With love to Riyadh

You tried so hard.

First you arrived via the google query "russia vuck," which led you here. It appears -- ahem -- that you and The Kid were both laboring under the same misapprehension as to that word. Seeing nothing but a description of Mr. T's sink installation activities, you decided to take a more direct approach, searching the entire blog for the word "sexy."

You have got to be kidding me. No, seriously. This blog?

Now if you were more creative -- or maybe more thoroughly versed in English, I don't know -- you might have tried "mountain boobs" like the guy from Scotland last week. That would have landed you here. Not exactly what you were looking for, but hey -- at least that post had the actual word.

Still not finding what you needed, you tried one last, heroic measure: searching the "videos" tag. I'm guessing that "Bald Cypress", "Snakebird, I love you", and "Paddling the mangroves" all excited you a bit when you first read them, but sadly, I can feel your ultimate disappointment all the way across the globe.

But congratulations anyway. That was the most dogged search for p*rn I think I have ever witnessed. You persevered in the face of truly daunting odds. Some might tell you to just go rent something*, but -- well, it's Riyadh. As if there weren't enough reasons to lighten the hell up a little over there, maybe it would spare me from watching such pathetic displays unfolding in my statcounter.

So I have a better idea. Why don't you just go paddle your mangrove.

Bison, head colds and anti-drug hysteria

Mr. T is leaving tomorrow to go slay some free-range, grass-fed meat for the freezer. Well, actually he's going to watch his Dad slay some free-range, grass-fed meat for our freezer. See, his Dad has long dreamed of a buffalo hunt, so Mr. T started trying to find a hunt they could do together that offered significantly more challenge than a standard Dick-Cheney-shooting-
fish-in-a-barrel-and-then-your-hunting-partner-in-the-face kind of deals. And he found one on 90,000 acres in Nebraska. If my father-in-law gets a buffalo, our half will tally up to about 350 pounds. The deep freeze will be full for awhile. (And lots of friends will be eating bison as well.)

But I'm getting away from my main point, which is -- as always, really -- me.
So Mr. T is leaving tomorrow, which will require me to wrangle The Kid alone till we head up to Montana next week.

Cue head cold.

I was sitting here working this afternoon and I could feel it hitting me. First the stuffy nose, then the burning eyes, then the ache in the throat. And I looked down at the dog and said, "Hey, sport, would you be so kind as to hop into your time machine and fetch me some good cold remedies from 1998?"

Remember when cold meds used to work? I used to be a big fan of DayQuil, and then Tylenol Cold and Flu for nighttime. DayQuil could power me through an entire day at Big Law Firm with even the most wretched virus. Yeah, I'd be seeing vapor trails*, but it gave me blessed, blessed relief. Then one day, they stopped working. I took a DayQuil, and continued to feel like pickled ass. Last year's bout with strep was particularly vexing. I assumed I'd developed some sort of tolerance for it until one day it dawned on me.

Meth. They took the stuff that actually works -- called pseudoephedrine -- out of the meds, because in very large quantities, pseudoephedrine can be used to make meth. Now pharmacists are required to lock up meds that contain it and weary cold sufferers must produce a photo ID and sign the products out to get them. Most cold-med makers, afraid that they would lose bidness if their stuff was locked up behind the counter, caved and stuck some weak-ass substitute in their products to keep them on the shelves.

I'm going to go ahead and call this law and order hysteria. Listen, I'm down with preventing the production of meth. It's an environmental and social menace. But this goes too far. Back in the midwest, they would simply not let you buy more than one box of cold medicine at a time, on the theory that no one has that bad a cold. That was fine. But then the meth people would simply shoplift it, leading the lawmakers to insist that pseudoephedrine must be locked up! Oh Noes!

But you know what? I don't care. If someone is determined to make meth, a signature and photo ID requirement isn't going to stop them. It's not. Because no one has ever made a fake ID! Like so much of our security-obsessed society, this is so much window dressing.

Fortunately, some manufacturers have resisted the blacklisting of pseudoephedrine, and their stuff remains behind the glass. I will be going to the pharmacy tomorrow and getting some.

