pluto demoted

Creeping Sociability

2009-08-07T10:01:00.000-07:00

The big question nationally, besides whatever Fox News has made up about Obama today, is how to provide health care for the 58 million uninsured Americans. Everybody hates taxation, but how about a system of direct donations from the health-care rich to the health-care poor?

I pay $875 a month for my insurance plan and I've had a physical once in the last four years. I'm a chronic underuser of American medicine, and fortunately not afflicted by any conditions American medicine can fix. If medicine could fix knees and neuroses, I'd probably use my plan more. Anyway, there are lots of people out there who would love to take advantage of the wastage in my plan.

Think of it like carbon credits, or Car Share or the fruit exchanges with which to get rid of all the pears and oranges we don't need. I hate going to the doctor because of the lectures I get about exercise and losing a few pounds, so at the end of the year I would donate the unused portion of my health plan to the poor.

A poor family would get at least three check-ups, three lab work-ups and three disturbingly placed rubber gloves every four years. What would I get in return?

I'm already getting a tax write-off for health expenses over $5,000, and I don't really need more tax write-offs because my income as a retiree and victim of Wall Street is so low. But I would have the satisfaction of helping some poor family care for their children, and knowing that the parents are the ones getting the lectures about exercise and weight loss.

Or we could have a direct barter, and the poor family could come over and get their exercise doing yard work. They could have all the healthful pears and oranges they want.

The Republicans might like this version of the health care plan better than the one with impersonal pooled care share. It's right up their alley. It has a nice ring of peonage instead of socialism.

The King of Dropping Bombs

2009-07-07T11:44:00.000-07:00

The man who wrote the soundtrack to my life just passed away, and I don't mean Michael Jackson. I mean Robert Strange McNamara, who lived up to his middle name in waging a pointless, interminable war by means of statistics like body counts, bomb tonnage and troop levels. By late 1966 he realized the Vietnam War was futile but didn't share this knowledge with anyone until three decades later.

This was a justly troubled man.

Gulf of Tonkin. Operation Rolling Thunder. Draft cards. Search and destroy. Body bags. Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today? The lyrics live on in the heads of my generation. And the beat goes on in Iraq and Afghanistan.

My father worked for Robert McNamara. That was a bit of problem, for him and for me. My dad was assistant secretary of the Navy for research and development, and sonar and submarines were his areas of expertise, not counterinsurgency. And he left the Pentagon in 1966, when he recognized that the war was a futile waste. Still, this was a matter of some discomfort for a son in college in those days.

Maybe that was why I dropped out of college, much to his chagrin, and signed up for the Marines in late '65. No. I was crazy, genuinely. But only a little more so than the times.

Later my dad told me stories about McNamara, a man who was genial and polite socially, but rigid and number-bound at work.

He told me that tonnages of bombs dropped on Vietnam were so important to McNamara that the Air Force and the Navy competed to drop the most, and would loose their bombs anywhere just to make the quotas. He told me that his proudest accomplishment, the building of a small, nuclear-powered deep submersible research submarine never would have been accomplished if he hadn't slipped it into the budget when McNamara was away. "He would have spent the money on bombs instead," he told me.

He told me that Bernard Fall, the great journalist and historian of the French Indochina War, visited McNamara to tell him the Vietnam War could not be won by the United States. McNamara dismissed him, saying "Where are your numbers?"

These are numbers from the soundtrack to my life: Anywhere from 4.5 to 6 million Southeast Asians and 58,159 Americans.

More On Our New Favorite Governor

2009-06-25T09:41:00.000-07:00

Never mind the sex talk. Here's how Republican governors really get down. In an e-mail published by South Carolina's The State newspaper, Gov. Mark Sanford tells his Argentinian lover about being one with nature:

Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2008 01:42:46 -0400
Beloved back to you...
Got back an hour ago to civilization and am now in Columbia after what was for me a glorious break from reality down at the farm. No phones ringing and tangible evidence of a day’s labors. Though I have started every day by 6 this morning woke at 4:30, I guess since my body knew it was the last day, and I went out and ran the excavator with lights until the sun came up. To me, and I suspect no one else on earth, there is something wonderful about listening to country music playing in the cab, air conditioner running, the hum of a huge diesel engine in the background, the tranquility that comes with being in a virtual wilderness of trees and marsh, the day breaking and vibrant pink coming alive in the morning clouds — and getting to build something with each scoop of dirt.

