My Life and Hard Times

Friends don't let friends let Newt Gingrich near their kids...

2012-01-27T08:46:00.000-08:00

OK. As you may have noticed, I've pretty much given up on my blog to focus on running marathons every day behind my fifteen-month-old son while nursing the bruised rib I got from my 7-year-old daughter, Kira. BUT, as some very famous Americans have said "these are the times that try men's souls" and "there comes a time when one must take a position" and so on. Which is to say: a recent event has forced me back to the mighty (if metaphorical) pen...of my keyboard.

It happened yesterday. I mean, it started a week ago, when South Carolina primary results left me feeling sort of dirty and slimy inside. But it happened yesterday, when, shortly after dinner, my wife made reference to some week-old coverage of the South Carolina debate, and I found myself trying to explain to Kira who Newt Gingrich is--and why her parents think his recent success with the public is, well..."close to despicable."

It's uncomfortable to talk about Gingrich in the presence of a child, let alone with a child, but I did the best I could. I kept brief my explanation of his failed relationship with the 7th commandment--the one about not having a boyfriend or girlfriend while you're married--mentioning only that he hadn't kept it and didn't think people should be bothered by that in his case. Then I explained that he isn't very honest, which is a commandment Kira understands in a more immediate, day-to-day way. But to me, those problems don't adequately capture the man's continuing contribution to America's moral decline. So I attempted to describe his political style in a way she could understand by explaining that Newt Gingrich also does not believe in speaking kindly to others, that he actually likes to be rude.

Kira was startled by this. Being rude in the heat of the moment she understood, but liking to be rude? Didn't being rude make people feel sad in their stomachs after they realized what they'd done? Nicole stepped in here to explain that if Newt Gingrich feels sorry, he doesn't show it because, "honey... he's kind of a bully. And that's just how bullies act."

This cleared things up for Kira immediately. She brightened. "He would not be allowed in my class, then. We have a sign that says 'No Bullies.'"

Nicole and I laughed. That's true, we said: Newt Gingrich would have some trouble in second grade. He could come to the class--you don't want to throw anybody out--but if they were going to be fair, he would probably have to go talk to the principal about how to keep the school rules. We told her we were glad she didn't plan on becoming a bully. And then we brushed teeth and said prayers and tucked her happily into bed.

Serious worries, though, returned--as they often do--after the kids' bedtime. I mean, we'd already talked about the outside possibility that Newt Gingrich might actually become the nation's next President. We'd worried, of course, about many of his political views. Beyond policy, we'd also thought to worry about how his AM radio approach to diplomacy might go over internationally, and about how his erratic personality and delusions of grandeur might show us how much weight a President really can legally throw around these days. Heck, we'd even thought to worry about the sheer number of hotel workers worldwide a President Gingrich might pull a Kobe Bryant or Dominique Strauss-Kahn on.

But we hadn't remembered until last night that the President always, always make symbolic visits to elementary schools.

Schools where he's said that poor students should be scrubbing toilets to teach them work ethic.

Schools where he may or may not be eying teachers to join his possibly "open" current marriage.

Schools, most importantly, whose rules he never did learn to keep.

Please, America. Don't do this. Vote for a liberal, vote for another conservative, vote for the bizarre mixture of the two that is Ron Paul. But no matter what your political views are, please don't vote for Newt Gingrich.

You see: the children are watching. And even in this age of mass media and murky moral standards, there is at least one thing--who happens to be a current presidential candidate--our children still can and should be protected from.

Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?

2011-09-12T20:04:00.000-07:00

Because I have siblings in three countries, including (and limited to) San Francisco, India, and the United States, sending various quizzes per email is a major hobby of mine. In a recent quiz, called the "sibling challenge," I asked my brothers and sisters to correctly identify the original sources of nine historically common responses to the timeless question: "Why did the chicken cross the road?"

Recent(-ish) surveys show that the average reader of this blog is 67% as nerdy as my siblings (who, in a freak coincidence--which, I am told, has nothing to do with being raised by our parents--share exactly the same nerdiness rating), so I won't make you identify the quotes from scratch. Instead, try to match the answers above to the sources below.

Answers:

a) To turn into a fairy.

b) To prove he wasn't chicken.

c) To eat the cake.

d) To prove to the gophers he could do it.

e) To eat YOUR FACE!!! HA! HA! HA! HA!

f) Because it was there.

g) Because the grass is greener on the other side.

h) Well, I talked to the chicken, and she said she didn't intend to cross the road, but the road has thin skin and it's not her fault at all that he took what she said the way he did. As for herself, she's done talking to the road. There's no reasoning with him at all.

i) I can't find the most recent sibling challenge. What is it?

Sources:

j) This one is from H. C. Andersen (1805-1875). In an early short story entitled "A Journey on Foot from Holmen's Canal to the East Point of Amager," Andersen describes a forlorn chicken's quest to find an back-alley witch who is purported to own a magical feather. When the witch produces a knife instead, the chicken transforms into a fairy and flies away, weeping for the cruelty of mankind until a rainbow forms in her tears.

k) Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867). In a separate poem, Baudelaire urged the chicken to "be drunk! so as not to be the martyred slave of time!"--an admonition which resulted in a fatal hit-and-run, the chicken lost to time under the wheel of an anonymous assassin's bicycle.

l) commonly misattributed to Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna a.k.a. Marie Antoinette (1755-1793), this quote is actually derived from Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), who in De Amore Dei used the chicken, the road, and the cake as allegorical symbols for the soul, mortality, and the love of God, respectively.

m) Horace Greeley (1811-1872) praised the chicken for its pioneer spirit and commitment to westward expansion.

m16) Oswald C. Cobblepot (1941-????), also known for the famous folk maxim: "It could be worse: my nose could be gushing blood. RAAAR!"

n) Chauncey Gardiner (1925-1980) may have averted a recession by this famous statement of confidence: he seems to have meant that the chicken is impervious to ominous indicators of looming troubles; it will always feel a need to cross the road simply because it is there. Unfortunately, Gardiner faded from the public scene before he could be nominated as a candidate for President.

o) Cheech Marin (1946-2037), explaining away his conveniently-timed 1967 emigration to Canada.

q) Prince Cem of Osman (1459-1495). Later, while nominally under the custody of Pope Innocent VIII, Cem would confess he actually had known how the sibling challenge was supposed to work.

p) Madeleine Albright (1937-2021). Shortly after this comment, tighter trade restrictions were placed on North Korea.

I've got another riddle for you...

2011-08-02T08:48:00.000-07:00

This morning's riddle for Kira was as follows:

I have a thick red skull
and a mushy brown brain
and one long, thin, white leg

"I know!" said Kira after several unsuccessful guesses, "it's a gummi bear!"

"Does a gummi bear have a thick red skull?" I said.

"Yes," she said, "a red gummi bear does."

"OK," I said, "but does it have one long, thin, white leg?"

"A white one does," said Kira.

"No," I said, "a white one has two short, stumpy legs."

"Not if you eat one and stretch the other one out," said Kira.

"OK," I said, "but no gummi bear has a mushy brown brain!"

"It could be root-beer flavored," said Kira.

I sighed. I can't recall ever eating a root-beer flavored gummi bear, but they probably do exist, and there's probably even some county fair where you can order them deep-fried. "That's still three different gummi bears!" I argued instead. "A red gummi bear doesn't have a mushy brown brain or a long, white leg."

"You can squish them together in a ball," said Kira. "It's pretty easy."

So the bad news is: I was defeated in a battle of wits once again by a seven-year-old.
The good news is: next time I ask someone else that riddle, I'll bet they won't come up with the new answer, which is "a bitten-off red gummi bear head with a stretched-out white gummi bear leg attached to the bottom and a chunk of root-beer-flavored gummi bear stuffed inside."

We're quite the team, Kira and I.

Riddelin

2011-07-02T09:04:00.000-07:00

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I don't work this term--but for some reason my daughter still wakes up. In the morning. Intellectually, of course, I understand that waking up in the morning is something normal children do, but I have a hard time thinking intellectually (or otherwise) when she first crawls into my bed and asks: "Do you want to have breakfast now? Do you want to play? We could go on a bike ride! We could do flex-exercises! We should make pancakes!"

These are important points, but unfortunately I feel more like a log in the morning than a human being. If you've never felt like a log, consider: logs are very stiff, they don't stay up long unless you nail them in place, and they're dead.

So instead of saying, "Yes! Let's make pancakes on our bikes while we play Crazy Eights!" I usually tell my daughter something like: "Uughhh...."

This works for about two seconds, but only if she needs to catch her breath. "Can I put on makeup?" she says, "Can I paint my nails? Can I paint my Barbies' nails?"

Note to the future parent: it may seem reasonable to grant such requests, but remember that most children hate to be alone, and will try to do whatever you say they can in your bed.

"Uughhh..." I say. I've explained in more lucid moments that "ugh" should always be interpreted as "no."

"Do you want to come play in my room?" she says, "Can you watch me do somersaults? Can we go check on the garden?"

This week, I came up with a good answer. "How about we do riddles instead?"

"Yeah!" she says "I love riddles!"

So I tell her one. And then fall back asleep.

I'm thinking I might add them to my voicemail and email and everything else I'm supposed to be checking and responding to. Say: "I'll do my best to get back to you--if you can tell me what has four legs in the back, two in the front, and none at all when its work is done."

Or maybe: "I saw ten pigs walk into the zoo: I looked for their tails, but I only saw two. Tell me what I saw at the beep if your call is urgent."

Or even: "When you got angry, you framed me. When you felt bad about it, you left me a jar. But when it got dark, you still locked me up--and in the middle of the night, you checked to see if I was dead--*sob*--what am I?"

Hints for those whose obsessive natures have left them wanting to solve the above riddles:
Hint #1: One and a half of the answers to the three riddles above are human-made objects.
Hint #2: For one of the riddles, the following clues also apply: "The babies leave home, but the grown-ups stay there. When they get sick, they're treated like pies. When they get very sick, they're treated like queens." This riddle is the only one for which human-made things are not a part of the correct final answer.
Hint #3: It would be super creepy if the pigs in the second riddle were literally pigs. The third riddle is tangentially connected to little pigs, but only if you really want it to be and/or if you have remarkably (har har) big eyes.
Hint #4: None of these hints are very helpful.
Hint #5: If you come to a fork in the road, take it--even if the lying twin and truth-telling twin both try to stop you. Then use the fork to eat this red herring.
Hint #6: Carefully examine the picture below:

It is not the answer. It's not even a clue, really. But it might make your mind more open to the answers. Or just more open, period.

If the government were a family, how would its budget look?

2011-06-13T14:54:00.001-07:00

For their final exam, I assigned my Persuasive Writing students to hold a model Congress in which they'll solve our nation's budget woes. Because giant numbers are hard to keep track of, I decided to pretend to revalue the dollar such that the government's annual revenue was not a mind-boggling $2.2 trillion dollars, but rather $45,000, which happens to be the current median American income.

On this scale:

1) The federal government would be spending about $76,000/year. Oops.

2) Its debt would be $300,000.

There's something fitting about that: it's like the government is trying to buy a full professor's house on an adjunct's salary. I can relate: except that unlike the government, I live in a basement apartment.

Should we relegate the government to a basement? Should we help it find a better job? I don't know, but here are some more figures that might make the debate in D.C. over these various issues a little clearer:

3) Our government is about $2,600 family-scale dollars from a balanced budget...per month. Note to those spending $76,000/year: please let us know if you can cut $2,600/month in "waste" or by "improving efficiencies." I'm a vegetarian so I wouldn't know, but could any of you save $2,600 a month just by cutting pork?

4) Letting the Bush tax cuts expire would generate around a scale $500/month in income. This is more than twice what the average panhandler makes in a month or what a just-below-average lawyer charges for two hours. Not enough to solve the problem, but maybe worth considering.

5) Cutting the Department of Education's budget in half would save a scale $66/month: the same as not eating out twice--if you're kinda cheap and leave lousy tips. And assuming you eat out at twice a month.

6) The Iraq war would have cost about as much as getting two new cars: a Camero for him and a Mustang for her (that's a scale $61,000 or so, depending who's counting).

7) That said, liberals who focus entirely on military spending are in some serious denial. Even eliminating the entire Department of Defense (which would be insane) wouldn't solve the problem: it would only save our federal "family" $1,300/month. Deep military cuts (say, 20%) would save a scale $260/month, so you're going to have to find something other than the military to complain about.

8) Speaking of entire programs: Medicaid weighs in at a scale $600/month. That means if we refused poor and disabled people all medical treatment, we could be 23% of the way to a balanced budget!

9) Since Americans buy 10.2 billion cases of soda per year, a soda tax of 25 cents a can would generate a scale $105/month: almost enough to fund the entire Department of Education.

10) Eliminating the Social Security Wage Base (which is a rule that you don't have to pay any social security taxes on income over $106,800/yr) would raise a scale $200/month: as much as a 15% cut in military spending.

So: assuming most of my math is right, you know have a clearer idea of the situation the federal government is in. I'm sorry if it depresses you: depending on your perspective, you can blame FDR for making a big government, Ronald Reagan for his failed experiment in raising revenue by lowering taxes, or George W. Bush for turning a projected budget surplus into an epically blown opportunity.

And then, when you're done being depressed, you can pat yourself on the back for being more financially responsible for the government. Although, to be fair, you aren't helping record numbers of people afford college, bailing out screwed-up private financial institutions, dealing regularly with maniacal tyrants overseas, and making sure people with bad credit ratings don't have to bleed to death on the streets if they get hurt.

So while it is important to help the government fix some things financially, maybe we should cut those "worthless" politicians and bureaucrats a little slack.

Pictured above: the author of this post doesn't let the budget
get him down. Republicans and Democrats come and go:
forget about them all and dance!

Query Letter

2011-05-28T16:04:00.000-07:00

I recently finished the first draft of my book and am ready to start the hard part: the Query Letter. A Query Letter is a mythical beast with four wings on either side of its face and cattails coming out of its back, but if you don't have one, you're allowed to substitute words.

As an illustration of the above point, I have included (below) my first Query Letter draft.

Dear Sir/Madam to Whom It Concerns:

Once upon a time, there was a blender. And an author, who put things in that blender. The blender was a metaphor. It wasn’t actually real. But the author put many things in it anyway, because that’s what the great authors have been doing since great authors first existed (about the 6th century BC). The things the author put in the blender were the Bible and a lot of blood that came out of someone’s eyes. That someone was named Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalin. Also Faiz Ahmed Faiz. And some other Urdu-speaking guys.
When the blender finished writing, it was beautiful. The author started bleeding out of his own eyes, because he was in love. But not with a woman. With his work, like Ghalib was. And that love was like lightning that incinerated his soul.
He smeared the ash of his soul on the outside glass of the blender (which was no longer a metaphor) and I copied it into my book. My book is 74,765 words. They were much smaller on the blender, so I’m not sure I copied them all right. But that’s what editors are for.
If you find me an editor, I will give you a share of the money. Which I WILL earn. I swear! Because it’s so (heart-breakingly) beautiful, people who read it will weep and hand their credit cards to whoever asks for them because that’s how lost they’ll be in the madness of love.

Sincerely,

[name withheld for privacy reasons]

The Caged Bird Tweets

2011-02-22T17:20:00.000-08:00

I had planned to post the highlights of my experiment with Twitteration. Unfortunately, there are no highlights yet. Maybe these can hold you over until when:

12 Feb
Baby reaches toward me like Adam in Michelangelo's painting--only it's my eyeball, not my finger, that he's almost got...

14 Feb
Nicole says Valentine's Day was designed for six-year-old girls: lots of pink, cute little notes, and free candy. Also, no angst.

15 Feb
Just folded a sheet that's had the spit-up washed out twice today. Ponce de Leon, we have found the fabled fountain of youth.

18 Feb
Someday, my young friend, you too may tell your wife, "You always look so sexy when the kids are asleep."

19 Feb
I am so religious: every day, I listen to my infant son recite the entire book of Lamentations. Still wish he would just sleep, though.

22 Feb
The internet puts the whole world at the same distance. The only things we have to fear are horseshoes and hand grenades.

Becoming a Twit

2011-02-12T08:41:00.000-08:00

I am currently working on a book so poetic that I am only averaging a little over five hundred words per day even though I am almost always working whenever my baby isn't crying so loudly I can no longer think.

You would think that I would put out more than 515 words on average in that three-hour work window, but don't be fooled: dredging great writing out of my soul is fairly time-consuming, because my soul is pretty far away.

All of which is to say: I didn't blog in January, and may not blog again "for realsies" until April.

Honestly, I thought that would be good enough, but having watched the news out of Tunisia and Egypt (not to mention Algeria), I'm getting a bit nervous that if I don't keep active in some way, I may be ousted from my own blog by popular protests.

That's why I decided yesterday to become a real Twit.

I joined Twitter in June of 2009 so I could win free tickets to a play, but almost immediately forgot my password and didn't tweet again until yesterday, when I suddenly remembered that my Twitter password was "Twitter." Armed with that password, I have since tweeted twice, hoping that a tweet a day keeps the protests at bay.

You can follow me on Twitter if you know how to do such things (no help here--I'm still only following the people in charge of that long-ago contest...) OR you can check this blog every week or so and I'll update a post with selected tweets.

Why No One Publishes My Fiction

2010-12-21T11:19:00.001-08:00

My daughter recently asked to email her uncle Matt, who is serving an LDS mission in India. She only wrote the subject line and two sentences, but that was enough to get us past the starting--which is the hardest part of most writing. Nicole went on to tell Matt about our lives (wake up, get spit up on, do laundry, repeat) and said that I would finish by telling more interesting stories. Here is what I wrote:

Dear Elder Mattathias Singh Goldberg Westwood,

Nicole said I would tell you some stories, so here are some stories. Once there as a frog. The frog lived in the bottom of a well, unless it rained really hard, in which case the frog could go and see the big wide very wet world. One day the frog wandered so far into the big wide wet world that the well waters dropped back so far he wouldn't have been able to get back in without a very dangerous jump. But it didn't really matter, because on his way back to the well after the storm, the frog got run over by a rickshaw.

Here is another story: once there was a bird. The bird had three eyes and a magical shadow. From high in its perch in the mountains, the bird would look down on the earth and think "my, it is rainy down there." When it became sunny again, the bird would look with its third eye on the world and see all kinds of things. For examples: a village where every dog had lost one of its legs but all were happy in any case because that is the nature of most dogs, an old man who'd had two fingers frozen off at high elevation during the mostly pointless 1962 war with China who could slip playing cards in and out of his sleeve covertly in the gap between his remaining fingers and made good money doing so, a village of squatters who had erected makeshift homes and even several shrines in the thirtieth through fiftieth floors of an office building which had been abandoned during a past financial crisis, and a dead frog. The bird flew a thousand feet over the frog, which was instantly revived and could thereafter lure sufficient flies into its well to feed its family simply by croaking a hypnotically melodic croak with which it had been gifted.

