Lance Mannion

Ask me anything

Updated on Friday as questions continue to arrive.

I'm having some trouble concentrating on the blog this week.  Typepad, ever helpful, has some tips for bloggers running short on inspiration.  One of the tips is "Invite your readers to ask you a question."

Ok.  Consider yourself invited.

Ask me anything.

11:05 AM.  Our first question comes from Rana, who writes, "Pick one place you've encountered in your travels, moves, etc. that, if you could, you would transport to your current location. Would you tell us about it and the memories or qualities that make you want it to be a regular part of your life?"

Ah, this morning that's easy.  The Hot Chocolate Sparrow from Orleans, MA.   A clean, well-lighted place, reliable and free WiFi connection, great coffee and these:

11:15.  From actor212, our next question is, "Bachelor Number Three...if you could be a tree, what kind of tree would you be? :-) OK, serious question: If you could bring back to life just one person and have them answer just one question fully, who and what question?"

An Australian pine on the beach at Key Biscayne.  Good looking tree, lots of company, holds the breezes, great view.

Abraham Lincoln.  "Mr President, just what exactly did you have planned for Reconstruction?"

11:35.  actor212 has a follow-up: "Interesting choice of Lincoln, Lance. Why, and why that question?"

That question because I've often wondered if Lincoln had a plan that would have brought the South back into the Union on Union terms rather than on its own terms the way it finally came back.  Lincoln, because he's one of the figures from American history I most admire without feeling as though I know him.  I wonder what my reaction to him in person would have been?  A lot of people found him strange and off-putting.  So I guess it really doesn't matter to me what I'd ask him.  I just want to hear him talk and watch his reactions and his manner.  Apparently he told really, really, really dirty jokes.

11:50.  Ken Muldrew wants to know, "Did you ever finish Against The Day? Was it worth it?" 

Ken, it isn't necessary to finish any of Thomas Pynchon's novels, except for maybe V.  Pynchon is so brilliant that if you've read just a few sentences from each of his books you will have imbibed more wisdom, intelligence, and great prose than if you had read through the entire ouevres of Melville, Twain, James, Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Jacqueline Susan.    Consequently, I am prouder of my having gotten through the whole first chapter of Against the Day than of my having read all of Moby Dick when I was 12.  Think about the genius at work here!  A 1062 page novel written in the style of the kind of boys adventure pulp that hasn't been published in over 70 years?  Who but Pynchon would have had the audacity?

12:45.  Campaspe chimes in trying to give me homework.  "Are you ever going to write a Mortimer/Rumpole valediction, or are you still too sad?"

You had to remind me.  Now I'm sad again.

Seriously.  I'm going to get to it, right after I finish my Taming of the Shrew post.

Ha ha ha!

Um....I'm working on it?

"In Rumpole's world, women are more competent, smarter, tougher.  Doesn't threaten him.  He's not a feminist.  Not particularly fond of women either.  His libido and a good chunk of his heart died when his first fiancee, the girl who came before She Who Must Be Obeyed, died.  He doesn't care how good women, or men, are at anything except at winning cases in court.  He measures everybody against that one ability.  The only thing worth doing.  And since he's the best at that, by far, he doesn't care how more or less competent than men women are, and he's glad to help them out in their careers even at the expense of men.  It happens that the only barrister of his acquaintance who comes close to rivaling him is a woman, Philda Erskine-Browne, nee Trant, 'the Portia of our Chambers.'  But since Philada is ambitious and wants to advance in legal circles, she has to become a prosecutor and use her considerable talents to get people locked up, which diminishes her a bit in Rumpole's eyes..."

1:19.  Dr. Inteuri, one of the finer writers blogging, has a writing question.  "Do you engage in any "rituals" to help you write? If yes, what are they? (e.g. music, beverages, meditating on the blinking cursor, etc.)"

Lots of writers hate me when they hear this.  I've never had trouble getting started writing.  I can start in as soon as I sit down.  I can start in while I'm walking.  In fact, I have started in while driving.  My only problems writing have been finding the time and feeling physically up to it.  Rituals don't make a headache go away or add hours to the day.  I used to to need to write with a certain kind of pen.  I also used to have to work at a table instead of at a desk.  In grad school I used to do my best writing on Friday nights, so I would arrange my social life around that.  So more than I've ever had rituals, I've had fetishes.

6:43.  And we're back with more.  Here's a question from Solver.  "Lance, I've started following your blog a few months ago so maybe you've covered this before. You seem to write a lot about pretty girls and cops. Is there a reason for that? You are a male so the former makes sense although most middle aged gentlemen, for whatever reason, avoid the subject if they have a family. Why cops then?"

Solver, our old friend Chris the Cop would probably say that I don't write about cops enough.  His specific complaint is that I've been remiss in relating a lot of great Chris the Cop stories.  Expect more writing about cops in the near future.

Now, as to why I've written as much as I have about cops, I think it's because I'm genetically predisposed to like cops.  My great-grandfather was a cop.  In fact, he was a hero-cop.  He dove off bridges to rescue people drowning in rivers and single-handedly chased down and collared notorious Albany gangster types running from the scenes of crimes that involved bullets flying and bodies falling in pools of blood.   He was a real-life T.J. Hooker.

Newspaper accounts don't mention if he had a real life Heather Locklear helping him out, but that would explain the pretty girl thing too if he had.

9:30.  Speaking of our old friend Chris the Cop, our old friend Chris the Cop has a question.  "Ever read any Ken Bruen and if so, what did you think?"

No, I haven't, Chris.  But after visiting his website I now want to.   I take it you recommend him?  Which of his books should I start with?

9:50.  Lina asks an historical question of the kind I've been waiting for all day.  Lina writes, "Did Richard III really kill his nephews? Or was he the victim of Shakespearean/Tudor slander? "

Lina, as those of us who know the true history have always said, Richard Plantagenet was a handsome, brave, virtuous, and kindly man and the rumors of his villainy were started by Harry Tudor.   Richard loved his little nephews and was tender and generous towards them and wholly protective.  He was also a great and wise leader who would have brought England a golden age if he had not been accidentally killed at Bosworth Field by another nephew, Edmund, known to history as the Blackadder.

Friday 11:15 AM.  Jim 7 has a health question.  "Whole life or term? And what IS Universal?"

Jim, I think Typepad is acting up again and garbled your comment a bit.  You meant "Whole wheat or wheat germ," correct?  Either is good because you want to avoid those bleached flours and processed sugars.  Universal is a movie and television production company in Hollywood that used to be most famous for producing classic horror films like Frankenstein and The Mummy.