Ah, yes, the tranquillity of air conditioning, country music and a big diesel hum. An environmentalist as well as a family values guy.

So You Think You Can Judge

2009-06-02T08:44:00.000-07:00

So I think I used to be a fan of "So You Think You Can Dance," a TV talent show that features some very good dancers and some very weird judges. Two weeks ago I lost my appetite for this show when head judge Nigel Lythgoe made some homophobic remarks for which he has since apologized. He also showed a remarkable narrow-mindedness about dance, for which there is no excuse.

Not that I know much about dance, but I can spot calcified prejudice when I see it.

The occasion was a samba performed between two male dancers, one straight and one gay. Okay, they weren't all that good. They fell on their keisters at one point, and their costumes seemed borrowed from a Ukrainian ice-dancing surplus store, but they gave a good effort. But all Lythgoe and the other judges talked about was what parts they were dancing when they had the same parts inside their tights. How could they tell who danced the female role and who danced the male role?

Lythgoe sputtered about how the audience may be alienated, guys should not dance with guys and dancers should not be effeminate. He said it seemed like something from "Blades of Glory." Ha. Ha.

Now to the point. Back in the long-ago '90s, I covered the Gay Games in New York and witnessed a real-life glory of blades. At a ratty rink on Coney Island two male figure skaters from Canada amazed everyone, even the reporter from the staid New York Times, with a complete reinvention of pairs skating. Here were two guys tossing each other up in the air, and catching each other, without regard to the usual muscular male role and projectile female role.

Here was figure skating that said something about the narrowness of gender roles, as well as how stunted all other figure skating is. I imagine dance could use a little such shaking up. It probably happens somewhere other than on TV.

The funny thing is, I always thought Lythgoe was gay. We all need our stereotypes shattered.

A Vote For Really Traditional Marriage

2009-05-26T11:44:00.000-07:00

The California Supreme Court ruled today that Prop. 8., outlawing marriage between same-sex partners, is constitutional. Never mind equal protection. Never mind the thousands of gay and lesbian couples who were married before the passage of Prop. 8, and now are huddled together on a sort of court-sanctioned ice floe. Never mind the other states that have outstripped California in progressivism. Iowa?

It's time to do something. My proposal is Prop. Mate, the logical follow-up to Prop. 8, which really puts the eternal capital M in marriage.

Backers of Prop. 8 said they believed in "traditional marriage" between a man and a woman. That would be one man and one woman, and no less of an authority than the Mormon Church, which heavily funded Prop. 8, claimed that recognition of gay marriage could lead to recognition of polygamy. You want traditional marriage, one man and one woman? We'll give it to you.

Prop. Mate, the Perfection of Marriage Initiative, specifies:

"Marriage shall be defined as the joining of a man and a woman until death do them part."

You have to admit, it has a nice traditional ring. And heterosexuals will have to keep their rings on their fingers forever.

The Bible tells us so.

Happy Cuatro de Bloggo

2009-05-22T11:18:00.000-07:00

This is to celebrate the fourth anniversary of my wife's blog, called I'm Mad and I Eat. I may be mad in the other sense, but I think it's a great name. Her nom de fume, Cookiecrumb, is more ironic than apt, though. In meatspace, she's more of a tough cookie or a whip cracker, a saucy little treat who doesn't even like sweets. Pardon the Mix-Mastered food metaphor.

Four years. She's been blogging longer than Twitterers have been tweeting or Facebookers have been facing and getting faced. When she started her food and occasional Bush-whacking blog, Bush was popular, expensive restaurants were still opening, housing prices and the stock market were rising and newspapers were only folding in the paperboy sense of the word.

That was a long time ago, especially in digital years. I'm surprised that blogs themselves still exist. I know mine barely does.

But I love blogs anyway, at least hers, and all it's done for us.

