Hogmanay

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And days of auld lang syne?

For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We'll tak' a cup o' kindness yet
For auld lang syne.

Driberally tonight

Drinking Liberally tonight at Triumph Brewery, 117 Chestnut Street in Philadelphia.

Tonight's topic: the works of -- Harold Pinter.

Profoundness: on goat cheese

The Chronicle has published a list of the year's 10 best cheeses, but the list inexplicably omits Humbolt Fog by Cypress Grove Chevre, which the best cheese produced in the U.S. today.

Profoundness: on the economics of being single

Frankly, the biggest problem with being single right now -- or at any time, really -- is not having an economic partner to help with bills and housework.

You say "arrest," I say "kidnap," let's settle the whole thing in federal court

Here's another one to file under "You can't pay me enough to live south of the Mason-Dixon line": a 12-year-old African-American girl was arrested by plain-clothes police in Galveston, Texas, in August, 2006. Four officers leapt out of an unmarked van, beat the girl about the head with a flashlight (causing damage to her eardrum and throat), and threatened to shoot her puppy. One of them yelled, "You're a prostitute! You're coming with me!"

The raid's actual target was a white prostitute who lived 2 blocks away.

A few weeks later, police found the girl at school, where she is an honor student, and arrested her in front of her peers and friends for assaulting the officers and resisting arrest.

You better believe a federal suit has followed, if the document I've linked to there via courthousenews.com has actually been filed. I can't check on the website of the District Court in Galveston because I don't have a PACER ID. I also couldn't find a record of the pleadings via Lexis, which means either it's not on Lexis, or I don't have the Lexis skills I thought I did. In any event, § 1983 suits can be hard to win, even when the facts look outrageous like in this case.

Profoundness: on the new frugality

All these "how to save money" and "how to live cheaply" and "how to reduce your debt" blogs would be more useful if I had any actual income.

Christmas greeting

Since I have absolutely no money right now, I'm feeling even more alienated or left out or separated, anyway, from mainstream America than usual this particular Christmas. So many firms, from department stores to car dealerships to jewelers, are desperate to keep from going bankrupt that the Christmas sale ads are harder to ignore this year. Always incessant and ubiquitous, but louder and more glaring.

I haven't been religious most of my life -- that is, since I epiphanied myself in church at age 4 by thinking, "What if the Bible is just a book of made-up stories?" In my 20s, I dabbled with celebrating the winter solstice, not because I was a pagan or Wiccan believer but because it felt neat to participate in a young, suburban white person's backlash against Christmas, to shock or at least surprise the family and neighbors.

A very dear atheist friend of mine hangs a few lights on his balcony and gets a small tabletop Christmas tree every year. It's out of habit, clearly. I don't even do that kind of decorating any more. I have a shoebox of Christmas ornaments that I haven't displayed for years. I should donate them, or maybe give them to my friend.

When people ask (and they generally don't, because it's not a polite question, really), I've learned to say only that I'm not religious. If I say, "I'm not Christian," they look at my hair and understand me to be saying that I'm Jewish. Then they wish me a happy Hanukkah or Passover, and I have to say, "I'm not Jewish, either," which usually makes the other person uncomfortable, and since I know that's the way the conversation always goes, it's not polite for me to let it go that direction. If I say, "I was raised Catholic," an evangelical Protestant will kind of nod, knowingly, though I'm not sure what they know; another ex-Catholic will offer me a drink. So that's often a wise move at parties, but the first answer is still generally, "Oh. I'm not religious."

But I do note the end of the calendar year, with everyone else. The choice of date is arbitrary, not even coinciding with the physical solstice any more; but I think I'm a practical person and it's practical, once a year, to step back, look at one's accomplishments, think about goals, and consider how to implement long-term plans and strategies to accomplish new things. It's useful to use the near-universal down time that society experiences at the end of December to do these things. For the past several years my life has been eventful. It's nice to mentally close the book on one eventful twelvemonth, and then conceive of the next twelvemonth as a blank calendar to fill.

Also, I like to stand on a balcony or in a street intersection and sing "Auld Lang Syne" with other people and pass around a bottle of champagne. I even rehearse it for a few days before New Year's Eve so I have the words right.

For the peoples who created the dead-of-winter seasonal traditions that carry on to this day, this time of year must have been terrible. Cold, dark, full of wolves. Not too hungry; "starving time" was early summer, when last year's food had mostly run out, but this year's food wasn't yet ripe. But I think about short, damp days followed by long nights crowded in smoky, drafty dwellings, and of course there's little to do but to think of rituals and ceremonies to perform in an attempt to convince the powers that be to bring back dry, warm, sunny weather. And then to celebrate your success with the gods, which you didn't know to be inevitable.

Here's to wishing that "peace on earth, good will toward men" weren't merely a platitude for this single day.

