August 2003 Archives

In honor of the ever-so "fair and balanced" Fox news lawsuit against Al Franken, I join the Fair and Balanced Friday blog protest.

Because everything I do is oh-so fair and balanced. Just like Fox News.

--> www.nealpollack.com/cgi-bin/blog/do.cgi/200308122150/permalink

But apparently, I live in a country where...

58% of my fellow citizens believe you have to believe in God to be a moral person.

83% of them believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus. 28% believe in evolution.

I just don't get it. Of course, as a Jew raised in a very unreligious household — nobody in my family attends a synagogue regularly — I'm clearly way in the minority as far as faith goes.

This reminded me of a book I read a few years back by Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God. A concept she kept returning to was the tension between logos, the knowledge of the rational, and mythos, the belief in the rationally inexplicable. At various times in their histories, the major religious faiths have struggled to balance the two. For example, the Islamic world was a center of scientific development at one point, but now, not so much, to put it mildly. The Christian world seems to be going the same way if this poll is any indication.

Yet I know there are religious people who don't put their brain on God-is-my-copilot autopilot. One friend of mine tells me about a conversation with her father, a physicist at Stanford University, who finds that the more he learns in the course of his work, the more his faith is strengthened. There's no conflict there for him.

What saddens me about the kind of religious faith that's taken root here is how mindbogglingly literal it is. No room for mystery. No room for spiritual struggle. Everything is neatly spelled out. This is right, and this is wrong, and it says so in the manual. Don't confuse me with the facts (or those pesky science classes in school), my mind is made up.

What a dreary universe these people must live in. I don't want to live there with them. It's good to know there are other people out there who share my views and want something better too.

Not to mention, let's see how "blessed" a country we really are if our scientific and technological prowess comes to a crashing halt because we've become a bunch of hide-bound dumbasses with WWJD slogans plastered all over our cars and our t-shirts.

--> "Believe It, or Not", Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times, www.nytimes.com/2003/08/15/opinion/15KRIS.html

Nico Pitney makes the case that progressives should support Dean, despite loyalty to the Green Party, because he's the best chance to advance their goals and get a very dangerous administration out of the White House. The article includes a frank look at several of the less-than-satisfactory aspects of Dean's platform, but ends on an up note, concluding that "What we have in Dean is a man who can articulate liberal positions intelligently, passionately, and commandingly, and who has the grassroots/netroots support and an appeal to diverse constituencies that will allow him to defeat George Bush."

--> "The Progressive Case for Howard Dean", Alternet, August 12, 2003, www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16592

Gee, for a network that brought us "The Simpsons" and "Futurama", Fox sure seems to lack, well, a sense of humor. Consider their new lawsuit against Al Franken and the publishers of his upcoming book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, in which they claim that Franken's "intent is clear — to exploit Fox News' trademark, confuse the public as to the origins of the book and, accordingly, boost sales of the book."

As anybody who has been unlucky enough to experience Fox News' brand of "fair and balanced" reporting, there can't be any brand confusion there.

Good going guys. I was going to buy the book anyway, because I loved Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot, but now maybe I'll pick up a few extra copies for friends and relatives. I don't think any of them will think Fox News had anything to do with the production of the book, but they may think, as do I, that Fox network is the big fat idiot of 2003.

(Or perhaps they are acknowleging that the audience they have been targeting with their right-wing propaganda is stupid enough to think that this book is a production of Fox.)

--> "Fox sues Franken over 'fair and balanced'", CNN, www.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/books/ 08/12/foxnews.lawsuit.ap/index.html

It's a ChatBot! Found via Google text ads on the Village Voice website. Actually, I got bored after a couple of minutes and apparently, other people did too. Oh well. At least it's realistic!

--> www.zabaware.com/webhal/dubyabot.html

And fails to hold up under close scrutiny. What's interesting is that this A.P. story showed up on the Kansas City Star website.This ain't exactly the San Francisco Bay Guardian, folks. If Midwest heartland newspapers are criticizing the push to war, Bush really is in trouble. Aw, shucks.

--> Powell's push toward Iraq war questioned, August 10, 2003, www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/6497528.htm

The interesting part is that she used the Yahoo News send-to-a-friend feature. My guess is that they will be restricting the message length in future... the funniest part is the language. "Please do not reply rudely lest a curse befalls your water"? Ooookaaayyy....

Margaret Mbuli (revelations_16:8@heatwave.org) has sent you a news article. (Email address has not been verified.)
Personal message:

Halleluyah brethren,I am a minister of the Lord and I am concerned with the word of prophecy in ISAIAH 20:19-25 -the task of making the altar to the Lord in the heart of Egypt.It will be a sign and witness to the Lord Almighty in the land of Egypt.He will heal us.
The Acacia wood I can get but with the bronze work someone like you can contribute.I am asking you to do this on your own free will.I live and work in Tanzania with my husband Eliezer Mbuli.We have to build this altar to the Lord and place it at a spot that he got a revelation.Apparently in that dark village alot of visions have been experienced by different people and I believe the zeal is in place.This is at his homeland in Mlalo at a place called Cana.We neither have a church and are not known,infact,even the place where he saw the revelation is not ours.Please do not reply rudely lest a curse befalls your water and a plague upon you.Thank you Margaret Mbuli. Read ISAIAH 17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24.