A thousand year later there was a lost wanderer in a great desert. He looked this way, he looked that way, and he saw only rocks and sand as far as his nearly sand-blind eyes could see. He walked in no particular direction at all and collapsed--afraid that he would weep in despair and that the tears would waste his body's last ounces of liquid and he would die. In the night, the wanderer dreamed of good things to eat: sweet doughy balls, and cakes with the taste of honey and cumin seed, and tiny fritters shaped like the tracks lizards leave as they skattle their way across the barren wasteland. In his dream, he kept feeling as if something was missing, something he desperately needed, and that's when he heard it: a hypnotically melodic croak. The dreaming wanderer left the sweets and walked through the freezing winds of the midnight desert toward the sound. He removed five rocks from their places and then a sixth. As he lifted the sixth rock, off slid three pebbles plink, plink, plink into the waters of the well and the dreamer woke up and fell on his face and drank desperate thirsty gulps of it until he felt human again.

Those are my stories for today. If you were going to kill me, I would tell you nine-hundred and ninety-eight more, but you are not going to kill me, so there's really no need to tell you of the girl the wanderer saw through the well, who could weave her old castaway clothes back into sheep, goats, camels, alpacas, and once--inexplicably--into a wooly mammoth. Nor is there need to tell you about the man who prayed to find his fortune and chanced upon a magical goat and who became very rich selling goat cheese until he learned that the goat had the power of speech and knew the way to a secret kingdom where no one casts the evil eye. And of course I won't tell you about the boy who grew up in a land of happiness but invented another world and walked into it by trying to imagine sorrow.

I hope you are having a good time and learning not to tie your shoes too slowly or disappear into the library of your own mind for too long.

-James

Should Top Earners Pay Higher Income Taxes?

2010-12-08T08:26:00.000-08:00

Dear People in the Top Tax Bracket,

When many liberals look at your incomes, the answer is clear. State and federal governments need money. You have a lot more money than you need to live. Therefore, they should take a higher percentage of money from you, right?

From a practical perspective, that's not bad--an extra percent or two in the top bracket generates a lot more money than a percent or two at the bottom--but it understandably makes many of you top 2% of earners feel a bit like the government has noticed your nice jacket, chased you into a dark alley, and shaken you down at knife point while explaining that they have a bit of a spending addiction and need your help.

From your perspective, it may seem like the United States is built on a clear division of labor: private industry earns the money; the government spends it. You work hard or smart (or else have the foresight to be born with the last name "Walton") and then politicians who are probably too busy text-flirting with teen-aged Congressional pages to do much math blow $3 trillion a year and then announce that they need more of your money. But does anyone ask what you stand to gain from higher taxes?

My friends: fear not. Today, I will try to answer that question. For the first time in the history of the world, I will bother to explain how higher taxes for you top-bracket earners actually benefit you.

But first: let's get to know each other. Let's start with a very personal question: how did you make your money? Maybe you are Bill Gates and before you spent all your time checking this blog for updates, you made a billion dollars by ruling the world of computers (up until Al Gore ruined your near-monopoly by inventing the internet). Or maybe you're way at the bottom end of the top 2% and earn your just over $200 grand a year as a highly successful lawyer or stockbroker or as the owner of a car sales franchise. The again, maybe you're not even in the top 2% yet but you've started your own company making the next big thing and you're pretty sure it will go viral and by next year you'll be crazy rich and so you're worried about top-bracket taxes in advance.

Whatever service you give or product you produce, you are probably very good at it. If you weren't, you probably wouldn't be earning like you are. That makes it easy to think that your special skill--whether it's hard work, intelligence, strong people skills, or having a successful father--is the sole reason for your success. But don't fall into that trap. You don't make money just by being you. You make money if and only if there's a useable outside world to work from.

That is to say: it's hard to sell cars if the government doesn't build roads. It's hard to sell Microsoft Word to every household in countries without public education where the majority of people are illiterate. And it's hard to successfully start your own company in relatively government-free places like Somalia, where everyone's been too busy surviving to develop skills that make them worth hiring, where shoplifters carry automatic weapons, and where it's really not worth it for the average person to venture out of their house to buy your goods anyway.

Successful businesspeople make better products, but they rely on the larger society for quality markets. Take a few moments to estimate the:
a) cost of educating your own laborers from childhood: $______
b) cost of providing the only security for your business operations: $______
c) lost profits from customers without access to your product because of gov't roads, or because a lack of public education makes it useless to them, or who don't buy your product because they or their parents couldn't pay for a medical emergency years ago and they died: $_____
Total: $_____

Now write down the amount you pay in federal and state taxes: $______
Next, multiply the federal part of that number by .13 and add it to the line above. This is your tax amount if the Bush tax cuts expire: $____

It may seem obvious to you based on these two lists that you earn a lot more by operating under a decent government than without a government. So obvious, in fact, that you might think people in your bracket would want to give money to the government whether they were taxed or not. But my dear high-earning friend: do not be fooled. Other high earners, the ones who don't read this blog, are not as philanthropic as you. All businesses have a vested interest in making the market more educated, safer, and healthier, but since the market is so big, most of them won't do it unless everyone solemnly swears to work on the problem together. Many top earners would rather claim that their jet ski purchases stimulate the economy than actually do more to pay for the military, infrastructure, and educated populace they actually depend on.

Let's talk about this in the context of now. If we let the Bush tax cuts for the top 2% of earners expire, each of you goes from paying 35% of your income to paying 39.6% and the government gets an extra $70 billion or so per year. How much is $70 billion? More than enough to pay for the entire Marine Corps ($29 billion per year). More than we spend, even in this age of tracking terrorists, on military intelligence (about $50 billion per year). It's also more than twice the current estimated net cost of TARP ($30 billion), and just over the usual budget of the entire U.S. Department of Education (about $60 billion a year not counting recent stimulus money). Yes: even by government standards, $70 billion a year is real money.

Now, let's imagine that because of the $700 billion less in revenue the government will get thanks to eight-now-turning-into-ten-years of the Bush tax cuts in your bracket, one of these services ultimately gets cut. Have these tax cuts for your bracket really been worth 24 years' worth of Marine Corps funding? Or 14 years' worth of military intelligence? Have they been worth more than 23 bailouts? Go ask the Tea Party about that last one--I'm curious to hear what they think.

Of course, most Tea Partiers would probably say that the real problem with federal spending isn't the Marines and that bailouts are Satanic but rare. They would say instead that the $700 billion the Bush tax cuts for you top earners cost should come out of entitlement programs that only serve to turn losers into whiners. I will not use the same line of argument with you, however, because unlike Tea Partiers, you know that this is silly--thanks to the Social Security Wage Base, everyone in your bracket pays the same $6,621.60 maximum social security tab as someone with a $100,000 a year income, meaning that your social security tax rate is far lower than your cleaning lady's is. (You also know that Medicare is funded by a flat tax, but let's not talk about that too loudly.)

In the end, then, you can't blame the entitlements. And you profit way too much from government-funded services like security, infrastructure, and increased consumer and workforce access to education and health care to be bothered, if you're honest with yourself, by the relatively low prospective 39.6% tax rate that makes a country where people earn what you do possible.

The real question, I suppose, is whether you want people in the future to be able to earn as much as you do. If you think the country should stay safe, strong, and developed enough for the best businesses to have a chance at the success you've seen, you should beg for the $70 billion annually in tax cuts your demographic is getting to end. If you've been aching to see the end of collective American prosperity and supremacy, you should call up your local Republican Senator and offer him a ride on your new jet skis.

And who knows? Maybe you can become the first American multi-millionaire to jet ski all the way to Somalia, and you can start a business while you're there...

Guessing Game

2010-11-02T19:45:00.000-07:00

After spending three hours trying to figure out which districts I am part of (it's something like 4, 57, 26, 4, IV, and apparently none of 8, 9, 10, 12, 14 and whatever else was up for state school board), I finally managed to get sent home from the polling station to come back with proof of address (my driver's license still lists my old address, twenty minutes away). Don't worry, though. I did come back and vote, which has given me my annual buzz of civic engagement--sort of like going to church on Easter gives select people a year's worth of religion.

In more amusing news, Kira decided we should play a guessing game on the way home. I was a little burned out on guessing after all that voting, but Nicole and I played along anyway. Kira's game worked like this: she'd give us three clues, and then we'd guess what she was talking about. This worked pretty well when she'd tell us things like:
-she's an aunt
-she has red hair
-she's awesome
but got more difficult when the clues changed to
-it's a noun
-it's fast
-it's cool

For those of you playing at home, the answer to the first set of clues is "Kirstin." My answer to the second was "I don't know, Kira, and I don't want to guess" but the real answer was "Beavers. No, actually cats. Cats look like beavers. Haha! Cats look like beavers! Cats look like beavers! Cats look like beavers! Hahahaha! Cats look like beavers! Cats look like beavers! Cats look like beavers! Cats look like beavers!"

She danced her way into the house and down the hall to this refrain and was still laughing about the line as she put on her pajamas.

Sometimes I wish I had her energy, but times like this remind me it's probably safer that I don't.

An Interview with Barack Obama's Unicorn

2010-09-30T20:48:00.000-07:00

Several days ago, I mentioned Barack Obama's unicorn in a post. The next night, the unicorn appeared in my dream for an interview. Unfortunately, I can't recall much of what the unicorn said. The following is a fictional transcript of the actual interview.

Unicorn: I read your post the other day.
Me: Oh my gosh! It's a unicorn!
Unicorn: Yeah...I get that a lot.
Me: Sorry. You must be the President's--
Unicorn: He and I have been working together for several years, yes.
Me: Wow. I'm pleased to meet you...uh...
Unicorn: Hussein.
Me: Excuse me?
Unicorn: Hussein. My mother was an Arabian and so even before I was born her owner had picked out the name Hussein. It's not really a traditional unicorn name, but since neither of my parents had horns or magical powers, he wasn't really expecting me.
Me: But I thought all unicorns had horns?
Hussein: No, the horn gene is recessive.
Me: Oh.
Hussein: Yeah.
(crickets chirp)
Me: So did you and the president bond over your shared name? I mean, his middle name is also--
Hussein: Oh, it's not really his middle name. We added that after he and I got together. See, he was working as a community organizer in Chicago, and I happened to drop by to use my magical powers to heal this little kid who'd accidentally eaten some asbestos...Barack was pretty fascinated and asked if I'd ever thought about going into politics...I turned him down then, but when we decided to team up a few years later, I went back in time and added the Hussein so the public could know in some small way about me.
Me: You went back in time?
Hussein: That gene's also recessive.
Me: Right. So what made you decide to go into politics?
Hussein: Well, I'd been using my recessive magical powers to heal people, and quite frankly, it takes a lot out of me. So I figured it was high time for a system overhaul. I tried going back first to talk Lyndon Johnson into it, but he said his plate was pretty full. So I said "that's OK. I'm a unicorn. I'm sure I can get someone else elected president."
Me: So wait--this whole health care overhaul was your idea?
Hussein: Idea, no. You don't have to be a unicorn to believe that people in this country should have access to health care whether they can afford a Prius or not. I just gave the idea a little push is all.
Me: You know, a lot of people don't like your health care reform.
Hussein: It's not what I'd hoped to get through. I tried to bore through some of the bureaucracy and paperwork with my horn, but it got stuck and I gave up. It's a half-canter forward, though. You have to admit that.
Me: Not really. Some people say it's a communist plot to turn our country into a second-rate version of Canada.
Hussein: Oh, I don't know that it goes that far. Maternity leave is much better in Canada. So is the curry, actually, now that you mention it--there's a place in Brampton which has some of the best karhi pakora I've ever tasted--I'd say the United States isn't quite up to being a second-rate Canada yet.
Me: Um...Americans don't like being told we're not the best. It's politically incorrect.
Hussein: Right. Sorry.
Me: It's all right. I'll still check out the place in Brampton.
Hussein: You should.
Me: So I take you've been completely surprised by the backlash against your reform bill?
Hussein: More or less. Unicorns are naturally more optimistic and generous than people, so that's probably part of it. When the Tea Party thing started though I had to go back in time to try to get the Founders to explain to me what was going on...
Me: Really? What did they have to say?
Hussein: Oh, nothing helpful. I asked them why they hated taxes so much and they said taxes themselves weren't the issue, they just didn't want to foot the whole bill for the Seven Years' War.
Me: Interesting.
Hussein: Yes, but not very useful. I told Barack about it and he said wars had dropped out of people's top ten concerns in recent polls, so we'll have to leave the whole war-cost protest to the 1770s.
Me: What's your mid-term election strategy, then?
Hussein: Well...I've been placed a bit outside the inner circle on that one. See, Barack's current thinking is that my whole "Yes, We Can" strategy set expectations too high and now no one will ever forgive him for not saving the world. He's thinking it might be safer to run on something like "Let's Not Kill Each Other," but that might be a bit of a long shot...

India Urges Hindu Fundamentalists to Visit New York

2010-09-29T20:42:00.000-07:00

In 1992, a mob of Hindu fundamentalists demolished the 16th-century Babri mosque in the North Indian city of Ayodhya, claiming that the land the mosque occupied is sacred to Hinduism and Muslims need to get out of everybody's sacred places. Israeli settlers in Hebron and American oil companies which had formerly operated in Iraq strongly agreed. Lately, however, it's not a sacred oil well or Palestinian territory or possible birthplace of a Hindu god where Muslims are finding themselves unwelcome, it's New York City--a place no one would have expected back in 1992 would ever be sacred to anybody.

Eighteen years after the demolition of the Babri mosque, India's courts are prepared to issue a verdict in the longstanding dispute over the disputed site, but India's leaders have one request: would all organized Hindu fundamentalists in the Ayodhya area take a field trip to New York first just in case they need time to get over the ruling without killing anyone?

Hindu fundamentalists at a 2003 rally
to build support for a temple on the
site of the razed mosque.

Key leaders in India's Bharatiya Janata Party are currently in talks with the New-York based Tea Party Express about the specifics of trip funding. According to a Tea Party spokesman, who wished to remain anonymous, the visiting Indians will likely be used to "add some much-needed color" at several protests in addition to the main events outside the proposed Park51 site.

Super-Nerdy Post

2010-09-28T20:53:00.000-07:00

Some of you may be wondering why I am constantly full of crap. I have no idea, but I suspect part of the answer might be that what I am actually thinking about is usually far too nerdy to discuss in public, and so I've learned to be silly and crazy and lie a lot instead.

What am I really thinking? I looked over old
pictures to try to read my face, but it was too
covered in powder from Holi.

Today on Caucajewmexdian, I tried to explain pretty transparently one thing I'm actually thinking about. Or rather: I tried to explain one thing I was actually thinking about two months ago which has since become far nerdier and more complicated and difficult to dump onto a page (and unsuspecting audience) all at once.

In any case. There will be no insane, tongue-stuck-in-cheek-so-hard-you'd-have-to-pry-it-out-with-a-jackhammer sort of post here today. Sorry. The best I can offer is my super-nerdy post on the blog next door. Read at your own risk (mostly of boredom but with an outside chance of infectious nerdiness).

Crisis Report: U.S. Kids Can't Tie Shoelaces Like They Used To

2010-09-27T08:27:00.000-07:00

A recent report issued by the influential Center for Motor Skills Research indicates that the United States has now fallen to 47th worldwide in percentage of six-year-olds who can tie their own shoelaces. Fifteen years ago, the United States ranked third.

The sobering reality on America's playgrounds today.

What's behind the precipitous decline in this traditional core childhood skill? No one really has any idea, but this blog still went the rounds and asked the experts. Their theories:

Blame Flip-Flops

Shoelace industry insider Robert E. Bell, Jr., CEO of Old Hickory Shoelace Co., blames flip-flops. "We used to think that Velcro was the big threat," said Bell "We never imagined our culture would turn casual enough to make flip-flops a problem. They aren't good for your kids' feet, they keep kids from learning this core skill: if parents keep dressing their little girls in flip-flops all summer and half the fall, we're on our way to becoming a third-world country, shoe-wise." Bell added, "this is making me upset. Let's not spend any more time talking about it."

Blame Eastern Europe

"Yes, fewer American children can tie their shoes today than could in the age of the dinosaurs" says Facebook's Jim Breyer, "but the fall to 47th has a lot to do with the rapid gains countries like Romania and Moldova are making, and we don't need to always compare ourselves to them. So turn off the red alert and go back to playing FarmVille. Your kids aren't from Moldova, and for Americans, they're doing just fine."

Blame Technology

"Did Peter Thiel really say that? How ironic!" says a character played by actor/director/producer Jeff Daniel Phillips. "Look: if kids weren't playing the video games and parents weren't spending their lives on Facebook and your blog, you wouldn't be interviewing me about this so-called 'crisis'."

"Why are you interviewing me, actually?" Daniels added.

Blame Pres. Obama's Low Approval Rating

"People need to spend less time being disappointed with my husband and more time building their children's skills" says Michelle Obama. "Next time you're tempted to read and forward an email saying that Barack is secretly Muslim, ask yourself if you've taught your kids about how the rabbit goes around the tree and down the hole. And I mean the shoelace rabbit, not some conspiracy theory one."

Blame No Child Left Behind

"I'm sure you've gotten all kinds of explanations, but the truth is pretty simple," says kindergarten teacher Tejinder Dhaliwal of Visalia, California, "We used to help kids with these sorts of skills in kindergarten. No Child Left Behind changed all that. I'm not surprised by these numbers and wouldn't be surprised to see similar declines in jump-roping, finger-painting, and social skills. We chose to raise a generation of test-takers. We've got to live with the consequences of those decisions."

Opinion: America Should Sign Subprime Contract with Republicans

2010-09-25T11:26:00.000-07:00

House Republicans recently unveiled a (sort of) detailed "Pledge to America" which outlines their rationale for a future subprime "Contract with America." The basic message goes like this: America needs to balance its budget, but can't afford to let go of any of the Bush tax cuts or any part of Medicare or Social Security or our military budget, which actually needs to be increased to fully fund a missile defense system. The only way out of this dilemma is to get a low, adjustable-rate mortgage using the rest of our government as collateral.

This is a good idea for two reasons:

1) If the economy magically improves, then an adjustable-rate mortgage can only go down!!

2) As everyone knows, our federal government is a bit of a fixer-upper anyway, so it wouldn't be so bad if the foreclosure clause of the "Contract with America" get activated.

"But wait!" you say, "I thought getting foreclosed on was a bad thing!"

