George Dubyai Bush

I've not mentioned the ports deal because I think it's mostly bullshit. The Democrats are rightly chewing it like a piece of red meat because they can score political points--doing so, however, is aligning them with the ugliest of rabid isolationists and Xenophobes on the Right.

That's not to say there aren't genuine concerns behind the deal. I think Administration officials and their connections to Dubai need closer scrutiny, as does port security in general. Now people are talking about the lack of scrutiny most incoming containers receive, which is good. Also in need of scrutiny is the priority given to corporate profits over every other aspect of society. But mostly this is much ado about nothing, particularly in comparison to the other scandals of the Dubyai Administration.

Not-so-frivilous lawsuits

I've been thinking about the Baigent/Leigh lawsuit against Dan Brown over plagiarism in The DaVinci Code; a lot of media talking heads are pooh-poohing this as a frivilous suit for more money. I saw Jeff Toobin last night on CNN saying it was ridiculous for them to sue because Brown used their idea that "Jesus married Mary Magdeleine"; that was an old idea, after all, and "they didn't originate it."

The problem with this argument is that it diminishes the amount of stuff Brown took from Baigent and Leigh (and other works of suspect scholarship like The Templar Revelation)--the entire idea that DaVinci's and Poussin's paintings are encoded knowledge pointing to the sacred blood line, and that Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland is encoded with Grail knowledge, and that the Priory of Sion was tied to the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau, and that the French nobility were descendents of Christ: ALL of this stuff is born from Baigent and Leigh's brains. Whether or not one thinks they hit the nail on the head, their narrative explanation tying all these mysteries together was absolutely original, and was a minor bestseller before Brown came along. Yes, their books have experienced renewed interest since Brown's novel (which I admit I have not read, but I've seen the History Channel refutation), but to say they're unjustified in crying foul is presumptious. Let the courts decide, because their entire narrative framework--not just an outline--was taken, including their research (suspect as it was), their speculative leaps, their interviews and imaginings, and even their suspects and main players. When I read the jacket of the book upon its release I was telling Borders customers it looked like a complete rip-off to me.

I hope Baigent and Leigh win a zillion dollars for one reason: Brown wrote a novel I wanted to write, dammit--he should be punished for stealing MY idea. And from what I understand from people whose taste I trust, it's a piece of shite. Though I am glad it has a lot of Christians asking questions about their faith--including my suddenly heretical mother.

How do I know so much about all this esoteric bullshit? My 'trash' pleasure reading has for a long time been conspiracy theories, alien books, alternate histories about Atlantis and the intergalactic origins of man, etc. I have a soft spot in my heart for Holy Blood/Holy Grail.

Netflix

Watching Nanook hunt seals and foxes, watching his adorable children and beautiful wife, watching them scratch a frail subsistence out the world's harshest environment--all of this was thoroughly engaging. Trying to imagine how amazing this film must have been in the 20's was even more engaging. I've been after all jaded by years of Jacques Cousteau and Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, Marty Stouffer, David Attenborough, etc. I can watch arctic animals on TV daily. Footage of walruses 85 years ago must have been like footage of aliens would be today.

Nanook's awful fate, disclosed at the beginning of the film, made everything more poignant. The final scenes of his dogs enduring a miserable storm are awe-inspiring. Sure, there's more than a bit of what we'd regard these days as anthropological ignorance behind the lens, but far less than expected (chief among these sins is using actors and staging a sort of narrative in order to capture Eskimo culture). Still recommended, and still an important film.

Homecoming

I just spoke to the Mrs. She's in Kansas City awaiting her connection to BWI, where I will be picking her up at 10:50pm. Five days without Cha is bad for me. I turn more hermit-y and curmudgeon-y than usual.

An example: Saturday night when I got home from Yahtzee's I found some dude leaving the party next door kicking cans and empty cups into my yard. I leapt the fence between our yards and chased him down the alley. For some reason he started screaming "NIGEL! NIGEL!" and he fled across Burke Ave. into the darkness. I don't know what I would have done had I caught him--perhaps put my shoe up his ass while saying "Nigel can't help you now." I returned to my yard to find Greg from next door looking out his kitchen window at the yard. I picked up the cans and the cups and threw them back over the fence, glaring at my young nemesis, who wisely remained indoors. Two days earlier I'd found a smashed forty ouncer in my flower bed--my tolerance is wearing thin. Only I am permitted to dispose of forty ounce bottles in this manner!

three hours to Cha

Pa Rum Pa Pum Pum

Dude, Tiny Drum is the worst regular patron I've encountered in years of restaurant/retail/library experience. He's driving me batshit. A forty-something PhD candidate who hits on women less than half his age routinely and publicly, and who is not in the least discouraged by continual failures in this department, Tiny Drum reminds me of my erstwhile friend The Hulk, who fails abysmally with women and always claims that he's the one who turned the other party down.

Tiny Drum lacks wit, manners, and sophistication. He bores me to tears with weekly plot synopses of Smallville. If I wanted to know what was happening on Smallville, I would watch it, jerkass! He bores me to tears with continual and nonsensical stories about imagined plots amongst the PhD faculty in the Education Department to discredit him. Tiny Drum needs no help in this area, given that every time he opens his mouth his PhD candidacy is instantly discredited. He asked me once to edit something and I was foolish enough to agree; I routinely edit stuff for the student employees here, after all. Now every piece of paper he submits crosses my desk beforehand, including emails to his advisors.