Simply Left Behind Refuses to be left behind

Carl has been on a tear lately.

A story for Fat Tuesday

Follow the link.  For Kathleen Maher and anyone else who remembers Vatican II, a short story called Lent.

Best part of any Pink Panther movie

The opening credits.

Clouseau vs. Clouseau

No way Steve Martin's Inspector Clouseau survives against your memories of Peter Sellers'.  But that's because you're remembering Sellars in the original Pink Panther and A Shot in the Dark and The Return of the Pink Panther. Watch The Pink Panther Strikes Again and Revenge of the Pink Panther and you'll be shocked and dismayed. Noisy, grotesque, and deliberately obnoxious, as if both Sellers and Clouseau's creator, writer and director Blake Edwards, were in a conspiracy to make the audience hate Clouseau, these are terrible movies built around Sellers half-hearted efforts at parodying himself.

In his first three outings, we couldn't wait for Clouseau to walk into something, trip, fall down stairs, break something, or blow himself up because it was funny and because it was the inevitable result of Clouseau's vanity and over-confidence.  The slapstick was character-driven and the joke didn't end with the prat-fall.  Clouseau's pain and humiliation continued the joke and set up the punchline, which was that he ignores them.  His pride trumped everything, including third-degree burns.  Clouseau's wounded but triumphant vanity is the necessary point of every joke at his expense. It reminds us that he is a human being with feelings we're meant to sympathize with.  We are meant to like Clouseau.

Sellers described Clouseau as a "sad and serious man."

In The Pink Panther Strikes Again and Revenge of The Pink Panther bad things happen to Clouseau because the bad things themselves are the joke.  Clouseau is just a target.  There is no pain, no humiliation, because dart boards can't feel.  Instead of being a character in a farce, Clouseau is merely a clown in a dunk tank, and Sellers puts about that much effort into playing him.  Edwards' writing and direction are even less inspired.  I don't know if they were sick of the character---although Sellers was working on the script for another Pink Panther movie when he died in 1980---sick of working together---they weren't speaking during the filming of The Pink Panther Strikes Again---or, in Sellers' case, just sick---his health was failing by the late 1970s when the movies were made---but, like I said, both director and star seemed determined to murder our affection for Clouseau as a substitute for murdering Clouseau himself.  If they could have thrown him off Reichenbach Falls they would have.  They settled for turning him into an object of contempt.

Up until The Revenge of the Pink Panther, I'd have said that Sellers owned Clouseau the way Chaplin owned the Little Tramp and Buster Keaton and W.C. Fields owned their comic personas.  But when I saw Sellers play Clouseau badly, in fact, hardly play him at all, it dawned on me that there was a character there who existed apart from what Peter Sellers did with him.  Looking at it that way, what Steve Martin's up to in his two Pink Panther movies is something of a rescue attempt.  He's taking Clouseau away from Sellers, and Edwards, and giving him to the public by giving him to other actors, writers, and directors as a character to be reinvented with each new incarnation, like Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, and James Bond. 

Martin's Clouseau is also a "sad and serious" man. But he's kinder than Sellers' Clouseau (From here on all comparisons are to Sellers at his best), softer-hearted, and, while often just as self-absorbed, more easily reminded that other people have feelings and wishes that don't conform to his own.  He's every bit as vain, and as with Sellers' Clouseau, the vanity is defensive.  But with Sellers it's the case that at a level not very far down from the surface Clouseau knows he's an idiot and a fraud. He boasts and swaggers in the hope of keeping other people from finding out what he suspects and in the process manages to fool himself much better than he fools anyone else. Martin's Clouseau knows that he really is a great detective but he also knows he can be a klutz and a dope and get in his own way on his road to fame and honor.  He has to boast and swagger to keep up his own confidence as well as to try to distract his colleagues from his frequent mistakes and keep them focused on what he's doing right.  When Sellers' Clouseau is on the case, the joke is that Clouseau is often missing the obvious.  When Martin's Clouseau is on the case, the joke is that the supposedly smarter people in the room are missing the clues Clouseau finds because they are too focused on his stumbles and bumbles.  In a way, Martin's Clouseau is like an over-eager little kid who can't get the grown-ups to take him seriously, and the harder he tries to make them treat him as a grown-up like them the more child-like he appears in their eyes. Which makes Martin's Clouseau a more kid-friendly character, so it's not surprising that his movies are more kid-friendly movies.

The Pink Panther 2 is not a particularly good movie, even for a kid-friendly movie. It's not even as well done as the first Martin revival. But the problem is not that Martin is no substitute for Sellers. The problem is simply that the script is weak.

The crime---a set of crimes, actually. The quadruple thefts of national treasures from museums in Japan, Italy, England, and France.---just isn't worthy of the great Clouseu's talents. It's a simple smash and grab operation with a suspect who gives the game away right at the beginning. So there's no whodunit, no howdunit, and no compelling why-he-dunnit, and no need for a detective as brilliant as Clouseau to be assigned to the case, let alone for a "Dream Team" of brilliant detectives.

Without a formidable crime to solve, the other three supposedly formidable detectives have nothing to do but stand there and gape in amazement and horror at Clouseau's bumbling. Very quickly they fade into the woodwork.  This might have been what would have happened if the great detectives had been played by A-List movie stars, as I suspect was the plan when the story was concocted.  I can't think of any other reason for giving Clouseau three rivals when one would have been enough except to give Steve Martin three co-stars of equal box office mojo to boost the film's international appeal. I can imagine the producers getting excited over the prospect of hiring, say, Colin Firth, Jackie Chan, and Antonio Banderas.  Alfred Molina, Yuki Matsuaki, and Andy Garcia aren't Fox sitcom rejects, but after the producers realized they were settling for character actors instead of leading men as their stars it should have occurred to them to make the parts characters. 

Actually, one character, since all three have essentially the same role, the anti-Clouseau.  My choice would have been to let Alfred Molina go it alone.  He could have easily handled both the Sherlock Holmesian brilliance and the smooth David Niven-esque charm necessary to stealing Emily Mortimer's affections away from Clouseau.  As Clouseau's suave, hot-blooded Italian romantic rival, Andy Garcia looks shockingly seedy and past it.

An aside: It's easy to imagine this conceit played out in Sellers' day, with his Clouseau going up against Roger Moore or Marcello Mastroianni. It's easier and more fun to imagine Sellers playing all four members of the Dream Team.

With no real mystery or suspense to drive it, the plot of the movie is pretty much a string of excuses for a series of stupid Inspector Clouseau tricks. Some of these are funny, some of them are...not.