Think again, long and hard, about what the federal government does. It:
a) Promotes global warming by maintaining roads and airports. If we allowed our freeways and airports to collapse, people would use less fuel and Mother Earth would be happier. :)
b) Spends lots of money on children whose parents aren't making much money. This is just stupid, since the kids can't even vote, and their working-class parents are probably too busy to vote. What programs like CHIP do is allow harmless children to turn into dangerous voting seniors, who are basically like terrorists who hold the country hostage by having nothing better to do than show up at the polls. Hence the Pledge's gun-point promise not to touch Social Security or Medicare. If we allow underprivileged children to turn into old people, we are letting the terrorists win.
c) Maintains national parks with public funds, preventing private sector development. Wouldn't Yellowstone be better if it were run by Disney Corp? And couldn't we sell the Smithsonian to the Chinese or something?
d) Funds Congress, which--after Enron and the Banks and the Media and deadbeat dads and students taking tests and prominent evangelical leaders who like to pay men to spend extra time with them and any group involved in any way with the city of New Orleans--is one of the most dishonest and corrupt institutions in our country.

This blog seldom takes overt positions on political issues, but would like to give its ringing endorsement to the Republican Pledge to America. Please pray to the Constitution that the Republicans will win a billion seats in Congress this November so that they can shut it down and go home and we won't have to worry about roads and uninsured children and communists and their unicorns anymore. Amen.

The Goldberg Guide to Effective New Media!

2010-09-23T20:45:00.000-07:00

As I came into class today, two of my students were discussing another class they share. Apparently, the teacher lectures for all two and a half hours, but has required the students to sign up for Twitter so they can talk to each other about class.

Wow! I thought. The internet does solve everything. You can be really boring, but the power of social media will make all your students want to spend extra time staring at a screen talking about your course matter anyway! Heck, maybe next semester you could just tweet your two-and-a-half hour lecture, 140 characters at a time. Everyone is more interesting with a little bird voice.

Twitter, however, has limited application. It's really only good for adding instant excitement to education. For humor, where my interest lies, you have to look beyond Twitter into MS Paint, which has a similar sort of magic:

Interesting fact: MS Paint is also a good way to diagnose a medically deficient sense of humor. If you see something in Paint, and you don't think it's funny, you should either see a doctor or self-medicate until it is funny to you.

This Post has Been Outsourced

2010-09-21T19:52:00.000-07:00

...to Russia, where a comment inspired me to write my first sonnet since ninth grade.

Here's a completely unrelated picture:

It is of a deer I saw on my way to Nicole's graduation.

How to Fix the Economy

2010-09-20T21:01:00.000-07:00

Heard on the news today that officially speaking, the recession ended a year ago. That is, things aren't technically getting worse anymore, there's just a lot of leftover bad. Economists call this period after a recession ends a "recess" because so many people are underemployed and therefore theoretically have more time to play outside (if you're an economist, playing outside is always only theoretical). Americans who are not economists don't know the technical term "recess" and so they call the period we're in lots of other words which are not printable on this blog and spend their extra time applying for theoretical jobs.

Our recess: looks a bit lonely, but otherwise nice.

The good news about the current recess is that I have a part-time job. I teach three classes at a university, which happens to be what full-time professors do, except that they have to go to faculty meetings. Also they get paid nearly twice as much as I do and get medical benefits and usually travel allowances.

I know numerous people in the same position I am in, because they are my co-workers. Like me, they graduated at a time when most institutions have full-time hiring freezes, and therefore hire lots of the people who can't find full-time jobs to teach part-time for less money and no benefits instead.

Don't get me wrong--I don't blame my employer. When the economy is slow and your funding is down, there aren't many options other than to do what they're doing. My guess is that numerous companies in numerous sectors are doing the exact same sorts of things right now. If my company let all of us extra part-timers go and replaced us with full-time employees, we'd be stuck with nowhere to go, and the company would be stuck with too much payroll for a continuing economic recess.

No--in order for things to get better, all the underemployed people in the country would have to quit at once and not take another job unless it paid nearly twice as much, included benefits, and involved mandatory attendance at boring meetings. If this mass quitting were to happen, employers would all have to take a crazy risk at once and start hiring full-time, which would give most of the people who just quit real jobs, which would stimulate the economy, which would save all the companies that just risked their necks to hire.

Yes--every struggling company would be foolish to hire full-time people now and every single part-time employee doing more than part-time work would be incredibly foolish to quit now, but if all the part-timers were to quit and all the companies were to hire, things would work out just fine.

...all quit our jobs at once! That's change America can believe in
if it closes its eyes and tries really, really hard.

So: if you see President Obama this week, tell him to read this blog post. And this blog post will tell him to cancel his traditional yearly message to sixth graders and address the nation's part-timers instead. If he tells us all to quit, and we all listen, the recess will end and he'll get re-elected. If the President doesn't read this blog, or doesn't come up with the same brilliant plan on his own, his approval ratings will continue to fall and we'll end up with four years of President Glenn Beck.

The choice is yours. Well, no, actually it's his. I think.

Please leave a comment if I'm right, Mr. President. (I'd also accept an electronic hoofprint from your unicorn if you're in a hurry.)

The Good Life

2010-09-18T15:53:00.001-07:00

Apologies must go up front to my more sensitive readers: I am about to offer my second scatalogical story this week alone, but rest assured that I weighed your feelings before deciding that this tale must be told.

My infant son and I had been spending a pleasant Yom Kippur afternoon together, he resting peacefully on my side (where he could hear my heartbeat), me thinking about change, as you're supposed to do on Yom Kippur. At some point a sound made clear that one thing in my life which would need particular changing was my boy's diaper, but I waited good and long to do so, because he's developed quite a reputation for peeing whenever the diaper comes off: on the nurses who weighed him at birth and after one week, on the doctor just prior to his circumcision, and as often as possible at home.

At length, I repaired (I'm not sure I'm using that word right--but it sounds quaint and dated, which is nice and helps compensate for the subject matter) to the changing table, and commenced to effect the change. No sooner did I reach for the new diaper, however, than an explosion of yellow matter with a deli-mustard-like consistency propelled itself out of my son's body, off the end of the changing pad, then the changing table, then over a foot of carpet (raining down bits and pieces along the way) and onto the back of the open door. Thinking of nothing else, I moved post-haste to contain the damage at the end of the changing table, not thinking to cover him in the meantime, so that soon I was distracted by the sound of a stream of liquid hitting the nearby wall and thereafter turning upwards and soiling the table off the other end of the changing pad.

All told, my son's mess stretched perhaps four feet and required some seven separate wipies to deal with. I had to clean him, the pad, the table, the carpet, the door, then move the table to clean the wall. How is a father, in such circumstances, supposed to react?

I could angrily lecture my infant son on hygiene, but elected not to waste any energy doing so.

I could choose to believe that if there were a God, he would not create baby boys with such powerful digestive organs, but thought it better to leave the Almighty and his creation alone.

I could cry and cry and cry about the hard world and the soiled clothes and the realization that by the time he's toilet trained the room may never be the same.

But it was so much more fun to laugh while I cleaned him up and put him down for a rest (after his great exertions), then call my sister on the phone to share the absurdity of the story all the while thinking that yes, this is proof if there ever was such a thing: I am living the good life.

New Business Plan

2010-09-17T20:01:00.000-07:00

So...I was all excited about opening a local vegetarian bakery, but then I found out that most cakes and cookies sold locally are meat-free already. The same is true in this area, believe it or not, of ice cream parlors (one serves a beef jerky ice cream, and another features a turkey gravy as a topping option, but everything else is meat free), so there went my back-up plan.

Nicole and I discussed moving to another city where a vegetarian bakery or ice cream parlor would still be a novelty, but we don't know that many people in Montana. So I've come up with a C plan instead: I'll make millions of dollars selling heartbeat bassinets.

Believe me: babies will buy them. There are few things babies hate like not lying on their parents. A baby who is used to being inside of its mother and hearing the comforting rhythms of her heart doesn't need three dangling stars above its head: two dangling stars are plenty, and the other space can be used for an artificial heart (see diagram above). With an artificial heart beating a familiar rhythm overhead, the baby can sleep peacefully in the bassinet.

A warning to parents: if you don't let your baby buy my heartbeat bassinet, whatever bassinet you do buy will probably end up as virtually useless decor and you'll be doomed to stay up all night blogging because you're afraid to actually fall asleep with a baby on your chest. Just a friendly warning.

Tax Cuts and Bubbles

2010-09-16T20:42:00.000-07:00

Nine years ago, I made one of those paper count-down chains they taught us to make in elementary school in the weeks leading up to winter break. Every week, I've been cutting off another link and am almost done, because this is the season when the Bush tax cuts are set to expire. For me, that will be a symbolic moment of exorcism: in a significant way we will be a little more free from that dark ghost of economics past.

Or will we? I heard on the radio today that the Democrats and Republicans are fighting over the issue in a way I didn't expect. The Republicans want all the tax cuts, including the ones on the richest 2% of Americans, extended (after all, if you're making $8 million a year, your time is too valuable to look for all the tax loopholes designed for the rich. It's much easier to get your taxes off up front without having to come up with a charity donation or local investment to write off). The Democrats don't want those tax cuts extended--but they do want to keep the rest of the Bush tax cuts, the ones that protect "middle class Americans" who earn $200,000 per year.

Did you hear that? $200,000 a year is middle class! Good thing we've got a party to fight for the vulnerable people in that income bracket!

Politically, I guess it makes sense to call very-but-not-quite-obscenely-rich people "middle class," but I'm beginning to wonder if that sort of thinking, on both sides of the aisle, is what got us into this economic mess in the first place. As I recall, the current economic crisis began when people took out massive sub-prime mortgages and second mortgages on houses they couldn't afford in the first place and then (surprise!) couldn't make their payments. Why, I wondered, would so many people do that?

Simple. Let's say you want a normal, middle-class American standard of living, and Congress tells you that means you should spend up to $200,000 a year. You'd better take a loan out fast, because where I come from, ain't many people who actually earn that.

Maybe we got in this crisis in the first place because Bush tax cuts drove up our collective idea of what appropriate spending was. The rich got richer and the "middle class" spent more to try to keep up, whether they had it or not.

Q: If you can pay cash for 16 of these every year, still have
$40,000 for living expenses, and be considered middle class,
what's the minimum number you have to buy to prove that
you're not dirt poor? A: I don't know, but loans never hurt.

I'm about ready to start my own Tea Party, except that in mine, we'll sink luxury goods to the bottom of Boston Harbor until people decide they're not worth going into debt and wrecking the economy for and maybe we should spend our money on things like schools, hospitals, research, and cleaner factories instead.

Once Upon a Time

2010-09-14T22:21:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time there was a little moon-baby who came to earth. The earth was beautiful, but in the thick gravity everything felt heavy. It was hard for the moon-baby to move his arms and legs and he couldn't float around anymore. The gravity made the moon-baby tired and he'd sleep and sleep.

I'd watch his moon-face and I'd watch the slow way he'd stretch his moon-fingers. Here is a secret: I am also from the moon. My mind still makes moon-jumps, in fact, but my fingers are slow in all this gravity and my eyelids won't stay open while I try to write.

This world is heavy. Heavy, heavy, heavy. That's why you have to learn to close your eyes and think of the moon. Closed eyes are your moon-eyes, and your moon-eyes remember that in the real world, which is the moon, things are light.

When you will remember that, you will smile your moon-smile. Here is another secret I will someday tell the moon-baby. The moon-smile is what will make the other moon-people recognize you. It's the way you open your moon-eyes and smile the moon-smile that will make a silver-souled moon-girl fall in love with you some day.

...and we're back (sort of)

2010-09-13T22:46:00.000-07:00

As you may recall, I had hoped to blog for twenty minutes each day (note: Sundays are holidays, and don't count) during the month of September. Well, Friday I didn't, and Saturday my twenty minutes consisted of staring at the screen and thinking about the craziness of this year's 9/11 anniversary but not coming up with anything witty to say about it.

I'm still feeling a little short on the witties. Or wits. Or whatever you call them.

Look! A postcard from my sister:

Look, Daddy! I can pee eight inches past the top of my head!

2010-09-09T22:54:00.000-07:00

The diaper was actually "poopy"--that's the technical term the hospital nurses use for the result of an infant's bowel movements--but just before I finished changing it, my son decided it was a good time to pee: on his belly, on his fourth pair of clothes for the day, on my arm, on his changing pad, and off the edge of his changing pad for a total distance I estimate at eight inches past the top of his head.

Eight inches.

If you calculate that according to body size, it's something like if I peed straight up in the air nine up to nine feet above the ground.

Kids--even when they're a mess, they're strangely fascinating. (Or maybe you just turn crazy when you become a parent as a defense mechanism.)

Today is a Magick Day

2010-09-08T20:36:00.000-07:00

Spent my twenty minutes today (well, OK, it was thirty, but close) on the blog next door.

Be back here later.

Quick Story

2010-09-07T22:58:00.000-07:00

Nicole and I like to talk. A lot. For most of our marriage, we've spent a few hours each night just chatting with each other.

Yesterday, shortly after he was born, the baby heard my voice behind him. He craned his head impressively far back to take a look at me, as if he were trying hard to connect new sights to sounds he knew far better than I had realized.

There are a lot of things in life that probably technically matter which I don't often get done. But I feel pretty good about the choices I make thinking about the way my infant son already recognized me.

I won second place in a fiction contest and third place in the same magazine's essay contest recently, and that was affirming. But the voice I care most about is not the one that ends up printed on a page--it's the one whose sound makes my son want to turn his head.

My Life

2010-09-06T23:42:00.000-07:00

The Compleat Book of Advice for Today's Child and Her Balloon

2010-09-04T10:10:00.001-07:00

The sheer ingenuity of today's children makes parenting a terrific challenge. As numerous surveys have shown, most parents have either "no idea" or a "foggy idea" of what to tell their children 86% of the time. Take Nicole and I--the question we most often ask our daughter is "what are you doing?"--if we don't even know what she's up to when we're watching her, how can we possibly give her all the advice she needs?

When we do give advice, it is often in the form of sentences sadly under-represented in parenting books, such as "it's hard to wash the table when there's a balloon wrapped around your finger" and "don't spin your plate when there's that much rice on it."

This problem is not limited to us. A close friend confirmed that some of the most important advice she gave to her son was, "If you don't know what it is, you shouldn't stick it in the video slot."

In order to better prepare both parents and children for situations such as these, I've decided to compile a complete list of advice for children. Ideally, parents would discuss a few lines such as those above with their children each night, so as to head off problems in advance.

If you have found yourself putting together extremely unusual or bizarre sentences in your interactions with children, please put them in the comments section below so that we can make this book as comprehensive as possible.

What we've got here is failure to communicate...

2010-09-03T08:38:00.000-07:00

When I need money, which is pretty much always, I like to earn it by teaching persuasive writing at BYU. The Greeks called the study of persuasion "rhetoric" and, in compliance with a 1926 Congressional Act called for the preservation of words using the consonant combination "rh" in the English language, we still use that term in class. I explained just two days ago that rhetoric is not all about the writer, but involves connecting writer, issue, and audience. An important part of rhetoric, I told my class, is understanding your audience's values and appealing to them, rather than to your own values, when making an argument.

I don't think they teach rhetoric in French schools. Probably also not in Iran. As the following case of an issue, some writers, and an audience will demonstrate, however, rhetoric-education is valuable, and you should keep paying me to do it in the U.S.

The Issue
In 2006, an Iranian woman named Sakineh Ashtiani was charged with committing adultery and helping her lover murder her husband. If I understand correctly, either crime alone carries the death sentence in Iran, so her conviction on both counts put her on death row, with stoning as a possible means of execution. If I understand correctly, there are also major questions about whether she actually was involved in the murder of her husband and especially about whether her confession was obtained through torture. Various human rights groups have expressed serious concerns over the case.

The Writers
In response to a recent rumor (later denied by the Iranian embassy) that Sakineh Ashtiani would be executed by stoning, several prominent figures in France decided to write letters in Sakineh's support. An ex-President of France summoned stirring lines like "I consider that the grand Persian culture which contributed so much to human civilization deserves better than this." Segolene Royal, who nearly became France's first female president in 2007, said that Ashtiani was "enslaved for the crime of being a woman" and that punishing her "will lead to even more unhappiness." And then, perhaps taking a cue from Royal, Carla Bruni, the Italian-born model who is currently serving a term as wife of French President Nicholas Sarkozy, entered the fray with an open letter to Sakineh, which built up to this emotional appeal:
"I just can’t see what good could come out of this macabre ceremony, whatever the judicial reasons put forward to justify it. Shed your blood and deprive children of their mother, why? Because you have lived, because you have loved, because you’re a woman and because you’re Iranian? Everything within me refuses to accept this."

The Audience
How might all these appeals resonate with the values of the Iranian government? My guess is that ex.-Pres. d'Estaing's appeal to the greatness of Persian culture might have backfired, since the last time an Iranian government cared more about its Persian Imperial heritage than its Islamic religious heritage was under the Shah the current government fought a revolution against. I'd also be surprised if Royal's insistence that Ashtiani was imprisoned "for being a woman" went over well with people who don't think the being a woman necessarily includes committing adultery. But I only know for sure about reactions to Bruni's letter, which elicited a headline in a major Iranian paper called Kayhan which translates to, "French Prostitutes Join the Human Rights Protest." The editorial references Bruni's high-profile pre- and extra-marital affairs and suggested that Bruni was defending Ashtiani only because "she herself deserves death." Since Iran has sometimes acted outside its borders on its ideas of who should live and die, that particular statement didn't go over well with the French, who have announced that they will push for new sanctions on Iran.

Aristotle might have been a more effective
writer in this case, because unlike Bruni
he a) understands rhetoric and b) hasn't been
paid to pose for naked pictures now available
to the world on the internet.

Progress
So: the French called on Iran to change, but without taking their audience's history and values into consideration. This mostly upset Iran, where a major newspaper called the French first lady a prostitute. The paper went on to give its own view of how extramarital sex should be handled, completely ignoring French fears of Iranian violence--if tougher sanctions go through, Iran will be probably lose millions of dollars over that one sentence.
Who, exactly, is winning in all this?
Am I naive to believe that the French could have done better had they focused on issues like evidence instead of appealing to the glory of the Persian Empire? Am I wrong to think Carla Bruni maybe should have stopped at "why deprive these children of their mother?" in her final draft rather than drawing attention to herself and her own values with the "Because you have lived, because you have loved, because you’re a woman and because you’re Iranian? Everything within me refuses to accept this" lines?
And am I off-base in thinking that Iran could have successfully dismissed these rhetorically poor French appeals without mentioning that in their hardcore Iranian opinion, another country's prominent public figure technically "deserves death"?