It ate by lifting up the top of its head

Oh, if only all of us could have been designed so intelligently: paleontologists have figured out that a weird-ass amphibian fossil they found demonstrates that the creature ate by lifting up the top of its head. This is opposed to how we eat, which is by putting food and drink in the same opening that we breathe through.


The animal, though described by scientists as one of the ugliest ever discovered, bears the scientific name Gerrothorax pulcherrimus, Latin for most beautiful of the wicker-chested amphibians. It lived about 210 million years ago.

Quote of the day: "you will feel the pain of Detroit's death"

An architect turned cross-country tractor-trailer operator explains his concern if the plan to save the American auto industry fails:

No matter where you live, YOU WILL FEEL THE PAIN OF DETROIT'S DEATH. I travel the entire country dealing with the supply tentacles of the auto industry. If the head dies, the arms die too. And you live next to an arm.

Illustrated! And with some myth-debunkin', to boot.

Driberally tonight

At Triumph Brewing Co., 117 Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, 6:00 - 9:00 p.m. Be there or be square!

Tonight's topic: Avoiding using the term Third Way on pain of having a drink poured over your head.

Monday art house: solid rocket booster separation video

Note how the 2 boosters rotate in tandem during the fall, until they hit too much atmosphere. And people say we need to adopt the metric system. Bah!

New Orleans is scary and you can't make me go there

I've never been interested in experiencing Mardi Gras in New Orleans (or anywhere else, really, for that matter). To each his own, of course, but drunken street parties aren't my idea of a way to let the good times roll.

A dear friend of mine waxes rhapsodic about New Orleans on a regular basis. He's been there several times, mostly for business, and always adds a day or two of vacation onto the business trip so that he can enjoy the food and music. As a vegetarian I'll pass on the jambalaya and the andouille sausage, but I guess I enjoy a beignet and a cup of hickory-coffee as much as anybody else does.

That said, someone please explain to me why I should ever visit New Orleans, and do your explaining without sounding like an apologist freak. Dig this recent article by A.C. Thompson in The Nation:

Facing an influx of refugees [after Hurricane Katrina], the residents of Algiers Point could have pulled together food, water and medical supplies for the flood victims. Instead, a group of white residents, convinced that crime would arrive with the human exodus, sought to seal off the area, blocking the roads in and out of the neighborhood by dragging lumber and downed trees into the streets. They stockpiled handguns, assault rifles, shotguns and at least one Uzi and began patrolling the streets in pickup trucks and SUVs. The newly formed militia, a loose band of about fifteen to thirty residents, most of them men, all of them white, was looking for thieves, outlaws or, as one member put it, anyone who simply "didn't belong."

Awesome. What's even more awesome is that nobody's been investigated or prosecuted, and the vigilantes were operating with the blessing of the police. The situation was treated as completely to be expected, and not a damn thing has been done about it since 2005. But wait, there's more:

"I'm not a racist," [one of the murderous white guys] insists. "I'm a classist. I want to live around people who want the same things as me."

Dude said that with a straight face, honestly believing it is a perfectly reasonable thing to say, believe, and kill people about. He doesn't want people who aren't of his class near him. Therefore, it is acceptable to shoot at people who aren't of his class when they appear in his neighborhood, even if they appear in his neighborhood because their homes have been destroyed in a hurricane. He probably calls himself a Christian, too. And another:

"I'm not a prejudiced individual, but you just know the outlaws who are up to no good. You can see it in their eyes."

I'd quote more, but it's like shooting fish in a barrel. You can read "I'm not a racist, but" statements only so many times before you want to take the dead fish from the barrel and start slapping the speakers with the fish. The article continues with white vigilantes acting out a Red Dawn wet dream on two African-Americans who were trying to find an evacuation bus:

After two shots erupted, Collins and Alexander took off running and ducked into a shed behind a house to hide from the gunmen [. . .]. The armed men, he says, discovered them in the shed and jammed pistols in their faces, yelling, "We got you niggers! We got you niggers!" He continues, "They said they was gonna tie us up, put us in the back of the truck and burn us. They was gonna make us suffer [. . .]. I thought I was gonna die. I thought I was gonna leave earth."

Apparently thinking they'd caught some looters, the gunmen interrogated and verbally threatened Collins and Alexander for ten to fifteen minutes, Alexander says, before one of the armed men issued an ultimatum: if Alexander and Collins left Algiers Point and told their friends not to set foot in the area, they'd be allowed to live.

