Another day, another wedding invitation

So I've been invited to yet another wedding.

This one is the second marriage for both the bride and groom, so they're kinda keeping it small. Knowing that I don't have a steady boyfriend at this point and likely grateful for the opportunity to save a couple of hundred dollars, the couple addressed my invitation solely to "Ms. Glomarization," not to "Ms. Glomarization and Guest." I guess even the most starry-eyed, head-over-heels-in-love people I know are pretty certain that I'll be ending my days single and alone.

Won't be the first wedding I've attended without a date. Not even the first wedding this year I've attended without a date. You know that point in the reception, after the newlyweds have had a few minutes of their first dance, and they turn and invite everybody else up to dance? That's probably the best part of attending a wedding without a date, I'd have to say.

Not that I want to be a downer. However, I admit there's not much, other than serious economic advantages for both parties, that would ever make me get married again. And you'd better believe that my pre-nup would be absolutely bulletproof and would leave my future ex-husband with little but the clothes he'd brought into my household.

It is understood that this attitude of mine is not helpful when it comes to finding men who want to date me.

Oh, well. I have a few weeks yet to find a dress that it screamingly inappropriately short, and to get some heavier handweights to work on my tricep exercises.

Dr. Warren Hern profiled in Esquire

This was a cold-blooded, brutal, political assassination that is the logical consequence of thirty-five years of hate speech and incitement to violence by people from the highest levels of American society, including but in no way limited to George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jesse Helms, Bill O'Reilly, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson. Reagan may not have been a fascist, but he was a tool of the fascists. George W. Bush was most certainly a tool of the fascists. They use this issue to get power. They seem civilized but underneath you have this seething mass of angry, rabid anger and hatred of freedom that is really frightening, and they support people like the guy who shot [Dr.] George [Tiller] -- they're all pretending to be upset, issuing statements about how much they deplore violence, but it's just bullshit. This is exactly what they wanted to happen.

Dr. Warren Hern, the only American doctor who still performs late-term abortions, in a lengthy piece by Esquire.

Friday jukebox: Luke I Am Your Father

"I got a ray gun with yo' name on it":



This has been your daily dose of "WTF?"

SEPTA cleaners?

If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn't have believed it: a couple of days ago, I saw SEPTA employees cleaning platforms, both on the El (30th Street) and the Broad Street Line (Lombard-South).

The guy cleaning at 30th Street was scrubbing with a long-handled push broom. At Lombard-South, it was a woman walking behind a motorized wet mopping machine.

Now if only something could be done with the terribly neglected Fairmount stop on the Broad-Ridge Spur. That station freakin' depresses me whenever I ride through.

Driberally tonight

Drinking Liberally is a weekly social gathering where progressives talk politics and get to know one another. In Center City Philadelphia, we meet on Tuesday nights at Triumph Brewery's upstairs bar, where there are drink and food specials from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. I hope to see you there!

Triumph Brewery is at 117 Chestnut Street in Old City. It's conveniently SEPTA-accessible via the Market-Frankford El (2nd Street station), all the buses that turn around at or near Penn's Landing (5, 12, 17, 21, 33, 42, 48), and a few other buses that pass nearby (9, 25, 38, 40, 44, 47, 57, 61).

This week's topic: I have another commitment, in the woods. See y'all next week.

"Come for the beer, stay for the check"

15th unassisted triple play in modern major-league baseball history

And in case you didn't see it:



So far this season there's been a perfect game (Mark Buehrle, Chisox, 23 July, see amateur video of last 3 outs) and yesterday's unassisted triple play. Now all we need is for someone to hit 4 straight home runs in a single game by October.

"Handbags and Gladrags" epiphany

I never really got why women of a certain age would swoon over Rod Stewart, because by the 1980s his voice was really trashed, and I couldn't tolerate anything after "Young Turks," and "Maggie May" was played way too much on the classic album rock radio station I listened to.

But I recently heard "Handbags and Gladrags" (starts at 4:30) on the radio for the first time in years and years, and now I get it.

Also I'm generally a sucker for blue-eyed soul.

When lawyers attack (Pakistan edition)

I guess if you're an attorney with an anger management problem, you could go to Pakistan to blow off some steam:

"Lawyers used to be a very gentle people," says superintendent Sohail Sukhera of Lahore police force. "They were polite and educated. But the last couple of years have converted them into an absolutely different commodity."