In conclusion
Words can be useful and powerful things. Carefully chosen words can actually reach across cultural difference to help achieve an objective. When using words to try and influence someone else, however, it's important to keep one rule in one's mind: you are not talking to yourself!

Mormons: the Next Generation

2010-09-02T20:19:00.000-07:00

My best friend, Michael, and I made up half the Mormon population in our grade at the local high school. A teacher who had both of us, but had somehow missed our shared faith, called us his "Thoreaubians" because of the strong independent streak we'd developed from our minority religious experience.

Michael and I both went to colleges in Ohio for a year, followed by two years each of full-time church missions (his to Brazil and mine to Germany the same year those two nations faced off in the finals of the World Cup), followed by half a year each back at Ohio colleges, after which we both ended up out West at BYU (Michael a semester or two sooner than I).

After a few years in Utah, Michael got married. About a year after him, I got married, too.

Yesterday, Michael's wife gave birth to a son they named Owen:

Sometime soon (she hopes very soon), my wife will give birth to a son we'll name Elijah or Jacob or Benjamin or Leif (unless we listen to Kira and name him "Balraj" or "Bob Singh").

Looking at little Owen, I can't help but think: Michael and I have done really well for ourselves. We've both made through the first third of our lives (statistically speaking) without touching alcohol, tobacco, or drugs. We've spent three hours each week in church getting practice listening patiently, which is not bad exercise for being husbands and fathers. We've found good women who share our belief in God and our commitment to his children and want to make homes with us. We've lived in American abundance without turning totally materialistic, and we've learned an awful lot without developing the delusion that we know everything we need to know.

And now we're helping launch another generation of Mormon men. So I pray for them: that they'll find good ways to belong and know when it's a blessing not to belong. That they'll know what they want enough in their hearts to avoid the worst distractions our society throws at their senses. That they'll be aware but not too afraid, and open but not thoughtless or reckless. I don't pray that their world will be better: I know it will be better and also worse. But I pray that both its good and its evil will ultimately serve to bring out the divine in them.

May they remember and honor the dead as they serve and care for the living.

Happy late birth day, Owen. Happy soon-to-be birth day, my son.

Month of Mayhem

2010-09-01T09:48:00.000-07:00

Some of you may have noticed that I sort fell out of the internet over the course of the summer. This is because the internet is actually shaped like a donut--it's easy to get caught up running around and around in circles for ever, but when you get right to the center there's nothing there.

In Buddhist thought, your soul is also that way. There are all kinds of thoughts and worries and actions around the edges, but the center is absolutely uncluttered. And if you could let go of all the outside stuff, the center would be set free.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your perspective), I'm not interested in being set free at this point in my life. I have a daughter here, and a son very close to here, and I'd far rather be caught up in the madness of life for them than risk accidentally becoming enlightened and ending up orange-robed in some faraway monastery.

To prevent enlightenment, then, I'm determined to return to this blog! I have made a resolution that I'll write (almost) every day in September, a feat I plan to achieve through two simple twists:
1) I will stop writing after twenty minutes each day, for good or ill.
2) I won't lie as much as usual, because it takes so much effort. I'll have to just tell you what I'm thinking about instead--which will probably be mostly incoherent.

Please enjoy the coming month of mayhem!

Quick Question

2010-07-30T15:26:00.000-07:00

So: I started graduate school by paying for an orchiechtomy. I am now finishing by paying for a root canal.

People warned me that more education means greater earning power. They neglected to mention that the purpose of greater earning power is so you can pay to have the dangerous parts of your body removed one by one.

I forget what my question was.

Happy Birthday Kira

2010-07-04T22:32:00.000-07:00

Author's note 7/30/10. My sister, Judith, somehow obtained my login information, presumably from a source who may or may not be married to me...in any case, she added some interest to my long vacation from Blogland by covertly inserting this post:

Birthdays, birthdays, birthdays, one minute it's the blogs birthday, then it's the birthday of the neice I blove most, and next it will be the very first birthday of a tiny baby child. Kira's little tiny baby child brother, I mean. Which will make her most definitely not an only child, although I guess she never really was.

Yes indeed, yesterday on the Fourth of July it was my niece Kira's birthday. So here is a toast, to Kira! Or perhaps it should be an oatmeal - I have had heard rumors that it is the preferred breakfast fare. We shall toast that you, Kira, may enjoy many many bowls of oatmeal the years to come. (can you hear the clinking of fine crystal glasses?)

Kira has accomplished a lot in the last year. I mean she went to kindergarten and graduated college with a theses too - and unless I'm mistaken, the graduation came before the kindergarten gig. And possibly she had a couple of multi-cultura l weddings too. Amazing, kids these days - half of 'em are hooligans and the other half graduating even before Mrs. Whats-her-name has the chance to hand out snacks and settle 'em down for nap time.

I remember when I was visiting in Utah how excited Kira was for kindergarten, I suppose that it is first grade eve that is upcoming now. I hope that by then brother will wake up on time and that he has a better grasp on the complicated subject of girl's hair.

Maybe when I come to visit Utah in October I'll wake up and Kira and I can do James' hair before we take him Kindergarten class. I mean she needs to learn how to do boys hair at a young age or else Balraj will be left to fend through hair gel and schlac by himself! Except for my brother is very bald. I guess if he had hair he would just look even more like Osama bin Laden anyways. What kind of fate leaves brothers, one often mistaken for Jesus and the other for a terrorist? Kira, we should buy a wig for your dad or maybe a toupee...

Speaking of brothers, I still feel awful that I missed James' groomellete party, not to mention Jamicole's awesome wedding, which of course was a pretty big day in Kira's life -- part five. What are you going to do to top that day in life part six, Kira? But I was running around Thailand and India at the time, so I suppose I'll just forget and not slow down.

Yup, Kira, no looking back. I am only looking forward to baby blessings and hopefully a family Thanksgiving spent in New York and summers in Utah.

We all have a lot to look forward to, especially my favoritest six year old to date.

To Kira, from your littlest ant, in Thailand.

(and sister to you, Mr. James)

Happy Birthday to Blog

2010-06-23T16:36:00.000-07:00

Well, the grand day has finally arrived. One year has passed since my first-ever blog post.

Hooray!

According to voting readers, the best post ever on this blog is "Best Goldbergish Post Ever?," which just goes to show that elections aren't worth much.

The more exclusive "jury prize"--selected by a panel of secretive experts--for best Goldbergish post goes to "I Apologize" (although it's neither on this blog or written by me), and to "Piano Lessons" (also not on this blog and not by me), which just goes to show how bad secretive experts are at following directions, even if they have good taste.

In other news, this blog has gotten 4,400 visits to date, at an average visit duration of three and a half minutes. Assuming that the average reader's time is worth $10/hr, that means just over $2,500 worth of your collective time has been spent here. That's awfully low tuition for the wonderful education you've been getting in such valuable subjects as. . . um. . . oh, look, it's an eagle!

Word to the wise: never hold a blog birthday costume party.
I'm just sayin'.

Best Goldbergish Post Ever?

2010-06-15T19:13:00.000-07:00

It has come to our attention that next Wednesday is the first birthday of this blog. Hooray!

At the birthday celebrations, we'd like to give a special award for the best post. In order to determine what that post is, however, we'll need your input. What's been your favorite post on this blog to date?

Mr. Pizza man wants to know what you like
so badly, he's bleeding out of his eyes.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

2010-06-12T16:59:00.000-07:00

This morning Nicole was feeling particularly gross. Because I have no way or knowing whether you are close enough to knock on wood after reading this, I will not suggest that this may be an indication that the relatively golden weeks of the second trimester are drawing to a close. I will stick to telling you, instead, that around 10 am Nicole announced that this day was not meeting her expectations, and she would like to start over.

A generically good husband, I'm sure, would have thought of something comforting or optimistic to say. But I am not a generically good husband, I'm Nicole's husband, and standard optimism will not always do. So I told her the scariest story I could think of instead.

"Speaking of starting the day over, can you imagine going through a Groundhog Day experience while pregnant?" I said.

Nicole groaned, and then laughed her dark, death-defying sort of laugh.

I love our marriage.

Peace in the Middle East

2010-06-11T19:42:00.000-07:00

I think that many of us can agree that peace has been so difficult to achieve in the Middle East because the people there are uniquely obstinate in not being able to recognize governments they don't agree with ideologically. If those Middle Eastern people (let's call them Middle Easties) would just travel, trade, and negotiate with each other like normal people instead of trying to kill each other, there wouldn't be a problem.

I mean, it's been over fifty years, and they still can't treat each other civilly. Where else on earth does stuff like that still happen?

My Dream

2010-06-09T19:15:00.000-07:00

Some people work for years to discover their dreams, but today mine fell SPLAT onto my head, sort of like an egg that had been broken in the sky after being laid by a drunken bird in mid-air.

Forget writing. My dream is to start a bakery.

It will a vegetarian bakery, specializing in cakes without meat. We will also have cupcakes without meat, brownies without meat, even milk without meat to go with them!

If things go well, I may add a meat-free ice cream bar on the side. We'll also offer meat-free lollipops for vegetarian children.

I've already done a sketch for our general advertising:

And some special advertising sketches for more niche markets:

The March of the Theses

2010-06-03T14:45:00.000-07:00

I would like to write a documentary for Morgan Freeman to narrate. It will be about intrepid Master's Theses which trek past several authorities and through several forms to the center of Antartica--where, tragically, most will never even get a date.

One of the scenes in my documentary will be this very moment, in which a graduate student (played by me) writes this blog post to inform readers that a month after his thesis defense, his thesis has been submitted as a .pdf document for approval by people with sharp eyes and red pens.

In one of the film's most moving moments, Morgan Freeman will explain that the student, who appears to be sitting and typing like always, is actually providing a link through which people can preview and even download the pdf of his thesis, even before it is approved! How exciting!

Unfortunately, by this point most of the audience will already be asleep.

Oh, well.

Now Celebrating: Fetal Awareness Day

2010-05-29T18:44:00.000-07:00

The baby surprised Nicole today by kicking vigorously for most of her shower--surprising, since he usually waits to kick until she's lying down and relaxed (11 pm is his most active time).He continued to swim and squirm throughout the day, wiggling and kicking inside of Nicole so much during dinner that she finally put down her fork and asked if he was trying to get her attention.

The baby did not respond. We've decided that today is simply Fetal Awareness Day. It's a sort of holiday, we think, which takes place on any day when the fetus is particularly aware.

The baby Kira is calling Balraj is in a celebratory mood. You would
be, too, if you spent all your time in a private, heated indoor pool.

Birthday present!

2010-05-18T15:00:00.001-07:00

Technically my birthday isn't until Thursday, but we celebrated Sunday night at my parents-in-law's anyway--why not stretch out a good thing to cover the whole week?

In the midst of the festivities, Kira came from playing outside and brought something to me.

"Here Daddy!" she said "It's for you birthday."

"What is it?" I asked.

"A dead slug" she said happily.

She was wrong--it was actually a dried cocoon--but I still found it strangely touching that she'd found what she thought was a dead slug and had been willing to give it to me.

I'm not an economist, but....

2010-05-11T11:39:00.000-07:00

Let's say the housing market begins to collapse. Let's say that affects other sectors of the economy, and people get upset. Let's say that many of those upset people put pressure on various levels of government to crack down on illegal immigrants--or at least those who haven't left the country on their own already because there are no longer as many jobs.

Now let's suppose that the government actually succeeds in throwing out the nation's estimated 12 million remaining illegal immigrants. Let's also suppose that those illegal immigrants lived in apartments, perhaps even houses.

Now let's suppose that you have lost your job and would like to rent out your basement as an apartment, or even sell your house, but now have to compete with an extra 12 million people's worth of empty dwellings. Or else let's suppose that an evil senator we'll call B. B. voted for a bill through which the government bought some failing companies in the real estate sector and is hoping they will stop failing and can be sold off as private businesses again.

Won't you be glad then that all those immigrants are gone?

Our Glorious Democracy (Bye Bye Bob Bennett)

2010-05-11T09:28:00.000-07:00

Reading the news often gives me a warm, familiar, numbing sense of deja-vu. It's spring, and my favorite basketball player (Steve Nash) is on court bleeding into his eyes again. A President is nominating someone with no direct judicial experience to the Supreme Court. Some prominent, charismatic Christian evangelical religious leader and political activist has been paying a man to spend time with him. Ah, sweet familiarity!

If Steve Nash isn't getting stitches, it's not Playoff Basketball.

And then I happen to run across an article that says one of my state's Senators, Bob Bennett, didn't get enough votes at the Republican Party Convention to even make the primary election because he's not conservative enough and my jaw drops.

In a way, this is also deja vu: it wasn't too long ago that my district's ultraconservative Congressman, Chris Cannon (who had a rating of 96 from the American Conservative Union) was defeated in a primary by Jason Chaffetz, whose politics are just to the right of Shiv Sena. The hot new thing in Utah is apparently to throw out anyone who will shake hands with a Democrat, an immigrant, or anyone who has ever lived in or near Washington, D.C.

Bennett tries to convince convention delegates that he is not now,
nor has a ever been, a member of the Communist Party.

That Bob Bennett didn't even make the primary, though, still manages to disturb me.

How does something like this happen?

It's simple, say the analysts. The general pattern goes like this:

1) Seasoned statesman listens carefully to weeks and weeks of expert testimony, makes hard choice to support controversial bill for the good of the country.
2) Ultraconservative voters listen to weeks and weeks of talk radio, decide that controversial bill is Satanic, Communist, or both, and decide that only purity can save the nation.
3) Out-of-state-group pays to get handpicked delegates selected at local caucus meetings while normal people are out watering their gardens.
4) Seasoned statesman is told "the party doesn't want you anymore."
5) Primary and general elections are held--in Utah, this is done for fun, but it's already been decided that a case of rabies will be sent to Congress in lieu of the outgoing eighteen years of experience.

Welcome to the current chapter in our glorious democracy. Aren't you glad that in November, you will get to vote?

Next Up in Facebook's Bid for World Domination

2010-05-10T09:09:00.000-07:00

Few companies have the audacity to try to take over the entire internet the way Facebook intends to with its new "Open Graph" approach to hegemony. But then again, few companies can get 80 million people to publicly admit that they play a game called "Farmville." So instead of asking themselves if it's a good idea to rule the internet, Facebook's managers are asking themselves: is taking over people's experience of the internet really enough? Why not become the nation's top cellular service by next year, too?

Introducing: the FacePhone.

"The idea began in a happy accident," says Facebook board member Jim Breyer "when my profile got hacked. Phishers sent a message to two thousand or so of my friends asking if they'd like a Facebook phone number. The next day, I've got something like 600 messages complaining about emptied bank accounts and I thought--Wow! That's a sad scam, but there's obviously a lot of interest in this!"

Breyer took the idea to fellow board member Peter Thiel, and within twenty-four hours what might prove to be the idea of the decade was born.

"We'll be giving out FacePhones for free," says Thiel. "Using the FacePhone will also be absolutely free with no limits on pictures, texts, or even picture messages--to other FacePhone users."

And how much to call outside of the FacePhone network?

"The FacePhone will be like Facebook itself in that way," says Breyer, "your friends will have to join if they want to contact you. It's not possible to call out."

Thiel is confident, however, that this limitation won't be much of a concern. "On any given day, an average of 200 million people log into facebook. That's nearly 4% of the literate people in the world every day. Start offering them free cells phones linked to their accounts, and it won't be long until you can talk to everyone who's not a total techno-hermit on your FacePhone."

"Imagine never having to call anyone without checking their status line and most recent personal information first," says Breyer. "This is a big, big idea."

So how will Facebook pay for this?

"Ads are a factor, of course" says Thiel. "We're developing a system in which ads will be generated based on recent calls--if you've just spent an extended period with one company's customer service line, we'll bring up ads for their competitors. What company wouldn't pay top dollar for an opportunity like that? We'll also be charging for corporate accounts in the first place. Once we have a hundred million private users, most companies won't have much of a choice but to sign up for their own FacePhone lines--no matter what rate we set."

Won't companies be a little upset by that?

"Oh, I think the perks will outweigh the costs," says Breyer. "For a premium fee, we'll provide companies with some tools that help them make the most of user information. Let's say you run a movie theater: imagine being able to automatically send a message or coupon to every one of your contacts whose status includes the word 'bored.'"

"These aren't just free cell phones," says Thiel, "we're talking about a new and lucrative way to organize the world."

And what does Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg think of the plan?

"He's excited," says Thiel. "He's always looking for one more reason for the average person never to quit Facebook--we're confident that this will make Facebook even more essential not just as a product, but as the only socially acceptable 21st century way of life."

Like it or not, it seems clear that with its latest innovations, Facebook is doing just that. Geniuses like Napoleon, Hitler, and Pinky & the Brain may have failed, but Zuckerberg & Co. are showing that it's still possible to take over the world.

"Does this smile make me look evil?" -Peter Thiel

Thesis Defense

2010-05-03T23:09:00.000-07:00

The classical thesis defense, I am told, used to look something like this:

The brilliant professor sits, blowing wisdom out of his nostrils, while the student peaks over the edge of a mushroom nervously, hoping to be allowed to pass. Grad students to this day have nightmares that their defense will be this way.

Students: never fear. All you have to do to prevent that is to come up with a thesis idea so preposterous that only nutcases will be willing to serve on your committee and you can have a defense that looks like this instead:

Trust me. I had one Thursday. It was wonderful.

Q: What is the worst joke on earth?

2010-04-29T09:38:00.000-07:00

A: Richard Simmons.

Actually, that's a lie. It's really this terrible joke about Richard Simmons.

Q: What do you get when you cross a duck with an airplane?

2010-04-27T14:20:00.000-07:00

A: I don't know, but it's probably very ugly.

Q: How many chickens does it take to screw in a light bulb?

2010-04-26T20:17:00.000-07:00

A: It doesn't matter, because they're all on the other side.

Why I Haven't Written in a While (part two)

2010-04-21T11:15:00.000-07:00

It is a sad but true fact that I am functionally illiterate when stressed. This is, doctors tell me, because stress aggravates my latent clausophobia: while I retain the knowledge of how to read and write, an acute anxiety of any text that begins to approach a complete sentence keeps me from exercising that knowledge whenever my clausophobia becomes active.

This is less crippling than you might imagine. Despite my studies in English, I seldom make it all the way through a book in any case, so I really don't miss books. I also find that my few weeks away from the news seldom change anything: the world is reliably dysfunctional whenever I come back. The hardest part of my periods of active clausophobia, in fact, are the blogging losses. It's strange to think that because of my condition, for three weeks my digital self did not exist!