White residents of Algiers Point weren't much more friendly to the African-American neighbors who actually lived there:

Roughly twenty-four hours [after a neighbor threatened him with "you loot, we shoot"], as Bell sat on his front porch grilling food, another batch of armed white men accosted him, intending to drive him from his home at gunpoint, he says. "Whatcha still doing around here?" they asked, according to Bell. "We don't want you around here. You gotta go." [Bell] was gripped by fear, panicked that he was about to experience ethnic cleansing, Louisiana-style. The armed men eventually left, but Bell remained nervous over the coming days. "I believe it was skin color," he says, that prompted the militia to try to force him out.

And where were the police? The ones who didn't skip out ahead of the storm or who weren't doing their own "foraging" are engaging in don't ask, don't tell. For the purposes of this article, The Nation had to sue the coroner to get autopsy records, many of which were missing or incomplete.

Oh, blah, blah, blah, New Orleans government is corrupt, racism is bad, tell us something we don't know, blah. Well, I still won't put it on my list of places I need to see before I die. Bleurgh.

Profoundness: on late Christmas gifts and cards

If Epiphany is the day that the Wise Men arrived to fall down and worship the King of the Jews, then I think we should remember that even the baby Jesus got his own birthday presents 12 days late.

Profoundness: on marriage

As a post-married person, I wonder if a lot of gay couples' desire to be married is a simple -- though understandably strong -- desire to have what they're told they can't have.

Saying "Been there, done that" is more dismissive than I mean to be to people who love each other and want to share their lives together. But honestly. Been there, done that.

Of course, it's perfectly natural to want what you can't get, if only for the sole reason that you can't have it. If my hair didn't have this coarse, Mediterranean texture, I wouldn't have so much grief taking care of it. When we were growing up, my sister wanted my bedroom. Then we switched, and I mentioned how I liked my new room better. Guess what that made her want to do? If my friend L. weren't gay, she could have married the partner with whom she shared both a condo and a spectacularly dysfunctional relationship, and just think how much easier that break-up would have been! In short, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.

Hell, it's happening to me, too. At school I'm surrounded by people in their mid-20s who are getting married, left and right. I catch myself on a nearly daily basis, especially on the nearly daily basis when I don't have a date that night, selectively forgetting what it was that made me pour a generous shot of whisky for myself one night, set the soon-to-be-ex-husband down, and say to him, "Dude, this just ain't workin'."

Absolutely, gay people should be allowed to get married and have access to the full complement of rights that non-gay people may obtain merely because they may get married. I'm just failing to understand exactly why they want it.

Atheists in foxholes

Confidential to Frank: you have more than one friend who's an atheist.

Also, you're right. There are plenty of atheists in foxholes.

Pastor Rick Warren for invocation in January: hard nut to crack

Like just about every other bleeding-heart, filthy hippie liberal I've talked to or read today, I'm finding it hard to square President-elect Obama's message of tolerance and meaningful, constructive dialogue with his invitation to celebrity pastor Rick Warren to deliver the inauguration invocation. Whereas Obama has been talking about meeting on a common ground on all kinds of issues, Warren is an anti-contraception religious extremist. Whereas Obama has promised to "always be honest with [the nation] about the challenges we face," Warren used inflammatory and misleading words when he supported Prop 8, using "activist judges" language, and still falsely portrays the controversy as "really a free speech issue."

Today, Obama reasserted his stance as "a fierce advocate" for gay rights. But Warren has famously equated any version of marriage outside of the Christian heterosexual norm with incest, forced marriages of children to adults, and polygamy (video: start at 2:00 and continue to Interviewer: "Do you think those are equivalent to -- gays -- getting married?" Warren: "Oh, I do!") Note that that's two different things, though. The other examples were centrism vs. extremism, honesty vs. dishonesty. Advocating for gay rights vs. opposing gay marriage is apples vs. oranges, not apples vs. applesauce.

Of course, the next step in the conversation is to argue that a gay person can't have the full complement of a citizen's rights if she's statutorily barred from getting married. So what's a centrist, pragmatist to do? You work it so that a civilly united person can get the full complement of a married person's rights, and then make it the law that no one can be barred from getting a civil union on the ground that she's gay. Put another way, you get rid of any distinction between a couple united by marriage or united by civil union. Taxes, health insurance, inheritance laws, medical confidentiality rules, whatever -- you make the religious ceremony and church sanction completely irrelevant to whether a couple is legally united.

The only signature on the marriage/union certificate that would matter, then, is that of the state official, whether officiant (e.g., justice of the peace) or functionary (e.g., marriage/union registrar).

It's very French. Or very Soviet. But in any event, I doubt that it's one of the seven signs.

Rationalizing the invitation by offering "worse" choices --"At least he didn't pick Reverend Wright or James Dobson or Joel Osteen" -- is only a race to the bottom. It's like arguing that unionized workers should be happy to accept a cut in benefits or pay because everybody else who isn't in a union gets less.

Noz has posted some thoughtful comments, concluding with the observation that Warren wouldn't have been chosen if his hateful rhetoric had been aimed at other oppressed groups of people.

