Balls and Walnuts
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With apologies to vampire bats
So President Bush is worried about human-animal chimerae:
Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research, human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids, and buying, selling, or patenting human embryos. Human life is a gift from our Creator — and that gift should never be discarded, devalued or put up for sale.
Well, Mr. Bush, aside from the fact that such a law would prevent the cloning of human genes into bacterial or viral vectors, thus crippling biomedical research for decades to come, I think you should clean house before implementing such a policy.
You may begin with your Vice President.
D.
Quickie poll
Don’t forget the Number 500 Giveaway! I hope to see several more entries before the evening is over.
I’m happy — not about the state of the world, of course, but about my trilogy. In the last few hours, I did a bit of cosmetic surgery on the first novel, and the current word count stands at just under 90,000 words. Ideal! Not only that, but this first novel is one tight sumbitch, and I think anyone who finished it would have to buy the next book. But that’s just me.
I’m chucking the working title (The Brakan Correspondent) because it put the main character’s father front and center. I want to keep Cree (the correspondent’s daughter) center stage. All of the titles below refer to her, although they also have double meanings that spread to a few of the other characters as well.
Tell me whether any one of these grabs your eye better than its neighbors:
Nest
Out of the Nest
Fallen from the Nest
Fledge
Fledgling
Thanks!
D.
Funny thing is
I own a Miata, which is almost the spittin’ image of this car (except for color).
I’m a Honda S2000!
You live on the edge, and you live for the adrenaline rush. You don’t need luxuries, snob appeal, or superfluous gadgets. You put your top down, get your motor revving, and take all the curves that life throws at you at full speed. So what if you spin out occasionally?
Take the Which Sports Car Are You? quiz.
I found this quiz at Dean’s place.
By the way: don’t forget to enter my 500th Post Giveaway, if you haven’t done so already.
D.
Cindy Sheehan arrested for wearing a tee shirt.
UPDATE: San Jose Mercury News reports, Police Drop Charge Against Sheehan, Apologize.
Gracias to Blue Gal for pointing me to John Nichols’s editorial in The Nation, The War on T-Shirts. Here’s a bit of meat:
Is there really a law against wearing a political T-shirt to the State of the Union address?
No.
The Capitol Police, who on Wednesday dropped the charges against Sheehan, have acknowledged in an official statement that: “While officers acted in a manner consistent with the rules of decorum enforced by the department in the House Gallery for years, neither Mrs. Sheehan’s manner of dress or initial conduct warranted law enforcement intervention.”
What they have not acknowledged, and what is truly troubling, is the evidence that Sheehan was singled out for rough justice.
What follows is the entry I wrote this morning:
Here’s Cindy’s story. Her shirt said, “2245 dead. How many more?” Read the whole story, but here’s the part that gets me:
I had just sat down and I was warm from climbing 3 flights of stairs back up from the bathroom so I unzipped my jacket. I turned to the right to take my left arm out, when the same officer saw my shirt and yelled; “Protester.” He then ran over to me, hauled me out of my seat and roughly (with my hands behind my back) shoved me up the stairs. I said something like “I’m going, do you have to be so rough?” By the way, his name is Mike Weight.
The officer ran with me to the elevators yelling at everyone to move out of the way. When we got to the elevators, he cuffed me and took me outside to await a squad car. On the way out, someone behind me said, “That’s Cindy Sheehan.” At which point the officer who arrested me said: “Take these steps slowly.” I said, “You didn’t care about being careful when you were dragging me up the other steps.” He said, “That’s because you were protesting.” Wow, I get hauled out of the People’s House because I was, “Protesting.”
Bradblog has updates and pictures.
I don’t know if I have many Bush supporters in my audience, but I’m speaking to you folks now. What will it take for you to wake up? That’s all I’m asking. What will it take?
The rest of you, sorry for the political post, but it seems like something new pisses me off every single day.
D.
Number 500: a giveaway
Yup, this is my 500th post. I’d like to celebrate by giving away a copy of one of my favorite books, Jorge Luis Borges’ Collected Fictions. If you already own it, or if you despise Borges, let me know, and I’ll send you a gift certificate instead.
The rules are easy. In the comments, tell me how you found your way here the very first time. I know the answer for some of you (the BBSers), but for most of you, I haven’t a clue — and I’m curious.