He says that, in the last month, there have been 18 cases of assaults carried out by lawyers in Lahore alone.

"In one case, lawyers broke the leg of a police inspector. Others have had their skulls exposed when lawyers have hit them on the head with stones or chair legs. It's really uncalled for."

It would appear that some lawyers, whose civil disobedience made world-wide headlines after the chief justice of the Pakistan supreme court was fired for political reasons, have become drunk on their own power. They "fought for the rule of law over 2 years," but a small yet very visible and noisy group of them haven't quit fighting.

Calley's apology: 41 years late

After years of radio silence on his war crime, Lieutenant William Calley has apologized for the My Lai massacre, where he ordered and participated in the mass rape, torture, and murder of some 450 Vietnamese non-combatants, including infants and children:

There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened.

I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry.

My first thought is "McNamara Syndrome" -- I wonder if he's just had a cancer diagnosis. My second thought is that he's not apologizing for the acquittal of the other participants, nor for the military's cover-up of the event. (The initial report, reducing the massacre to the sad result of the combat unit's psychological breakdown, disclosed only about 120 dead and appeared to excuse the action with a claim that the soldiers had found a few American weapons in enemy hands.) My third thought is to follow some bouncing links and dig up some testimony:

[Infantryman] Paul D. Meadlo, his [landmined] right foot and self-respect gone, came to the motel determined to relieve his conscience and describe the horrors of My Lai. He stated that Calley had left him and a few others with the responsibility of guarding a group of about eighty people who had been taken from their homes and herded together. He repeated Calley’s instructions. “You know what I want to do with them,” Calley said, and walked off. Ten minutes later he returned and asked, “Haven’t you got rid of them yet? I want them dead. Waste them!” After telling about this, Meadlo raised his eyes to the ceiling of the motel room and began to cry. His compassion for the victims had taken control of him months before, and his body shook with sobs as he continued. “We stood about ten to fifteen feet away from them and then he started shooting. Then he told me to start shooting them. I used more than a whole clip -- used four or five clips.”

Calley ended up serving 3 years house arrest. He was the only person who served any time at all, or was even convicted, for My Lai and a few related massacres.

Pete Seeger comments in 1971 (0:27 to 2:40):

Do I see Lieutenant Calley?
Do I see Captain Medina?
Do I see Gen'ral Koster and all his crew?
Do I see President Nixon?
Do I see both houses of Congress?
Do I see the voters, me and you?

Who held the rifle? Who gave the orders?
Who planned the campaign to lay waste the land?
Who manufactured the bullet? Who paid the taxes?
Tell me, is that blood upon my hands?

At the meeting this week where Calley apologized for the massacre,

[h]e did not deny what had happened that day, but did repeatedly make the point -- which he has made before -- that he was following orders. Calley explained he had been ordered to take out My Lai, adding that he had intelligence that the village was fortified and would be "hot" when he went in.

In other words, "I was just following orders and acting on faulty intelligence."

The village was populated with babies, non-combatant women, and old people (very large PDF includes photos), and Calley was observed personally killing dozens of them. He's been called a scapegoat and fall guy. Poor Lieutenant Calley and his lame, qualified apology.

News flash: homeopathic "remedies" don't cure . . . anything

In case you were still on the fence about whether water can have a memory, the World Health Organization has released an official warning against relying on homeopathy to treat HIV, tuberculosis, infant diarrhea (second only to pneumonia as the leading cause of death for babies and toddlers), malaria (another leading cause of infant and child mortality), and flu.

Tonight: Dill Pickles old-time music at Fergie's in Center City

"Party like it's 1929" happy hour at Fergie's Pub -- see you there.

Oklahoma: state can't require ultrasound before abortion

From Oklahoma, where there are only 3 abortion clinics to serve the entire state's population:

An Oklahoma judge decided Tuesday that doctors do not need to perform ultrasounds and offer women detailed information about the tests before performing abortions, striking down the strictest such law in the country.

Oklahoma County District Judge Vicki L. Robertson ruled that the 2008 law, which included other abortion-related provisions, violated a state constitutional provision that requires laws to address only one subject.