John Cleese is wasted as Inspector Dreyfus, which is probably for the best. Cleese is too old and frail-looking to play the punching bag that Kevin Kline and Herbert Lom were in the role. Lily Tomlin's scenes seem hammered into the movie, as though she happened to drop by the set during shooting one day and she and Martin hurriedly came up with some bits for her to do for the fun of it.  Weirdly, the joke behind their scenes together depends on our remembering what a sexist and racist jerk Sellers' Clouseau could be. But Martin's success at portraying Clouseau depends on keeping the references to Sellers hazy and distant.  There's a reason Burt Kwouk's Cato has been replaced by Jean Reno's Ponton and also a reason Clouseau has been given the very nerdy and unglamorous Nicole as a love interest, and  it's strange to have Tomlin and Martin going on as if on his way home Clouseau's going to be stopping off at the nudist colony to ogle Elke Sommer and then have to fight off Cato jumping out at him from the refrigerator in his apartment.

________________________________________________________________________________

"The Pink Panther 2" directed by Harld Zwart. Starring Steve Martin, Emily Mortimer, John Cleese, Jean Reno, Lily Tomlin, Andy Garcia, Albert Molina, Yuki Matsuzaki, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, and Jeremy Irons. Rated PG.

Oscar night ennui

Arranged to have tonight off so I could watch the Oscars and maybe do a little live blogging, but I've got a feeling I'm going to wind up watching the second half of Oliver Twist on PBS---and I didn't much like the first half.

I'm sick and I'm grumpy and I want cheering up and it's been a long time since an Oscars broadcast cheered me up.  When was the last time Billy Crystal hosted?

Doesn't help that I've only seen two of the movies nominated for Best Picture, Slumdog Millionaire and Frost/Nixon, none of the performances nominated for Best Actress, one for Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Penelope Cruz in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which was a bad movie, and yes, I got the joke, it wasn't funny, made worse by Cruz's cliched performance), one for Best Actor (Frank Langella), and one for best Supporting Actor (Heath Ledger who should win it going away but not because he's gone away, which is why he's likely to win---if he hadn't died, he wouldn't have been nominated), and two of the movies that got their directors nominated for Best Director (Slumdog Millionaire and Frost/Nixon again.  Didn't think Frost/Nixon was especially well-directed.  But, hey, it's Ron Howard.)  There have been years when I saw few of the nominees and still enjoyed the Oscars.

This year, though, instead of it being the case that I didn't have time to get to all the movies, it was the case that I didn't want to see most of them. This is the most joyless, earnest, and pedestrian group of nominees I can remember. Not an epic, not a comedy, not a happy movie in the lot, except Slumdog Millionaire, which hasn't fared well in my memory. It's beginning to feel phony.

When I say "happy" movie I don't mean a movie with a happy ending or a sunshiny story. I mean a movie that makes you happy to have seen it, a movie that makes you feel the fun the cast and filmmakers had making it.

Compare this year to last year when the Best Picture nominees included No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Juno, Atonement, and Michael Clayton.  Three epics, a very original comedy, and good old fashioned thriller.

The year before the Best Picture nominees were Babel, The Departed, Letters From Iwo Jima,The Queen, and Little Miss Sunshine.

These weren't all great movies, but, by God, man, they were movies!

Yeah and rock and roll has been all downhill since Buddy Holly died.

I am sure that all the ones I haven't seen---except for The Changeling---are good movies. But none of them struck me as great examples of movie making. They are issue movies and character movies, with lots of dialog and lots of acting. Movie stars are almost always at their most unbearable when they are acting.  And whenever a movie is about the actors acting, the directing is usually a matter of pointing the camera and letting it roll.

When I watched the trailers for Milk, Doubt, The Reader, The Changeling, and Frost/Nixon, I had the impression that I wasn't being shown anything I couldn't have seen done and done better on television in the 1970s. Well, except for the parts of The Reader where Kate Winslett gets naked.

All I'm saying is that I have no rooting interests tonight.  And, no, I'm not rooting for Melissa Leo just because she's been around and paid her dues and isn't it great that a non-glamorous real actress is getting the recognition she deserves. 

But like I said, I'm sick and I'm grumpy. Tell me how wrong I am about all this.

8:33. Ok, Hugh Jackman's doing a great job of cheering me up.

And Anne Hathaway always cheers me up.

8:47:  Penelope Cruz. Shows what I know.

8:54. No! I want to hear about Steve and Tina's invented religion!

But I like the script to scene clips.

Would have been a very different Oscar night if more of the Best Screenplay nominees had been Best Picture Nominees too.

9:04.  Just a note, the thirteen year old is enjoying this Oscar show immensely.  And Jack Black is one of his favorites!

Angelina is looking at Jennifer with such fondess.

Do you think Tina was falling in love with Steve? He probably knows the look.

9:16. Revolutionary Road nominated for art direction.  "Which looked like anything but the prison it was."  Yeah. The American suburbs in the 1950s.  Proto-Gitmo.

9:23. The thirteen year old and I are officially united in rooting against Benjamin Button for anything.

9:25. Great. A salute to mush.

Were WALL-E and Eva and Bruce and Betty really the only true romantic couples in movies last year?

9:34. Ben Stiller's doing a better Joaquin Phoenix than Joaquin Phoenix did.

10:04. Josh Brolin doesn't need an Oscar. He's going home with Diane Lane.

10:09.  Heath Ledger wins it. The thirteen year old is contented.  He's off to bed.

10:22.  Rob Farley makes me sorry I haven't seen The Wrestler.

10: 27.  The thirteen year old came back downstairs to watch Will Smith give the award for Visual Effects to Iron Man or Dark Knight. He threw a pillow at the TV when Will gave it to Benjamin Button.

10:56.  Where do the dancers who appear on the Oscars work the rest of the year?

Oh, come on, let the stars of Slumdog up there to do the final dance!

Jai Ho - Slumdog Millionaire (English Subs)
by aka71691

11:10.  My least favorite part of the Oscars.  The obit call.  It levels every body and every achievement.  Heston and Newman deserves 15 minutes all to themselves.  Richard Widmark too.

11:22.  Susie Bright's having more fun doing this than I am and has things to say.  Plus she's joined our We Hate Benjamin Button Club.

The floating head montages are really spooky.

Also, this eulogizing the nominees by past winners has a bit of the attending one's own funeral feel to it.

Richard Jenkins was in Stepbrothers, Burn After Reading, and The Visitor last year.  Now that's an actor's resume.

One of those Oscar mysteries we'll never know the answer to. Did Sean Penn win the Oscar or did Harvey Milk?  And if it was Penn, did he win it for being good at playing a gay man, or did he win it for being a straight man playing a gay man?  But that's like asking if Heath Ledger won for being great or for having died?

