Me, at the Berlin Wall, Nov. 8, 1989

That Berlin Wall.

I was there. When it came down. With my brother. Twenty years ago, today, I'm pretty sure. It's confusing; there were tiny little Trabants that sounded like poorly-tuned lawn mowers driving around; they'd stop, a towering blond man, an equally towering blonde woman would get out, invariably dressed in acid-washed jeans and clutching bananas. Often, a little child, roughly my height, would also somehow tumble out. Clutching an Alf doll. Always. I can't find any of my pictures.

The West Germans were surly; the East Germans were bewildered. The Russian guards were huge, and had seemingly-all set up little tables where they were selling their various medals; they always had their truly terrifyingly-looking but actually quite sweet German Shephard guard dogs. According to the guards, the dogs were never vicious, but were just used for the visuals. Dunno. I got one of my brothers' a wonderful frock-coat styled military jacket.

There were a number of amazingly annoying (all blonde, don't ask me why) American female college students, all talking with high voices, and all complaining about their accomodations: "My hotel doesn't have an elevator!" "My elevator was slow and scary!" "You can't get a taxi!" "I got served liver last night and I swear it didn't say 'liver' on the menu!" "I don't like the butter." (That last comment is totally bewildering, I'm guessing it was because it was unsalted.)

"It's cold!" "Why do they only play bad euro-disco everywhere?" (Ahem, those last two are me.) It was cold. I lost my big down coat in Duisberg, where I was working at the time, and so was wearing a tweed jacket of my brother's plus all other clothing items that I owned.

I think I saw Frank Zappa, filming. I didn't bother him, except to notice that he'd cut his long hair.

A West German woman at a bus stop told me how upset she was about the "easties" because she was convinced her children would never be able to get apartments of their own. A bevy of long-legged West German under-dressed beauties (don't they worry about chest colds?) were handing out pamphets complaining that the East German underdressed long-legged beauties were undercutting their prices.

Actually, there were many surly West Berliners handing out pamphlets complaining about the easties.

There were many people from Eastern Europe with suitcases full of money (actual suitcases full of actual East German money) exchanging it for hard currency.

I did't feel much love. All the excitement was at the wall. All those excited seemed to be foreigners.

My memories. Hey, James, what do you remember?

What a Costume!

(Left click on pics for greater clarity.)


Last year when we were visiting Antwerp, I really liked the sculpture depicting the "ongoing" work of finishing the Cathedral there. When the church was originally built (starting in the late 1400's), they ran out of funds, and one tower remains incomplete. In the 1800's, a sculptor fashioned these figures which stand alongside the church, continuing to "work" on what is now considered a permanently unfinished building.

When I first saw them, it was too late and dark to take pictures, but since it was not far from our hotel, I decided to double back the next morning, and take advantage of better lighting. When I arrived, I saw that a street performer was puttering about amongst the figures, putting on the finishing touches of a costume to make him blend in .

In vain, I struggled to get shots that did not include him. I felt too shy to ask him to get out of the way for a few moments, but now what I like best about these pictures is the fact that he was getting ready. You can also see the mirror (top pic) that he used to apply his make-up, and of course, his tip-jar.


All he needs now are his gloves.

Schoolchildren singing Nixon's, Bush's praises

Glenn Beck and various other life-forms are foaming around their mouth-like openings because a couple of videos of schoolchildren singing songs to Obama have surfaced. This is not brand-new behavior. Here's a school choir singing to Pres. Nixon (with Henry Kissinger conducting ftw):

Even more tantalizing is this report from the Washington Wire in the aftermath of Katrina:

At the annual White House Easter Egg Roll, children from the stricken Gulf Coast region serenaded First Lady Laura Bush with a song praising the beleaguered Federal Emergency Management Agency. To the tune of Hey Look Me Over, about 100 young children from Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama sang:

Our country’s stood beside us
People have sent us aid.
Katrina could not stop us, our hopes will never fade.
Congress, Bush and FEMA
People across our land
Together have come to rebuild us and we join them hand-in-hand!