Perhaps I'll be a little bit more reasonable tomorrow, and will see the sterling wisdom of this law once my sinus passages are no longer the size of bratwursts.

Which will only happen after I get some decent cold medicine.





*not really

Endangered Species Thursday: The ends don't always justify the means

Thank goodness for the people who actually read this blog and send me things. I've been slapping myself silly this week trying to get images ready to submit to my stock agency, finish a project for the day job, get ready to go to Montana this weekend, finish some sewing I'm doing for Christmas, and a lot of other things you don't give the tiniest shit about.

But this means I haven't had much time to read the stuff that interests me on the internet and then share it with all of you -- you know, cheery stuff like turtles choking on plastic bags, the innumerable species on the brink of annihilation, and people who commit ugly acts against animals in supposed defense of those same species.

Michael, sender of all things good, is a cat-lover, and was appalled by this story. Me too. Apparently, a guy on the Gulf Coast is accused of shooting and killing a cat he claims was preying on endangered plovers in an area where he regularly leads bird-watching tours.

This has, of course, pitted bird lovers and cat lovers against one another, and the conflict has become somewhat ferocious. But why the binary thinking? Yes, of course feral cats preying on endangered birds is a problem. No, unilaterally shooting them is not an appropriate response to that very real problem.

One of the issues in this case is, no doubt, that the accused is being tried under a law where it's frankly a stretch for the prosecution. (Lawyerly Disclaimer: I am not a Texas lawyer and I don't know all the facts of this case.) It would have been a better use of government resources to round up and care for the feral cats in this area than it would have been to put this man on trial.

It's an ugly case. Look, I know how desperately depressing species loss is. But don't lose your head, people. Let's think of solutions that don't involve bloodshed. It's like that old joke: What do you do if you see an endangered animal eating an endangered plant?*

Well, damn sure you don't blow it away with a 22-caliber rifle, pally. Feh.



*Yes, I know domesticated house cats are not endangered. You still shouldn't shoot them.

Welcome to America. Or not.

I have a long-held theory that governments staff their passport control counters with the surliest assholes in the country as a form of grassroots foreign policy posturing. It's a way to remind visitors that they are at the mercy of a foreign government that views them as an insignificant speck, so they'd better behave.

And I think the U.S. has probably become one of the worst. I can say without reservation that getting through passport control in mainland China was easier than getting through on the way back home. And that was in Portland, arguably the world's happy-go-luckiest city. Can you imagine how unpleasant it must be for visitors?

Which is perhaps why foreign travel to the U.S. has dropped 17% since 9/11, costing us a cool 94 billion dollars for our paranoid assholery.

I suppose that is why I find this hilarious, albeit in a God-can-we please-be-reasonable-again kind of way.

Who's been purgin' the sturgeon?*

I really don't know what to make of this. East of Portland about 45 minutes lies the Bonneville dam, which hosts on its grounds a trout hatchery and a pond which held seven endangered white sturgeon. Till Monday morning anyway, when an employee found the pond empty.

Sturgeon aren't little. I've been to Bonneville a few times, and those fish were big -- the news article says about five feet long, and that's about right. Here's a great image of them.

I guess I'd like to know how you can remove seven ginormous fish from a pond on a federal site without being noticed. This is a dam, people -- security once searched my trunk when I was taking my son to feed the trout at the hatchery. (Though I'm pretty sure that was because of the profusion of anti-W bumper stickers on my car.)

People suck.


*The single positive aspect of this event is that it allowed me to use this phrase in a socially acceptable manner.

Tags for this post: Travel, Dumbassery and Parenting; Or, my weekend in three words

Ever had a holiday weekend in which occurred disaster after disaster, and yet you still had a great time? Ours went something like this:

Wednesday night: Leave for Montana way too late, get into hotel room in Richland, WA at obscenely late hour.

Thursday morning: Leave hotel room way too late; get on road to Montana. At 1:30 pm, run out of gas in the middle of barren Eastern Washington (because you're towing a trailer and your light never went on), barely make it to an exit with no gas station. Wait with kid and two dogs while your husband walks across railroad tracks and, miraculously, returns with can of gas obtained from gentleman in undershirt with two-legged dog who refuses to accept any money. Return can, thank man profusely, give him gift of multi-tool and knife which Mr. T always has on hand on accounta he works in that industry.

