Just do it

Imp
Peach

Bush

Life on the Streets

A major premise of The Wire's first season is still a major problem in B'more.

Ghost Dog

Ghost Dog, originally uploaded by Blog-Sothoth.

Ghost Dog won't sit still long enough to have her photo taken. She's perpetually on the move, snapping at flies, digging at boxes, exploring beneath furniture.

Ghost Dog shivers in her crate, scared and growling. Then, without warning, she emerges, grabs a stuffed animal toy, and wants to play.

Through a Petri Brightly

A long, thoughtful, and surprisingly optimistic assessment of our biotech future from the New York Review of Books.

[Image courtesy 4XScience]

Sicko

Moore drops that increasingly annoying confrontational "gotcha" gimmick* and the result is his most effective film to date. His trademark cornball folksy exasperation works well as he tells the stories of a few people without health insurance before getting quickly to the true subject of Sicko: people with full coverage whose insurance companies fucked them. Sometimes to death.

Sicko is a grim catalogue of pointless suffering and waste. Many in the crowded theater were reduced to loud and continual blubbering. On July 4th at The Charles the outrage and disgust were palpable. I hope everyone who sees Sicko carries that outrage into action. It will take hard work and activism for the US to end the barbaric negligence of its citizens' health by rich amoral corporations and sycophantic politicians. Just as the criminal actions of HMOs and insurers become unbearable in the film, Moore pauses to ask "What is wrong with us?" It's a powerful moment.

Sicko isn't perfect. Moore meanders a bit too much, lingering in France and Cuba for too long, getting a bit off topic in the former and a bit maudlin in the latter. I'm a huge fan of French Republican idealism but Moore ignores the heavy cost of its nanny state in his glowing portrait.**It's also likely that the Cuba sequences were stage-managed to some degree by government officials eager for good PR. But considering the cloud of insurance company obfuscation Americans have breathed for years, Moore's approach is hardly unwarranted. At a time when the Democratic Party has removed universal health care from its platform the debate Sicko hopefully inspires is badly needed. See it before you pay your next premium.

*With one glaring exception, which I shan't spoil.
**At least the French make providing health care to everyone a priority; financing it is a secondary consideration, and the idea of prioritizing profits over health is regarded as obscene.

[Image courtesy VCReporter]

Dixon

In I. Dixon took us more intimately into the creative process than ever before, and in End of I. he digs even deeper, as his narrator rehearses and retries different versions of the same openings for each chapter before getting the stories going. The material is familiar from Dixon's other novels: daughters, sick and dying parents, caring for a disabled wife, friendship, work, financial frustrations, sex, worry, fear, neuroses, character flaws, drinking, joy, the writing process.

I admire Dixon's work enormously. Sometimes he's howlingly funny, other times terribly sad. He's always interesting, and has a truly unique voice. For the tenth time: read him, dammit.

Happy 4th

Babysitting Pooch isn't going well. Last night she pooped in the house as L. dropped her off. We chalked that up to nervousness because dogs know when their owners are ditching them, and Pooch is rather neurotic to boot. She seemed fine after L. left, and played with us and followed us around the house.

But the fireworks. Oh, the fireworks! Neighborhood residents kept up a steady bombardment of bottle rockets, fire crackers, and M-60s until the wee small hours. Each explosion caused Pooch to cower and take cover under the sofa. She peed on the bathroom floor. She pooped in the kitchen. She vomited on the living room rug. I banished her to her carrying crate and this morning she tried to bite me when I let her out.

And we have her 'til Sunday.

Speaking of fireworks--we decided that instead of watching the Inner Harbor display from our roof, we'd drive five minutes and get the full effect. I parked six blocks from the Harbor and we were almost there when it started to rain. And then it began to pour. And then a monsoon hit, with great sweeping sheets of wind-driven rain. We ran underneath the overhang on the first level of the Legg Mason building, and sheltered there with a few hundred other sopping wet suckers for 30 minutes. Because the weather was so wretched a stampede of people was fleeing the waterfront, kids and broken umbrellas in tow. Nature provided her own fireworks display with bright lightning flashes and thunderous tympany. We waited for a lull in the action and fled back to the car and home. Pooch was happy to see us until more fire crackers went off. We watched several shows from our bathroom window--there were at least five major displays visible, not to mention the neighborhood small-arms fire.