We have a whole new set of friends. She visits with them every day, even the ones in exotic lands like Italy, Australia and Michigan. I hear about them from her, look over her shoulder at their photographs of fine edibles, and know them by their goats, children, personal travails and plating techniques. It is a food blog part of the blogosphere, but there's far more to it than that. To get serious for a second, she has had friends who have died, had babies, suffered illnesses, undergone divorce and gotten married, and she has mourned, worried and celebrated, without ever having met most of them, except Facebook to Facebook.

We also have a whole new social circle and party circuit. We meet regularly with many of the local food bloggers here in meatspace. And I do mean meatspace. A couple of my favorite new friends are master grillers, and no party with them is complete without coming home smelling like charcoal, bacon and the rare juices of USDA Choice vegan repellent.

We have recently been invited East by one of Cookiecrumb's online friends who is a master chef and artist. He's having an opening at a gallery, and he even promised not to serve bad wine. I'm tempted to load us all into the Suburbaru and hit the Interstate, even though I know this guy only second hand from the master hand at our family keyboard.

Hell, I might even blog more.

At Least This President Reads

2009-03-17T10:57:00.000-07:00

"You ought to teach a course."

That's what my wife said when I brought home my latest book on Afghanistan, to add to a pile of books on how colorful British imperialists carved up South Asia, Africa and the Middle East to suit their views on how the world ought to look.

They drew lines in the sand around a bunch of tribes and invented Iraq after the First World War, extracting oil, fighting insurgents and leaving a fake government in place. In Afghanistan they fought several wars against implacable mountain peoples, without even any oil to gain, and lost bloodily, leaving the lessons of war in that country to be relearned by the Soviets and now the U.S.

No book reviews here. All I have to offer is one line from my latest book, "The Unforgiving Minute," by Greg Mullaney, a young Army officer (now advising Obama) who served in Afghanistan. Before being deployed he saw a list of instructions on how to prepare posted by a veteran. One piece of advice:

"Go to the worst crime-infested place you can find wearing a flak jacket and Kevlar helmet. Set up a tent in a vacant lot. Announce to the residents that you're there to help them."

No, I'm not the one to teach the course. But seven or eight years ago the reading list was already there, the lessons of history ready to be absorbed. Too bad the deciders thought they knew it all.

It Was Only A Movie

2009-03-09T11:23:00.000-07:00

Me, I miss George W. Bush. Sort of.

Conservatives are trying as hard as they can to forget Bush and his era. Now it's Obama's war, Obama's recession, Obama's stock market. Forgetting that O inherited this stuff from W is a great bit of brain work, well worthy of a party whose leaders include a radio-enabled drug addict and two children, Bobby Jindal and that eighth-grade prodigy from Georgia.

How much do I miss W? I rented Oliver Stone's movie "W."

There they all were, Cheney, Condi, Wolfie and the drunken Yalie who later got sober and tore up a few countries, including this one, worse than he ever did any bar or frat house. Josh Brolin was magnetic in a way the subject of his portrayal never was. I didn't even mind listening to him.

In the bad old days, you could watch small doses of Bush on TV or read the paper and enjoy the simple pleasures of hate and fear. You could make fun of Bush and call him names (although I can't remember any worse than "Bush"), much the way Fox News loves calling Obama a socialist while he tries to bail out Wall Street banks.

Now I can't read the paper anymore. I hate to see my guy taking a beating on every front, from Afghanistan to A.I.G. By the way, what do those two have in common? They can't be saved. How are they different? We own 80 percent of A.I.G., and the Taliban has 80 percent of Afghanistan.

I hate to see Fox News having so much fun, knocking a president and willfully forgetting their old favorite who preceded him, and drove my IRA into a ditch. Of course, the only Fox News I watch is on the Stewart and Colbert shows, because it's even funnier that way.

So I rented the movie, even though it runs two hours and twenty-nine minutes, which I think was the total time Bush served in the White House, minus vacations.

An hour and a half into the movie, the computer crashed like Merrill Lynch. The DVD was scratched, dirty or choked on a pretzel. I took it back to the video store and didn't ask for a replacement.

I know how it came out. And I can barely afford the DVD rentals.

Deep-Fried Thoughts

2009-02-27T10:54:00.000-08:00

Which is more depressing? Having two bars in your neighborhood, Chili's and Applebee's? Or having just one bar in your neighborhood, Applebee's?