Thursday night: Reach house in Montana, think for a moment that an unruly rock band moved in and trashed the place, find tiny turds that are too small to have emerged from average-sized musician, realize it's a pack rat, and start cleaning up.

Friday afternoon: Leave for Glacier National Park way too late, eat delicious meal in Kalispell. Get to Apgar Campground in Glacier just after dark and attempt to get tents set up before meeting sister's flight back in Kalispell at 11:12 p.m. Complete tent set-up approximately three seconds before downpour begins, complete with kid- and dog-scaring thunder and lightning. Look at watch, notice it's almost ten o'clock.

Warily observe the slide into hysteria on part of kid and younger dog, thank God that older dog is deaf and old and doesn't give a shit. Get kid calmed down, just before husband enters tent loudly forecasting certain doom if family stays in tent, which is leaking. Calm kid down again, run after dog who bolts out of tent in fear and won't come to anyone but me since I'm the idiot that trained him in the first place. Get sodden dog back in tent just in time to hear husband observe that, dammit, there were vacancies in the hotels in West Glacier and why didn't we just do that. Tell husband fine, take the friggin' tents down then, we'll snag a hotel room just before meeting sister's flight. Sit in car with kid and dogs; hope husband doesn't get struck by lightning while handling tent poles in thunderstorm. Imagine headline -- and inevitable Darwin Award -- and wince. Alleviate guilt by remembering that I offered to do it myself, even though it was his idea in the first place.

Drive to West Glacier to secure these supposed accomodations, which are now nonexistent, because we are apparently not the only complete fracking idiots who wimped out on camping in a storm. See vacancy sign 1/4 mile ahead, swerve to right only to have four other cars swerve the same direction in front of us and pull in, each competing for the same vacancy.

Lather, rinse, repeat for the next 45 minutes. Have clever idea that the hotels in Whitefish won't be as full as those nearer the park, and call ahead to the Holiday Inn Express. Get room reserved at 11:16 pm, after calling sister to instruct her to cool her heels at the airport for another fifteen minutes.

Get sister, who has a hearty laugh at our expense, but the joke's on her because she has to sleep with Trailhead Kid that night, who ends up horizontal on any bed he sleeps on.

Saturday: Leave Whitefish way too late, but get up to Logan Pass early enough to do five mile hike to Hidden Lake with sister while Mr. T and the kid set up tents in new campsite. Have an absolute blast hiking and blabbing with sister. Photograph more mountain goats. Realize it's all worth it. Go to sleep in Avalanche campground after consuming huge slab of buffalo meatloaf at Eddie's in Apgar.

Sunday: Leave Glacier way too late, drive scenic route back to house, see that pack rat shat on the counters again and did not succumb to the trap. Go fishing with Mr. T, sister and kid till dark. Eat bite of single rainbow trout caught by Mr. T, let the kid have the rest, which he proceeds to eat, skin and all. Listen to neighbors' Newfoundland bark at coyotes for two solid hours before finally falling asleep.

Monday morning: Leave house way too late. So late, in fact, that sister misses -- by ten minutes -- being allowed to board flight. Realize that if the dog hadn't had such relentless, horrid gas all the way to Spokane, the ten-minute stop in Sand Point to try and get him to poop wouldn't have cost sister her Monday flight. Get sister hotel and reservation for flight Tuesday at 7:00 a.m. Have one last lunch with sister; be secretly glad. Leave sister at hotel and go home. Get home way too late. Realize it was still a great weekend full of nature, hysterical laughter at the string of catastrophes and the easy interaction with family you truly love. Write boring blog post about it.

Anyone still with me? Or did I lose you back at the two-legged dog?

Facts? We don't need no stinkin' facts

Good grief, but this is annoying. Apparently the new fad is to excoriate Al Gore for how much power his Nashville residence uses. So, you see, we should not listen to anything Gore says because he's a hypocrite. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!!