1) I thought I knew from hot weather after going to Morocco. But I didn't. Laughlin, Nevada and Phoeniz, Arizona... now that's some heat for you. Maybe air conditioning is a necessary evil.

2) There may be 35 million people living in California, but they must all be crammed into the Bay Area, Sacto., and San Diego/LA/Orange County, because there are certainly large areas of land where there's nobody.

3) Casinos are interesting places, inhabited chiefly by very large people wearing t-shirts from Old Navy or with slogans about September 11 or the like. They eat and gamble a lot, but nobody looks like they're having all that good a time.

4) There are still cool road signs in the Southwest. We saw one advertising Alien Beef Jerky, and another one for an establishment called Bun Boy.

5) You can stop sniggering now (I haven't.)

6) There is a casino in Primm, Nevada where you can see the car where Bonnie and Clyde were sitting when they were gunned down.

7) While I was gone, California seems to have gone completely mad. But everybody outside of California thinks we're mad already.

8) Arnold Schwartzenegger sounds like Andre the Giant impersonating the Dwead Piwate Woberts in The Princess Bride. I don't know that I can listen to that for 3 years.

9) There's no place like home. There's no place like home...

Just finished reading one of the books from Virago Modern Classics, The Brimming Cup by Dorothy Canfield, written just after the end of the first World War. It takes place in rural Vermont and focuses on the year in the life of a wife and mother named Marise, who goes through early midlife existential angst precipitated by her youngest child going off to school and the arrival of an attractive new neighbor who has designs on her.

It took me over a month to get through it because I kept putting it down and reading other things. On the one hand, the writing... is — very — oh so... dramatic, and overwrought at times. So! many! exclamation points... and ... ellipses!

Yet underneath that is a well-written and enjoyable melodrama, and underneath that are some interesting reflections on human nature, mortality and immortality, what helps people get through the day, and how to find something to believe in when your old beliefs are no longer enough. It also sounds like Marise and her husband Neale have a really healthy marriage, and I like to think that when their kids are grown, they'll get to leave their house in rural Vermont from time to time for some extended vacations in Europe. (Though due to the timing of the book's events, that would place their retirement during World War II... )

My friend Edith, the talented ticket-winner, scored herself and me two tickets to Norah Jones at the Fillmore for Friday, August 1, via Alice Radio's points program. (I don't think Edith has actually paid cash for concert tickets in years, if ever — and she's landed some great shows and kindly invited me along; my personal favorites are the Ben Harper show at Bimbo's and the Erasure accoustic concert at the W hotel".

This concert was good though. I like Norah Jones; think I heard "Don't Know Why" on the radio a few times too many and don't have the album, though I've heard it and thought it was pretty enough, but not something I had to own. I might be tempted to pick up the next one though — her band and some of her songs had a country music thing going on that I didn't expect but really enjoyed. She was charming and funny too, especially when she praised the burritos in the Mission, but complained that they were too big. "Oh I can eat the whole thing. I can eat it. But it's not a good thing. No no no, I don't mean anything disgusting..." (Edith and I snickered when she complained that the one she'd eaten that day was "an inch too long." Yes, we're grownups.)

The fly in the ointment for me was the woman we were standing next to in the audience. This always happens to me at a show — I get fixated on somebody annoying nearby. It's probably just my personality, yet this woman really was spectacularly obnoxious. It started with her cellphone which, counter to the instructions at the beginning of the show to turn off all cells and pagers, started flashing a bright blue light. Even with the stage lighting, the mirror ball above, etc. it really was distracting. But did she turn it off? Did she walk to the side to deal with her text message? No, of course not. She crouched down for about five minutes, phone furiously flashing all the while as she made a not very convincing attempt to cover it up.

Conversation finished, she got back to her appreciation of Norah. Which she showed by bopping along to the music, in the process also managing to bop me in the back of my legs with her purse while simultanously bopping Edith with her butt. I'm not sure how she did it, as Edith was standing to the front and right of her, and I was back and to the left. That takes talent. Talent which was not evident in her tuneless humming along to the songs. I'm not kidding. Norah would be up there singing and playing the piano, unaccompanied by her bandmates, and this woman was attempting to "harmonize" with her. It was truly painful. If she and her boyfriend hadn't left early, I probably would have lost it and said something (and it might have involved suggestions about where she could put her blinking cellphone and recommendations to take singing lessons). I know rudeness doesn't justify rudeness, but holy moly!

Why go to a concert if you're going to be doing everything but listen to the performance... and why spoil it for other people?

Actually though — she couldn't spoil it. It was too good a show, and her antics gave me something good to write about in my blog.

It's really heating up now, since Larry Flynt announced he's running too!

My suggested campaign slogan:

"California, now you're really f**ked!"

Michael's suggestion:

"California: Now here's somebody you can get BEHIND!"

(I think we could possibly become the first consultants to get paid for NOT consulting!)