wear" an opera with music by Michael Gordon and libretto by Richard Foreman.

It was a totally amusing event, with fantastic music and a truly Dadaist sensibility. The costumes and props, of which there were many, were charmingly home made, like the original Dada costumes by Hugo Ball.

The opera concerned the concerns of Madeline X, who is beautiful. Madeline X was represented or discussed by a quartet of singers, dressed up like four psycho Andrews Sisters. Madeline has a brain inside her brain that is a box that either is or is not open. Madeline likes or doesn't like to play golf with or with out ducks. There are big ducks and BAD DUCKS in the opera. Ducks who go into restaurants beautifully dressed are eaten. There was a gaggle of "movement ensemble" performers and a rather large chorus who also moved. The performers who were not Madeline were dressed in black suits, with short trousers (the golf thing) and large kilted barrels wrapped around them. They wore striped glasses and a daub of paint on their chins to represent goatees. One of the chorines was an adorable young thing who was having a great time, she couldn't stop smiling. Though when you have a striped golf club as a prop you probably shouldn't be smiling. The set was a charming homemade mish mosh, with a card and mirror motif reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland. Indeed the movement ensemble and chorus looked rather like pawns. Occasionally the movement ensemble would push in a large duck tank. I really enjoyed myself and would certainly buy the album - the music was absolutely wonderful. And I would recommend the opera to anyone who doesn't mind not knowing what's going on. If you have to know what's going on, then don't go.

This picture is of Leche with the "PRE" version of the french market bag. I knitted and knitted and got this huge bag, all floppy. This was my first knitting project that did not involve a rectangle or square. It was also my first felting project. I knit the thing in the round and it was large and floppy. Then I popped it into the washing machine in hot water. And it came out like below. I followed the recipe (I guess they call it a pattern) which I would never actually do if it was a recipe, and the things I wanted to change I should have changed. Proving that knitting isn't really that complicated. Here's a picture of the POST felted bag.

Reviews: Omayra Amaya

Okay Okay, I get more comments about Sci-Fi than I do about the shameful behaviour of the U.S. Government. So I'll shut up about torture. However there's a good op-ed piece in the LA Times today about the situation. Read about it Here

So Last Weekend we drove up to Santa Barbara to visit ye olde daddy and go to a flamenco dance concert that some lovely friends of ours had given us tickets too. As we drove along the 101 we passed the Day Fire in the distance, churning smoke into the sky. In the morning our car had a fine layer of ash upon it. Smoke is best seen with polarizing lenses otherwise you can mistake it for haze or for or clouds. Like when we were coming into California last, over the Sierras, driving over Donner Pass (7089 feet high) and into the great San Joaquin Valley I saw smoke - through my polarized sunglasses and suggested to my companions that maybe we should turn the radio on and see if we could get any news about the fire and whether the road was closed. But there was scoffing, scoffing at my suggestion. I was told that the Valley was always hazy. And then of course we turned a corner and went down into a smoke bank forest fire. But the Day fire is something, fanned by Santa Anas, it is huge and has scorched acres upon acres. Luckily though no one has been killed, and very few structures have been damaged.

Well ye olde daddy made us some artichokes and mahi mahi for dinner and then we went all greased up and happy from having some champagne and mayonnaise with our protein and veg to the theatre where we saw the Omayra Amaya dance troupe. They consisted of a guitarist, a singer, a percussionist and two dancers one of each genders. The percussionist played a box which is apparently a cajon drum, but that is what you find out if you google percussion box flamenco which, of course I didn't do at the time. The two dancers did not dance with one another, they had a series of solo dances. I liked it all, I thought it was rather thrilling and that Omayra had beautiful arms. My beloved companions were less enthusiastic. But we still had a good time. I actually like going to things I don't know anything about. Was this good flamenco? Bad flamenco? Is combining Modern Dance with flamenco a tragedy or brilliant? I don't have an opinion about it! I rather liked the Isadora Duncan\Martha Graham parts of the dance. I was reminded of dancers on Greek friezes during the modern part. I liked the stampy footy part too. But the performance was part of a greater Santa Barbara effort called the Flamenco Arts Festival, so when I read the program notes, I read about the other shows that were part of the Festival and I learned one crucial thing about flamenco. You have to be BORN to it. Flamenco dancers and guitarists have pedigrees and lineages, so don't go see someone who isn't the niece of an uncle of a grandpapa. So I recommend going to the theatre and seeing some flamenco. Oh, the guitarist, Roberto Castellon was brilliant.

And just a general note, I'm so glad the U.S. government has figured out that the terrorists hate us for our freedoms. And now they're busy taking away our freedoms so that the terrorists won't hate us. Isn't that sweet?

Republicans Toe the Line, Part their Asses

Well well well. Forget anything nice I ever said. The Senate leadership just rolled over and played dead. While pretending to be all moral and upright and concerned about the rule of law - unlike the white house, they were secretly in cahoots with the white house to oh, suspend rights that people had under the friggin' Magna Carta, much less the constitution.

Well I guess Karl Rove doesn't believe in habeas Corpus, and therefore no one else does either. This is just another way that the dancing republicans pretend to have diversity but actually don't.

McCain and Warner just suck the titty of the republican war chests, parting their partisan asses to special interests. Disgusting.

The Torturer Next Door

Slate has an insightful article about why the US Military Lawyers are against the Bush Administration's proposal to make torture legal for the american military. It's called the Cooler Heads. One of the reasons the Military and old hands like McCain and Warner want to stick by the Geneva conventions is that it makes the rules of war clear for soldiers on the ground and it gives a soldier a legal reason to disobey an order.

Think about what we ask a soldier to do. We ask them to kill people legally. Isn't that a mind blower? A soldier needs a clear framework to do her job.

And now think, what happens to the person who is asked to hold a person's head underwater until they are breathing water? What happens to a person who is ordered to place electrodes on another human? What happens to the person who delivers the electrical jolt?

How can a government strip the moral integrity of a young serviceman by asking them to do that? And what happens when that young man comes home?