Except, not. Think Progress summarizes the Vice President's response:

Gore’s family has taken numerous steps to reduce the carbon footprint of their private residence, including signing up for 100 percent green power through Green Power Switch, installing solar panels, and using compact fluorescent bulbs and other energy saving technology.

Having thus reduced his footprint, Gore also purchases carbon offsets to reduce that footprint to zero. Here is my favorite explanation of the concept of carbon offsets, from Real Climate. In relevant part:

The idea behind carbon offsets is built upon the foundation of carbon emissions trading established by the Kyoto Protocol, a scheme called cap and trade. Carbon emissions for industries are capped at some level by regulatory permits to emit CO₂. If a company is able to cut its emissions below that level, it can sell its emission permits to another company. The cuts in emissions are thereby steered, by the invisible hand of the market, to the cheapest and most efficient means. Cap-and-trade has worked well for reduction of sulfur emissions in the U.S., that are responsible for acid rain. CO₂ emission is intrinsically even better suited for cap-and-trade, because it is a truly global pollutant, so it matters not where the CO₂ is emitted.

The carbon emissions market requires a certification process to verify any reduction in carbon emissions. Carbonfund.org and the other similar operations take donations from people like me and use the money to pay for renewable energy sources like solar cells or wind farms, that would not have been built otherwise. For these efforts, they receive credits for reduction in carbon emissions that are certified as valid, and therefore eligible for trade in the emissions market. Instead of trading that emission credit, carbonfund.org “retires” it, so that it isn’t used to balance higher carbon emission from another source. The certification process from the emissions market has an unintended benefit of providing an independent way to verify the carbon impact from sending money to organizations like carbonfund.org. It's a nifty idea.

I can think of little else that better exemplifies the intellectual bankruptcy of this sort of gotcha! bullshittery than this manufactured controversy. It could not be clearer that these howler monkeys have made no effort to understand carbon offsets.

And the traditional media is falling for it, of course. Jake Tapper's article covers three pages online, buries Gore's response several paragraphs in and contains no explanation of carbon offsets and little acknowledgment that Gore's actual carbon footprint is zero.

And I don't expect much from Fox News, but this is Grade A idiocy:

Al Gore's posh home in the Nashville suburbs might be "carbon neutral," but it still uses a lot of power.

Yeah. In other words, Al Gore's household contributes less to global warming than any one of his detractors, but so what?

Why let the facts get in the way of a good smear?

What year is it again?

This just takes your breath away.

A geneological study done for Ancestry.com has revealed that an ancestor of Rev. Al Sharpton was once a slave owned by a relative of now-deceased South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, once an ardent segregationist.

"It was probably the most shocking thing of my life," Sharpton said of learning the findings, which were requested and published Sunday by the New York Daily News. He called a news conference to respond publicly to the report. "I couldn't describe to you the emotions I have had . . . everything from anger to outrage to reflection to some pride and glory."

I can only imagine the impact of such a revelation on Rev. Sharpton.

But what made my mouth yawp hopelessly open was the reaction of some of the present-day Thurmonds.

While some of Thurmond's relatives contacted by the Daily News expressed skepticism about the report, Doris Strom Costner, a cousin of the late senator, said Sharpton should be proud to know his family's connection to hers. "He's in a mighty good family," she said by telephone from Edgefield, S.C. Asked how she feels to learn of evidence that her family owned slaves, she said: "I can't help it. I'm 74 years old, and I certainly can't help it. I don't feel one way or the other."

Let's put aside for a moment that she can spare not even the slightest bit of regret for the practice of slavery and that her ancestors engaged in it. He ought to be proud that his ancestor was owned by a "mighty good family"? Or she insinuating that the Rev. Sharpton himself is actually a part of the Thurmond family merely by virtue of that fact? Slavery ended more than 140 years ago. I don't think one ought to assume that, in 2007, a black American is automatically part of a white family simply because his ancestor was a slave owned by the forebears of that family. That confers continuing validity on an abhorrent practice that ended long ago. And it's an unseemly appropriation of the familial identity of black Americans.