Here in Terra Linda (developed before builders were required to know Spanish) we're now stuck with just Applebee's. The other apostrophe restaurant, Chili's, closed. Such is the recession.

Even when I'm going through an alcohol-free phase, I do enjoy bars, just as I enjoy coffeehouses. Both offer observational and conversational opportunities, and bars offer more of the latter. And here's my theory: If you've never been to an Applebee's, you cannot claim to understand America.

Who was the conservative pundit who said Obama didn't seem "like the type of guy who would fit in at Applebee's salad bar"? It was David Brooks who wasn't aware that Applebee's doesn't have a salad bar. Just a bar. If he'd hang out there, he might get a little closer to his nation's pulse, even though the pulse is slightly occluded by cholesterol.

Not long ago, during happy hour (23-ounce beers for $3), a burly guy looked around Applebee's horseshoe-shaped bar and said, "I'll bet none of you have been to work today."

One guy ventured that he had. Another guy said he had been engaged in child care. Five other people, and the burly questioner, an electrician, admitted they were out of work. A couple of the people had worked in stores in the half-shuttered mall and couldn't stop returning to Applebee's for happy hour, even though they were unhappy.

The electrician said that naturally he knew I hadn't been to work. Five years of retirement can do that to you.

Since then all the happy-hour conversations seem to come back to lack of work, shrinking prospects for retirement, closing businesses and failing newspapers. As a former newspaperman I am pleased to report that working-class Americans, the Applebee's clientele, are connoisseurs of daily newspapers and will miss them.

No, they may not be connoisseurs of food. But the chips and salsa aren't bad and go well with three-buck Bud.

Red All Over

2009-02-25T07:38:00.000-08:00

Two bad-news newspaper stories were in the New York Times this morning:

"Hearst Threatens to End San Francisco Paper."

"Post to Drop Liz Smith Column."

That would be the New York Post, and guess which story was promoted on the front page of the Times? That's right, the loss of a Post gossip columnist was more important to the gentlemen who run the Times than the possible loss of San Francisco's daily paper and its excellent coverage of Oakland.

Of course, that's predictable, because the only bigger jokes than the Post in the Times' newsroom are San Francisco and, unintentionally funnier, the San Francisco Chronicle. To be fair, there may be little news here. Dog bites man, poops on man's paper. It's been predictable for years that the Chronicle will fold, be sold or lay off half its staff.

Unfortunately, it's been getting rid of half its staff for years, to no avail.

Does anyone mourn the possible loss of a major city's daily newspaper? Will anyone hear the tree fall in the forest? Well, at least trees won't be converted into ink-spotted white space.

At least now we know why the Chronicle is celebrating its 144th anniversary with such pomp. It did seem a curious number.

Mirror, Mirror ... Never Mind

2009-02-23T09:49:00.000-08:00

Gradually going blind has its advantages. You get to go to Lenscrafters, pick out new glasses and change your image. Maybe you'll even see it in the mirror.

I've never minded wearing glasses. A visit to the optometrist has always been an opportunity for painless plastic or wire rim surgery. Look at that rack of glasses, and all those choices of looking like John Lennon, Elvis Costello, a Blues Brother or a professor in a department of something postmodern.

Sadly, Lenscrafters has more in the way of accountant rimless and absolutely nothing in Mickey Rourke tinted.

So there I was last week, trying on dark, clear and reading glasses, imagining my new ominous, responsible and scholarly selves, and what do I see? A guy who qualifies for the AARP discount and just got back from the dermatologist. Underneath the new specs were specks where potential growths had just been removed. They dramatically spelled out, in scab cursive, my wife's previous warning: "Just get age-appropriate glasses."

I'll bet nobody ever said that to Mickey Rourke. Damn you, unfair vanity.

Off the pig? Roast the pig!

2009-01-26T15:43:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the new era of Obama (and maybe me coming out of an 8-year depression). Just to set the record straight: Obama is a lot more conservative than the wingnuts claim he is. For an alleged commie radical he's spending a lot of effort trying to keep Wall Street from falling into the dustbin of history. And arugula is not what we liberal elitists crave for dinner.