George Bush Says It's OKAY to Torture American Soldiers

I'm just so amazed at the ability of the Bush Administration to completely ignore the rule of law. So NOW the Republicans, lead by the "I never met a penis electrode I didn't like" guys at the white house, want to arbitrarily sign off of international rules about torture under the Geneva convention. And they're bashing the Republicans who don't want to abide by international treaties that 1) have been in existence for a while and 2) were mainly written by the US, back when we were the good guys. It's very interesting that the people who actually have served in the military, McCain, Warner, Powell, want protections for US soldiers while the guys who sat on their hands and have never been in battle don't.

There was an article in the LA Times yesterday about how this was going to cost McCain big among the evangelical christian right, who also, apparently think it's cool for governments to torture people. In fact, if it wasn't for those terribly Popish costumes, they'd be bringing back the Spanish Inquisition. What McCain and Powell get, and what this administration seems to be clueless about is that we win when we persist in being better.

There has been a shift away from property rights to human rights, and people persist in being confused by this. It used to be that children were the property of their father, a wife her husband, a farmer his landlord, a serf his lord, a nation it's King. But property rights suck. Human Rights don't. And there is a clear and shiny line that even the most Manichean among us can see. Which is you can not harm another person. You can not violate their dignity. Which is why the Geneva Conventions are a shining beacon of humanity, really one of the nicest things us people can point to and say "see, we're civilized."

So of course, the right wing extremists running our government are against it.

Stale Saying Commonplace Chestnut

I went to the bookstore and forgot to get a book of Sudoku puzzles. But I did wander through the Sci-Fi section. My cousin had recommended a few books when I had last seen A., at the Sci-Fi World Con. I had gone to a store before and had not seen any of the one's she had recommended. So, in an effort to be gone from the house while the cleaner was there, I decamped to the mall and stalked around a chain bookstore. There are some pretty racy book covers in the old Sci-Fi world. A lot of breast plates and naked backs with tattoos. Anyway, I picked up a couple books. Science Fiction books with racy covers. Then I was feeling guilty that I was not at home working, so I walked over to the tech section and started to look at the books there. I thumbed through a few java books, thinking, "But I don't want to learn another language!" Can you hear me stomp my little foot? But then I saw a book about PHP and MySQL and since I'm futzing around with those as well I decided to buy that book. So I wandered around the chain bookstore and found the counter where you could buy the books. There were actually a lot of counters where you could buy books on every level of the store, they were just unmanned as it were so you had to wander until you found a populated counter. Anyway there I was buying some Sci-Fi and Computer Programming books and I thought;

"Am I a cliche?"

Chocolate

Today is Milton Snavely Hershey's birthday, the man who brought us the chocolate bar. Who the hell names their kid SNAVELY?
Well apparently, now that we have the internet we can answer that question, not very many. But there is a popular limerick about Snavely the snail. Which goes like this:

Some unseemly snorkelers from Wales,
Were arrested and sent off to jails,
For acts most immoral
Among the reefs coral,
Such as writing graffiti on snails.


And then there is a site which morphs the limerick to different verse forms, (a la Queaneau) here:
A Study in Verse Forms by Peg Kay

Petty Tyrants

Sometimes it is just appalling how awful people are about everything and to anyone no matter what the situation.
For example, I had to go to the DMV, always a pleasant experience, for a second time in a month. The first time we had been told that we had filled out the transfer form wrong. The beloved's Rev. Auntie was leaving the country and we decided that the peeb nation fit in her car real well so we'd buy the car off her. The Rev was leasing the car, so the (paperless) title had to go from the lease company to her and then from her to us. And we had just mashed it all up on one piece of paper that the lady at the DMV had given us. So she told us to come back with two orange pieces of paper - going from the lease company to the Rev and then from the rev to us. Okay. So the Rev sent us the needed orange document from the lease company to her. Then she left for the outer Hebrides to bring the word of our lord to some sheep, some salmon and some men in skirts with no underwear. I popped over to the DMV.

So I explained to the woman behind the DMV counter what had happened, proudly displayed the two orange pieces of paper, waited for her to grock it. Then she said, whose Akbar? Which is something that I don't grock. I don't know I said. Well, whose Akbar she said again, quite pointlessly I thought, like why don't you give me more info because I don't know who Akbar is and I don't know why you're talking to him, capice? Well it turns out the VIN number was wrong, and Akbar had the VIN number on the (paperless) title, and so while the ORANGE pieces of paper and all my documents had ONE VIN Number the (paperless) title had Akbar's VIN number. So the woman behind the DMV counter told me to take the car, go around back follow the signs and get the car VERIFIED. What she didn't tell me was that I was supposed to take the car to the big glass doors right in front of her. Whatever, I can follow directions. So I get in the car and follow the signs and get in the VERIFICATION lane which is empty and right next to the driving test lane which has a line in it. The two lanes go up around the building and have little signs on the pavement demarking the lanes, here driving test, here VERIFICATION lane. With a STOP sign indicator for each lane. All the driving test people were in line behind the STOP sign and I drive up to the VERIFICATION STOP. I wonder briefly why I'm not parking way back there in front of the glass doors so that the behind the counter DMV woman can see that I am following directions waiting for VERIFICATION. But I am a smart chick, I can read, and so I park where the signs tell me to park. There is a guard guy ordering the test drive lane cars, and he sees me, waves at me and goes on ordering the driving test cars. When he has gone up and down the driving car lanes he comes over to me and asks "Are there a lot of people in there?" motioning to the brick DMV building beside us. "Yes, it's very crowded today." I say. "How many people are in there?" he asks, "A lot, it's crowded" I repeat, "You wouldn't know how many people are in there, would you?" "Many, many people are in there, " I say thinking maybe he doesn't like the word crowded. "Can you tell me exactly how many people are in there?" "Probably the average amount of people are in there, for an average September week day" I reply, getting more and more annoyed with guard guy. "But you wouldn't KNOW" he says triumphantly. "Not exactly," I say. "You wouldn't know cause you cant see through a wall!" I am amazed. I can't see through walls, doesn't he know that I am Superman's sister? I actually DO have X-Ray vision and can see that he has a very small penis. I don't often let on about who I am.