More Beck insanity:


"I've been on food stamps and welfare, did anyone help me out?" Uh, yes, someone did help you out, the Government. Perhaps Glenn Beck and Craig T. Nelson believe foodstamps come from the foodstamp fairy and welfare arrives courtesy of Santa Claus.

h/t to the fine commentators at pharyngula for the links.

News from Tehran

The MSM appears to have given up on the story, but due to the miracle of Youtube, twitter, and Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish, we can watch events unfold in real-time. Sullivan seems to have the market cornered on Farsi speakers.

The video below, I think, distills events to their essence: A large street protest, police on truncheons riding motorcycles beating the crowd, a crash, the crowd protecting the injured policeman. Harshness, kindness.

Next Year or 2024. When Gay Marriage will be ruled a constitutional right?

My, sez Djinn, prediction. Next year. Or 2024. It's a long post, I know, but this is as short as I can make it. Want more info? Just ask.

California put on its ballot, this year, a citizen initiative to change the California constitution to declare marriage as allowable between only a man and a woman. The famous Proposition 8.

Subsequently, the California Supreme Court declared gays a protected class, subject to strict scrutiny; which means under the 14th amendment to the Constitution, they have a right to marry.

All discrimination is not created equal. In US law, there are three distinct categories, strict scrutiny, intermediate scrutiny, and rational relationship.

Strict scrutiny, as you may be able to ascertain from its name, is the strictest, and only applies when a fundamental right is infringed, or when a "suspect classification" is used. Race is a suspect classification. Under suspect classification, for example, blacks and whites cannot have separate water fountains, "separate but equal" does not win.

The California Supreme court has determined that Sexual Orientation is a "suspect classificaion" with the effect that laws applying to sexual orientation must be justified by a "compelling government interest," must be "narrowly tailored," and must be the "least restrictive means" of achieving the compelling governmental interest.

Gays in California used to have, and currently have the option of entering into "domestic partnerships" which have most, but not all, of the benefits of marriage at the state level. They have no benefits at the federal level.

Under "strict scrutiny," such "separate but equal" rights are clearly disallowed. It's why you or I cannot put up separate water fountains for blacks, or whites.

So.... The people of California have amended their constitution (with only 52% of the vote! But that's for a different rant.) to require marriage (this is a completely civil right, in that the benefits are granted totally by the government) to be between only a man and a woman.

But, under strict scrutiny, there are only two possible ways to handle one group being denied rights granted to another group. 1. Give the rights to the denied group (integrate schools, no separate water fountains) or, 2. Take the rights away from the privileged group. Bang, Zoom, thank you m'am, or sir.

The California constitution, by disallowing marriage between two people of the same sex, has now invalidated reason 1 of the possible solutions. Gays cannot be given marriage rights. However, reason 2 is still open; that is, Marriage can be denied to all. This is, I suspect, what the actual outcome will be. There is 3; another choice, the amendment could be declared a "revision," and thus subject to stricter standards to pass, that is 2/3rds majority in both CA governmental houses and a vote by the people. This would invalidate it, but there is very little case law to determine the probability of this, so let's think of the exciting possibilities.

Assuming the court doesn't choose revision, the only option available is to deny Marriage to all Californians, and give them all civil unions. This has serious consequences, as civil unions are not recognized by the US government, which would deny those couples now able to get married that right.

That is an important point, because state constitutions can add extra rights not guaranteed by the US constitution, but cannot subtract rights guaranteed by the constitution to all.

So, when (or if) California declares all marriages invalid under their constitution, we will be in a unique situation. For the very first time, the issue of Gay Marriage will be "ripe" to be heard by the Supreme Court.

Currently there are four almost 100% probable no votes for gay marriage, one unknown vote (Kennedy, the only vote that counts, because he is the swing) and four at least potentially probable yes votes. So, there's probably even odds, if the Supreme court hears this issue, that they will say "No."