Give us pig meat. Roast it good. Slash it in chunks. All of it. Serve it with beans and macaroni and cheese. I'm sorry, Hannity and Limbaugh, we elitists are so far ahead of you we've come up behind you to become better cavemen. Arugula? In a pig's eye!

On Sunday I went to a birthday party for a friend who roasted a whole pig in his backyard in honor of the new age. Forty for him. Five days for Obama.

The party wasn't really for Obama, but he was the first topic of conversation and held first place until the splayed and singed porker came out of the firepit. To be precise, the caja china, a fearsome charcoal-fired device that enveloped the pig and created enough heat to crack the paving stones on which it was set.

It was fabulous, just the thing the new president would like. As Obama said, “I’m not looking for some fancy presentations or extraordinarily subtle flavors."

How about giant pans of juicy pork chunks?

My wife got an ear.

Stimulus packages under the tree

2008-11-30T09:54:00.000-08:00

Somehow economic disasters are always our fault and our responsibility to fix.

A few years ago Americans stopped saving and started spending and borrowing like, well, Americans are always urged to. Then something went wildly wrong with the housing and financial markets. We were told we were living beyond our means, something no one mentioned to the suckers at all those mortgage closings.

The solution? The government borrowed $700 billion, or more, from us taxpayers to give to the banks that had been giddily lending to foolish people who couldn't pay it back. This was real money, not the mortgage-backed paper those banks used to build the housing crisis of cards.

Our job? Same as after 9/11. To go shopping.

Yes, the idea this Christmas season is to spend more money we don't have. Saving is a good thing, but right now Uncle Santa is getting a lot of requests for corporate bailouts (never mind who's been naughty or nice) and Wall Street and retailers really need us.

On Black Friday (a name eerily reminiscent of the names given days of stock market crashes), we did our patriotic duty and went to the mall and stimulated the economy. No one was trampled at our little mall, but plenty of people were there with us, and this year it's hard to say we're all consumerist saps.

After all, part of our family's economic stimulus plan was to buy a chest freezer for homemade stocks, soups and tomato sauce. I know all that good food will last at least through the coming year.

I'm not so sure about our money.

Surrender-Monkey Bubbly All Around

2008-11-04T14:52:00.000-08:00

Ah, I remember it well. August 8, 1974. The day a disgraced Richard Nixon left office in a go-to-hell-icopter from the White House lawn. I went out to the local liquor store in Cambridge, Mass., and they were all sold out of champagne. A Boston Globe reporter was even in the store writing a story about the sudden statewide champagne shortage. So early this morning, I went to Safeway to get a bottle.

It was a bottle of Taittinger brut, and the sign under it said it cost $29, marked down from $50. But when the clerk rang it up the price came to $39, marked down from $60. After a price check, the clerk said I'd grabbed a more expensive Taittinger, and asked if I wanted her to get the cheaper one.

"No, this is for Obama," I said, grandly, mostly to the people waiting impatiently in line. "And if McCain wins, we've got plenty of the cheap stuff at home."

Cheers and high-fives from everyone, especially the good union clerks and baggers. This may be white suburbia, but it's Marin County, California, soon to be part of the U.S.A. again. I hope.

Thinking the unthinkable: If the unthinkable happens, we'll be drinking that very drinkable Taittinger anyway. (Warning: Severe name-dropping ahead.) The great thing about champagne, as I told Claude Taittinger when he and I were at a fancy dinner in San Francisco a few years ago, is that you drink it in very good times and bad.

"Ah, oui, mon frere," he said to me, or something like that, and I reminded him of the greatest champagne movie of all time.

Remember Bogart and Bergman in "Casablanca" when the Nazis enter Paris? They pop a bottle of bubbly.

At least in this election the nasty totalitarians aren't about to enter our capital. They're already there.

Santé, and sanity.

Over here, a small carbon sockprint

2008-09-22T14:50:00.000-07:00

Here in the green states, the Prius is the big status symbol. Oh, hi, these cars say, I spent $24,000 on a little dolphin-shaped car and its precious-metal-laden battery so I can use less gasoline than you.

Thank God there's now a cheaper way to display your loyalty to the Earth: Fly your underwear and socks in the air.