"So how can you expect them to see you if you're not in front of the glass doors?" He goes on to tell me. "Why does it say to stop here then?" I ask, but what I really want to do is punch this guy. "I don't know, but you have to move back." He proceeds to talk to me more about buildings, brick walls, signs; with his arm on the car door so I CAN'T MOVE BACK.

Well it goes on and on after that, but that guy is going to have one short life, because someone some day is going to have temper management issues. Someone who has no patience with being in some frigging Kafkaesque bureaucratic insane asylum is going to take him out. And I will testify on behalf of the defense, asking for clemency.

And of course, I have to go back.

Reviews

There is a wee show at the Museum of Arts and Crafts that we went to see this weekend. Called Tigers and Jagaurs it featured local artists (L.A.) and was about Asian\Latino synergy and influence. Of note were Bari Kumar's "Mas Para Menos", which featured a multi-armed Kali\Jesus figure. Totally fantastic. And Clement Hamani's "Rice Rocket", a low-rider rick shaw blaring 70s oldies. Richard Duardo's energetic mish mosh of punk\asian\latino prints and Shizu Saldamando's chinese screen of a Hungington Park party. Small but choice. Upstairs there was a much larger exhibit of palestinian embroidery, that made me think, "Oh those Poor Exploited Women!" It certainly didn't make me feel how great palestinian culture was, it just made me think about how OPPRESSED those women are.

This is actually wrong, and not just silly wrong

SO I was bumming around the internet, avoiding working, (yes! I am working, for pay and once, for a facial) and I found this photo of the Sedan Crater. I have a rule that all the photography I put on the blog is mine, but this isn't. Since I haven't been to the Nevada Nuclear Test Site.

This is wrong. Making explosives that make craters you can see from outer space AND that are radioactive is immoral. Why would anyone want to do this? What moral compass do they have? Reading the articles that came out on the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl accident, I was amazed that anyone would want to continue to build new nuclear power plants. A week later the L.A. Times had an article about how nuclear waste site designers have to figure out warning signs that will last 100,000 years and be legible in languages that haven't even been invented yet.

Think about that. Warning signs for the ages in languages we haven't imagined yet.

Meanwhile the bobos in washington have continued to fuck up the world, squandering all good will towards the U.S. by invading a country that didn't do anything and now they don't have enough manpower or friends to stop nuclear proliferation, which, I hasten to mention, will actually increase the probability of dead people coming your way.

I originally wrote "Bonobos in Washington" but those monkeys would be doing a better job than the ID10ts currently there.

Orchid

Here's an orchid that I've adopted and almost killed, but it is apparently happy and blooming now.

Just Plain Wrong

apologies in advance. I don't have a picture, I didn't take my camera.

That said, it is just plain WRONG to wear your renaissance faire costume to the World Con Sci Fi convention. WRONG. Luckily there weren't a lot of people wearing Star Trek outfits, because most people at the Sci Fi convention were spherically challenged, and those outfits don't like an ounce of blubber, but still, at least a few pointy ears would be in keeping with the theme of the conference you spent money to attend. I hate to say this, but good old Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of York ain't in outerspace.

So I went to visit my cousin, who has been going to the sci fi convention since 1955, since it was in So Cal, this year and we had lunch and strolled the convention site.

There are many things that you don't really get to do as a grown-up, wear capes, make loud noises for no apparent reason, dress in costumes. Being a grown up is rather boring, so I'm all for a little fantasy dress up. In fact, speaking of loud noises I started tap dancing at one point because it's fun to make loud noises with your feet. Put me in a top hat and noisy shoes and I'm happy as a clam. But I do think ye merrye ye olde englunde is not sci-fi. Give me a Klingon, an Alien, Sigourney Weaver; but don't give me stale ale. If you know what I mean.

Anyway, there is a heavy duty component of FANTASY lumped into the fantasy - Sci-Fi world and so many people wear wizard costumes and purple velvet capes. You can buy handmade cape clasps in the shape of dragons and feather masks and such, lots of leather boots of all sorts - black shiny stiff storm trooper boots, soft brown leather elf boots. A rather popular, but to me totally bewildering, accessory was the tail. The first time I saw someone wearing a tail I thought, "Very few people's asses can take that kind of scrutiny. Yours for example. I wouldn't draw attention to it." Then I noticed it was a common trait, as it were. But wouldn't you think that people would be using something other than raccoon tails? First we have Elizabeth in Space, and now she's joined by DANIEL BOONE! Metaphors are getting mixed with a cement truck at the sci fi con! If I was going to wear a tail I think I would pick a dragon tail. Yet I did not see a single dragon tail being sported as I walked about. And did you notice? There was nary a tail at the Emmys last night. Someone better contact some Hollywood sylist types, I want to see Angelina in a tail. She's probably half dragon anyway.

So after lunch, we went up to the break out session on Restoration Dance. This is not THE EMPIRE being restored, but rather the secret Jane Austen sci-fi sect, who had gathered to do a little promenading around the conference room at the Hilton. Mr Bennett, Lizzie Bennett, Mrs. Bennett, Wharf, random Elizabethans, a few hobbits and some wizards were all there. I was reminded of going to the gay two stepping bar in Austin and watching the texan cowboy queers dance the two step together. Very fun to watch two guys in cowboy boots and hats waltz clog about the dance floor. Similarly, vary fun to watch a Klingon reach out a hand to touch the gloved fingers of Lizzie Bennett, who is wondering "Where the hell is DARCY?"

Well, I can never actually go attend the conference, since I obviously don't have the wardrobe, but it was grand fun and if you're in Japan next year, you can stop in.

Face Time

Well I haven't written in a while, and I'm just going to blame the house guest who is staying with us, who is the most polite house guest on earth and who really isn't the reason why, but I'll just do that anyway. I won't blame the depression that only large quantities of bittersweet chocolate gellato could assuage, depression in the face of the continued rejection of job seeking.