Tomorrow night at this time, I’ll write down the names of the commenters and draw one at random. The winner will need to email me with his or her snail mail addie.
Karen reads Kate Rothwell’s Somebody Wonderful . . . in one day!
Little Green Fascists tests the waters of poor taste . . . and finds them warm and inviting!
And . . .
I finally explain why you should belittle your children at every opportunity!
Plus . . .
Too many exclamation marks cause fingernail cancer!!!
And more.
D.
My little humorist
More later. I thought I’d dash this off before fixing dinner.
I’ve been teaching my son grammar from Strunk and White, and from Karen Gordon’s books, The Deluxe Transitive Vampire and The New Well-Tempered Sentence. He finished reading Gordon’s chapter on commas last week, so now I’m having him go back through it and write sentences demonstrating each of her major points. Here is what he has done so far, uncorrected by yours truly:
Monday:
He barfed, he heaved, he blew his nose.
I barfed Sparky up, and I saw her half-digested tail wagging. Sparky didn’t like being in Sam’s stomach, but she liked his intestines. He wanted lunch and she wanted a heart. He always salted her before eating, but he thought she was bland all the same. [Eeeew.]
I woke up covered in barf [I think I understand the theme of this composition] and said, “Let’s go again! Let’s go again!”
Tuesday:
Sam tumbled and splashed and rolled around in the radioactive waste. When the radio started saying, “Recently there has been a radioactive spill and we would just like to caution everybody from playing in it, that is all”, he started drinking the foul liquid.
Sam drank the water so that he would get 6 extra eyes. From the left, a boy rose up and Sam saw his tentacles. At dark he thought 30 tentacles were enough. Out of the murky water appeared a girl with 6 red eyes and 4 tentacles.
I’ll make him a blogger yet.
D.
Why is Bush so awesome?
Major tip of the hat to Jellio at YesButNoButYes for this hilarious video.
Okay. Now I can get to sleep with a smile on my face. G’night.
D.
Samuel Alito got me out of bed this morning
. . . at 6 AM.
I guarantee you, if I had set the alarm for 6 with the intention of spending an hour editing, or perhaps working out at the gym, I’d have groaned, turned over, and gone back to sleep. Nope, it took Sam Alito to motivate my ass out of bed.
Something strange is happening inside my head; the neurons are rearranging themselves, like one of those old mosaic puzzles where you had to scoot squares around in order to unscramble the choo-choo train. I’m becoming more political. Yeah, I’ve written political posts, I’ve donated to lefty causes and campaigns, and I’ve even emailed my representatives in the past, but nothing compares to the all-out blitz against Alito that I — we — took part in over the weekend.
Sure, we lost, but we picked up 23 votes against cloture that we didn’t have when this all started. We know who our friends are, and we know who the Vichy Dems are, too. We have some sense of the clout we can wield as citizens of the net. And we did it all without support from the established liberal groups, like People for the American Way.
But say what you will about blogs and the netroots, we are not effective organizers for this type of large-scale effort, with an opposition wielding tens of millions of dollars. That we got this much accomplished in the fact of that is simply incredible.
And a rallying cry from Meteor Blades that, I swear to you, brought tears to my eyes (but then, I cry watching sitcoms, too):
. . . But a battle is not a war. And, disappointing as it was, and as devastating as Alito’s tenure on the court may turn out to be, giving up is simply not an option.
No matter what the odds, and no matter how few of our elected representatives we can count on to stand with us on this matter, and a hundred others, we have to keep up the fight. The war against Big Brotherization is as crucial as that for abolition, for women’s suffrage, for civil rights.
In every case, the warriors in those wars suffered immense setbacks, repeatedly so, and found it hard to get the politicians to speak up and stand up for them. Eventually, however, because they refused to surrender, and because they took the fight beyond the electoral arena, they won.
We will, too.
Read the whole thing.
One more inspirational link — Jane, at firedoglake: We shook things up.
Oh, yeah.
It may sound weird to you, but I finally feel like a citizen of this country.
The other day, my son asked my wife — and I’m paraphrasing here, cuz I wasn’t present for the discussion — whether we were just watching the world go to hell, or whether we were trying to do something to change it. It feels good to show him that we do more in this family than write checks to politicians, Amnesty International, and the ACLU.