It wasn't so long ago that drying your laundry in the backyard was a sign of poverty and tastelessness. Now all the best people are drying their clothes au naturel. The clothespin, long relegated to craft projects, has made a comeback as a pin for clothes, at least here where poor people aren't so poor as to steal your laundry off the line and there aren't many neighborhood associations banning the sight of laundry trees.

In Marin County, the sound of a dryer spinning is as shameful as the sight of a plastic shopping bag.

So for $27 I bought an expandable clothes rack. A full load of jeans dried in three hours in the summer sun.

Problem: where to hang all those pesky and thick athletic socks. Aha. About 15 years ago, when we had jobs and spent money with abandon, we bought a $300 wrought-iron torchiere that held 16 candles. We used it maybe twice during dinner parties, because it dripped wax on the rug and couldn't be trusted not to set fire to the house. Even when the candles weren't lit, they drooped every which-way.

Now the damned thing holds sixteen socks and some shirts and underwear high up in the sun. Our neighbors can see this proud status symbol over the fence and, from the size of the socks, ascertain our small carbon footprint.

The total savings: About $3 on each month's electric bill. We've turned a useless yuppie status symbol into a useful one, and in about eight years we'll have paid it off.

Illegitimi non carborundum

2008-09-03T10:18:00.000-07:00

We're being told we can't mention Bristol Palin's out-of-wedlock pregnancy. After all, candidates' families are off-limits, except when they're herded onstage to demonstrate, say, what a wonderful mother of five a candidate is. Never mind that Sarah Palin forgot to drum in the abstinence-only lesson she wants to inflict on everyone else's children.

Fine, but you have to wonder what kind of right-wing crapstorm would have rained on the Clintons if a seventeen-year-old Chelsea had turned up unmarried and pregnant.

Yep, it would have been a Category 5 crapstorm. The Republicans have never shown any mercy for their enemies' families. John McCain provides the two prime examples, and both involve bastardy.

One was as victim, when he was smeared as the father of an illegitimate black child by Bush-backers in the 2000 South Carolina primary. The other was as victimizer when he made a joke at a 1998 Washington fundraiser. Because of the media's delicate sensibilities (for McCain mostly), the joke was never repeated verbatim for the public.

"Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly?" McCain asked the crowd of appreciative Republicans. "Because Janet Reno was her father."

We know who the real bastards are.

The Amerivore's 10

2008-08-20T07:23:00.000-07:00

My wife the food blogger just completed a cute quiz called "The Ominivore's 100." It's a checklist of 100 required, exotic, disgusting or possibly dangerous comestibles that might have passed foodies' lips - everything from fugu, crocodile and rattlesnake to PB&J, which probably seems grotty to the Brit who made up the list.

Okay, put your flag lapel pin on your bulging tummy. Here's my list, the Amerivore's 10, the food checklist to prove you're a genuine red-white-and blue patriot with Dick Cheney autographed bypasses. Count up which of the following culinary experiences you've had and see how you scored. Git 'er done.

1. Have you been through a drive-through? Extra point for doing it in a pickup. Extra extra point for throwing the wrappers and cups in the back.
2. Have you been to a TGIFriday's, Applebee's, Chili's, Romano's Macaroni Grill, Red Lobster, Ruby Tuesday's, Bennigan's or an O'Not-This-Again's? Extra points for the last two, since one went out of business and I made up the other.
3. Have you eaten a deep-fried onion flower? The whole thing? Extra point.
4. Endless Pasta Bowl? Extra point for each refill.
5. Popcorn shrimp? Did they taste better than knots in sneaker laces? Extra point.
6. KFC Mashed Potato Bowl?
7. Buffalo wings without the bones or in any flavor other than Buffalo?
8. Sbarro's pizza? Two extra points for any more than one slice, and a bonus point if you know how to pronounce it.
9. Hummos Pit-za, or any other Rachael Ray Yum-O Family Friendly Snack? (Probably healthy, but really, "Pit-za," "Rachael Ray" or "Yum-O"?)
10. Boiled peanuts?

Just threw that last one in for old-timey cracker fun. For new-timey cracker fun, try Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Crackers.