11:52.  Slumdog Millionaire. The only happy movie won.

The real road to serfdom

You gotta love the way the mayor of Lansing shouts this smug, fat-faced Fox Stooge down.

The New York Post editorial the stooge quotes is based on several lies, the main one being that autoworkers actually take home seventy dollars an hour.  That figure, long ago exposed as a con, includes the estimated cost of all benefits paid to all workers including retirees.

The mayor didn't get around to it, but I'm sure if he'd have had time he'd have pointed out that what the comparison between autoworkers' compensation and that of the average industrial worker in the Midewest shows is not that autoworkers are paid too much, but that everybody else is paid too little.  And it's not that union members have too many and too generous benefits it's that other workers don't have enough and what they do have are stingy.  National Health Insurance would fix this, but that's another argument.

The other lie is that "2000 dollar loss" on every car.  It's not a loss.  It's an added cost.  I know corporate greed heads are inclined to treat every dollar spent as a dollar lost, even if they make two dollars back, and I know the would-be aristocrats who run our economy these days think there ought to be a way to get people to work for them without having to actually pay them anything---that is, they think it would be nice if there was a way to bring back serfdom.  But the cost of labor, whatever it is, is part of the price of a car.   The price charged might have to be 2000 dollars higher but it doesn't matter if someone actually buys the car.  What percentage of the price of an average new car is 2000 bucks anyway?  About 10 per cent?  Think cars would be flying out of the show rooms these days if they cost 18 grand instead of 20? 

Detroit can't sell enough cars.  Toyota can't sell enough cars.  Honda can't sell enough cars.

Lots of reasons for this, but one of them is that 30 years of making life better for the upper classes in this country by making it harder for the middle and working classes has finally caught up with us.  Thirty years of stagnant wages and increased prices and lost jobs and lost benefits and stolen pensions have worn us all down.  We can't afford to live here anymore.  The cost of paying autoworkers a wage that keeps them in the middle class adds 2000 bucks to the cost of an SUV?  What added the other 30 thousand?

The autoworkers are going to get screwed on whatever deal is in the works.  And it won't be enough. 

The actual take home pay of the average autoworker is around 28 bucks an hour.  Shave it down to 25 and the corporate greedheads will be back next week to demand it be shaved again down to 20.   Shave it to that and they'll want it at 15.

As the Mayor says, people in Washington and on Wall Street won't be happy until Americans are working for Third World wages.

Making Kobe go to his left

Shane Battier just became my favorite NBA player of all time after Dennis Johnson.

Bryant isn’t like that. He is better at pretty much everything than everyone else, but there are places on the court, and starting points for his shot, that render him less likely to help his team. When he drives to the basket, he is exactly as likely to go to his left as to his right, but when he goes to his left, he is less effective. When he shoots directly after receiving a pass, he is more efficient than when he shoots after dribbling. He’s deadly if he gets into the lane and also if he gets to the baseline; between the two, less so. “The absolute worst thing to do,” Battier says, “is to foul him.” It isn’t that Bryant is an especially good free-throw shooter but that, as Morey puts it, “the foul is the worst result of a defensive play.” One way the Rockets can see which teams think about the game as they do is by identifying those that “try dramatically not to foul.” The ideal outcome, from the Rockets’ statistical point of view, is for Bryant to dribble left and pull up for an 18-foot jump shot; force that to happen often enough and you have to be satisfied with your night. “If he has 40 points on 40 shots, I can live with that,” Battier says. “My job is not to keep him from scoring points but to make him as inefficient as possible.” The court doesn’t have little squares all over it to tell him what percentage Bryant is likely to shoot from any given spot, but it might as well.

The reason the Rockets insist that Battier guard Bryant is his gift for encouraging him into his zones of lowest efficiency. The effect of doing this is astonishing: Bryant doesn’t merely help his team less when Battier guards him than when someone else does. When Bryant is in the game and Battier is on him, the Lakers’ offense is worse than if the N.B.A.’s best player had taken the night off. “The Lakers’ offense should obviously be better with Kobe in,” Morey says. “But if Shane is on him, it isn’t.” A player whom Morey describes as “a marginal N.B.A. athlete” not only guards one of the greatest — and smartest — offensive threats ever to play the game. He renders him a detriment to his team.

A long one but a good one by Michael Lewis, The No-Stats All-Star.

Hat-tip to Susie and Lambert.

A matter of principle

Lot of loose talk about how, whatever else their doing, the Republicans are sticking up for their principles.

Most of the talk is from Republicans congratulating themselves and their apologists in the Media sucking up.  But I've detected a rueful admiration on the part of more independent-minded people, even some Liberals.

Boy, if only the Democrats could stick up for their principles like that.

Yeah, I hear that.

But sticking up for your principles is only admirable if your principles are admirable.

We got ours, we want more, fuck the rest of you and the economy isn't a particularly admirable principle and there's no reason to admire anyone for sticking up for it.

Actually, it's not a principle.  It's not even an attitude.  It's sound expressing an appetite.  The Republicans might as well be growling and grunting and flinging their shit at the TV cameras.

I suppose that there are some Republicans for whom We got ours, we want more, fuck the rest of you represents a carefully thought-out economic philosophy and they are in fact sticking up for their principles.  True believing free market, small government principled conservatives, which in this day and age is akin to being a principled mercantilist.

But people generally have sets of principles and there are times when those principles conflict and in those times some principles have to take precedence over the others.  You would think that the principle of not letting the country go down the toilet would be a more important principle for a supposed public servant.

And now we're hearing that there were a number of Congressional Republicans who wanted to vote for the stimulus.  Presumably these Republicans knew that their constituents wanted and needed the bill to pass.  But they were bullied out of it by their hard-line party leaders and scared off by the prospect of primary challenges from their Right, which makes them unprincipled cowards.

If this is true, it means that the leaders were willing to throw members of their own caucus to the wolves for the sake of riling up the base and keeping the rank and file angry, reactive, distracted, and donating.  They're willing to lose seats in order to keep their own or maybe they just haven't noticed that in the last couple of elections whenever moderate Republicans have disappeared from their caucus they haven't been replaced by Right Wing Republicans or any sort of Republican at all.  They're willing to reduce their own ranks even further, condemn themselves to a permanent minority status, in order to stick up for the principle of holding onto their own power and prestige.

For these Republicans, when they stick up for the principle of We've got ours, we want more, fuck the rest of you, that "rest of you" includes...other Republicans.

________________________

Firedoglake's Jane Hamsher and David Shuster discuss Beltway perceptions versus the people's sense of reality.