Not the best reason for jump-through-hoops abortion laws to be struck down, but I'll take what I can get. This particular law was elaborate:

The Oklahoma law, which was never enforced, was the first to mandate that any woman seeking an abortion must have an ultrasound and that doctors describe the image in detail, including organs and extremities, even if the woman objects.

Failing to point out the fetus's organs and extremities would have been a felony.

Other provisions of the law prohibited doctors from writing off-label prescriptions for abortion pills, and required clinics to post signs that reminded women that nobody could coerce them into having an abortion. They also violate the Oklahoma constitution.

The Afghan wife-starving law

An Afghan bill allowing a husband to starve his wife if she refuses to have sex has been published in the official gazette and become law.

[ ... ]

The original version obliged Shia women to have sex with their husbands every four days at a minimum, and it effectively condoned rape by removing the need for consent to sex within marriage.

Imagine how skinny I'd be if my ex-husband and I had been Shia in Afghanistan.

Driberally tonight

Drinking Liberally is a weekly social gathering where progressives talk politics and get to know one another. In Center City Philadelphia, we meet on Tuesday nights at Triumph Brewery's upstairs bar, where there are drink and food specials from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. I hope to see you there!

Triumph Brewery is at 117 Chestnut Street in Old City. It's conveniently SEPTA-accessible via the Market-Frankford El (2nd Street station), all the buses that turn around at or near Penn's Landing (5, 12, 17, 21, 33, 42, 48), and a few other buses that pass nearby (9, 25, 38, 40, 44, 47, 57, 61).

This week's topic: Some attendees have noticed that the male-to-female ratio at Drinking Liberally has been about 24,358:1 lately. We need to recruit more women! Serendipitously, new research from Europe suggests that drinking beer can boost women's bone density. Thus, Drinking Liberally is healthy for women. Bring a few with you tonight!

"Come for the beer, stay for the check"

RECAP, the Firefox plug-in hack around PACER

Please read my update about PACER.

RECAP is "a Firefox-only plugin, that rides along as one usually uses PACER -- but it automatically checks if the document you want is already in its own database. . . . RECAP’s database is being seeded with millions of bankruptcy and Federal District Court documents, which have been donated, bought or gotten for free by open-government advocate Carl Malamud and fellow travelers such as Justia. [I]f the document you request isn’t already in the public archive, then RECAP adds the ones you purchase to the public repository."

Who wants to be the test case for this one? The article points out that, "after all," the filed documents can't be copyrighted. But that's not the problem. The problem is that using RECAP will bypass the federal courts' fee-collection system. I'd analogize to taking a book out of the library without using a library card, or (maybe better) refusing to pay a fee when you return a book late on the ground that the book you've taken out isn't copyrighted. Whether or how the book is copyrighted is irrelevant. Whoever provides the book or document is allowed to charge a reasonable administration fee for the access, even if it's an uncopyrightable public document.

I mean, I guess you can't charge a fee for access if you're operating under one of the weirder GNU type "copyleft" licenses that includes language about fees, but that's not what we're talking about here.

Canadian health care comment

There's been a lot of nonsense flying around about Canadian health care, so I've decided to throw my 2 cents in, because I know actual facts about the Canadian system, since one of my parents is from Canada.

My grand-dad was Canadian. He was well into middle age when Canada instituted its single-payer system in the province where he lived.

Grandpa died of cancer when I was in high school. While he was still able to stay at his home, he had a nurse making house calls for him 2 or 3 times weekly. Understand, Grandpa and Grandma lived on a farm in the middle of nowhere, on the edge of a town of 1,500 souls -- Alice Munro and Robertson Davies country, about an hour from the nearest full-service hospital. He spent his last weeks in a hospital room, pretty well doped up because the cancer had taken over both his back and his lungs; he was in pain from both breathing and lying down.

But my point, and I do have one, is that cost was never a consideration in any of the conversations the family had about his care. The nurse and her 2-hour round-trip to care for him, the diagnostic imaging and treatments before we switched to palliative care, the final weeks in the hospital, all free. The family upheaval around his end-of-life care did not include stress about where the money to pay for it would come from. It's hard to express how much of a difference that makes, though it seems to me that it should be obvious.

Grandma spent her last few years in an assisted-living facility. It wasn't free, but it cost spectacularly less than American facilities generally cost. She saw her doctor regularly, and, again, we never had to factor in the cost of her pills or treatments or hearing aids when we looked at her budget for the facility.