I still have to count my blessings, however. If I had periodic lexiphobia instead of clausophobia, I would have to hide from things like stop signs and billboards when sick. As it was, I spent a full week of my three weeks of digital nonexistence in California, completely unperturbed by road signs which content themselves with one-word utterances.

Recently, thanks to end-of-the-semester grading and an impending (29 April) thesis defense, my levels of stress have risen to the point of the delightful delirium I typically exist within, and my clausophobia is once again latent. Hopefully, it will remain so long enough for me to tell you about all the books I didn't read while actively clausophobic.

Do I Give Blasphemous Advice in Other People's Dreams?

2010-03-31T20:23:00.000-07:00

Let's assume, for purposes of this post, that God created the earth in seven days or less.

Let's also assume that Kathy Cowley told the truth in her recent comment, and while we're at it, let's go on and assume that other people are constantly having dreams in which I give them the same advice.

Is it blasphemous to expect mortal writers to create worlds at the same pace which is traditionally attributed to the Supreme Being? Or is such advice OK, since fictional worlds are invariably less complex than real ones?

The Missing Week

2010-03-30T22:34:00.000-07:00

For purposes of this post, we will assume a week extends from Tuesday to Tuesday.

For purposes of this post, we will also assume a week progresses from most recent to the murky time period I often anecdotally refer to as "the other day."

And of course, we will assume that you are disappointed rather than pleased that I have not posted all week.

Starting from these (admittedly dubious) assumptions, I wish to say to you: never fear. Using my superpower of inventive memory, I now present to you a review of the Missing Week:

Today: I am trying to make a very important point in class when I am reminded by something I say of a whole genre of Mathematician/Physicist/Engineer jokes which I was often told as a child. This in turn, reminds me that because my father would count asymptotically when I was approaching trouble, I never learned to hate math like other children and have been a misfit since.

Yesterday: I am in bondage in Egypt--until some grape juice is spilled on a plate, at which point I am at a table eating chapatis with haroset and horseradish.

Yesterday's Yesterday: It is Sunday. My daughter is so restless at church that I sort of wish we were Buddhist so that I could go to church alone in a monastery and not come out for several months instead. After church, I tell my wife I was a much more patient father before I had a child.

The Day Before Yesterday's Yesterday: We pass numerous cows on our way to the Hindu temple in Spanish Fork, UT, site of the largest Holi celebration in North America. When we get there, the place has been overrun by college students who believe that being covered in colored powder automatically makes you a temporary hippy. One holds up a sign that says "PEACE DAMNIT." I am not sure whether he knows that our country is currently involved in two wars, and that neither of them is in Vietnam.

Several Days Ago: My daughter and I drive for more than an hour in search of an old friend's wedding reception while my wife takes a breather at the local Buddhist monastery. We have trouble getting to the reception because half the roads Google maps suggested are under construction or closed. We finally reach what appears to be the correct address. There is a large abandoned barn which creeps my daughter out. Either we have the wrong address, or this is a terrible metaphor for marriage.

The Other Day: There is an eighteen-and-a-half minute gap in my otherwise perfect recollection of this day. I blame the ghost of Richard Nixon.

The Other Other Day: There is an eighteen-and-a-half hour gap in my otherwise perfect recollection of this day. For the other five-and-a-half hours, I am asleep. Fortunately, I have no strange dreams.

A Week Ago: I write a post called "The Missing Week" and schedule it for automatic publication in one week, thus relieving myself of any responsibility to update my blog between now and then.

A thank you to 2% of Americans

2010-03-22T13:49:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a long-debated healthcare bill in the hopes that voting Americans will have some idea what it's about before elections in November. Credit for the landmark bill has largely gone to Barack Obama, who--in a brilliant strategic move--decided to run for office at a time when George W. Bush had secured Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress.

I'd like to take this moment, however, to thank the 2% of Americans who earn over $200,000 annually per individual or $250,000 per couple and will see their income taxes rise to offset the costs of this bill.

While I do not personally understand how hard it is to have an annual income of a quarter million dollars, let alone be taxed on it, I want these people to know that I appreciate their sacrifice in the face of the soul-sucking socialism this bill represents.

(And I'd like to think that Jesus appreciates their sacrifice, too.)

Pick Your Poison; or, Why I Love Email Forwards!!

2010-03-19T12:26:00.000-07:00

I like to keep my finger on the pulse of America, as manifest in the email forwards I get. This week, the pulse was telling me that Americans are tired of being outnumbered by rules by a factor of 5 to 1. Also, they miss the good old days when every decent high school had a smoking dock.

As a general rule, I don't talk back to America's pulse (except maybe to say "thumpa thumpa thump," a sort of pulse-speak greeting), but in this case I felt an exception was necessary. The present needs someone to speak up for it, and why not me? After all, in the past I would have died at twenty-five-and-a-half.

So without further ado, I present to you an email I got forwarded, and a response I like to think of as a forward striking back:

HIGH SCHOOL -- 1958 vs. 2008

Scenario 1:
Jack goes quail hunting before school and then pulls into the school parking lot with his shotgun in his truck's gun rack.

1958 - Vice Principal comes over, looks at Jack's shotgun, goes to his car and gets his shotgun to show Jack.

2008 - School goes into lock down, FBI called, Jack hauled off to jail and never sees his truck or gun again. Counselors called in for traumatized students and teachers.

Scenario 2:
Johnny and Mark get into a fist fight after school.

1958 - Crowd gathers. Mark wins. Johnny and Mark shake hands and end up buddies.

2008 - Police called and SWAT team arrives -- they arrest both Johnny and Mark. They are both charged with assault and both expelled even though Johnny started it.

Scenario 3:
Jeffrey will not be still in class, he disrupts other students.

1958 - Jeffrey sent to the Principal's office and given a good paddling by the Principal. He then returns to class, sits still and does not disrupt class again.

2008 - Jeffrey is given huge doses of Ritalin. He becomes a zombie. He is then tested for ADD. The school gets extra money from the state because Jeffrey has a disability.

Scenario 4:
Billy breaks a window in his neighbor's car and his Dad gives him a whipping with his belt. Billy must do chores to earn the money to pay for the window.

1958 - Billy is more careful next time, grows up normal, goes to college and becomes a responsible, successful businessman.

2008 - Billy's dad is arrested for child abuse. Billy is removed to foster care and joins a gang. The state psychologist is told by Billy's sister that she remembers being abused herself and their dad goes to prison. Billy's mom has an affair with the psychologist.

Scenario 5:
Mark gets a headache and takes some aspirin to school.

1958 - Mark shares his aspirin with the Principal out on the smoking dock.

2008 - The police are called and Mark is expelled from school for drug violations. His car is then searched for drugs and weapons.

Scenario 6:
Pedro fails high school English.

1958 - Pedro goes to summer school, passes English and goes to college.

2008 - Pedro's cause is taken up by state. Newspaper articles appear nationally explaining that teaching English as a requirement for graduation is racist. ACLU files class action lawsuit against the state school system and Pedro's English teacher. English is then banned from core curriculum. Pedro is given his diploma anyway but ends up mowing lawns for a living because he cannot speak English.

Scenario 7:
Johnny takes apart leftover firecrackers from the Fourth of July, puts them in a model airplane paint bottle and blows up a red ant bed..

1958 - Ants die.

2008- ATF, Homeland Security and the FBI are all called. Johnny is charged with domestic terrorism. The FBI investigates his parents -- and all siblings are removed from their home and all computers are confiscated. Johnny's dad is placed on a terror watch list and is never allowed to fly again.

Scenario 8:
Johnny falls while running during recess and scrapes his knee. He is found crying by his teacher, Mary. Mary hugs him to comfort him.

1958 - In a short time, Johnny feels better and goes on playing.

2008 - Mary is accused of being a sexual predator and loses her job. She faces 3 years in State Prison. Johnny undergoes 5 years of therapy .

This should hit every email inbox to show how stupid we have become!!

Unfortunately, this ad wasn't included in the original forward.
Scenario 9: Mother wants baby to stop crying NOW.
1958 Mom smokes, experiences "the Miracle of Marlboro,"
doesn't smack kid.
2008 Mom never sees an ad like this and forgets to smoke,
yells at her baby. Feels guilty. Watches Oprah. Repeats cycle.

2008 vs. 1958

Scenario 1: Tyrone, who is black, and Amy, who is white, go to prom together

2008: They have a great time, date a while, and then break up because they're going to different colleges.

1958: Tyrone gets lynched.

Scenario 2: Bobby's dad gets extremely angry a lot.

2008: Bobby's mom reads something online and wonders whether depression may be manifesting itself as isolation and anger in her husband. She waits a few days and finds the right moment and way to ask if he's feeling OK and if a visit to a counselor might help. Because he knows his wife is smart, Bobby's dad goes and gets treatment. He still gets angry but not as much. For the rest of his life, Bobby feels special compassion for people who struggle with anger.

1958: Bobby's dad is still thinking about all the weird crap he saw and went through in the war but doesn't feel like he can talk to anyone about it. He feels alienated from his wife, who can't figure out why he's so different than he was when they dated, thinks (possibly correctly) that his kids are spoiled brats, and only feels good when we can wander out back and drink for a while, although some nights the alcohol just makes the anger worse. His son Bobby decides he hates everything and becomes one of those scary bitter hippies who shout abuse at Vietnam vets.

Scenario 3: Pedro's little brother, Gerson, is still in elementary school. He has trouble focusing all day because he still struggles with English.

2008: Gerson's teacher happens to speak Spanish and occasionally clarifies instructions in Spanish when he and the other immigrant kids look lost. Gerson also spends an hour with an ESL group each day. A college student who speaks Spanish comes in once a week through a volunteer mentor program to help Gerson with homework.

1958: Gerson's teacher happens to speak Spanish, but the school has a strict English-only rule. One day, the teacher tells Gerson, in Spanish, to pay attention, and the next day she gets fired for it. (Note: if she'd been caught, this could have happened to my grandma.)

Scenario 4: Mary would rather solve logic problems or do math than go outside and play.

2008: Mary goes on to study computer science, comes up with some new ways to organize information on the internet while daydreaming in class, and is a billionaire before she turns 30.

1958: Because she's a girl who likes math, Mary is a freak. Whenever she answers a question, she gets laughed at--so she stops answering out loud and just takes notes to herself. In college, a nice boy pays attention to her and she tells him some of her ideas about making numbers into machines. He steals the idea, makes a million dollars, and she doesn't even bother to try to tell anyone because they won't believe her anyway.

Scenario 5: James notices that his left testicle has grown larger and feels sort of hard.

2008: James does some reading on the internet and suspects he has testicular cancer. He talks to his parents about his concerns and sees a doctor as soon as possible. The doctor sends him out for tests, confirms the diagnosis on the same day, and tells James that the survival rate for testicular cancer patients is over 95%. James gets treated and quickly goes on with his life. He gets married and has kids.

1958: James doesn't know how to bring up the subject of testicles in his idyllic 1950s home. He decides that whatever is going on, he can just tough it out. Eventually, he goes to the doctor who tells him that he has a near-incurable form of cancer and probably only a few months to live. Experimental treatments make all James' hair fall out and cause countless horrific side-effects, and then James dies anyway. The medical bills bankrupt his parents and his brother takes a hazardous industrial job to work his way through college now that the family savings are gone. The asbestos at that job later gives him cancer and he dies, too.

This should hit at least a few inboxes to show we've been crazy for a long time.

Things I Believe In:

2010-03-18T22:45:00.000-07:00

1) God
2) Eggplant

Mmmm....eggplant.

woH ot ediH morf hcraeS senignE, srotagerggA, cte.

2010-03-17T12:20:00.000-07:00

ebyaM er'uoy a tnedissid ni narI ro anihC ohw t'nseod tnaw sih/reh sgnitirw ot wohs pu ni tnemnrevog sehcraes. ebyaM er'uoy dierrow tuoba sremmaps gnipoocs pu er'uoy liame sserdda sa rieht stobor llort eht aes fo eht tenretnI rof gnihtyna gnidne ni moc.laimg@. Ro ebyam uoy tusj tnaw ot etirw touba ruoy yzarc dlo dneirf leahciM yddirP tuohtiw mih gnidnif tuo sa noos sa eh yllacitsissicran selgoog sih wno eman.

Sretupmoc evah ot eb demmargorp ot daer sdrawkcab, dna ot ym egdelwonk, enon era. elpoeP era hcum erom elbixelf dna nac erugif tuo lla sdnik fo sgniht fi uoy tel meht.

ehT kcirt si ot tsurt rouy ecneidua ot peek eno pets daeha fo eht retupmoc.

Less Than 0.4% of Births "Suckers"

2010-03-11T20:11:00.000-08:00

If the common aphorism "there's a sucker born every minute" is factually accurate, that means that about 0.4% of the 255 average births on earth per minute result in suckers.

Just thought you might like to know.

AWESOME sequence

2010-03-08T09:31:00.000-08:00

Usually, episodes of Black start with the some corporates execs doing something sketchy, or else with something from forensic account Jared Black's off-the-job life. Almost every episode, that short sequence is followed up, after the credits, with Black arriving on the scene of what may be a serious corporate crime.

Last night's episode of Black opened with an extended sequence in which the FDIC takes over a failing bank instead, and it was pretty AWESOME. A lot like a spy movie, actually, with secret meeting, covert operations, and then like 300 federally-employed special agent accountants swarming the bank on a special signal Friday night to lock everything down and get records cleaned up and transferred over before the bank reopens on Monday.

What's particularly cool about the sequence is that I did some looking around, and it's accurate! Stories from 60 Minutes and NPR describe the same sorts of things that happen in the show. Who knew that accountants, of all people, would be so spectacularly sneaky?

Actually, now that I think about it, I'm not all that surprised...

America's real Secret Service--the FDIC.

Sounds of Kahanistan

2010-03-04T21:20:00.000-08:00

In Kahanistan, foods whisper their flavors into mouth, nose, and ears.

In Kahanistan, the colors of autumn sing and the warmth of the afternoon hums.

In Kahanistan, even the doors often stop to tell your hands whether they are open or closed. And through the doors in Kahanistan, you can hear the strangely-woven melodies of the occupants' dreams.

Never was blindness so vivid as in Kahanistan!

When you walk down the streets of Kahanistan, it is always as if you are walking on a bridge which sways back and forth below you, and the frequency of the swaying travels up through your eyes--eyes, which, in Kahanistan, can receive such frequencies as sound and only subsequently translate them back into sight.

The dogs that roam these swaying streets of Kahanistan use their voices not only to bark, but also to sit, beg, play dead. When the rain cries down in sheets and sighs its way under their fur, people passing wrinkle their noses against the slight arhythmic hiss the dogs emit. Even when the time comes for these stray dogs to die, their deaths manifest themselves aurally: a low whine, a faint tearing as if of paper as the spirit leaves the body, and at last, an almost-silence that prickles ever so slightly along the outside of the drum of a passerby's ear.

Natives and tourists alike both mourn and give comfort through sound in Kahanistan. Doctors heal using sounds; patients allow themselves to be healed by listening. Hope is made of sounds in Kahanistan, as is memory.

Yes--in Kahanistan, the past pulses from the ground and makes a rhythm you hold in your bones.

In Kahanistan, harmonic resonances take the place of identity.

In Kahanistan, you can hear a person's heartbeat in his or her voice.

When lovers kiss in Kahanistan, the silences they keep always wrapped inside themselves under countless shrouds of sounds are able, for a fleeting moment, to meet.

In Kahanistan, the gradual emergence of a sound like a hummingbird from out of a woman's body signals the beginning of new life.

If you draw a map of Kahanistan, you have to do it using symbols that tell you how the very air vibrates with the idea of Kahanistan. It is a nation of vibration, a place that can exist only in the dynamic space of sound.

What draws you, like me, on frequent pilgrimages to this imaginary country? Perhaps we come because we love to use our minds for hearing.

Campaign Finance Reform

2010-03-03T09:59:00.000-08:00

The country of Kahanistan recently adopted a new constitution, much like ours but with one noteworthy exception: because Kahanistan has far too many states to make a Senate practical, their bicameral legislature is composed of a "House of Experts" and a "House of the People" instead.

The members of the "House of Experts" are elected representatives who, like members of our own House of Representatives, have staffs to do much of their research and bill drafting while they spend most of their time worrying about fundraising for expensive media-driven election campaigns to make sure their staffs get re-elected. This House is expected to work out many of the details of legislation.

The second house, the "House of the People" operates something like a lawmaking focus group. Members of this House do not and cannot seek election: they are selected randomly from out of the census records (with an international team of computer scientists and statisticians observing and confirming the randomness of the selection process) and invited to join the House for a term. Thus, the House of the People routinely includes numerous members drawn from the ranks of Kahanistan's stay-at-home mothers along with garbage men, advertising copy writers, nurses, public school teachers, college students, small businessmen and women, grandparents, retirees, the unemployed, and generally at least one or two prisoners (who participate through video conference). All legislation which comes out of the House of Experts is subsequently examined, debated, and then accepted or rejected by the House of the People. The members of the House of the People also talk amongst themselves about the nation's problems and occasionally create detailed mandates for the House of Experts to write legislation on this or that issue, keeping this or that in mind.

Kahanistan claims, through this system, to be the world's only true democracy--a bold claim for an imaginary country, to be sure, but one which the innovative system of government nevertheless justifies.

Could the U.S. ever adopt a system like Kahanistan's?

It may be that a measure as radical as selecting one democratic legislative body without campaigns and elections would be the only successful means of enacting effective campaign finance reform.

Late to Kindergarten...Again

2010-03-01T11:12:00.001-08:00

After missing almost all of last week with her share of the family plague, Kira was excited to go back to school today. She loves school: that's why she goes even though she's already gotten to wear the fancy graduation hat most of us spend years working towards.

What Kira does not love, however, are mornings. My wife says that's because she's my daughter. I have no idea what she's talking about.

In any case, this morning, as is the case on most of the days when my wife works early and leaves me solely responsible for getting Kira to school, we were late.

Can I just say I have a persistent and growing fear of being told that I've earned a long sentence in parental detention for fostering the habit of tardiness? I can see it now--I bring Kira to school, she is handed a hall pass while I am whisked away by men in suits and dark glasses who put me into a cell where I'm forced to stare at a clock and mildly electrocuted for an hour or so whenever it passes 8:55 so that, when I'm allowed to go home again, the very thought of being late just makes me want to cry.

Kingdom of Ten Thousand Years

2010-02-26T13:39:00.000-08:00

The Apocalypse came and the dead rose from their graves, but there was no Messiah.