The invisibles

I'm getting used to the fact that in the minds of Republicans, working people whose paychecks come from the local, state, or federal government don't exist.  Their jobs don't count as jobs and the money they earn and spend on food, clothing, rent or a mortgage, and to pay taxes doesn't work its way into the economy as a whole but vanishes into the ether, its existence proved only by red ink in the budgets and higher taxes Republicans have to pay.

This is how Right Wing agitprop minister and pseudo-historian Amity Shlaes is able to argue that the New Deal didn't reduced unemployment.   She counts government workers as unemployed---until 1942; government workers who wear uniforms and carry rifles belong to a special category of government workers who somehow don't count as government workers.

This is how the new chairman of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele, is able to claim that the government never created a job, despite the paychecks he has collected from government and despite the fact his job is to help lots of Republicans get government jobs.

This is how Senator John Ensign can blithely suggest that his home state of Nevada can cut services without the workers who provide those services losing their jobs.  Those workers don't exist to him as people.  They're just bloat.

And it's not only people whose checks are signed by a government employee who are invisible.  People whose companies depend on the contracts they have with the government, people who build and repair roads and schools and dams and canals and levees and ports, people who sell things for money from cashed government paychecks, and fix roofs and serve meals and wash cars and deliver flowers and pick up trash for money from cashed government paychecks---they're all invisible too.

So it's not surprising that the Republicans in the California State Senate and Assembly aren't worried about the 20,000 people about to lose their state jobs and the thousands of others who will lose their private sector jobs and the thousands of others who will lose their businesses because of canceled projects.  They aren't worried about ruining those people's lives and they aren't worried that those people will remember who ruined them come the next election.

Invisible people cast invisible votes.  Can't count what you can't see.

Seriously.  To most Republicans in Washington, and apparently in California, most of us are invisible, no matter who signs our paychecks.  To them the country is a very small place populated only by themselves and their friends and family.  The rest of us just work there.  To the rest of us it looks as though the Republicans have decided that it's worth ruining the nation to advance their own agenda of tax cuts for their relatives and pals.  But to them they are saving America, at least the only part of it that isn't invisible to them.

The rest, who may not be as self-centered and blind, are betting that the economy is just going to get worse or better no matter what the President and the Democrats try to do and either way, they'll be ready come 2010 to say "Told you so!  All that spending by liberals doesn't do any good."

They're missing the fact that most Americans are not pro-big business idealogogues.  We don't care if Keynesian economics works or if it's better to do nothing because in the long run the economy will right itself.  As Harry Hopkins said to the original Hooverites, people don't eat in the long run.  What we want is relief right now.  We can worry about the long run in the long run.

In the medium run we're going to remember who voted to make our lives miserable in the short run, who voted against relief, who voted to wreck the country in order to further their own return to power in the long run, power they want only to continue to withhold relief and wreck the country further, because a nation full of ruined, desperate, hopeless people is a nation full of people who will work cheap.

They think.

_________________

Obviously I think that come the next election voters are going to remember who sabotaged every reasonable attempt to provide relief and salvage the economy.   But this depends on voters knowing who did it.  I wrote a few weeks back that one advantage FDR had during his first hundred days that President Obama doesn't have was a national media that on the whole wasn't trying to hide the facts from the people.  It wasn't that the press corps was made up of wiser and better men and women, although I think there were probably more then than there are now, because the jobs went to people who wanted to be reporters more than they went to people who wanted to be players and celebrities.  But I might be romanticizing.   The truth was the misery was just too great to be denied and the nation had suffered through three years of Hoover vainly promising that things would get better in the long run.   It was plain as day to everybody.  FDR and the Democrats wanted action and action now.  The Republicans were in the way.

That should be as plain as day now.  The President and the Democrats want to take action and, please, save it for another day whether or not that action is enough or to your particular liking.  The Republicans want to do absolutely nothing but sneer and gloat and root for the President to fail.  And what's happening in Washington, is happening in the states, particularly in California.  But you might not know that if you didn't read this New York Times article carefully and all the way through.

California's in a mess.  Things are getting worse by the minute.  The state needs money yesterday.  But nothing's being done.  Help is not on the way.  Why?  What's the problem?

"Intransigent" lawmakers and a governor "bereft of allies and influence."

Which is the true.  In the way half the truth is true.

The governor has allies and influence---among Democrats!  The intransigent lawmakers are all Republicans!

The Times reporter, Jennifer Steinhauer, gets around to mentioning that.   Nine paragraphs down the word "Republican" makes its first appearance.  But basically her lede and the following seven graphs imply that the blame belongs to all the state's lawmakers and that everybody in Sacramento, including the poor bereft and friendless governor, is at fault.

Then there's this beaut of a graph.

In a Legislature dominated by Democrats, some of whom lean far to the left, leaders have been unable to gather enough support from Republican lawmakers, who tend on average to be more conservative than the majority of California’s Republican voters and have unequivocally opposed all tax increases.

See that.  The way this passive-aggressive sentence is constructed, because the Democrats dominate the Legislature they own the problem.  It's their fault they can't gather enough support from the Republicans.

Note the totally irrelevant aside about how some of those Democrats lean far to the left.  So?  Are they in the way?  Doesn't appear to be the case.  The Democrats agreed to a Republican demand for more corporate tax cuts.  Not a sign those far left leaning Democrats are putting up much of a fuss.  But somehow their mere existence has made it impossible for the Democratic leaders to do their job of overcoming Republican obstructionism.

Note this too.  "Republican lawmakers...tend to be more conservative than the majority of California Republican voters..."  Another way of describing someone who is more conservative than your average Republican these days is Right Wing kook.  There are more than just a few Right Wing kooks in the California Legislature, but Steinhauer doesn't feel compelled to note that some Republicans lean far to the the Right.  They're just "more conservative".  Conservative is a nice, soothing word that implies principle and virtue.  The list of negative connotations of far left leaning is too long to get into here.  But what it boils down to is that Steinhauer has pretty much blamed the bomb-throwing commie hippie leftie types for making it impossible for the principled and virtuous conservatives to agree to any deal.

That's not the upshot of the whole story.  By the end it's obvious the Republicans are the problem and happy to be the problem.  But for almost the first page of the story Steinhauer goes out of her way to avoid placing any of the blame directly on the Republicans.

Related fuming:  Steve Kuusisto on The GOP and the Charnel House.

Updated:  Carl reports that Republicans in Kansas are just as blind, stubborn, smug, destructive, and dumb as Republicans in California and Washington.