Anecdotally, I've never heard from any of my Canadian relatives that they had to wait in line for some life-saving treatment. It may take a while to get a check-up, but that doesn't differ from my own experience here in the States. In comparison, I need to see a dermatologist about a funny-looking mole, and was told that I probably couldn't be seen for 4 or 5 months, even though I have a family history of melanoma.

If I recall correctly, the Canadian system doesn't cover dental, though you can opt for private dental insurance if you want. So my Canadian relatives tend to have teeth that are more, shall we say, English-looking than mine. But this is because they are tight-fisted with their money, not because their health insurance system is wanting. Also, most of the guys played hockey in their youth, and those of my parent's generation didn't use helmets or mouthguards.

And Grandpa smoked a pipe for decades. His teeth were worn down where he held the pipe in his mouth. I don't know when he ever saw a dentist, though I know he had a small bridge that he'd use pretty much only when he was eating. One day we were sitting at the kitchen table playing cards and eating jellybeans. Suddenly, he pulled a jellybean out of his mouth, with one of his teeth still attached to it. We all of us thought it was hilarious. Who breaks their tooth on something as soft as a jellybean?

3:18 of why I love the hell out of movies

À mon avis, ça dit beaucoup de choses vraies. Sacrément vraies! (Don't panic: the film's in English. Joel and Ethan Coen made it for Cannes 2007 so it's subtitled in French.)

Men I've dated, part n in a series

A couple of days ago, I picked up a copy of Sarah Stolfa's The Regulars, a compilation of portrait-snapshot photos the author took while "she earned the dubious distinction of Unfriendliest Bartender In Town" at McGlinchey's. I'd gone into the bookstore for something else but thought I'd enjoy flipping through the portraits to see if there was anybody I recognized.

To my surprise and delight, I found a photo a guy I'd slept with a few times in the first year after my ex-husband and I split. The photo must have been taken about the time that we were seeing each other -- I don't mean from his expression, which is a little wary and perhaps unhappy, but from what he's wearing, and from the year noted by his name, and from the length of his hair.

Though we didn't meet at McGlinchey's. We'd found each other thru Craigslist, and the first time we met was at the Locust Bar, another, similar dive. On one date, we went to a Sixers game and bought nosebleed seat tickets. I got some kind of vertigo and woke up in the morning with a nasty, nasty headache. On another, we stayed at his place and watched Secretary and he got to try something new. We didn't really click, however; we may have had a third date, but if we did I don't recall it.

One morning some months later, we passed each other on the sidewalk, going opposite directions to work. After that, I started taking a different route, and then I started law school and didn't need to walk down that particular street any more. I haven't seen him since. But apparently I just need to go to McGlinchey's sometime if I want to say hey and catch up.

The real "death panels" are in Alaska

The real "death panels" and long waits for care are in Sarah Palin's Alaska:

A particularly alarming finding concerns deaths of adults in the programs. In one 2 1/2 year stretch, 227 adults already getting services died while waiting for a nurse to reassess their needs. Another 27 died waiting for their initial assessment, to see if they qualified for help.

The programs at issue provide in-home help for thousands of Alaskans with the basics of life, from medication to meals. The goal is to help people stay in their own homes rather than go into nursing homes or other institutions.

The services are paid for by Medicaid, the state-federal health program for the poor and the disabled, and overseen by the state Division of Senior and Disabilities Services. Individuals qualify based on income and need. Private contractors do most of the work. The programs cost about $250 million this year, with the federal government currently paying 61 percent of the bill.

In other words, while Governor Palin wasn't busy vetoing funds for programs that shelter runaway teens, her state government was funneling federal money to independent contractors who sat on their asses while low-income sick and elderly Alaskans got poorer, sicker, and older -- and died on her watch.

Reminds me of the Danieal Kelly child neglect case here in Philly: federal, state, and city funding for addressing child abuse and neglect is distributed to 3d-party contractors through DHS. DHS doesn't take care of children; they only administer the money and draw up rules and regulations that they don't enforce against the contractors until enough kids die that the mayor takes notice. Why various cities and states continue with this model is beyond my comprehension.

Why you should not Facebook at work

Or, at least, you should not add your boss as a friend, then forget and complain about your job:



Via passive-aggressive (and just plain aggressive) notes.