However, Kennedy wrote the opinion in "Lawrence v. Texas," the ruling that gave gay people the constitutional right to have sex (in 2003!) and so is at least a probable "yes" vote.

In Lawrence, Kennedy penned that

"our laws and tradition afford constitutional protection to personal decisions relating to marriage, procreation, contraception, family relationships, child rearing, and education." ... "Persons in a homosexual relationship may seek autonomy for these purposes, just as heterosexual persons do.”

Sounds like he sees Gay marriage as a fundamental right. If so, then Americans might soon have a constitutional right to gay marriage, fueled, (ouch. My irony meter just broke...back to the shop.....) by the diligent efforts of the "Yes on 8" people in California.

Scalia, in his angry dissent in Lawrence agreed, stating:

Today’s opinion dismantles the structure of constitutional law that has permitted a distinction to be made between heterosexual and homosexual unions, insofar as formal recognition in marriage is concerned.

Assuming Kennedy votes "no", I ran a statistical analysis on the ages of the conservative justices to determine the average year one would die. (I possess such superpowers; but, to compensate look somewhere between silly and stupid in a bodysuit and cape. Not true, I can rock the cape, but no bodysuits or tights for me.) It's just about 16 years from now. If there is a Democrat in the White House in 2024, and an interceding Republican administration hasn't installed an anti-gay conservative (bit, uh opinionated, Djinn? Hell Yeah!) we, after every single other country in the first world (assuming we're still in that group) will finally decide that gay people have the right to get married. Pretty depressing.

Postscript. There are only five conservative justices, so the error bars on my prediction are pretty wide, but I used what material was at hand for my prediction. So there.

Jesus, straight as an arrow?

To set the stage, Jesus is at the Garden of Gethsemane with his apostles Peter, James, and John, the apostles asleep. Roman soldiers led by Judas (suddenly former apostle) come and take Jesus away after that famous kiss. All of Jesus' apostles flee. Then there are these two verses:

Mark 14:51 And there followed him a certain young man, having a linen cloth cast about his naked body; and the young men laid hold on him:
Mark 14:52 And he left the linen cloth, and fled from them naked.

What is going on? Naked boy, apostles asleep? The only one to try to save him from the guards? Hmmmm........... Hmmmmmmm............. How often did Jesus preach against Homosexuality? Let's see. That would be ZERO.

Betty Boop Takes A Whack At That Highest And Hardest Of Glass Ceilings

And she winks at the voters. (t=45)



Enjoy this cartoon from 1936.

Fruit Fly Fallout After Nuking Incident

Maybe the bad Karma doesn't wait for the next life.

Perhaps people will think that I deserve whatever I get for being so uncaring in my efforts to purge my kitchen of fruit flies. But when I opted for the microwave, remember, I was defending my home. I looked around my kitchen, desperate for a non-toxic way of keeping those inscrutable invaders away (dead).
Is nuking them in the microwave so much crueler than spraying them with a deadly neuro-toxin (like Hitler), or leaving them to starve on a sticky strip (like Pol Pot)? Aren't those other traps really just a way of pretending you are not killing them, but (like Milosevic) just relocating them------into the trap? And isn't keeping a clean kitchen just yet another way of starving them slowly to death (like Stalin)?

And hey, I never actually chased them around with the brulee torch; I was just brainstorming. And I DID feed them in the microwave.

In any event, whether it's my husband's Jewish background with his attendant aversion for using ovens for the disposal of unwanted populations, or his longstanding vegetarian leanings, my husband is appalled. Furthermore, he is now unwilling to eat anything from the microwave, even though I cleaned it thoroughly.

So what I need now is a way to 'ritually cleanse' the microwave after it's misuse.......sigh.

Heck, maybe I'll just leave the critters alone. After all, now that I see that they read more newspapers than Sarah Palin, I have a new found respect for them. In fact, I think I'll treat them to some wine.