So begins the plot of Kingdom of Ten Thousand Years, which Faye recently lent me. What remains after this resurrection-without-redemption is an extremely difficult politics as groups with entirely different understandings try to live in society alongside each other. Germanic tribes struggle to adjust to a world far too crowded for their migratory way of life. Renaissance thinkers leave tight-knit neighborhoods of their century's former inhabitants and wander through the cities, trying to take everything in. Ancient African nobles try to use their influence over former subjects to get nice jeeps and build McMansions.

Initially, twenty-first century governments stay more or less intact, but the issues of how to accommodate the extra billions of people reveal deep-seated differences between different segments of the never-dead population. How many inhabitants should an overcrowded Europe be allowed to send to America? How much religious freedom should be granted to the often shocking faiths of the past? Should divorces be handled according to the customs of the couple in question's time and place, or should society have one standard divorce law? And what about language--is there room in England for schools to teach Old English?

As the newly risen begin to adapt to the new system, vote, and attempt to assert their influence, the conflicts between centuries eclipse many old and bitter conflicts between contemporaries. Old rivals like the Medicis and Strozzis, for example, drop old differences to work together in defense of their worldview. Lancaster and York, Mughals and Marathas, likewise see each other in a new light. Twenty-first century U.S. Republicans and Democrats begin to feel they have more in common with each other than they had ever thought possible before, and that have hard feelings for the nineteenth-century versions of their parties, and some progressively serious differences with many of the Founding Fathers. Trust between these different factions erodes quickly as levels of violence increase...

The story that eventually unfolds is one of increasingly repressive and brutal autocracy by the natives of the present and their allies in the face of a thousand challenges from the past. But it reads as particularly poignant because as a twenty-first century reader, you tend to side with the never-dead in the book. How are they supposed to react when the standard levels of domestic violence in medieval ghettos escalates into a pattern of murders of wives and daughters who try to leave? And how are they supposed to react when virulently anti-Semitic Christian extremists from the early Reformation period assassinate a Jewish scientist as part of what turns out to be a plot to get their hands on a nuclear bomb?

This is one dark and wild ride through the future into a churning mess of the past.

Muffins of Doom

2010-02-24T13:36:00.000-08:00

I've been sick since Saturday or so (thanks, probably, to my unusually fatty bones), and got a surprise visit this morning from Gloria, who'd heard I was sick brought some of her famous Muffins of Doom over (I hadn't had any since July, so they were a real treat).

It was less a treat to see how excited Gloria was about my family's ill health. I've had a fever and some ears-and-throat infection I get whenever I don't sleep enough, Kira's got pinkeye and two ear infections, Nicole has been feeling gross. A bad week, for sure, but Gloria seems to think it's a sign of the Apocalypse.

"I look at your family, and it's like I can see a hoofprint from my favorite horseman," she said. "Man, I miss you guys."

Then, of course, she had to rejoice over recent events on Capitol Hill.

"I don't think Barack Obama is the Anti-Christ, but he's definitely an Anti-Christ" she said. "Why do you think he and Congress are trying so hard to do something about health care? They know that pestilence has to come before Jesus comes back, and they don't want Jesus to come. Shame on them!"

Gloria already knows I don't agree with her about health care, so I kept myself busy with one of her banana muffins and just listened.

"At first, I just missed President Bush. He was such a good President, Apocalypse-wise" she said, "but lately, what with the election of Senator Brown and the record snowstorms in Washington--well, I'm as giddy as a little school girl on the first day of school. The End is near and not even a bearded Hilary Clinton could stop it!"

The thing about bananas that makes them so appropriate for muffins of doom, Gloria once told me, is that they have to "ripen in iniquity" first. I may not agree with her about politics or what is and isn't a sign from God, but I appreciate the way she talks. Sometimes, with friends, form trumps content--and it's nice to have good friends.

Perpetually Confused, "The View from James"

2010-02-23T10:33:00.000-08:00

I haven't reviewed an album yet, but will make an exception for the latest from Perpetually Confused, because the title is based on another James who is unusually tall. What do things look like from his perspective? Most people would try to answer such a question using stilts, but music turns out to be a worthwhile substitute in this case.

A breakdown of my impressions track by track:

The View from James
1. Harem of One
-This is the song that introduced me to the band. Still love the percussive elements and the strong rhythmic feel of the lyrics. In an age of commercialized romance, it's nice to hear a song that brings real passion and commitment to life, putting the love industry into stark relief.
2. Very Baby Very
-Apparently, "cry" and "very" are one letter different when texted from certain phones. An interesting experiment in texted songwriting. The musical influence borders on theft, but at least this band knows who to steal from.
3. Rocks for Brains
-I think it's safe to say we've all had days like this. At the same time the words describe what it feels like, the music reminds you how it really feels.
4. Sex Before Cereal
-The album's second-best instrumental track.
5. The Hegemony of Time
-Form meets content in this multi-rhythmic song about how we are all trapped in the idea of time. Lyrically, no other song on the album rivals this one...
6. If by Rival You Mean Plagiarize
-except, of course, for this illegal medley of classic tunes: unusual in that the verses are stolen from Bob Dylan and the choruses from Leonard Cohen, but the melody from the Beatles.
7. Ayaz
-You can almost feel the Huma fly by while listening to this song.
8. Crazy Works for Me
-A song about the boss of a girl named Crazy. Not the album's best effort, but sort of hypnotically appealing, in a makes-you-feel-like-the-world's-biggest-dork sort of way.
9. Sex After Cereal
-The album's best instrumental track.
10. Appendix in C
-A meandering seven minute song that explains all the obscure references in the rest of the tracks. (On the vinyl version, "Appendix" takes up its own side of the album.)

Economic Sanctions: An Afterthought

2010-02-22T08:38:00.000-08:00

I think one reason the United States overuses economic sanctions is that they can be highly effective against countries where the government is controlled by businesses.

Unfortunately, not every country is like ours in that way. Some countries, for example, are controlled by Michael Jackson fans instead. Others were controlled for years by fans of Saparmurat Niyazov.

I will offer the same advice to top U.S. policy-setters as is given to husbands and wives in hundreds of New York Times best-selling pop psychology books: not everyone thinks like you. Deal with it.

And the Cost-Free Stimulus Plan Is...

2010-02-20T12:08:00.000-08:00

Drop all politically-motivated economic sanctions.

If the U.S. government lifted all trade restrictions and embargoes at once, from Cuba to the Cote d'Ivoire, from Burma to Belarus, businesses would have real, tangible reasons to get over their skittishness and expand.

We've had an embargo against Cuba for a long time. What good has it done us? And yet, if we opened trade up again, how many jobs might be created importing, exporting, reviving a long-dead branch of the American tourist industry, possibly finding offshore projects for unemployed American construction workers?

We've tried to punish Myanmar's military government for human rights abuses by cutting off trade possibilities for its people. If sanctions were lifted, could U.S. companies and local citizens both benefit? If we stopped insisting on isolating the already-isolated military government, might their methods gradually soften? I don't know for sure, but if what you've been doing has spent decades not working, isn't it time to try something else?

The government has injected money into the economy. Now let's open up new opportunities for companies and entrepreneurs to use it.

Coming Soon! A Zero-Cost Stimulus Plan

2010-02-19T15:19:00.000-08:00

As many of you know, our government is occupying Iraq, Afghanistan, American Banks, and the Automotive Industry at an incredible cost while pumping money into the economy with the mad hope that someone will offer me a job this fall, thus averting a Goldberg family depression.

And yet businesses have been slow to respond. For some reason, they think that one-time tax breaks aren't a good reason to hire more people. It's almost as if our business leaders stayed awake during their math classes (which comes as quite a surprise to anyone who has ever taught math).

So, while a second Great Depression has apparently been diverted, an Average Depression persists, and the government is down to about -12 trillion dollars for further stimulus measures. This makes Barack Obama sad.

Someone may still be on the verge of a great depression...

How do we get companies to hire again without using taxpayer money?

I have an answer. Not a joke, not a lie, not a pointless video or a sarcastic comment, but a real, implementable, policy answer that, if implemented, would be guaranteed to raise employment significantly and almost immediately. So please--come back tomorrow and bring your Representative or Senator as we reveal the official, honest-to-goodness, zero-cost "My Life and Hard Times" Economic Stimulus Plan.

I Have a Good Idea: Economic Sanctions!

2010-02-15T20:17:00.001-08:00

As many of you are aware, leading Iranian government officials have opted to use their four-year break between vote-rigging efforts to attempt to develop nuclear "power plants of peace" which have absolutely nothing to do with a purely hypothetical desire to develop nuclear weapons (after all, why would a country with American troops occupying its eastern and western neighbors want nuclear weapons?). Recently, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has gone so far as to publicly call on Iran's nuclear agency to enrich Iran's uranium to "a high enough grade to piss off the West, but not high enough to break any international laws...yet" by year's end.

This is, of course, concerning to top American politicians, who believe that the time between elections is best spent calling each other "stupidhead." Hilary Clinton, along with her foreign policy assistant Barack Obama, have recently publicly called for stronger economic sanctions against bad guys in Iran and their families.

Apparently, the administration is hoping that just as tough economic sanctions convinced North Korea to leave the "Axis of Evil" and start acting more like the Carebear of the Far East, just as tough economic sanctions on Iraq convinced Saddam Hussein to mend his ways and avoid getting his country invaded, just as tough economic sanctions restored peace and prosperity to Zimbabwe after the worst of the Robert Mugabe years, and just as crippling sanctions forced Fidel Castro to acknowledge the inherent inferiority of communism and relinquish power long ago, sanctions will fix all our problems with Iran.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad agrees that tough sanctions are the safest course for Iranian stability. "People are getting tired of me here" he said in a recent open letter to Western diplomats, "I really need the West to take aggressive action so I have someone to blame all our problems on. Can I get some help here?"

Ahmadinejad: "Can't you see I'm hurting for a scapegoat?"

Clinton: "Hang in there, Mahmoud, help is on the way!"

Good News and Bad News

2010-02-13T16:12:00.000-08:00

The good news is that I, James, am back, presumably for good.

The bad news is that Drona is gone and probably will be for a very long time.

Why is that bad news, you ask? Let me tell you a story.

At about the same time anti-Drona protests were rocking this blog, the government of Iran, where Drona has been writing from, was bracing for anti-government protests marking the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution. Protests have been taken particularly seriously in Iran since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's re-election last summer, and the government has been constantly looking for ways to calm people down before the pepper spray runs out.

Their most recent tactical innovation, announced last week, was banning gmail and encouraging people to sign up for a new state-sponsored email system.

For many people, of course, this will be extremely convenient. Having too much email is a widespread symptom of modern life, and it's comforting to think there are places in the world where even when you don't have time to read your own email, someone in the government just might be reading it for you.

Without access to his gmail account, though, Drona also can't access Blogger. Unless Iran lifts its permanent ban, Drona may have forever disappeared.

Alanis Morissette: please pay belated attention. Unlike many things mentioned in your popular 1996 song, this actually is ironic. A crackdown on protests on the other side of the world has given victory with unexpected swiftness to protests here. We are freed from virtual tyranny, indirectly, by very real tyrants.

So why do I feel so sad?

Just kidding! And a coalition offer...

2010-02-11T20:04:00.000-08:00

It's funny how simple misunderstandings so quickly get blown out of proportion. Unkind words are said by commenters, posters overreact, pretty soon there's a virtual funeral to attend and flowers to be taken care of. It's not pretty, and more importantly, it very quickly becomes expensive...

But let's get back to our own situation. In a heat of irritation, I may have made some hasty statements and promises which obscured the true facts.

Let's remember that James went into hiding on his own. I wasn't even involved then. I was hesitant to accept an assignment as interim guest poster, but did so out of the goodness of my heart. But the readers didn't hold up their end of the bargain and listen to me. They didn't keep the rules I set for them. It's sad when people are dishonest like that, but that's the way the world is, I suppose.

The point is: James can come back at any time. No one has ever told him otherwise. He hasn't, because he's been afraid that I'm a more interesting writer, but I can assure him that's only true for discerning readers (who are apparently a minority locally).

If James wants to come back, let him come back. We'll take turns blogging. Share power.

And I absolutely promise (swear on dadeckr's grave) that I won't pay anyone to have him killed.

OK?

NOT FUNNY! And some death threats...

2010-02-11T13:37:00.000-08:00

Recent events (i.e. the last post) on this blog are SO not funny, I can't even handle myself.

I was working on a Manifesto for today, but now I don't even feel like I can post it. You people wouldn't appreciate true wisdom if it walked in, took over some decadent hobo's blog, and slapped you in the face--which, as a matter of fact, it did.

I need the culprits. Now.

My current suspects are:

Kathy Cowley for having a poor aesthetic sense.
Man in Dark Glasses for looking shady.
Dadeckr for wishing he weren't the pansy (with poor grammar) that he is.
Vincent Van Gogh for being insane and a bad listener.

Over the course of the next week, we will send some new winter headgear (if you know what I mean) to one person on the suspects list until the culprit is eliminated. So suspects: if you are not guilty, find out how his and turn him/her in! Better yet: find James and bring him in, so we can end things properly.

As for the rest of you: don't get complacent. If the members of the current suspect list leave this world and disturbances continue, I will be more than happy to expand the scope of our investigations. If you know what's good for you, you will join the search for the culprit and the decadent ex-author, too.

I will leave up the hideous open letter post for the time being in case it or its comment section include clues leading to the culprit or to James.

Again: you have eight days. (Although, if you're on the suspects list, you may only have two...)

An Open Letter to Drona from James's Loyal Readers

2010-02-11T11:06:00.001-08:00

Drona,

We, the loyal readers of this blog, have come out of the comments section into the main part of the blog to counter your revolution.

Drona, we reject you.

We reject Stalin as our leader.

We reject your view on cowards. We may be courageous or cowardly, but we are powerful nonetheless.

We reject submission to your totalitarian unity.

We reject your manifesto on writing. We like lies and jokes. We like complicated and meaningful writing.

We reject your manifesto on reading. We will read smut if we please. Sometimes we are pleased to read Menachem Bloodaxe or The Brothers Brar. We will even read these two works at the same time. They complement each other very nicely, like listening to Dark Side of the Moon while watching The Wizard of Oz.

We fully reject "Tender Buttons," even if it is assigned.

We reject listening to you. And shame on you for including a mentally ill painter in your authoritarian commands!

We reject your manifesto on the telling of history. We will continue to search for ancestral stories, interesting and unknown bits of history, journals of people in hiding, and letters hidden in an army rucksack of rags sent from a secret attic.

We reject your "friendly" warning. We refuse to help you locate our supporters. We are willing to die or go to a tea party in exile before we submit to your threats.

We reject the recurring label "decadent hobo" for the blog's true author. He may look like a homeless man since he's been in hiding all of this time, but he is not, well, not really, decadent. Okay. Just stop calling James names.

You do not have our support. We spit upon your requests. We metaphorically shred your posts and manifestos.

You will never have our thumbs, Drona. You are not a teacher; you are a tyrant.

You can see now that the loyal readers of this blog still have power. We will strip the red and the revolution from this blog. We will delete your profile and your picture. We have the power to overcome your tyrannical rule.

All loyal readers who wish to displace Drona and the Communists, add your comments to this post. We will show Drona that we are not afraid and the people truly hold the power.

Long live James!

Friendly Warning

2010-02-10T09:02:00.000-08:00

This post is by Drona. I am here to stay.

You may notice that someone has recently been leaking Manifestos from a counter-revolutionary source. We have no reason to suspect that these Manifestos actually come from James, since they appear to be written in comprehensible English, which is not his habit. Whoever the real author and leaker of these Manifestos is, however, should be warned: we are not amused.

We have reason to believe that the person who has leaked the Manifestos has also been commenting recently. That hurts my feelings.

You have one week, readers, to find and turn in the culprit or I will begin to delete large portions of this blog's past. Honestly, that's something I should probably do anyway, but I'd be willing to wait if I can get some cooperation.

Thank you for your support.

Manifesto on the Telling of History

2010-02-09T09:40:00.000-08:00

This post is by Drona! Stop asking for James!

History can be inconvenient...

...or useful.

1) History should be told for two reasons: to instill pride in the masses, or to instill revolutionary anger among prospective members of Party. Any approach to history other than these two is suspect.

2) When telling history to the masses, the focus should be on a single, easily comprehensible arc. This arc can be either inspiring or boring. If it is inspiring, the masses will feel safe in the trajectory of history and become helpfully complacent. If it is boring, the masses will lose interest in history, spend their time looking for pornography instead, and become both complacent and impotent to effect any real and harmful change. Either will do.

3) When telling history to prospective members of the Party, the focus should be on indignation. Anger fuels the Revolution. Anger justifies necessary excess. If history is disgusting, reprehensible, then rhetorical or physical violence in the name of cleansing history will become more appealing. To fuel the Revolution, history must be told as a power source from which to generate resentment and hate.

4) The purpose of telling history is to separate the listener from history. It is only by severing the people from the past that the future can be born. For the masses, this means encouraging amnesia: it is best if history is something they forget, and not something that informs the way they see the world and live in it. For prospective party members, this means disassociation: they should feel so compelled to condemn history that they have to step outside of it, disavowing national, ethnic, religous, and family ties that bind them to a compromised collective past. Revolutionaries must leave the collective of mankind and become independent individuals before they will be able to turn and subdue the human collective in the name of the Future.

5) The telling of history must change constantly, must remain always new. In one century, the white destruction of Native peoples may be a comforting arc (Manifest Destiny) for the masses; in the next century, this same arc becomes alarming and must be hidden from the masses and used to promote indignation in the Party instead.

6) When using history, don't rely excessively on outright lies and fabricated events--even though such fabrications may seem far more useful than objective realities. People, unfortunately, tend to see through such things in the current era. This is a great disadvantage of our digital age, and an inevitable consequence of too much public access to information.
It is generally equally effective, however, to selectively emphasize real events rather than to narrate false events. For the creative editor, this can be even better than simple fabrication. One of the advantages of this digital age with its overwhelming quantities of information is that everyone relies on editors and summarizers. The glass is, so to speak, half full!

Manifesto on Listening (to me)

2010-02-08T08:55:00.000-08:00

That you all should be listening more closely to me is a truth I hold as self-evident.

He only has one ear. What's you excuse?

Manifesto on Reading

2010-02-06T02:00:00.000-08:00

1) If you're going to read something, read the whole thing. Don't skip parts. Don't read only what you feel like. If I read the entirety of Gertrude Stein's "Tender Buttons"(which I did) because it was assigned to me (which it was), you can suck it up and finish whatever you're whining about. To do anything less is both dishonest and inefficient.
After all, you wouldn't let someone into your house or office casually and for a few minutes at a time. If you're going to let someone in, you've got to strip-search him first for security reasons, and once you've done that you should listen to all he's got to say before you go strip-search anyone else.