The pick is a hard nut to crack. I almost wonder if Obama didn't jokingly say, "Hey, well, if I win, you can do the invocation at the inauguration next January, how's that sound!" at the Saddleback Forum. Oops.

A big gripe of mine, personally, is that the fuss is all fine and good but it all begs the question that having a religious invocation before the inauguration is appropriate to begin with.

invitation to a bar mitzvah

I just got an invitation to the bar mitzvah of the son of a good friend of mine. The ceremony is being held in a Christian church.

I think my head just exploded.

I mean, mazel tov and stuff. But, um.

Dr. Boli explains the Canadian government to you

Canada is a constitutional monarchy. The real power rests with the Queen of Canada, who at any moment could squash her government like a bug. We saw this power recently, when the Governor-General, the appointed representative of the Queen, prorogued Parliament, "prorogue" being the parliamentary term for "squash like a bug." The "constitutional" part of "constitutional monarchy" merely means that, for the most part, the Queen chooses not to squash governments.

Dr. Boli continues in more detail, answers more of your questions on a regular basis, and posts other amusing articles and ad-VER-tisements pretty much daily.

Driberally tonight

Driberally tonight at Triumph Brewery, 117 Chestnut Street in the Old City section of Philadelphia. Come join the weekly open gathering of Philadelphia liberals and enjoy drink and food specials! Tonight's topic:

So everybody has their panties in a twist that President Bush plans to move to the Dallas suburbs after he leaves office, and the suburb he's chosen was historically governed by a restrictive covenant (a term that immediately brings the Shelley v. Kraemer case to the mind of all good law students), which banned people of color from buying houses there.

I'll put aside the reasonable conclusion that this move to the 'burbs only goes to further demonstrate that living on a ranch in Crawford, Texas, was mere political show and not indicative of any genuine preference for down-home country ranch livin'. What I'd really like to know is this: how many suburban Dallas neighborhoods were never governed by racially restrictive covenants?

I mean, honestly, people.

Friday jukebox: Chet Atkins

In 6 months I'll have a shiny new J.D., accompanied by a shiny new debt that exceeds the size of my mortgage. The number of jobs eliminated in November, 2008, was the biggest monthly cut since I was a toddler, and it doesn't look to be improving any time soon. The last time that many jobs were cut in a month, unemployment went to 9.0% within about a year. No wonder the earliest memories I have of my dad are of him being a grumpy-ass.

So here's some Chet Atkins:

Driberally tonight

Driberally, the weekly gathering of filthy, America-hating, beer-drankin' liberals, will be held tonite at Triumph Brewery, 117 Chestnut Street in Old City.

Tonight's topic: if the federal government goes through with a plan to deploy a 20,000-strong uniformed military force within the borders of the United States, does that mean that the 3rd Amendment will become relevant again?

Philadelphia thru the BBC lens: "Law and Disorder"

BBC News Magazine recently published a report filed by Louis Theroux, a guy who's been doing video travelogues for several years now. I remember watching Weird Weekends about 10 years ago, I think on the Bravo network when Bravo used to have shows with meaningful content.

Theroux recently spent a few weird weekends in Philadelphia, specifically in Philadelphia police cars, and subsequently filed a report called "Law And Disorder in Philadelphia." The accompanying article includes a 2-minute video excerpt revealing some of the less charming areas of North Philadelphia to the international viewing public.

The journalist outfitted himself in a flak jacket for much of his visit -- unfortunate as far as Philadelphia boosterism goes, but maybe good in that we were apparently in the middle of a cold snap while Theroux was here. (I haven't been able to pin down when the show was filmed.)

It's too bad he wasn't here for the couple of weeks surrounding the World Series and the Presidential election. Everybody was really mellow for a little while. Then the weather got chilly and people started getting grumpy again.

But in any event, both the article and the summary of the episode on the BBC iPlayer page carelessly conflate the rotten neighborhoods that Theroux documented with the entire city of Philadelphia. There are murders in Philadelphia; there's a "no snitchin'" mindset here; and there are problems of drugs, poverty, racism, and generations of joblessness. But there are not "gun carrying drug dealers on every corner, [where] it is now normal for the centre of Philadelphia to stage 30 or 40 homicides a month."

In fact, Center City is safer than some other sections of Philadelphia. Furthermore, the city as a whole is on track to finish up with fewer murders this year (163 as of 30 June 2008) than last year (392 by 31 December 2007).

I mean, not to say, "Whoo-hoo! Three hundred dead people in my town this year!" But still. No need to paint the entire city with the "lawlessness born out of poverty and disaffection" brush.

Standing question

If Article 1, Section 6, of the Constitution disallows Senator Clinton from serving as Secretary of State, then who has standing to sue?