Thank Goodness Things Like This Don't Ever Happen In Real Life

Some wise Chinese guy once said, "Voters don't determine outcome of elections; people who count votes determine outcome." (Do people in China vote?)
Don't believe everything you read. ( And thank goodness for Google!)

Stalin said that.

Thank you, can I have another?

The political debacle regarding the bailout and the financial crisis bring to mind that clever sage, Mencken.



Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.

H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)

A funny thing happened on the way to the gas pump

Oil is not priced like most sane goods. The price is not a buyer, say, me, will pay today to a seller with a gallon of crude. Rather, the price is an average of the futures contracts for some percentage of the world's supply. Got that? The price is what people think it will cost off into the future, not what someone will pay right now. (I'm having trouble finding links, but this is the way it works, baybee--I used to work for an energy company and wrote rather bewilderingly complex spreadsheets to determine this stuff--I'm looking, google, don't let me down......) Ahh, here's something. Notice, the futures contract price is the same as the spot price (actual cost) for "light sweet crude) in OK.

Because the price (and this is the actual price) we all hear quoted on the radio is unrelated to the price some average jo would pay, Oil is destined to bubble.

Plus, Oil does not require inventory. If no demand, the producers just don't pump it out of the ground. So, there's no pile-up of inventory when the price outpaces the demand.

If oil was considerably overpriced, and if the price was not set by the consumer, then you would expect that at some point, buyers couldn't find sellers.

Here's one, Iran.

Here's an entire blog that discusses these ideas rather exhaustively. As a disclaimer, the geologists I worked with seemed to think that oil had peaked around 1998 (unlike the website I linked to here) however, the current drastic run up in price is a bubble. It will go down prior to its slow, steady rise back up.

Bush misquotes Jefferson on the 4th.

Thomas Jefferson said:

May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.

Bush, in quoting, said:

"May it be to the world, what I believe it will be -- to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all -- the signal of arousing men to burst the chains, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government."

Shall we assume Bush is for "monkish ignorance and superstition?"

Stolen, shamelessly, from Ed Brayton. Thank you.

Happy birthday Theory of Evolution and gigantic Siberian blast!

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One Hundred and Fifty years ago today, July 1, 1858, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace read their papers (Darwin first!) describing the Theory of Evolution--the modern world was born.

One hundred years ago today, (in Pacific Northwest time) a mysterious gigantic explosion rocked Siberia, the Tunguska event; estimated to be 1000 times as strong as the atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima.

Happy cataclysmic July! May yours be less interesting.

My thoughts on the Mormon opposition to gays marrying in CA

As I said elsewhere (but why waste a perfectly good comment)

An unpopular minority - Mormons – trying to limit the rights of another unpopular minority – Gays - on an issue - Marriage - which Mormonism has a somewhat vexed (and very very famous) history, reminds all and sundry about said vexed history, are on the wrong side of history (again – see any number of issues, but perhaps blacks and the priesthood is the closest), hurts the reputation of the church in society at large, does nothing to lessen the distrust of the church felt by the Evangelicals who are the main supporters of the amendment, and is the exact opposite of what the church should be doing.

As to the argument that male-female marriage is "traditional," balderdash. These people mistake there ignorance of history for something akin to fact.

For all of you folks proclaiming that traditional marriage has always been between a man and a woman; right here (for me at least) in the good ol’ U.S. of A, before it was such, for a very very long time (certainly long enough to be called “traditional”) a very wide assortment of native american tribes had (and some still do) “two-spirits.” Basically, these are men who chose to live as women. They could marry, and were considered good luck, or even holy by some tribes. The Navajos, for example saw and still see them as especially gifted at teaching children. So here, in the US, it is not “traditional” for marriage to be between a man and a woman exclusively unless you define traditional to mean “my traditions that I got from somewhere else geographically and haven’t quite forgotten.”