2) Someone who reads two works at once, flipping back and forth from one to the other, will develop two minds and be in constant struggle with his own self. Someone who reads three works at once (out of order, no less) is not to be trusted.
If you want people to trust you, read one thing at a time. If you don't want people to trust you, you won't be able to serve the state very effectively as a spy, now, will you?

3) You can't read an unfinished novel on a five-year plan! Let an author finish, let the censors and/or publishers do their careful selective work, and then begin reading with a firm goal and resolute discipline.
Mark my words: the impatience of the digital age will be the death of our society. And I'm not saying that just because I'm a communist.

4) "Meme" is a four-letter word, and I don't really want to discuss it. Let one simple rule close off the subject forever: those who read should not write, those who write should not read. It would also help if they could avoid listening to anyone.

5) If you encounter a counter-revolutionary writer, counter him. In other words: it's OK to tell someone who writes like a decadent hobo that he also smells like a decadent hobo, and that if he doesn't thoroughly revise, he ought to be shot like a decadent hobo, too.

6) Children should be seen, not heard. Readers shouldn't even be seen. Make yourself invisible and let the text fill you. What is important is what's in a revolutionary book, not what might happen in the space between you and that book. Mixing the book and yourself is a particularly offensive sort of bastardization.

7) We should look less to words than to people. If words make castles in the air, they also make prisons there. Stalin is hope. Words are despair.

Uncle Joe loves children--and readers (not pictured)

Manifesto on Writing

2010-02-05T01:00:00.000-08:00

1) All writing should have a beginning and an end. Any work that attempts to exist without end leaves the realm of the human, and enters the fictional realm of the divine. Religion is an enemy of the people. Therefore, writing which reaches toward the Infinite is either delusion or poison.

2) Writing must belong to the author and not the reader, or there will only be chaos. If an author produces a sword, the reader has no right to beat it into a plowshare. To do so would be counter-revolutionary. (Even the English language itself agrees with this point. Consider the relationship between the words "authority" and "author.")

3) One sentence should have only one meaning. Trying to create multiple levels of meaning in a single sentence leads only to ambiguity, which is the literary equivalent of anarchy, or to duplicity, which in writing or life is a crime.
This is why we rightly stone the prophets.

4) Context. Context must be closely controlled. Every piece must be contained in its own time, space, culture, bound cover. If you take yesterday and show it to tomorrow, who knows what hideous mongrel might be born of their encounter? (The same is true of mixing west and east, profane and sacred, Norman and Anglo-Saxon, Native American and Jew, male and female.)

5) Order. Does. Matter. If you use the end of books as the gateway to the beginning, a backward-thinking public will soon emerge.

6) Matter. Does. Order. The writer's central concern should dictate the shape a piece takes. If the sequence is disrupted, you can't deliver ideology right. All you will do is shake up the reader's brain. Never shake a baby!

7) A stupid video involving your desire to be in a Maurice Sendak book is not writing. It's infantile, self-indulgent, and makes the reader feel awkward--unsure if he should be throwing change at you or maintaining a safe distance to avoid infection.

8) Writing is writing, videos are videos, what's serious is serious, and a rose is a rose is a rose.
Since a picture is mathematically convertible to prose on a metric scale, the mixing of words and pictures, however, is acceptable.

Uncle Joe wants YOU to be a better writer.

Workers of the World, Unite--

2010-02-04T09:29:00.000-08:00

--and submit to us!

Guest Post: On Cowards

2010-02-03T08:39:00.000-08:00

While James Goldberg is in hiding, the *members of the Commie Awards committee have designated me as the official interim guest blogger. Although the blog form is by default superficial (even when it pretends depth), I've decided to accept the position out of loyalty.

Thank you, comrades, for appointing me to this work.

As for you readers: expect more regular updates than from the infamously unreliable Goldberg. Also expect superior content, which makes more sense and doesn't enjoy lying quite so much. I can assure you, my readers, that when I lie it will be only as strictly necessary and not because I'm a decadent hobo who thinks that getting caught while lying is fun.

I'll also be putting up a picture in every post. (Everyone knows that multimedia posts are the future. As Goldberg's other blogs show, however, he has an unfortunate weakness for the past. Pathetic.)

A good picture should inspire. It is like a breath
of fresh air in a smoggy, smoggy world.

*surviving

December Commies

2010-01-30T13:10:00.000-08:00

The Commie Awards are given each month for the best comment on this blog. The monthly awards are the time for you, our reader-respondents, to shine. A special guest is chosen each month to present the award so the winner will feel extra-special.

After a month-long power struggle, we've finally...uh..."chosen" a guest presenter for the December award.

Before he was internationally infamous, our presenter looked like this: affable, business casual, and very proud of his own funny jokes. The kind of man you would like to have for a boss--if his pen name weren't Joseph Stalin.

The nominees for December are:

KP for disappearing during the month. Good choice.
Leon Trotsky for being a loser.
James Goldberg for failing to accept Soviet realism.
The Jews for involvement in various conspiracies.
Peter for his thoughts on the Apocalypse.

All the nominees have been killed, exiled, or ordered to be killed in exile.

And the winner of the December Commie Award is....

...Joseph Stalin!

The NoMass Party

2010-01-27T11:27:00.000-08:00

For those of you who hate the news, this blog brings an important update: Republican Scott Brown recent(-ish)ly won a special election for the Senate seat vacated by Ted Kennedy's death. This was a huge setback for Democrats, many of whom are reported to have "cried like colicky babies" because the loss of this one seat robs their party of its sixty-seat Senate "supermajority."

This, as it turns out, is a big deal, because as a democracy, the United States' official position on minorities that constitute less than 40% of the elected population is "Sorry, suckas." Brown's victory has upset the balance of power by shifting Republicans from "suckas" to the strong minority block needed to keep a filibuster on the floor, thus bringing Democrats' plans to a halt (which is, quite frankly, where the party's plans spend most of their time anyway--but I digress).

People whose salaries are paid by the Democratic Party aren't the only ones upset by the victory, though.

"It's definitely time for a change" says Vermont resident Walt Thompson. "I'm worried about how our country will turn out if Massachusetts keeps wielding so much power--have you ever seen how Boston is run?"

Thompson is not alone in his concern. A recent survey indicates that 38% percent of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine residents are "seriously ticked" that their neighbor to the south has taken the limelight once again, and that an additional 17% are "moderately pissed off."

Channeling the rage: Emily Belanger

That's where activist Emily Belanger comes in. She's the brains behind the newly-minted NoMass Party, which she claims will be the first viable third party in America in over a century. "The problem with recent attempts to form third parties" says Belanger, "is that they all try so hard to have a national appeal. What good is that? Even if you get 5% of the vote nationwide, that's still zero seats."

Belanger's plan for the NoMass Party is to focus exclusively on five small, independent-minded New England States: New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Assuming roughly equal votes for Republicans and Democrats, the NoMass Party will need only 40% of votes in each voting district to secure the region's 10 Senate seats and 12 seats in the House of Representatives. This seems particularly possible, since the area already has a strong history of electing independents--according to Belanger, talks with Joe Lieberman (I, CN) and Bernie Sanders (I, VT) about joining the NoMass Party are already underway.

The NoMass Party's core electoral strategy focuses on five states.

Is Belanger's plan viable? We checked with Ramesh Chatterjee of Rajput University to find out. He supplied us with the following numerical breakdown of the possible road ahead for the NoMass Party:

7.7 million residents in the five target states
2.3 million likely voters in the 2010 elections in the target region
900,000 votes needed to secure the 40% which is likely to seal across-the-board victories
=0.3% of the U.S. population's support needed to win 10% of the Senate and 12 key House seats for NoMass.

What would the NoMass Party do with 10 Senate and 12 House seats?

"We'd be the most powerful party in the country" says Belanger, with an offhanded sort of confidence. "Republicans and Democrats are famously unable to agree on anything. We'd be the dealmakers, offering our deciding votes for one party on one issue then the other on another in exchange for their support on some of our core issues. We won't pick favorites. In each case, the party willing to offer our constituents the greatest concessions will win."

All this sounds great for the party's planned 900,000 supporters in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, and Rhode Island--but what about the rest of the country? "Losers can't be choosers" says Belanger, "but I think they'll be better off after NoMass moves the center of political power back out of Massachusetts."

"After all," she adds, "have you seen how they run things in Boston?"

The Brothers Brar

2010-01-27T10:00:00.000-08:00

Confession: I have never read The Brothers Karamazov in its entirety. It is entirely possible, in fact, that no one living has read the book in its entirety--even those who turn every page have, I suspect, let their minds wander for paragraphs at a time, the way I tend to skip out on hours of what's going on in my immediate surroundings to think about food.

I like the idea of the book, though. Though I haven't actually read it, I'm struck by the concept of exploring a given time and place through the trajectories of different brothers. Where do they go? What do their choices say about what the crises of their time were? About what universal human questions mean in a specific time and place?

That core seems to be what's driving Ranbir Singh's The Brothers Brar. The book starts in rural Punjab on the eve of Indian independence, in a family where the fourth of seven sons is about to be born. Subsequent chapters jump back and forth in time as you watch the lives of the boys unfold. The old ways of life are collapsing and in their place communism, religion, and emigration are options. I'm only about a fourth of the way through the book and already the world's a stage for these characters: one is moving from post-doctorate to post-doctorate appointment, trying to find a place for his science in the U.S.A. One has risen in the communist party ranks and is moving all around India, though tensions with the government are rising. Another married a foreign girl, but can't seem to stay away from India and is still fiercely loyal to the family. One is still making his living off the soil, but is beginning to think about moving away from the family land and the obligations that go with it.

It's a pretty intense read, and a good catch-up for anyone who wasn't paying close attention over the last half-century. Makes me wonder: with so much excitement just a generation or two ago, what's next for those of us who are still young? What paths will history offer to our brothers and sisters and us?

Winter vs. Summer

2010-01-11T10:42:00.000-08:00

People who prefer winter to summer are insane. This is what I and the man who works construction year-round decided while waiting for our daughters to get out of kindergarten today.

The reason why such people are insane is that even in hot climates, temperatures only rise high enough to damage the skin or increase the risk of dehydration. If you have enough water and some covering, you may be uncomfortable, but you will be fine.

Cold, on the other hand, is the primal hand of death. We bundle up in winter not just for comfort, but for survival. When your body begins to shake at the cold, it is a warning that your body competes in these temperatures with oblivion. If you were a pioneer and had not gathered sufficient fuel for the winter, spring would serve only to help thaw your corpse.

Those of us who still trust our inner selves know this instinctively every time we step out into the cold.

This is not to say winter is without its advantages: for example, regions with harsh winters tend to have fewer insects than tropical areas do (sometimes, the primal hand of death works to our advantage). But if, deep down, winter doesn't scare you--well, maybe you should get a job in year-round construction in Utah or Minnesota or serve as a missionary on the streets of a place where temperatures are low and the hours of darkness are long and hopefully your survival instincts will kick back in enough that you will stop taking the insane side of the winter vs. summer debate.

Swine Flu Warning for Al Qaeda Terrorists

2010-01-06T08:59:00.000-08:00

"Most terrorists" says Dr. Ibrahim al-Bakr, of the Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province Institute for Disease Control, "don't realize that they are a top risk group for pandemics." And, yet, according to Dr. al-Bakr, the poor sanitation and nutrition available in al-Qaeda leadership hideouts combined with the relatively large number of international contacts kept through the world al-Qaeda network is a recipe for contagion disaster. "With contacts in Africa, the Phillipines, Europe, and the United States, al-Qaeda is like a trawling net for the world's diseases. Terrorists may think that they are only carrying bombs, but they are also carrying germs--most often to their own comrades and leaders" says al-Bakr "Along with the elderly and pregnant women, I would put high-ranking terrorists at the top of the list for swine flu vaccine. And yet, for political reasons, they never come to my office."

Scattered reports indicate that top al-Qaeda leaders may already be suffering the consequences of their lack of careful healthcare planning. "Do you want to know why Osama hasn't put out a video in years?" said a Taiban operative who wished to remain anonymous, but would like to say hello to his wife, Aaila, and sons, Yeslam and Tim, "It's because he's been dealing with one bug after another, and it never seems to let up. Last time we tried to make a video, his voice kept cracking--you can't denounce the United States when you sound like you're going through puberty. American teenagers do that all the time, and who pays any attention to them?"

Another contact, closer to Bin Laden, said "I think he might have H1N1, but he gets angry when anyone suggests it because of the 'swine flu' nickname. I'm worried about him. He doesn't always drink enough liquids, and that's very bad when you're sick like this."

In rural Pakistan, there is no "other white meat" but H1N1
cases are still on the rise.

Is it possible that Bin Laden might succumb to the flu pandemic? We met up with Taliban commander Tariq Khan, who was on a scouting trip in Peshawar, to ask him this question. "Obviously, we're concerned about his health" the commander confirmed, "we can dodge the world's most powerful army, but viruses are a whole different challenge. His spirits are good, though."

What's the Al Qaeda plan if Bin Laden does succumb to disease? "He says that if he dies we're to hide the body well," says Khan, "and perhaps the United States will eventually bankrupt itself looking for him."

In the meantime, Dr. al-Bakr warns all terrorists of any rank to wash their hands regularly, cover their mouths when they cough, and (preferably in times of health as well as when they feel sick) avoid showing up to work.

Best Compliment EVER

2010-01-04T17:49:00.000-08:00

"If I had picked this up in a doctor’s office, I would have wanted to steal the magazine and bring it home."

-A friend on a draft of one of my essays (an extended version of another blog post)

Officially speaking, I don't endorse theft, but that's one of the nicest and most encouraging things anyone has ever said to me.

Dinner with Peter

2009-12-31T13:25:00.000-08:00

Met up again with Peter last night (thanks, by the way, to Lonnie for her advice to keep up contact with him). He's a little disappointed that another year is ending and the world isn't ending with it, but his vision of the Apocalypse is still strong.

The days are coming, he tells me, when restraint and righteousness have been delayed too long, when the earth runs dry and the blood in human veins runs cold, when brother will fight brother to the death over a glass of clean water, when the piece of technology children most long for is a sharp knife. In those days, he says, women will have nothing but sackcloth left to wear, will have their faces covered in ash and soot as soon as they step into the air outside. In those days, food will carry with it the taste of desolation, night will hang so thick it's hard to see the moon rise red, hearts will groan because they are too tired to break. In those days, prayers will only be whispered because of the scorn that will follow anyone who still believes in a good God.

Then comes the miracle. Cities torn asunder as primeval forests spring at once from the ground; the atmosphere aflame, burning itself free of toxins. The earth closes her wounds, swallows her scars. Adam returns to the world he once knew to meet his descendants, who are rising from their graves, whose spirits are pouring out of the Ganges into resurrected life.

Surreality: In the Blood

2009-12-22T20:09:00.000-08:00

My grandmother's great-grandfather was a convert to Mormonism during its early days and was deeply involved in the faith. He wrote songs and gave famous sermons, but most of the family stories we told about him when I was growing up involved things like his escape from a jailor and the jailor's dog (when the dog got close, my great-great-great grandpa just yelled "Sic 'im, boy!" and pointed ahead) instead.

A year or two ago I found out my ancestor was also the first Mormon to write a piece of fiction. Two nights ago, my wife and I finally found and read it online.

The piece was written seven months before Joseph Smith was murdered, at a time when anti-Mormon sentiment was running high in many parts of the country. But the piece is gutsy, funny, surprising, and engaging while trying to introduce people to some provocative Mormon ideas in the process.

Well, done g-g-g grandpa! And may my own work be half as fun!

An Alarming Thought

2009-12-21T08:34:00.001-08:00

I came back to graduate school last year primarily so I could have health insurance, but also with the idea that I would become a better writer. I feel like I am learning important things, but I feel (today) like I'm writing less important work.

In 2006, among other things, I wrote a play called "Maror." It's based on a true story about a Mormon couple whose two-year-old goes into an extended coma and eventually dies. The play explores what it means to believe in and experience miracles while not getting the only miracle you really want. The play asks us to consider how we can be healed from the bitterness intense suffering makes it so easy to receive. The play looks at how hard deaths in the Mormon community end in a mixture of faith and grief; the play emphasizes that faith and grief are in no way incompatible. We produced the play twice. The first time, a couple who had lost a child in a similar way told me that the play was accurate, that it brought back hard memories, but was very affirming to watch. A woman whose child was in the midst of serious health issues told me the play reached her in ways she never would have expected.

Perhaps a year after the second production, a close relative of one of the actresses ended up in the hospital in a coma and subsequently died. The actress later told me that she thought of the play often in that period, that in important ways it gave her additional resources to process her own experience.

To me, these reactions make a successful play. I am pleased to think I wrote something that helped a few audience members in their own hard times. Our scriptures tell us to mourn with those who mourn and comfort those who stand in need of comfort, and I feel like I did that with that play.

In 2007, I focused almost exclusively on ten-minute plays, but also felt like I was connecting with local audiences on important, central issues from everyday life. A few times, I dealt with young married couples facing various challenges and learning (or not learning) to talk productively with each other--stories Provo university student audiences need. I explored immigration issues in a way that (I hoped) would promote dialogue instead of stifling it, would enable people to frame the issues in ways they hadn't thought of before. I spent time with political polarization but in the specific context of how the broader culture of partisanship adversely affects the Mormon community. I spent time with ideas about the unexpected sources from which people can find strength to turn their lives around.

Audiences came, interacted, left the theatre a little different. It was a good year.

In 2008, my greatest writing achievement was a piece I wrote in March called "Prodigal Son." In it, I looked at how an otherwise close father and son were divided by the son's conversion to Mormonism. The play takes seriously the values and perspectives of both father and son, reaches toward understanding and a kind of healing that can accept difference and pain. The piece won the Association for Mormon Letters' award for Best Play of the year. It made it into the anthology "The Best of Mormonism 200 9" and as such will apparently be required reading in a Mormon Lit class at Utah Valley University next year. More importantly, the play resonated with my its audience and especially deeply with those who live in such situations. Like with "Maror," I was able to speak pain in an affirming way, advocating charity and love as sustaining powers through all kinds of difficulty.

And then I came back to school. I haven't written a play since.