And Matt Yglesias catches Poltico's David Rogers having the same trouble straight-forwardly describing what Republicans are up to as Steinhauer had.  This time the subject is the Republicans' lying about funding for high speed rail in the stimulus bill.  Matt:

Needless to say, this reality is at odds with the made-up story conservatives have been telling all weekend about $8 billion being earmarked for a train to Las Vegas. And Rogers, as we’ll see, knows what the truth is, knows what conservatives have been saying, and knows that the two are different things, but he can’t quite seem to describe what’s happening with regular English words...

Updated again, because the drama continues:  Over at Calitics, they're covering the California madness in real time.

A master of the universe plots his own downfall

Ten years ago I was still under the delusion I was a fiction writer and I was working on a short story that would eventually be titled "We Vanish Like Breath."  It was about a successful young investment broker whose life comes apart for no apparent reason.  The story opens with the broker dead, a suicide, and it's told by a friend of his, another broker from his firm, who's trying to figure out what happened.  I have no idea why I thought I had any business writing about this world.  It was a period piece even then.  Cigar bars, AOL chat rooms, no housing bubble, just scads of money wafting through the air and adhering to anyone smart enough to go stand out in the right breeze.  It's the tail end of the Clinton boom years but the characters' attitudes seem more out of the Reagan era to me.  Or they did, until we started hearing about what's been going on in the banks.

The story's not about money or business though.  It's about what too many of my stories seem to be about.  Guilt and unhappy sex.  On this date in history, then, I wrote this in my notebook:

The bar where we all usually met after work is called Bumpers.  It’s down near the Waterfront, in a new building that’s one floor of storefronts and three floors of parking garage.  The name derives from the billiard tables—Billiards, not pool.  Three balls, no pockets.—in the back room, but it’s attached itself to the fat Victorian gentleman in gaiters leering drunkenly from the menus and the sign out front, and it’s been adopted as a signature by the waitresses, who make their way through the crowds by bumping customers out of their path with their hips.  So picture it.  The back room at Bumpers.  All dark mahogany and red leather, backlit stained glass panels in the false walls, the figures in the glass boars’ heads and rampant stags, castle turrets and unicorns, blushing bar maids with deep cleavages and winking Robin Hoods.   Drinks served by flirtatious cocktail waitresses in gauzy blouses unbuttoned to the middles of their chests and skirts slit up to the hip so that they can reach the holsters attached to their garters and draw cigars, lighters, and clippers on command.  And there we are, commanding.  Apprentice masters and mistresses of the universe, all of us making obscene amounts of money but nothing compared to what we expect to make by the time we hit thirty when we’ll all be worth a unit a year at least, celebrating the great good luck of having been born us.  If we live in a knowledge-based economy now, like the President says, then we must be the most knowledgeable bastards on the face of the planet.

And smack dab in the center of our center of the universe, Holly, nine dollar Naturale uptilted in her teeth, hand outstretched to the admirer bringing her her third chocolate martini, surrounded by men, seven or eight of us, smoking, getting drunk, and vying for her attention.

Maybe there’s another woman at her elbow, a lady in waiting, either trying to be a good sport or doing some competitive flirting.  Any other women who show up keep their distance.  They stake out other booths off to the side or take over the nearest billiard table, chalking up their cue sticks and lining up shots with pretended indifference but all the while sneaking these sidelong glances full of envy or disgust.  The men around Holly are presenting masks of every emotion guys can wear around a woman they’re crazy in lust with.  This guy’s pining, this one’s jealous.  This guy’s a poet, this guy’s a comedian, and this guy is so tongue-tied and stupid he can’t remember his own name when she looks at him.  Here’s Lechery.  Here’s Anger.  Here’s Embarrassment, Humiliation, and Pride.  On any given night I am any one or all of these.  And Danny?

Danny’s there.  At the table, but at the far end, sideways in his chair, legs thrown out in front of him, holding his Don Diego in his right hand, his elbow propped on the back of his chair, wearing never another expression but that of a guy who’s enjoying a good cigar.

If Holly’s doing anything interesting, if she’s worth a tenth of the attention the rest of us are giving her, you’d never know it by him.  For months this goes on.  Holly calls her court together, Danny withdraws to his own private estate at the far edge of the kingdom.  The only way I know that he even noticed her is that once on our way out of there he complained about her smoking technique.
“She overheats it, puffing all the time like a steam engine, and she chews it to bits.  And you see the way she twirls it between her fingers?  We’ve all got these nice clean hands these days, we wash our hands half a dozen times a day.  All that soap leaves residue.  When she twirls her cigar like that she smears soap all over the wrapper, just destroys it.  What are you laughing at?  You do the same thing.”

She noticed him though.  His indifference mainly.  At first it made her dislike him.  “What’s with Mr. Smug over there?” she kept wanting to know.  Then it became her mission to make him notice her back.  A lot of the stories she told were for his benefit.  She told them to make him pay attention, even if it was only to sneer.  She pretended to be trying to annoy him, acted as if everything she said was in defiance of Danny, but at the end of another one of her stories she’d look down the table and see Danny standing up, asking if anyone wanted a drink, he was going to the bar, as pleasant and friendly and as inclusive of her and as condescending as if she was somebody’s kid sister who had just told us all about the pep rally at her junior high school.  Drove her insane.  “Asshole,” she’d say, before his back was turned.  “Creep.”  Whenever he wasn’t looking she made faces at him and gave him the finger.  Strange way to flirt.  Both of them.---from "We Vanish Like Breath," a short story by Lance Mannion.  Copyright 2009.

Life on Uncle Merlin's Island

Every couple of days for the last week and a half I've been getting phone calls from Uncle Merlin.  Conversations go something like this:

Uncle Merlin:  Aloha!  Have you had your morning swim yet?

Me:  Um...

Uncle Merlin:  Why not?  The water's beautiful!

Me:  Er...

Uncle Merlin:  What about the humpback whales?  Have you gone down to the lagoon to watch them breach and play out beyond the surf line?  It's their breeding season, you know.

Me:  Well, I...

Uncle Merlin:  If you put your head under the water you can hear them sing!

Me:  But...

Uncle Merlin:  Did you hear that?

Me:  That a humpback whale?

Uncle Merlin:  It's a mynah bird.  Bold little thing.  They land right next to you.  Any birds outside your window?

Me:  Crow.  Landed on the gutter.  I think something must have died in there.  Guess I better put cleaning the gutters in the job jar.

Uncle Merlin:  Can't you do that after snorkeling?

Me:  Snorkeling?

Uncle Merlin:  Or will you be hiking up the side of a volcano today?

Me:  I'm going to work.

Uncle Merlin:  That's too bad.  Well, have to run.  Kona Coffee on the lanai in a few minutes.