But okay. She's a 74-year-old southern woman. I picked up my jaw from where it had landed on the desk, swallowed hard and moved on. Then I read this:

Thurmond's niece, Ellen Senter, said she would speak with Sharpton if he were interested. "I doubt you can find many native South Carolinians today whose family, if you traced them back far enough, didn't own slaves," Senter, of Columbia, S.C., told the Daily News.She added: "And it is wonderful that (Sharpton) was able to become what he is in spite of what his forefather was."

I believe she means white native South Carolinians. Or are those the only kind of native South Carolinians? But it's the last line that really, really bothers me. In spite of what his forefather was? What, a child molester? A murderer? Or a man who survived the unspeakably cruel institution of slavery and raised a son who became a small business owner and supported 17 children? One of which was the parent of an activist minister who ran for President of the United States?

That line -- what his forefather was -- really, really grates on me. My objections are two-fold. First, the phrase has an unsavory tone that bespeaks an indignity, and therefore fails to accord enslaved peoples the human dignity that is their due. A second and related objection is the use of the passive voice. What he was. Not the conditions under which he lived, the obstacles he surmounted, or the limitations he endured. But what he was. "Just" a slave.

This, people, is as fine an example as you are likely to find of the principle that words mean things. Both of these folks probably meant to express, in their own way, some benevolent sentiment to Rev. Sharpton. And I can certainly understand how things might not come out as well as one might wish while speaking to a reporter. But the words, even if said off the cuff, are revealing. These comments are shot through with faulty assumptions, condescension and a kind of clueless privilege.

Now, I have a relative by marriage whose family is from rural South Carolina. She grew up on the plantation her family has owned since the mid-eighteenth century. Nice gig if you can get it. When she got married, she simply went to the cellar under the "Big House" and pulled out a bunch of 120-year-old antiques, had them refinished, and furnished her home.

During one visit, she showed me a number of historical items they keep in a glass case, including a register of all the slaves that lived there during one particular year. "Isn't this awful?" she asked with a shudder.

Yes.

The smell of fear

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this makes me want to puke up blood. I'm not some rosy-hued idealist suggesting that predators don't need to be managed. But I do think that formidable animals like wolves, bears, and cougars tend to throw into sharp relief the fear that underlies so much of blood-soaked macho culture.

Predators are necessary. Period.

Just another narcissist dumping her opinion into the tubes

Though it's a trite enough observation these days, I'm struck anew this morning by the real impact that can travel through this series of tubes called the internet. The difference between blogging and reading words on a page is, of course, the more or less real time nature of internet communication. The endings are not pre-ordained; we go along on the journey of others, often those we've never seen in person.

There's a blog out there I've been lurking around for a few months. The author of this blog has been creeping toward an inevitable and deeply painful event for awhile now. For the last few weeks, I've hesitated before viewing the blog, in dread for what might have happened since my last visit. I click anyway, of course. I've become invested in the story, in the outcome, in the life. I wouldn't recognize this person on the street, yet more than once I've lost tears at posts over there. The suffering is so clear and visible. It comes right through the screen and there's no place to go away from it, because I'm sitting here alone in my office and it catches me every time.

How can it be a bad thing, this investment in the lives and fates of others we don't know? Is there anyone out there who thinks these experiences of virtual empathy are anything but a salutary development in an increasingly cold world?

Apparently there is. I suppose it shouldn't surprise me that it's George Will, who made clear his disdain in this embarrasingly self-revelatory statement:

It’s about narcissism.... So much of what is done on the web is people getting on there and writing their diaries as though everyone ought to care about everyone’s inner turmoils. I mean it’s extraordinary.

It's about narcissism all right, but not bloggers'.

Under Will's formulation we must carefully preserve the boundaries between the people who are Allowed to Speak and Be Listened To, and everyone else. It's fear I smell in that statement, fear of the loss of relevance once preserved by restrictions on the flow of information that are no longer in place. That, and a hostility to the anarchic nature of blogging that has the cheek to encourage unauthorized empathy toward those outside our immediate view.

I'll leave Will to his disdain. I have inner turmoils to consider.