Anyway, my next door neighbor is running this really great e-commerce site called face city shop and since I live next door I just sort of invited myself over and said, what face products should I use? Well Robin asked what I was using and ominously told me, "Those products are good, and EXPENSIVE, but they're not PROFESSIONAL." Well, dear me! I want to be CHEAP and PROFESSIONAL! Except of course, at work where I want to be employed, expensive and professional. Anyway it turns out Robin doesn't really believe in night creme or eye creme, which bummed me out because I was looking forward to the Ultimate Lift Eye Gel on the face city site. So I can't report on that. But I did get some TRUTH SERUM (watch out when you come over for tea cause I'll put a few drops in yours and see what happens) and some soothing creme and this stuff smells like those chewable orange vitamin pills from the 70s. So it's kind of weird to occasionally get a whiff of that orange smell as you talk to people about why they should hire you. Even though they are 10 years younger than you are and have never worked at a profitable company before and so you know they aren't going to hire you and you wonder why they bothered.

But my skin looks pretty good, but it's very potent stuff and I quickly realized that I was using too much and the vit c was irritating my dermatitis - except you couldn't see it. And so most of my redness and blotchiness is kind of gone. I will report back when I've finished the bottles off. But so far, it's pretty good stuff.

Technology

I had this really good rant going about how this administration proves that neo con theories are totally stupid and bankrupt and how they've fucked everything up by being delusional school marms pointing their fingers at the world and tsk tsking when countries won't BEHAVE!
It was really good, but it all vanished when I tried to spell check, so you just have to take my word for it. It was pithy and well written and if Condi Rice read it she would fall down in tears. Alas, my ability to save the world was ruined by technology. Or my failure to SAVE prior to spell checking.
So here is a photo of a plaque at the Santa Barbara City Hall honoring the original white women settlers who came there. I thought it was appropriate today since today is not only the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, but Henry Gates had an op-ed piece in the NYT about trying to find the descendants of the few free black patriots who fought in the American Revolutionary War so that they can join the Sons or Daughters of the Revolution. The DAR being the group that refused to allow the mezzo soprano Marian Anderson to sing in their hall because she was black. Most of the free black men who fought in the revolutionary war fought for the British, since they had abolished slavery back in Britain by then and they offered to manumit any slaves who fought for them. This was one of those anarchic things that tickled my fancy. Imagine the stuffed up snobby DAR and SAR meetings being suddenly packed with african americans. Hee heee!

The Hood: Flora

I am not one who likes "privacy plantings" as they are called. They are not pedestrian friendly. Or community friendly. They are the opposite of the front porch that makes neighborhoods neighborhoody. I mean a few discreet plantings are all well and good. I have placed a potted senna, a lovely bush\vine, in front of my living room window, but it is literally in front of my ground floor living room window. Every time the neighbors walked by on their way to the trash my dogs went crazy. This bush just affords a little more privacy and makes people not walk directly in front of my window. It doesn't wall off my entire house from the community.

Well this picture is of privacy plantings run amok. Yes - there's a house back there!!! Vines cover the entire house and all the fences. There was a sign up for a while, instructing the mailman to just "throw the mail over the hedge."

I love that - just throw the mail over the hedge. It's so devil may care. Throw caution and your Visa bill to the wind! Don't even bother to find the mailbox, we'll find the mail among the weeds. I wonder if there are mail rules governing how things need to be delivered. Like "A Post Officer Must Never Heave Mail." It sort of gives a new meaning to over the hedge.

Reviews

Don't read a review or talk to anyone, just go see Little Miss Sunshine. Damn I wish I'd written it.

I finished Allison Bechdel's Fun Home yesterday. It is a beautiful graphic memoir about growing up, reading with your father, and finally putting the family secrets all in perspective. Speaking of perspective, the drawings make use of prespective brilliantly, with the point of view shifting to help portray the story. At one moment you can be on the ground, the next looking up at children hanging off the stairs, looking down at your father catching you in the pool. It's really wonderful.

We also saw Devil Wears Prada, a perfect movie to spend some time enjoying yourself in air conditioning. It made me incredibly nostalgic for New York and the publishing world. My old haunts, my old scramble to clean the desk, my old not getting into the same elevator. The clothes were pretty awful and the story was pretty lame - she's BAD because she has to work late! But Meryl was magnificent and the girl who plays the first assistant was hillarious.

Battery! Schmattery!

So I turned on the computer the other day and got a warning that said "Your battery is low, press F1 to continue and F2 to configure."
Ahem.
So I went to the Dell Website, thinking to go to their SUPPORT page and SEARCH for information about this low code OS ERROR on their machine. They didn't have one.

Think about this. A computer company doesn't have a place on their web site that consumers can look up support information. Is this dumb or what? You can't search for HELP at Dell. There is no little link on their main page, or poking around that sends you to a support area. I later find out that's because they have a separate site with a separate url. So if you just go to dell.com you can't get HELP.

So I rooted around in the closet and found the Owner's Manual. There were two battery entries in the book, one of which says that you need to be careful when you replace the battery because it could EXPLODE.

So I googled Dell Battery Explode and found out that there is a lovely photograph of a Laptop Exploding into Flames

So for now I am just keeping the computer on.

This is a photograph of a lovely, rustic mountain art cabin.

Signs: & Things I wonder about

So it's now the tenth day of a heat wave (in West LA, the valleys have been burning up longer than that) with temps above 100 digits and I say "It's hot." It didn't bother me really, it still cools down at night (though apparently not as much as it used to according to the LA Times the low temperature has risen 7 degrees in the past twenty years because we keep on cementing things up.) Until a couple of days ago and then it had just been too damn hot for too damn long. Our apartment is un-air conditioned and so we use fans and appreciate the bit of ocean breeze that kicks up around 4:00 ish. But we're on the ground floor and it's a bit of a dicey neighborhood so I don't like to leave all the windows open at night, particularly in the bedroom. So I spent a lot of the weekend napping with my body sweating up the sheets where ever my skin touched the bed. And staying awake at night listening to the motorcycles roaring down La Cienega and homeless people routing around in the alley, while sweating.