Me:  My lanai's still buried under an inch of snow and ice.

Uncle Merlin:  Aloha!

Click.

Uncle Merlin's on vacation.  Guess where.

The wisdom of Solomon

Another local business going bust inspires Nance to wax biblical on the self-un-nomination of Republican Senator Judd Gregg as Secretary of Commerce:

I’m trying to figure out how it’s possible that a man nominated a week ago could somehow be unaware his boss was planning a big spending bill that would conflict with his deeply held principles, and I’ve decided it’s impossible. I don’t want to be paranoid, but it’s 1992 all over again, and it’s increasingly clear that for the GOP, nothing but catastrophe will do. They are like the mother who told King Solomon go ahead, cut the kid in half, only the kid is the country.

Read the rest of Nance's post, Is this war?

The President checks in---February 14, 2009

No more modular furniture, ever! A photo essay in real time

Friday 11:27 am. Project completed.

Every time I put together a piece of modular furniture from Ikea or Target or wherever, I vow, on the graves of my sainted grandparents, that I will never, ever, ever buy any of this junk ever, ever, ever again.

We needed a new bookcase.

Guess what.

 

Ok, there goes my morning.  Yours too if you keep checking back.  I'm live-blogging the process because why should I suffer alone?   Updates as steps are completed or until I take an ax to the damn thing and chop it all up for kindling.

Step 1.  Open box.  Stare amazedly at incoherent stack of parts and "hardware" while wondering how in the world she talked you into this again.

Step 2.  Sit quietly for several minutes, without making any sudden movements that might scare them off, and wait for the furniture elves to arrive and put the thing together for you.

Step 3.  Curse the furniture elves and tell yourself that if they were really competent elves they'd be making shoes or toys or baking cookies in trees and you're better off without their help.

Step 4.  After completing Step 4a. (Explain to wife why work could not begin without twenty minutes of silent thought and blogging.  Pretend not to notice when she rolls her eyes.) move on to Step 4b. Sigh heavily and begin to do the work yourself.

Step 5.  RTFM.  Always read the fine manual.

Step 6.  Toss aside the f---ing manual because it's the size of an f---ing phone book and you could get through Tolstoy in the original Russian in half the time.  Besides, you've done this a dozen times before, what do you need with a manual?

Step 7.  Look over parts scattered across the floor.   Fish instruction book out of recycling.

Step 8.  Open Hardware Pack One.

Step 9.  Pick up all the pieces of "hardware" that went flying when the bag exploded as tore it open.  Tell yourself that the pieces that rolled under the couch are probably duplicates and you won't need them.

Step 10. Realize what you thought was Hardware Pack One was Hardware Pack Three.

Step 11.  Repeat Step 8, after carefully reading the label on the bag this time, dummy.

Steps 12-16.  Amaze yourself at your ability to actually follow the instructions and get this far without breaking anything, cutting yourself, or giving up in despair.

Step 17.  Be impressed that what you have assembled looks like it might actually turn out to be a bookcase.

Step 18-20.  Break something.  Cut yourself.  Give up in despair.

Step 21.  After a couple of cups of coffee and some zen meditation, return to worksite and survey efforts so far.

Step 22.  Become almost convinced that this isn't such a hard job after all.  Get back to work.

Step 23.  Read Cleveland Bob's comment on your post.  Become terrified you've made his mistake.  Go back through Steps 12-20.

Step 24.  After more coffee and meditation, get back to work again. 

Step 25-30.  Move along at record speed, becoming over-confident as you go.

Step 31.  Throw out empty plastic bags and plastic trees and left-over bits of packaging that are just getting in your way now.

Step 32.  Root through trash to retrieve pieces of hardware that were still in the bags you thought were empty.

Step 33.  Notice it's a beautiful day outside.

Step 34. Seriously consider stopping right here and going out for a walk, telling yourself there's no rush, you can finish this tonight or even tomorrow morning.

Step 35.  Imagine wife's reaction when she gets home to find unfinished bookcase and parts blocking her way through the living room.

Step 36.  Get back to work.

Step 37-49.  Insert, align, attach, rotate, flip, this, that, the other thing, etc etc etc.

Step 50.  Step back and stare in disbelief that you're actually done.

Step 51.  Tilt your head to try to fool yourself into thinking all the shelves are level.

Step 52.  Declare it all close enough for government work.  Try not to mind that a job you thought would take you an hour or so took two and a half.

Step 53.  Look at completed project from another angle.

Step 54.  Realize the damn thing doesn't look half bad.  You may actually have done a good job.

Step 55.  Start singing quietly, "If I was a carpenter, and you were my lady..."

Step 56.  Listen to voice inside your head saying, "You know, Lance, there are some women who would find a man who could handle this kind of project sexy."

Step 57.  Ignore other voice inside head saying, "Maybe if you had actually built thing from your own design using real wood and tools they would.  How many women are turned on by a guy who can follow instructions?"

Step 58.  Go back to listening to first voice.

Step 59.  Look around for wife.

Step 60.  Remember she left for work hours ago.

Step 61.  Sigh.

Step 62.  Remember she isn't that kind of woman anyway.  These kinds of things usually have the opposite effect because I'm always so full of myself afterwards.  Women married to husbands like me tend to become like the wives Jeeves describes as seeing it as their duty to put a damper on male enthusiasm.

Step 63.  Sigh again.

Step 64.  Try to be satisfied with a job well done while moving on to Step 65.

Step 65.  Vow that you will never, ever, ever again buy a piece of modular furniture!

Step 66.  Look behind you on living room floor and remember.

Step 67.  Target was having a sale. 

Of the PEOPLE, by the PEOPLE, for the PEOPLE...

February 12, 1809 was yesterday...

Evolution as faith, Creationism as science?

Helpful reader Tom Clarke sent me this link a long time ago.  I've been holding onto it for a special occasion.  I guess Darwin's 200th Birthday qualifies, huh?

It's a short, three-part video from the Vancouver Film School that turns the imagery and language of evolution and creationism on their heads.  You can watch in any order, but it's best to watch the third part last.

My big brother Jeff

Way back when, my friend Jeff was a lunatic behind the wheel of a car.

He'd roll up to a stop sign, ask me, "Anything big coming?" and before I could answer or even look for the semi that would kill us he'd shout, "BANZAI!" and floor it.