I have done some good work over the past year and a half. As far as I can remember, I've written:
-an essay about how our modern understanding of how trauma can affect individuals well after traumatic events end can enrichen our understanding about a Book of Mormon passage in which Jesus blesses some deeply traumatized children. The essay was written between classes rather than for a class, but won me some money and got published in a BYU Essay Collection.
-a draft of a picture book telling the stories of my experience as a terrorist look-alike after 9/11 and my grandfather's experience being separated from his best friend during the Partition of India. I like it, but haven't done anything with it. I finished the draft in December 2008 and haven't touched it since January of this year.
-a cycle of very short stories (less than 300 words each) about immigrants, structured around the Jewish liturgical calendar (a story about an African refugee invokes Passover imagery, Judah Maccabee is an undocumented Mexican immigrant in the Hanukkah piece). Again, I think it's beautiful, but it's just sitting in my files now.
-"Tales of Teancum Singh Rosenberg" a fictional set of folktale fragments. I love it, and it's been published online, which is great, but it's been hard to see much fruit yet. I think the piece has the potential to deepen the way we look at things, but it's sort of weird and without being trapped in a theater in advance, not everyone seems to have the patience for it.
-"Four Side of a Rhetorical Triangle," an essay with a strong voice that explores the ways in which we think about writing. This one, I think, will be able to make it into a national literary journal and be read mostly by writers and English professors. Maybe it will change the way they think and talk about writing. Maybe it will just give them a good laugh. It may not ever find out.
-and last, but not least, my three blogs. People do read these, at least according to Google Analytics. And they probably are helping someone somewhere with something. They have certainly helped me to write, which I was finding very difficult to do.

This school output is not too bad, but when I consider that I haven't written plays, haven't run a theatre company, and haven't done nearly as much connecting with audience, I'm faced with the alarming thought that maybe I'm not doing better. Maybe my writing is doing less to serve the community I love than it did before I came back to school. Maybe this whole academic career thing is a distraction from the core of what I once managed to do in engaging with real-life issues in moving and meaningful ways.

And maybe it's time to stop for today and go clock in to the research job that puts bread on the table.

To Blove

2009-12-17T17:13:00.000-08:00

Love. It's a theme that has preoccupied dateless philosophers for centuries. It's a theme songwriters consistently exploit in order to make alimony payments. It's a theme connected to time-honored social institutions like mawwiage and Nora Ephron.

But has it ever been successfully explained?

I don't think so. In an impromptu song, however, I think my daughter captured the basics of what story, song, and film have been arguing is the nature of love since at least the mesozoic era (dated by most pop culture archeologists as beginning in 1980s).

A Cartographic Conspiracy

2009-12-05T11:51:00.000-08:00

Cartographers today, when asked to produce a map of a given country, focus almost exclusively on the territory within the recognized borders of that country—a disastrous practice which has contributed to numerous failed policies and countless deaths. Whether a nuclear war will also result from this vast cartographical oversight remains to be seen. At the very least, large warning labels ought to be legally required on such maps, something like the labels on cigarette packages, if future crises are to be averted. Better yet, current country maps would be largely replaced by a new breed of “around maps” which balance focus on the internal with careful attention to external context.

If we had been using such maps ten years ago, perhaps the Bush administration would have thought twice before occupying both Afghanistan, to the east of Iran, and Iraq, to the west of Iran, simultaneously. More relevantly, American and European negotiators today might not spend so much time scratching their heads wondering why Iran is suddenly interested in refining uranium. If current negotiators would consult maps of around Iran instead of maps of Iran, they might recognize that their time would be better spent thinking about the implications of an Iranian nuclear program than in hoping a country with hostile forces on both sides can be dissuaded from developing some sort of meaningful military deterrent to invasion.

Unfortunately, our thinking about Iran typically stops at Iran’s borders. Through a happy accident in English-language alphabetization, some hardworking government officials do consider Iran and Iraq in the same day, but Afghanistan, though equally close physically, is banished by a conspiracy between cartographers and the alphabet to a separate compartment in our consciousness.

I’ve considered suing cartographers at large for malpractice on behalf of the United States—I’m not in it for the money, mind you (although I do plan to retire off my .5% share of the multibillion dollar settlement I anticipate). I just think that someone ought to pay for what has been lost to the epidemic of myopia that has us seeing one country at a time and missing what goes on just across borders.

November Commies

2009-12-01T08:49:00.000-08:00

The Commie Committee talked awards today over a breakfast of waffle-scent. (It's been a tight month, budget-wise, as party members have been defecting to the Democrats. Note to Republicans: stop mixing people up with your accusations! We are the real deal, not some smooth-tongued President!)

We've invited a very special presenter this month:

Mother Teresa is, as a proponent of unearned healthcare, apparently a communist by association. She is not, to our knowledge, a fan of this blog, as she is far too busy doing good in the postmortal realm(s), but has agreed to come and visit us anyway, thinking that the nominees were ultra-needy rejects from society (we will leave it up to our readers to decide whether her assumption is correct or not).

The October nominees are:

Rachel for wanting me to do her hair
Grandpa Zorro on hybrid leftovers (and other hybrids)
Auntie S. on the good and bad twins of November 26
Kathy Cowley for her October Commie acceptance speech
a.k.a. Olivia for her comment on "An Open Letter to the Master of the Universe"
with a special joint nomination going to the first five responses to "Is Extinction Forever?"

Agnesë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu a.k.a. Mother Teresa says, "And the winner is..."

"A.k.a. Olivia!"

Rainy Days and Mondays...

2009-11-30T08:00:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, artificial storm clouds move me to deep introspection.

Tales of Teancum Singh Rosenberg

2009-11-28T15:34:00.001-08:00

The same friend who recommended Menachem Bloodaxe: Lost Legend of a Jewish Viking recently also suggested I read "Tales of Teancum Singh Rosenberg."

What my friend may not have realized is that I grew up on Teancum Singh Rosenberg stories. My mother would tell them in the mornings, over my father's oatmeal, in the afternoons, between Ducktales and Batman, and at night, as we lay in our beds, unaware that, perhaps, right outside our windows the moon was sinking. And then, after we fell asleep, she'd whisper the histories of the names in the stories into our ears, so they'd sink down into our imaginations and attach to everything, so that even today, whenever I go to pull thoughts out of my mind, something from the world of Teancum Singh Rosenberg invariably comes up with them. (For every word I speak, then--and I speak in many words--another one typically remains unspoken, the insight that must remain in the shadows for the listener's lack of cultural context.)

Perhaps that's the reason why I was so surprised to see Teancum Singh Rosenberg stories in print. I'll admit that, at many times in the past, I haven't particularly cared for the author of this particular collection, but I admire his audacity in putting these together. (Whether anyone outside the Caucajewmexdian community will read them, of course, is an entirely separate issue--but maybe in this case that's beside the point.)

A story a day keeps the Time Blower's needles away (illustration by Davey Morrison Dillard)

Thanksgiving made Simple

2009-11-26T11:59:00.001-08:00

Kira explains the essentials of Thanksgiving:

Confession

2009-11-25T09:34:00.000-08:00

So, people in my graduate program hear that I write three blogs and they assume that means I'm extremely tech-savvy.

Poor saps. I didn't get my first email account until I was a junior in high school, which for people my age (26) is something like, well, not getting an email account until you're a junior in high school. I spent years hating the internet because it tied up the phone line in our house, so I could never get a ride home when I called.

Now of course, I love the internet, because the walks I took home while not being able to call for a ride were the times when I could think long enough to become the kind of writer I am today. It's kind of like famous mathematicians from past centuries doing great work while in prison--except that most of my work isn't great, and I never actually went to prison. But I digress. Where was I?

Oh, yes. The point is that I'm hardly on the cutting edge of technology. I got my first email account when I was a junior in high school. Deep down, I still think computers are scary monsters just waiting to swallow your ideas when it's least convenient, or else mesmerize you and suck half a day out through your throat. I didn't even make my first webcam video until yesterday, and, as you will soon see, it just goes to show that the world might be a better place if I'd stuck to postcards during my junior year instead.

October Commies

2009-11-24T08:51:00.000-08:00

The Commie Committee has convened once again! This month we've picked a very special guest presenter:

While not technically a communist, Joe McCarthy shared a communist affinity for abuse of authority, systematic scare tactics, and grand political plans based on laundry lists. He also did more than any other American to reconcile communist sympathizers with mainstream society by giving them the hallowed glow of excessive and unfair persecution. Surprisingly, this appears to be McCarthy's first appearance on this blog.

The October nominees are:

Bonnie for her advice on moving and moving on.
Cortimus for his visceral reaction to "Update from the Grad Office"
Kathy Cowley for her helpful weighing of homelessness vs. blogging and a Mirti follow up.
KP for his insights into voyeurism, conspiracy, and the New World Order.

Tailgunner Joe says, "And the winner is..."

"Kathy Cowley!"

An Open Letter to the Master of the Universe

2009-11-23T13:07:00.001-08:00

O Lord God, Master of the Universe
Creator of the grains of the earth
of the fruits of the vine,
Creator of the bodies we work until they break
the bodies we neglect because we're too lazy or too busy to do much else
of the bodies we get all sort of strange notions about from the media--
How are You? And how are things
up there
in Your cosmic abode
and/or
in the space your presence occupies
all around us?
Anything new you'd like to tell us about?
Anything you'd like to tell us about we're also ready to receive?

Lord God, I've been thinking lately
that this is a pretty good world you made.
I like it, in the mornings
when I walk my daughter to school
she hums to herself and rushes to pick up
fallen leaves and oh, the air feels good
around my face, and oh! how glad I am
that you gave me lungs for breathing
and her lungs for humming
and the trees--well, they seem happy, too
though as far as I know
you gave them no lungs at all
(I respect your artistic discretion
of course
on matters such as these)
In any case, it's a good world you made,
a nice home for your children
many of whom I know, by the way--
I chatted with a few today
they send their love
and want you to know that so close
to a holiday break
they're glad to be alive
glad they decided to come here
and be mortal
and get busy
and forget about you
until they get miserable enough to remember again.

Don't get me wrong--we're doing all right, down here
Sort of
I think
Or maybe that's a lie
I like to stay optimistic
but maybe I should slow down
because I realize it's pointless
to lie to You
Our Father, Our God
(who knows our thoughts
far better than we'd like Him to)
it's pointless to lie to You,
when the whole reason I'm praying in the first place
publicly
on this imaginary piece of paper
is to complain!
which I do quite well to other people
but not so well to You
on the same regular basis
So Oh Lord could you Please tell me this:
WHY
in this world you made
with so many real and impossible problems, like
cancers and impoverished children
fragile ecosystems we're attached to at the heart and hip
living minds that grow up in the dark
and the cold
no one around bothering to nurture them
WHY
in this world you made
where ghosts of the dead
still wander around
waiting for someone to help them make sense of
what their enigmatic time here meant
where our ancestors speak from the ground and beg us
half-hopelessly
to remember them
where the blood of murdered prophets waits
as a witness against our callousness
WHY
when you gave us so many compelling things to worry about
when you carefully crafted heartbreaking problems to draw us together
when you made trials that shine with the depth of eternity
and offer us the growth that will unlock the godliness in us
please just tell me why
we here on earth
spend so much of our time
dealing with stupid and trivial crap?

It's true. I'll give you the report,
as if you didn't already know--
we think our precious time here on earth
should be devoted to making other people check
the right boxes on various forms
whenever we're not busy
being made to check the right boxes ourselves
We think of problems as opportunities
to pass blame
and feel righteous in our shallow anger
and petty frustration
we think life
is about watching a series of commercials
and that success
is when you're the one making the commercials
we think compassion
is something you feel during a soap opera
and not when you go out of your way to help someone at work
or when your love for the whole human race
outweighs your worries about money
As to our attitude on righteousness, I will sum it up
as follows:
it's a very old-
sounding word,
one we'd have to look up
probably online
if anyone asked us what it meant
which, tellingly, they don't.

Heavenly Father--
seriously--
I know you know everything,
but is this how you expected our lives to be?

Is Redemption really supposed to come out of this?

You know, I feel better already
just having asked.

You have this great way
of making my questions sound silly,
once I work up to them
and I appreciate that.

Someone stepped out of her way to help me today,
and that was very nice. Thanks for her, and to you
for softening her heart.

Thanks also for nurses everywhere,
and all for the overworked and underpaid
who keep things moving
who do work that matters
I worry about them, but I'm grateful for their sweat.

Thanks for the eye doctor who talked on the phone with my friend
last week
for free!
Who says miraculous things no longer happen?

Thanks for my students who are intelligent and kind
who want to be patient and forgiving
Bless me, Father, that I not break them of those habits
with my own self-importance
and with the momentum of my priorities!

Thanks for the coming days off
for wife and daughter and
the vibrant family I acquired in a bulk deal
at the time of my marriage
to spend such holidays with.

That thing you arranged,
where the pilgrims and the Indians got together
did things right for a year or two
before going at each other's throats--
thanks for working that!
We down here really appreciate the hope
such things lend us
especially when the weather's turning cold.

Thanks also, though, for the memories,
both personal
and inherited
of sins
both personal
and collective
we've committed before You and each other.
It's easier, I think, to work on things
when we can look back at the past
and say:
ugh.

Thanks for the gift of tongues
(and yes, I mean that literally)
That talk and taste, two of my favorite things,
come in a single organ
is dazzling to me.

Thanks also for
Jesus
who told strange stories
who healed more feverishly than a nurse
who works graveyard shifts all month
for Jesus
who died and gave the earth a chance to groan
(it needed that)
for Jesus
who surprised a woman
who was looking for his body in a garden
the way that we look for it in the sacrament bread
She needed that
and we do, too,
and so I pray
in this strange way
publicly
and on imaginary paper
in his name

Amen.

New Moon Rising

2009-11-20T12:21:00.000-08:00

I love Stephenie Meyer for many reasons. I love that she's Mormon. I love her because she wrote books about not having casual sex and made millions of dollars in the process. I love her because her books are black and white and red all over. I love her because the last line of the last full paragraph on page 197 of Twilight ("It was a colossal tribute to his face that it kept my eyes away from his body") gave my cousin Jazon a new fitness goal: to work out until it's a tribute to his chiseled body that it distracts from his perfect face. Clearly, this is literature that changes lives. And I love Stephenie Meyer for that.

Do her books have shortcomings? Sure. There's a missing comma on page 67 of New Moon, for example. Her dialogue is often coated with a distracting number of adjectives and adverbs. And the way her books progressively romanticize controlling types and stalkers is a little bit alarming. But they can be forgiven all that, because they've inspired something better:

Vampioneers: The Everlasting Covenant is the fifth-best book I've ever read, and I've read a lot of books. It takes all the angst and turmoil of Twilight and moves it from the adolescent to the transcendent. These vampires aren't tortured by forbidden love for a whiny teenage girl; they are tortured by the way their immortality and changed natures are separating them from God. They don't spend their time staring through girls' windows; they rescue strangers from another continent from a midnight mob, embrace a new faith, cross an ocean, and help a prophet build a city as persecution rages.

And now, they'll be in a movie. That's right: at select screenings of New Moon in the intermountain west, they've started playing previews for what will almost certainly be the film of the decade. The Twilight film franchise, as you know, is nearing its eclipse.

So, move over Meyer media machine. The real new moon rising is Vampioneers.

How to Ruin Your Child's Life in Five Minutes or Less

2009-11-16T10:09:00.000-08:00

Hairstyles.

Difficult? Yes. Doable? Theoretically.

I have thus far successfully executed the basic ponytail, basic braid, and the advanced ponytail (with two hair-thingeys, one high and another one at the neck). This morning, I had intended to tackle the augmented braid, which is essentially a basic braid plus hair clips on each side above the ears. Admittedly, this was ambitious--I had yet to work with hair clips, and she was still eating her "monkey oatmeal," which increases the risk of unexpected movements and subsequent sticky disaster--but I thought the augmented braid was still reasonable and achievable.

Kira disagreed. "I just want it down, Dad. You can just leave it."

"But Kira," I said, "you need your hair to be out of your face at school." Kira responds well to logic, so this was a good parenting move on my part.

"You can just put clips on the side" she said.

Hmm. Kira has this way of complicating my good parenting moves. She's tricky like that. On the one hand, side-clips only was not in the brief hairstyle training Nicole had given me. On the other hand, Kira was a girl, and maybe she knew something I didn't. I looked at the clock. Side-clips only suddenly seemed like a good idea.

The metal clips I chose were kind of tricky. I had to figure out how to open them. I put them on backwards and had to start over again. It took a few more tries to get them in a place where they seemed to be holding hair back in the right way. By the time Kira was full of monkey oatmeal, I was glad to have backed away from the full braid.

As soon she started putting her hoodie on, though, I started to have this sinking feeling I had chosen wrong. The side-clips, bereft of the anchoring influence of the braid, didn't look sufficient to hold anything for the whole day. I looked again at the clock, though, and decided to stand by my work like a man and get her to school on time for a change.

By the time we got to school, it had become apparent that the clips were useless. Worse than useless--they hadn't been able to do anything against the tugs of head movements and hoodies, but were still keeping random tufts of hair pulled forward, preventing gravity from restoring any semblance of order. Kira ran off happily toward class.

The other children, I think, will have trouble understanding her. On days when her mother gets her ready, she'll be the pretty girl everyone is either drawn towards or jealous of. On days when I get her ready, she'll be that weird, quirky kid who might be homeless. In either case, probably, everyone will be staring at her, which will have who-knows-what psychological repercussions

Actually, as someone who was 6'6" and had a full beard by ninth grade, I have some sense of what the repercussions of constant stared-atness may be. But then again, very few people lot of me as particularly beautiful. Kira will have the worst of both worlds. As the years go by, she'll be shunned by her pretty friends on Daddy's prep days, and by her nerdy friends on Mama's prep days.

So much for a simple, happy childhood.

Hopefully, monkey oatmeal will give her the strength to deal with the trauma caused by my failed hairstyling.

Is Extinction Forever?

2009-11-10T17:58:00.000-08:00

Sinclair stations know to respect the hand that
feeds them--even if it's extinct and does not,
strictly speaking, have any hands.

I keep thinking about cars lately. The way they fly down roads at speeds no one would have once thought the human body can travel. The terrifying and exhilarating amount of momentum they generate. The way they colonize the land, making us make them asphalt rivers across our valleys, concrete palaces beside or below our busiest buildings. Who serves who, I wonder, in the relationship between the cars and us?

They are fueled by the ghosts of the dead, if I understand correctly: gas is made from the long-compressed remains of the dinosaurs and the plants of their prehistoric homes. To pour a potion made from the remains of the dead into worked ore torn from below the surface of the earth in order to transcend the natural barriers presented by great distance sounds more like some kind of magical incantation than like science, I realize, and yet who is to say that this is not a strange and magical world we live in?

And who is to say that those old spirits of those departed dinosaurs have not possessed our metallic idols? Who is to say they haven't returned to fill and rule the world?

I watch the roads and see trucks lumber down them like sauropods, motorcycles darting in and out of traffic like raptors. Have we engineered a seance that has gotten out of control?