The thing about heat this hot for so long is it saps your ability to do anything. You certainly don't want to move fast. And you certainly don't want to have the sun touch your skin. And you certainly don't want to exercise, or paint, or walk about town taking photos. Cooking seems incredibly complicated and ice cubes are in high demand, but you are too unmotivated to get up and walk the ten steps to get them.

Which makes you wonder about the commitment of all those suicide bombers in Iraq. It is hot in Iraq, temps for months in the century mark. And yet people can consistently get worked up enough to go out and blow themselves up in a crowd of civilians. I mean when it's as hot as Hades and you are going to blow yourself up, you know it's going to get quite a bit hotter when you explode. I can barely make myself go out and water the herbs in this weather and yet day after day someone is willing to strap on twenty pounds of explosive and walk in the heat to a market and blow himself up. That is a marketing message that is WORKING!

Beso

Beso trotted over here to my chair and jumped up so he could breathe on me (the way he likes to) and pushed me back into the wall because my chair is on rollers. Then he told me he was 1) bored and 2) hot and 3 I didn't put enough photos of him up on the internet.

Well I've done something about number 3 now.

Foreign Policy

An American Foreign Policy That Both Realists and Idealists should Fall In Love With
The New York Times today continues to prove that it has a DAMN GOOD Op-Ed page. And considering the hopelessness of this week's news; the Mumbai bombings, the continuing descent into tribal civil war in Iraq, the beginning of the Hesbollah\Israel war, Geo. W. receiving a barrel of herring - it was relieving to read that there could be a game plan for trying to stop all this violence and to try and make a world that had more economic, social, political and ecological justice for all of it's inhabitants.

This is a picture of a male date palm flower. The female date palms create dates that are inedible by hound dogs while maintaining an irresistible allure to hound dogs. So it adds a sort of karma-esque aspect to life in Palm Tree Lined L.A., what goes around (and down) comes back to you one way or the other.

Reviews

This is a flower from a tree - I think it looks like parrot beaks. Anyway we've been seeing things. Last week we went on a public radio movie binge and saw the two public radio movies. Prairie Home was a stirring reminder of why some people are on radio - Garrison Keillor is very, very odd looking! And WordPlay was a fascinating reminder that Bill Clinton is smart and able to solve problems, so it made me nostalgic for the days when the U.S. was run by someone who was smart and could solve problems.
TAXIDERMY! We also popped into downtown LA and saw the Rauchenberg combine show at MOCA. This was a rather comprehensive show of just Raushenberg's combine work. It was very interesting and actually I thought it packed a greater visual punch than the Rauchenberg retrospective at the Guggenheim a couple of years ago. That show was so huge that you were beat down by the sheer output of the man. There were a couple of paintings that had a chain and a brick attached to them, so that they couldn't run away, a commentary on slavery? Who knows, but just fabulous to see a chained brick painting. And of course the famous goat combine was there. The kashmir stuffed goat surrounded by a tire and standing on a painting is a classic Rauchenberg image. And I was glad to see that it had been cleaned up and restored. The last time I had seen it the goat was rather dusty, but now it's coat gleams. The amount of stuffed animals in the show made me think that maybe Rauchenberg was into taxidermy the way David Sedaris is into taxidermy and that maybe they are related, since this taxidermy fetish is genetic; Gengis Khan --> Bob Rauchenberg --> David Sedaris. Makes sense doesn't it?
We also went to the Hockney portraits show, and I found out - once again, but like oysters you have to try occasionally to see if your tastes change - that Hockney's work leaves me cold. I did enjoy seeing a portrait of a friend of mine, but the paintings did not move me or transport me or make me think of anything except that Hockney paints a lot of paintings. He has a good work ethic.
Speaking of paintings I was cruising around and checked in on my friend M. and she put some lovely watercolours up on the web.

Watercoloursbymolly

I also found this blog site of a painter who is, I guess, attempting to paint one painting a day. At least his blog is titled one painting a day. He paints a lot of images from video games, which I guess is the next step of art dealing with pop art, and there are some images of circuit boards that I rather like. But it is this painting of toast being buttered that I think is pretty fun.

toast painting

We've also bought a lot of music, and I must say that I bought the new Neil Young album simply because he has a song called lets impeach the president, because I've never really been a Neil Young fan, that's for rather older surfer dudes, not moi. But it is a rollicking album, and Young's raspy voice makes singing along, at the top of your voice as you drive down La Cienega with your windows open very fun. "LET'S IMPEACH THE PRESIDENT!"

Yeah baby!

Signs: Reading Room

Here's an old Christian Science Reading Room sign, the building is still being used as a CS Reading Room so it is also a contemporary sign. Notice how they don't ask you to ask them about CS, like the "Ask me About Kabala" sign down the street from me. No, CS is old fashioned and discrete, they let you rest your feet in a reading room. Which is why there are fewer and fewer CSists in the world, they are not keeping up in the cutthroat competition that religion has become these days.

Speaking of a losing company; General Motors. I don't know if this is happening in your hood or not, but in LA GM is offering to subsidize your gas consumption at 1.99 if you buy one of their gas guzzling cars, like the Hummer, which gets 10 to 12 miles per gallon in the city. But after a year you're on your own sucker! I was ranting about how stupid this is and how no one would fall for such a stupid offer, and how desperate GM must be to offer this kind of money losing incentive - you know, just because I like to kick a dog when it's down. But my beloved, C. said, "Well it's just like when we were at H.D. Buttercup and that guy said that all those 90 dollar pillows were on sale at 20% off if you bought four. And we spent 30 minutes looking at all the pillows trying to find the perfect combination of four pillows because they were 20% off." Which we did, because it was such a deal, like 1.99 gas. I mean for four decorative pillows instead of paying 360 dollars we would be spending 288 dollars. On pillows. It was such a good deal. And we had picked out the four perfect pillows that would look so great on the new couch when I realized that 1) we're unemployed 2) we have hound dogs and 3) hound dogs and silk pillows that are dry clean only do not go together so the whole IDEA of DECORATOR pillows in this context was RIDICULOUSLY STUPID. And we left with out any pillows. I mean it was such an insane idea that I had to make ridiculous an ADVERB for chrissakes. That's how stupid it was. But it wasn't as stupid as paying over 50 grand for a car that gets 10 miles per gallon so you can get 1.99 gas for a year. That's just pathetic.