He had a beat to shit old Toyota that was more rust than solid metal and more holes than rust and flooring it didn't produce much in the way of immediate results except for a scream from the overworked engine and a scream from the terrified occupant of the passenger seat, me.  After a few seconds though the car would lurch forward and then rocket out into the intersection, shedding bolts and flakes of rust as it went.  If we were turning, Jeff took the turn at a right angle and on two wheels.  If we were going straight on through...well, I don't think we ever went straight through any intersection.  There'd be a lot of banking back and forth before Jeff regained control of the steering wheel that had been wrenched from his hands by the force of lift-off.  People on the sidewalks dove for cover.

I learned a lot of things from Jeff over the years, one of which was how not to drive.

I met Jeff second semester my freshman year of high school.  He was a junior.  We were in a speech class together.  Jeff initiated our friendship.  He thought I looked lost and lonely.  I was both.  I'd come to the public high school from a Catholic grade school and I knew nobody.  All of my friends had gone on to the Catholic high school.  I spent the whole first semester in a deep, self-pitying gloom that I carried around with me like a bubble and I had no idea how to break out of it.  I felt alienated, isolated, forgotten, alone, and deservedly so.  Jeff decided I needed a friend and he made himself that friend.

From that day and for a good ten years afterwards, Jeff looked out for me.  He was the big brother I never had.

That's what he did, though.  He looked out for people.  He had far more little brothers than just me, little sisters too.  He took care of his friends in high school, he did the same when he got to college and then on into law school.   He continued the habit during his career as a lawyer and a teacher.  He was a born big brother.

Some people are like that.  They're put here to watch out for those of us who don't know how to watch out for ourselves.

Through Jeff I made other friends.  Thanks to Jeff, I got up the nerve to join the Drama Club.  It was Jeff who dragged me to movie after movie and alerted me to what to watch on cable and that's how I learned that there were more and better things to watch than old cowboy and war movies.  Jeff got me reading Rolling Stone.  He made me listen to music.  When I went off to college he gave me a tape player and cassettes of his ten favorite albums.  I wouldn't call his tastes cutting edge.  His favorite movie was Mr Smith Goes To Washington---Jeff went to Washington himself.  He interned in the DC office of a local Congressman.  It disillusioned him.  "Everybody in Washington is drunk all the time," he reported.  "The Speaker of the House has to be propped up in his chair, at the beginning of the day's session!"---his favorite actor was George Segal---he called him the Cary Grant of his generation---and the music he listened to and had me listening to was almost all of the Southern California folk rock variety, James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, the Eagles, which I liked too, but without telling him I was going out and buying albums by the Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, the Clash, and other New Wave bands and sneaking down to New York to go to clubs where bands that couldn't get gigs at CBGB's played for drinks.  But that's not something I'd have had the courage to do if Jeff hadn't taught me how to relax and have fun.

Amazingly, the one area of life where I was ahead of Jeff was love and romance.  I'm not sure how I did it, but I managed to discover girls on my own and got into all kinds of trouble and heartbreak without his help or advice.  For all his maturity, level-headedness, and social grace, Jeff was rather shy and awkward around girls who did not fall neatly into the role of little sister.  He must have gotten over that, at least with the girl who became his wife and the mother of his two sons.  But back in the day his love life consisted pretty much of one bad first date after another.  He seemed to have a knack for asking out girls with whom he had nothing in common.  I used to think that was oddly out of character.  Jeff was not otherwise a self-defeating type.  Looking back, though, I realize that it might have been the very opposite of self-defeating behavior.  I missed how ambitious and driven he was.  I don't know if it was conscious or not on his part, but I'm guessing he was steering clear of any women he might have developed serious feelings for because he saw how that tripped a lot of guys up on their way to the places they wanted to go.  I was probably a prime example in his mind.

Still, he did teach me two important and related skills that came in handy during my dating days.  He taught me how to appear comfortable in bars and he taught me, not how to drink---he knew I was a hopeless student there---but how to look like I was drinking.  And he gave me what I still think is the most important advice that any young person in love can hear.

The night my high school girlfriend broke up with me---the one who looked like Scarlett Johansson---I stumbled over to Jeff's house in tears and dumped the pieces of my broken heart on his kitchen table, pretty much demanding that he glue them back together for me right then and there.

"I can't believe I don't have her any more!" I wailed.

Jeff stopped me right there.

"You didn't have her, Lance," he said sternly.  "People don't have each other.  She didn't belong to you.  She wasn't yours to have.  She belongs to herself, and you were lucky enough that for a whole year she was willing to share herself with you. But you never had her."

I can't say that was a particularly consoling thought at the moment.  But he was right, of course.

Jeff and I stayed close through his college years and law school days.  But then I went off to Iowa for grad school, he got wrapped up in his law practice, and over time we lost touch.  I can't remember the last time I heard from him directly.  The funny thing is that although almost as many years have gone by as either of us had lived when we last spoke I don't feel as though our friendship ever ended.

I don't believe people live linearally through time.  We're all like Billy Pilgrim, unstuck in time, and we live in many presents all at once and those presents intersect, cross, flow together, diverge, rejoin, and break apart again and again, so there can be a present that is made up of several other presents from long ago.  There is no past, just presents that we have left for a while to live in another present, for a while.  This is why with some of our old friends and relatives we can let years go by between meetings and then when we get together it's as if no time has passed.  We can pick up ten and twenty year old conversations right in the middle.  This is how I feel about Jeff.  I feel that if we could get together today we'd just continue right on as if we'd never stopped.

Except that we can't.

Jeff died last week.

I'm not sure what killed him.  He'd had cancer but fought it off, and that doesn't seem to have been the cause.  The obituary my parents emailed me just says he died suddenly in the hospital.  I'll have to ask his wife, when I get up the nerve to call her.  She and I have never met.  If Jeff's ghost was here, he'd be handing me the phone right now and telling me not to be such a chicken.

Like I said, I don't remember the last time he and I spoke directly.  The last time I had a chance to and missed it was one Christmas a couple years before the blonde and I got married.  He dropped by my parents' house on Christmas eve, having heard I was home for the holidays.  Unfortunately, I was out visiting other old friends.  My brother Luke answered the door and took Jeff's message.

"Tell him I just stopped in to say ho ho ho," he said.  There was a long pause, then he gave Luke a wry smile and said in an ironically flat voice, "Ho ho ho."

Ho ho ho to you too, Jeff, my friend.

My brother.

And...."BANZAI!"

Department of Questions that Answer Themselves

How many of the 37 Republicans who voted against the stimulus and for throwing the country off the economic cliff could be prevailed upon to sign a pledge that they will not squawk if the money is allocated in such a way that none of it goes to their states?

After all, they're claiming it's all wasteful spending that won't do any good, so surely they must believe their constituents can do without any of it, right?

Heroes

Isn't it about time they renamed the show Victims?