I don’t think this is a flash in the pan, either. I keep popping over at my favorite political blogs, looking for marching orders. I’ve already pledged money and phone-calling time to Ned Lamont, the one dude who looks like he has a chance to unseat Windbag Lieberman in the primary. I’m angry. I want to do more.
And I’m not alone.
Yeah, yeah. I know I promised you more self-esteem BS yesterday, but I’m not sure anyone cares about that but me. Right now, I’m having a hard time firing myself up over what used to be one of my pet peeves, since I’m too fired up about other things.
Off topic: go say hi to Balls and Walnuts’s newest friend, Mark Hoeschletter, an 82-year-old gentleman who just began blogging less than one week ago. Today, Mark has some important words for the young people of today.
Finally, my apologies to all of you in the blogosphere whom I haven’t visited this week. I’ll do better, I promise.
D.
The merits of poor self-esteem: Part I
My mother, bless her labyrinthine heart, saved every scrap of writing and artwork I produced in elementary school, or at least she had saved every scrap until I moved out for college. Then, somehow, everything managed to fit into a single box in our garage. Some time between college and med school, I went through the box. It held no surprises for me — I had been through it several times before, looking for answers that I hoped would be more palatable than the obvious ones I’d known from the beginning.
Nope, nothing new. I saved the interesting stuff and tossed the rest. I kept my first grade report cards, quarter by quarter showing a teacher initially enchanted by me, ultimately exhausted. I kept a small folder of stories bound with three brass brads. And I kept another brad-bound folder from first grade, this one titled MY FAMILY.
The frontispiece consists of a family portrait, hand-crayoned by yours truly. You know the type — family in the foreground, names pencilled crudely under each, house in the background, smoking chimney, yatta yatta yatta. The smallest figure’s legs are fused in one column, he’s armless, and his head sits atop his body, an undifferentiated lump. That’s me.
I imagine any post-Benjamin Spock child shrink would have had palpitations over that drawing, and he would have been right. I was one fucked up kid. And look at me now.
Yeah, admit it. You missed that photo. (My son says, “You know, it’s kind of obvious it’s faked.” To which I say: “What? What? What’s fake about it?”)
I’m grappling for some image or memory to convey how self-hating I was as a kid, but you know something? So much of it was internal. I don’t have it in me to be self-destructive, so I can’t cough up any stories of drug abuse, insanely reckless behavior, or failed suicide attempts. Mostly, I stayed depressed.
Fred Delse, my med school mentor I told you about in this post on ego boundaries, once said that it was nearly impossible to diagnosis major affective disorders in kids. I don’t recall if he said, “It’s impossible because they’re all sick,” but that’s what I took home from that conversation. I thought: It’s okay that you spent your whole childhood wishing you were anyplace but where you truly were. Other kids were undoubtedly more screwed up than you.
Not surprisingly, I did have one addiction, schoolwork. I aced everything I touched. My one kernel of self-worth came from the knowledge that I was at the head of the pack. I earned this bit of self-esteem; I didn’t have it foisted upon me by teachers eager to praise my every artistic, literary, or spoken turd. I clung to it like a life preserver, and in the end it did, indeed, save me.
Sometimes I worry that my son’s childhood is too happy. I feel a little better after yesterday’s brouhaha.
The fiction writer in me cringes. Show, don’t tell, remember? But I can’t show you, not while my parents are still alive and capable of reading my blog. Irrational as it may sound, my father’s command to me in first grade still carries weight.
I had blabbed to my first grade teacher. At our first open house, she asked my parents about the stories I’d told her. My dad denied everything, of course, but when he got me home, he laid down the law.
Don’t ever, ever talk about what happens in this house.
So I can’t show you. Some of these things you’ll just have to take on faith. Besides — when have I ever lied to you?
But I’m still cringing. This is not effective writing.
I’m not here to whine about an unhappy childhood. In fact, my second choice title for today’s post was, It’s never too late to have an unhappy childhood.
I never would have become who I am today if I hadn’t been fueled by a ton of self-hatred. I couldn’t continue being who I am and doing what I do if I didn’t still have that hatred burning inside me, constantly requiring appeasement. My worst enemy is my best friend.
And I am resolute in my belief that a groundless “high self-esteem” is a bad, bad thing.
Tomorrow: Sociologists agree with me.
D.