Wacky Christ Bus Signs

Oh dear lord, aren't these a blast from the past? Some stoned-hippie-jesus-freak past that other people did. I didn't. And the thing is, GW Bush could sit down and smoke a spliff and agree with these people.

As everyone knows, I am not religious. I missed that bone when I was made. But all adolescents go through a religiosity period, where they try and understand why they are odd and different and maybe God will give them meaning in life. So there was a period when I thought about being a priest. (Notice the gender\career issue) So I thought I'd start by becoming an altar boy. But Father Sanner told me I couldn't be an altar boy since BOY was the operative word. Well that put me off good old roman catholicism, that and Father Bill's nose hair, which frightened me, and his guitar, which seemed out of place in a catholic church and his wanting to do in person confessions. I wanted to confess in darkness, thank you very much, though I always lied about my sins. I didn't sin enough and so my list was embarrassingly short, so I would just add some for good measure. I didn't really know what any of the big bad sins meant, so I had no clue that what Susie and I were doing in her closet was a sin, so I couldn't confess that.

So I went to a synagogue, a mormon class and sampled what the episcopals, baptists and methodists had to offer. When my brother had the great idea to try the hippie jesus freak prayer service the next town over. We went to this flat-faced apartment building, up to a second floor apartment filled with tattered couches and cushions and HIPPIE JESUS FREAKS. They had HAIR. Lots of it, all over not just sprouting out of their noses. They prayed and sang songs and spoke of Jesus, and they had a leader and they embraced peace and love and hugged each other. So I was hugged. By people I didn't know. Which sort of made me uptight. But I was a totally un-cool prig wasn't I???? They were full of Jesus' love and so why would I not want to hug them? The whole thing made me more and more uptight and I thought they were a little silly, but also scary. Of course, when you're 13 and out of your element with HIPPIES, it all seems a little scary. Anything new is scary. And being the new person in a group is scary. The hippie jesus freaks all knew each other and they new that my brother and I were fresh blood. After a while the leader asked that all those people who hadn't accepted jesus and been born again should go with him into the back room so they could bring jesus into their hearts. There was no fucking way I was going in the back room. My brother of course, who WAS an altar boy, was waving his hands and jumping up and down like a jackass. As if people didn't know we were there already. As if they weren't looking at us, as if the invitation wasn't specifically addressed to us and go in the back room, accept jesus and drink the Kool Aide kiddies RIGHT NOW, wasn't the message.

So I just said, "I've done that." "You've accepted jesus into your heart and been SAVED????" "Yeah, last month. It was great." My brother looked at me and said, "No you haven't" Thanks a lot Mr. Altar Boy who has to confess that he steal's grandma's cigarettes and smokes them when he goes to confession. Thanks for the sterling example of honesty. So we start to bicker, "Yes, I have, you weren't there." "No you didn't." "Uh, huh, at Janice's you're never at Janice's so how do you know?" The leader broke the bickering up and took C. into the back room where he drank the Kool Aide. (My brother was completely insufferable after that for about one month. Then he became a Buddhist and started walking around town in torn up sheets, which went over really well in suburbia.) I was left with the rest of the congregation doing super-secret jesus stuff that you only can do after you've drunk the Kool Aide, so I mumbled along and kept alert so that I could kneel at the appropriate time. When we were done I was out of there like a bat out of hell, and I made my brother come with me.

So my friend M. saw this bus and figured it was a sign, luckily she had her camera with her. So we have M. to thank for my ranting trip down memory lane. When I first saw these I thought "It's Dr. Bonner's Bus!" remember that soap?

Purchasing while Unemployed

Well, I counted up my schedule for the last three months and I have gone on over 22 interviews and phone screens. You think I would be getting good at this, but the old grey matter is not what it once was and I get stymied by the differences between UML and XML. So I say Oh yeah UML really needs to have a consistent structure, it needs to be well defined, which is you know a big foot in mouth gaffe. You wouldn't think that one letter would make a difference but tell that to the kids who lost at the national spelling bee last month. They know. They're prepared for a life in IT with it's TLAs. (Three Letter Acronyms).

I read an article in the LA Times about Charisma and how scientists are trying to identify what makes charisma. Personally I think I have charm, but was passed up on the charisma helping. They said in the Times that if you wanted to have charisma you should cock your head and open your eyes slightly wider when the other person is talking. Whatever you do, don't flare your nostrils as that is a sign of aggression, I learned that from my Karate teacher - I flared my nostrils a lot in NYC on the subway but it didn't seem to do that much. Anywho, I have been trying to cock my head and open my eyes wide while interviewing, but it makes me feel like Norma Desmond. I spent a lot of time cocking my head at the international house of soft porn, but they failed to see my value as a charismatic leader able to motivate employees into performing IT miracles. Oh well.

But speaking of unemployment, we purchased a new jungle gym for the hounds, they quickly identified it as upholstery to be assaulted. Here's a shot of them testing the quality of the stuffing. What were we thinking of? We purchased an apple green leather couch while unemployed! Stop me someone. It's like stalking your ex on ebay because he said that he was in creditors anonymous. I mean, we're unemployed so we have all this time to shop, for couches. We went and test drove a new car the other day. This morning I poured a glass of water on my wallet to cool off my credit card.

My next door neighbor, a very cool woman, mentioned her store - here's the web site:
Face City Shop

It's very cool and I haven't decided what to purchase. I need the "employable me" face cream. It's all possible in America with a credit card. I will report back on what I found, the eye cream and Fiji products (helping women and the environment in Fiji by creating sustainable products for export) are cool.