Tiny Drum writes like an Honors English high school sophomore. He worries more about word choice and juggling high-fallutin' jargon than about content and organization. Tiny Drum should worry more about the fact that his sentence-level grammar is adolescent, that he can't quite grasp subject/verb agreement, that he has no idea what a tense is, and further that he is unable to spell even with autocheck on. The student employees--most of whom are Korean--write more eloquent English than Tiny Drum.

Tiny Drum was asked to write an analytical summary of a scholarly article. He had no idea what a summary was, so I had to explain it to him. Then he tried to use an article about literary criticism as a model. When I pointed out to him that literary analysis techniques would not help him analyze a scholarly article about Haptic Technology, I had to explain: analysis, the difference between literature and scholarly articles from technical journals, the difference between fiction and non-fiction, the difference between fact and fiction, the difference between morons and people who belong in PhD programs, and the difference between an offer to help edit a single page and a full-time job as an editor/ghostwriter. Tiny Drum wanted to argue about the difference between fiction and non-fiction, because he hates to appear ignorant. I showed him his sample article (which was about Their Eyes Were Watching God) and asked if he thought there would be much character motivation to discuss in Towards a Technologically Proficient School System--then I pointed out he'd be unlikely to find many symbols either. It sunk in eventually.

Tiny Drum demanded I come to campus Friday to edit his summary. I told him no. He got angry, and then said he would treat me to lunch. I said "I don't come to campus on my days off. You'd have to pay me $100." Then he emailed it to me at my work address (which is published on the Liberry website) and kept bugging me about it. The summary was awful, full of redundancies as a Bush speech on Terror, and had little in common with any summary I've read that wasn't penned by a 3rd grader (See Dick use Haptic Technology). Instead of dealing with it I told him to scrap the document because it was hopeless. He asked me how to fix it, and I said "you can't fix this. Pick five points the authors make in their article, write them down, and state whether you agree or not and why. Throw this one away--you're spinning your wheels." He'd spent hours composing this rubbish. I was overjoyed to tell him it sucked.

Now, as I type this, he keeps bugging me to check another revision he emailed me: "I'm sorry," I said. "I'm doing something now that needs attention. When I have some free time I'll look at your summary for the umpteenth time. By the way--do you know about the Writing Lab, where people actually get paid to do this?"

I'd like to beat Tiny Drum--he wears a small drum around his neck on a leather thong. He's an ass.

And speaking of perpetually annoying patrons: Gimpy Bill from Borders has started attending my Arabic class a month into the semester. Fucking jerk. I have to rush out of class now every day so he can't talk to me.

Poker

Man, for the first time I came up short at Yahtzee's semi-annual poker fest. I raked in two fat pots at the outset before Lady T showed up and won all of our money, the shirt off my back, my shoes, my watch, three fillings, and Yahtzee's dignity. He lost all his money and stopped--I was down from $10 to .30 cents before a rash of wins brought me up to between $5 and $6. A strange night because Chief Engineer was up $3, as was notoriously woeful B-Yatch, while Big Fist and I, who usually do well, lost out (though me more than he).

Lady T has two crowns now: she's the current Risk champion and has assumed the purple mantle of champion poker face to boot. What will she do with her titles? "World Peace."

Beyond the beyond

I used s. divinorum again this weekend...on Friday, instead of sitting on the meditation cushion I lay reclined in bed in near total darkness. As I exhaled I tried to hold on somehow, to see if I could distinguish between 'this side' and 'that side,' to note the moment of transition. But like the experience of undergoing aneasthesia, that moment was past after I'd already lost focus on my mission.

A particularly powerful experience, with much buffeting of the body by jangly electric sensations. I was beset by a ring of force that commenced at my feet and began climbing my body with probing and insistent fingers. I could see lines of bright energy like Hephaestus' booby trap harness projecting out and down towards the top of my head (my eyes were closed), and as the ring climbed my body I began to resist, because on the other side of the force lines and through some glittering aperture I became nought but diffuse blue sparks. I gave up resistance and burst through to find that the blue sparks were underlying everything--somehow this blue goo was the benign undergirding of sentience in the Universe, diverse with multitudinous pinhead dancing angels like wee members of the Blue Man Group. I had a good laugh with some old acquaintances before realizing I'd just re-lived my physical birth in reverse.

Saturday afternoon in the same setting I tried it again, but with a bit more light in the room peeping around the dark blue curtains. I was in a shallow grave under a piece of tin and some men were trying to bury me by stomping on the tin and shoveling more dirt on top. Not pleasant. After a few minutes I realized the men were some constrution workers in the yard next door gathering tools together at the end of their day. What significance those tiny clinking sounds they made had for my salvia journey! The faint and diminishing light I'd seen around the tin as it was pushed down was actually the deepening twilight of the early evening.

I re-read Huxley's



and for some reason found it quaint, naive, and aggravating. His arrogance about Art, his contemptuous treatment of it and assumptions about its value to users of entheogens frustrated me.

Netflix

It's hard enough watching an old Italian pensioner descend through increasingly desperate circumstances into poverty and suicidal thoughts, but when he's got an adorable little terrier with him, the pathos increases exponentially.

A beautiful film, made with tender art (I could write reams about the elegant symbolic use of stairs and vantage points but will spare you)--and only 90 minutes long! Watch it with The Bicycle Thief and call out sick from work for three days.