We won’t even get into Hawaiian group marriages.

Soundtrack for post; only one possible.


Pic of Joseph F. Smith, the 7th president of the LDS church with his 6 wives and 45 offspring.

Brigham Young, mah peeps.

Long story short.

B. Young, to various , 1855. "will no one rid me of this troublesome lawyer?"

Turns out, someone would.

B. Young, to various, 1857. "Will no one rid me of this troublesome wagon train?"

Surprise! Turns out, someone would. Mountain Meadows Massacre.


Troublesome Lawyer:

My GGGma's (Mary Ann Polly Bullock) second husband. Jesse Hartley.


He wasn't Mormon. Brigham Young denounced him publicly; said that he should have his throat cut; Jesse lit off for the territories; he ended up dead. Bill Hickman confessed to the killing. He was never punished.


It’s an interesting event, that parallels, in a small way, the much larger horrors perpetrated at Mountain Meadows a few years later. Brigham Young expressed distress at non-Mormons traversing Utah; they ended up dead. Their killers, save but for a token soul, went unpunished. There's no proof that he directly ordered the killing, I suspect he didn't. But, in such an atmosphere, is a direct order necessary?

It's all in the cover up.

Bo Diddley RIP

I walked 47 miles of barbed wire,
Used a cobra snake for a neck tie.
Got a brand new house on the roadside,
Made out of rattlesnake hide.
I got a brand new chimney made on top,
Made out of human skulls.
Now come on darling let's take a little walk, tell me,
Who do you love,
Who do you love, Who do you love, Who do you love.

Friends, family, I know you don't click on my links. Spies have told me. You doubt my, uh, taste. For, uh, either good reason or no good reason, depending upon the phases of the moon. Click here. C'mon. I promise Courtney Love wasn't even in the country when this video was made. You go, Bo, down below; you and the Duchess, rockin' it. Who do you love?

ps. do not go gently into that good night--strap that red rectangular guitar on tight and charge right in.

On beauty, or why it's only intermittently useful.

I lived in Las Vegas (North Las Vegas, actually) when I was between 13 and 15. There were lots of beautiful women around, none who seemed to be on the sorts of career tracks that I would wish for me or mine. 'Nuf said.

Slighly longer explanation for those who were not denziens of sin city during the years in question--Vegas had, inexplicably, large numbers of showgirls, all beautiful, and prostitutes, some also beautiful, including the mother of my dear friend Bambi, who, besides being built like a taller, leggier, more naturally blonde version of Dolly Parton, would tell me stories about having to ride ostriches, and how frightening she found it. I didn't ask questions. I still feel great guilt about not being able to do anything for her.

The problem with mormons, or gee, Djinn lighten up.

In Mormonism, back in that day, at 15 you went to youth church in the afternoon, as a member of the MIA maids. "MIA" stands for Mutual Improvement Association. I can tell you can sense the fun.

I attempt to attend church. I did not fit in. I was tuning to a pirate radio that played Jimi Hendrix, Leonard Cohen and Neil Young; they were posting pictures of Donny Osmond on their bedroom walls (Hundreds of pics, I kid you not.) Now, this seems cool, at the time, though, not so much. I was clearly and unmistakably miserable; My MIA maid's teacher was the Bishops wife; we'll call her Sister Sweetheart -- small digression -- members of the congregation in Mormondom are expected to get up in church and give talks. A popular talk at the time concerned some sad girl whose dad wrote her letters pretending that he was her age and an admirer. Needless to say, I found this story disturbing.

Sister Sweetheart, suffering from that Mormon Beauty affliction, had a totally stunning son, let's call him Brad P. Mormon. He started showing up in the hallways of the church telling some nonexistent soul just out of earshot (poor dear, he was basically honest and could not pull it off) that he thought I was like, totally hot.
I was mortified and ashamed--they were pulling the "daddy" trick on me.

In retrospect, it was one of the sweetest things anyone has ever done for me.