Bad Leche

Our apartment was recently raided by the homeland security forces. They found, among other things twenty pounds of fertilizer, some blasting caps and large quantities of rawhides stashed under Leche's bed. Worst of all they found large quantities of cash and a passport hidden in a dog-eared, hollowed out copy of "The Art of Raising A Puppy."
Apparently Leche has become an Islamist Militant and the Canadian Security Forces tipped off the Feds. She had been writing some dangerous stuff in AlQueda.MySPace.com - she's shown on her home page with an AK-47, wearing a head scarf and eviscerating a stuffed care bear.
I pleaded with the officers, she's just a teenager! But they took her away to Gitmo. I have contacted lawyers and they say that there's nothing to do since she's been classified as an enemy combatant. I did receive this picture of her in her new surroundings.

Bread

For years I bought bread in a local bakery or at the bread counter of Balduccis or Citronella in NYC. And I made bread with my own two little hands. Bread requires flour, water, yeast, salt and maybe a pinch of sugar to start the yeast feasting. I have made flat breads, crackers, english muffins, slicing loafs, artisanal pain de levain and bread where I have coaxed wild yeast to grow in my own kitchen. I like bread and I never had problems finding bread in NYC. There was a darling little whole grain loaf at Citronella that they would slice up and it was wonderful on sandwiches and it was not huge so it was a good size for a two person household. And it toasted up so warm and crunchy that it really made you appreciate the handmade artisanal butter in the European style that you put on it. Yum.
I usually buy bread at the health food store; I like brown bread, whole grain bread, bread that has fiber in it. Well, actually, I usually buy most everything at the health food store. But we had to buy grocery store things and so we popped off to an actual grocery store to shop and I wanted to have a sandwich for lunch so I went to the bread aisle.
Now, I was actually prepared to not want to buy 98% of the bread in the bread aisle. But it's granola tofu fuckin' California here, we invented health food, you think you could get a whole wheat loaf of sandwich bread.
I actually looked at the ingredient lists of the bread, because I had no clue about the brands. This was actually harder than it sounds because I didn't have my reading glasses on. I don't really wander around with my reading glasses on, because they distort everything far away and so I tend to fall down if I just wear them. And I'm too vain to carry them around. So it's often hard for me to read menus in dark restaurants or ingredient items or fine print. However I persevered and found out something horrifying and shocking. In every loaf the second ingredient was high-fructose corn syrup.

Which means it is not bread.

Which means that diabetics should not be in the same room with it.

People think they are being "good" when buying these ridiculous "whole wheat" products that have absolutely no nutritional value. This is NOT BREAD. Bread does not contain CORN SYRUP. In my "Baking with Julia" bread bible book there is no entry in the index for corn syrup. Corn Syrup is something that mega-agri-business invented so that coca cola didn't need to have expensive sugar in it, it could have inexpensive corn syrup. CORN SYRUP is evil!!!!
And that is NOT bread!

So fear gripped me, what if I had been eating corn-syrup-fake-bread all this time. I had never checked the ingredient lists at the health food store! What if, like Canola Oil, it was all a crock o' shite, and we had been conned into thinking this was a better choice that we were willing to pay 2 dollars more for?
The next time I went to Whole Paycheck I checked the bread ingredients. We are safe. No corn syrup. In fact, often no sugar and when it is present it is like the last ingredient, which is where it should be. I was really worried that I was going to have to bake bread on a regular basis, which is one thing when you are unemployed, but another when you are employed.

Read the ingredients!

Signs: Joe's Cafe

Here's a sign from Joe's Cafe in Santa Barbara. We got the dogs groomed first and then went to the beach for a day, which you know is always a clever thing to do. We did not eat at Joe's, but apparently the food is good. We did eat at a local joint in the harbour and watched the sea urchin catch get loaded on trucks. Amazing how much those little fiching boats hold in their holds. We also watched some evening sail boat races and swimming races.


My friend M. has sent me a sign from Seattle.

Signs: Pub & Things I wonder About

Here's another pub sign.

Lately the federal reserve and some other economists have been shouting about inflation inflation inflation. Now. In 2006 - not last year, not the year before. Where have they been for the past five years??? Housing prices have quadrupled in the past five years. Doesn't that count as inflation? It seems to me that it should, duh!

What were they Thinking!!!!

This is what I woke up to this morning as I opened the LA Times to the front page:

The Pentagon has decided to omit from new detainee policies a key tenet of the Geneva Convention that explicitly bans "humiliating and degrading treatment," according to knowledgeable military officials, a step that would mark a further, potentially permanent, shift away from strict adherence to international human rights standards.


My first response was that if this was not grounds for impeachment for cause, it was grounds for impeachment for sheer stupidity. Currently we are investigating - Oh! So Many! - allegations of torture and murder that our troops are accused of committing. From Abu Grahaib to Haditha to Gitmo, we have killed and tortured people who we didn't have enough translators to interpret, all to keep Amerika "safe." Alberto Gonzalez, the chief architect of the administration's it's fun to torture brown skinned people in violation of international law because we have god on our side - actually got promoted for writing the memo that says torture is okay and legal if we do it, but not if they do it. In an appallingly sick show of alleged honor, Gonzalez threatened to resign last week because representatives thought he shouldn't have searched the office of a congressperson who had 90,000 in his freezer at home. However his real shame is letting all of our servicemen and women become potential torturers. What does it do to a young person to be directed to put electrodes on another human?

The administration's response to the Haditha massacre was to put together a "Core Values" slide show for the troops in Iraq. It was to emphasize the legal, moral and ethical standards for war. What happens when the policy manual doesn't have any ethical or legal standards?

America is a long-time signatory to the Geneva Convention. The thinking goes that there are rules of war and if we abide by them we can expect others to abide by them. We can't be shocked, shocked, shocked if our service men and women come into harm's way, get tortured or beheaded - because we have no moral standing to complain.

We win the war by being better, not by being just as bad.

International House of Soft Porn

So I went on an (onan!) interview for a position at the International House of Soft Porn; cable channel & web porn division. It was not in a mansion and there were no men in bathrobes wandering around. It was typical corporate blah land, plants, "designy" lobby chairs, anatomically correct manikins and some soft core mags to flip through while waiting.

There is much art in the world. Much of the art in museums has naked ladies in it. Therefore if you paint a picture with a naked lady it is art. Alas, there is so much bad, bad, bad non art that has naked ladies in it, but I've rarely seen it as a corporate decorating motif. (Though I have seen it used with abandon as a motif at a friend's house - particularly the little naked lady dwarf stool.)

It is very interesting to pass by cubicles filled with pictures of your kids, dogs, kitties and Miss June's titties.

The job was a typical IT job. They had systems, they had business needs, they needed things to work. I had a pleasant chat with the manager (VP) of the department for an hour or so. I asked the penetratingly direct question "So, are you a waterfall kind of guy?" Notice I refrained from asking about water sports.

When I spoke to the HR person she said, "we have benefits, but the PRODUCT is around." She couldn't say "Hey, we make PORN! You gotta be comfortable with PORN to work here." Which would have been refreshing. I said "Well it's just a different kind of cupcake, Kerri."

Things I wonder about Career Opportunities

More things I wonder about. Since I'm unemployed I spend time thinking about my career and wondering if anyone will ever employ me as an IT Project Manager, a job for which I am highly qualified since I've been doing it for - oh - let's say 15 years. However, being an IT Project Manager isn't a really glamorous job and while it should pay okay there are more lucrative opportunities to be explored.

For instance, how do you get to be a Cult Leader? L. Ron Hubbard was a pretty awful science fiction writer when he took his science fiction ideas and turned them into a really lucrative cult. He was so successful that the COS pretended he was still alive for years and had other hacks write horrible science fiction stories under his name to continue the franchise. And they figured out how to rig the NY Times best seller list by having their cult members go to bookstores and buy cases of his books, thereby sending him onto the best sellers list.

Or how do you get to be a War Lord? The only qualifications for being a War Lord seems to be having a Toyota Land Cruiser, a bunch of younger cousins and some Kalishnikovs. But being a War Lord allows you to do all sorts of taxation with out representation stuff that lines your coffers. It's pretty lucrative and you get the bonus of having people really really look up to you. It's great for the ego. Now I don't have a bunch of cousins, or a Toyota Land Cruiser and I don't know how to fire a Kalashinikov but if you look at the Al Qaeda in Iraq blooper real apparently Al-Zarqawi doesn't either. I can trade in my Accord for a land cruiser, but I'm still stuck with getting followers. I think that I could probably become a girl scout leader and get a following that way. We could cruise up and down La Cienega, roust the children and nannies in La Cienega Park and demand payment. The girlscouts offer the "experience of a lifetime" while learning about the power of girls, I say let's learn about the power of girls bearing semi-automatic weapons in land cruisers! Imagine what money we can make when we turn over parks to opium poppy production! It's so much better to buy local produce!

LA Stories

After hitting the little Sunday farmer's market on Melrose Place (good name for a soap opera, don't you think?) we were stopped at a traffic light on La Cienega Blvd when I heard a little "crash." I looked over and a Mini Cooper had rear ended a stopped Hummer. Unless the Hummer had magnets (Hey maybe X-men's Magneto was driving!) it was the mini's fault.

Another lovely L.A. moment came last week when I put on my really expensive suit and went on a job interview. I went to a house in a canyon overlooking the valley and was asked to have a meeting poolside. I sat on expensive teak that had bird doo doo on it in my exquisite blue grey suit and looked out at the canyon, the valley, the pool and spoke about Project Management, all the while wondering if I had enough sun block on.

Things I wonder about

Delusional people often are deluded that they are God, or Jesus. Or that they are divine, like Jesus, or that they are talking to God or Jesus. Or Mohammed or the Buddah for that matter. Who do delusional aethiests think they are?????

In Mexican Cuisine there are many salsas. Salsa Fresca, Salsa Cruda, Salsa Rioja, Salsa Verde. In Puerto Rican Cuisine there is no salsa, thought there is chicken and rice. So how come Puerto Rican music is called Salsa and Mexican Music Mariachi???

Signs: 1000 fabrics & Art Shows

This is a pretty good sign. We went to see the modernism in america show at the Hammer museum and it was pretty fun, all the Duchamps were fun to see and some of the painting were incredible - but I'm always a sucker for Kandinsky. But more surprising were these very evocative and moving videos by Jesper Just, a Danish artist, of men singing. In one a bewigged man sings an american pop song in a deep bass voice with a Danish accent and then slowly falls to the ground - doing an impersonation of "The Dying Swan". Move over Pavlova!

We also went a while ago to look at the Klimt's that had been restored to the heirs od Adele Bloch-Bauer after being looted by the Nazis. Anyone seeing the huge gold portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer can imagine why the painting was looted - It's GOLD! Any normal soldier in the field could tell it was valuable - it's GOLD! It's a huge painting, not something that one could simply hang over the old couch and it fills your entire visual field with GOLD! However the best painting was the one of birch trees. Once again a huge canvas with a landscape of birch trees. In art history books you always see the portraits Klimt did of women, which are always rather ambivalent about their subjects and which seem to surround their subjects with ornamentation that is more visually impressive than the women, who become enmeshed in the patterns. But you never see the landscapes which are really beautiful. Apparently he used lenses to flatten his visual field which then gives the paintings a flatness and an attention to surface while also portraying a three dimensional world. So you sort of get a visual impression of something that is both flat and deep.

The Hood: LA Conversations

We were driving along and Cam said, "Hey is that T.???" I had forgotten that you had to remember people's wheels as well as their kids and dogs so that you could recognize them on the street. At a stop light on Pico we pulled alongside T. and honked at her. She rolled down her window and screamed "I'm teaching J--k B---k's Lamaze class!" and drove off.