Now add up your score. If you scored three or less, you are voting for Barack Obama. If you scored between three and eight, you are voting for John McCain. More than eight, and you'll probably die before the election.

Why I Hate the Olympics

2008-08-12T06:58:00.000-07:00

Last night I set Stewart and Colbert on record, gritted my teeth and settled in to watch the Olympics up close and personal. This was my first look, having missed the magnificent opening ceremony with its computer-enhanced fireworks and dubbed nine-year-old songstress. Unfortunately, NBC added to Chinese Internet censorship by making it impossible for Mac users to access its Web site's replays of that opening ceremony. I guess they figure we Mac users don't matter because we think we're too smart for the Olympics.

We do. At least I do. I don't go for all that flag-waving crap, medal counts and opening graphics of past Olympics starring only American athletes. I could also do without the constant replays of the simian victory shouts of Michael Phelps. But those things are not why I hate the Olympics. Those are just the price of admission. The real torture is the first event of the evening, traditionally a sport you never heard of, with athletes you never heard of, that goes on almost as long as soccer.

Monday night it was synchronized diving, which is better than synchronized swimming because each team gets off the screen quicker due to the law of gravity. For a half hour (I quit and switched to "Antique Roadshow" at 8:30, saving Stewart and Colbert for later), pairs of adolescent guys in Speedos would leap off a platform and fly in formation into a pool while two commentators talked about their point of entry and other gibberish. Each pair of young guys then would haul themselves out of the pool and run giggling and smiling into the showers in full view of the cameras. A year or two younger and it would have been soft child porn.

"Why do they go right into the showers?" asked one commentator. "Because the pool is cold, and besides it's fun," replied the other.

At that point the only commentator I wanted to hear from was Cartman from "South Park." You know what he'd have to say about synchronized diving.

Tonight it's Stewart and Colbert live in synchronized satire, and record the Olympics. Fast forward, that's the event.

A Blurb for the 'Burbs

2008-07-22T10:35:00.000-07:00

I was born in the 'burbs and I'll probably die in the 'burbs. In between I spent a lot of time trying to be authentic and sophisticated by living in cities where I took public transit and, when I didn't, often discovered that my car had been broken into.

Despite the fact that there haven't been shards of glass on my street since the recycling man dropped a Moët bottle after New Years, I still can't get over the habit of buying cars that look good with broken windows. Besides, I do drive into the city occasionally to see how the smug young urbanites (recently arrived from their parents' suburbs) are doing.

The suburbs get a bad name, and Hollywood producers never miss a chance to make fun of them from their aeries in Laurel Canyon. And now, with global warming and gasoline more expensive than microbrew, there's good reason to hate the manicured lands of the automobile addicts.

But here's why I love my 'burb and our bland little home, Casa Rancho, as we call it.

First, it really is a ranch house, sort of. We turned the lawn in the backyard into a Victory (over Safeway) Garden. Okay, we're not really surviving on our produce because onions, zucchini and jalapeños aren't basic food groups, but at least our jalapeños won't give us salmonella. In San Francisco all our backyard ever produced was fog, noise from the neighbors and a few cherry tomatoes that were supposed to be beefsteaks.

Second, I love this place despite the fact it's in much-mocked Marin County, where taxes are high and driving a 3-series BMW is akin to being on food stamps. (Break My Windows, Marin cars are telling us.) At least in Marin County we get something for our taxes. Well, don't ask me what, since there's no glass on the streets to sweep up. But at least it isn't San Francisco, which buys gas for hundreds of already overpaid high officials who commute in city cars. And neither is it Oakland where the city administrator hires all her relatives, and then warns the gangsters among them when a police raid is coming.

By the way, we do have gangsters in Marin County, and not just the ones who commute to the Financial District. Believe it or not, the previous occupants of Casa Rancho, on this cute little cul de sac, were dope dealers. Their crops, until our efficient little police force vacated the premises, were green and mostly grown indoors. On a hot day I can put my nose up to the repainted wall, breathe deeply, and, yes, get high on living here.

Who Knows Where the Timepieces Go?

2008-05-12T15:39:00.000-07:00

The top drawer of my bureau, that's where. Right now there are 10 watches in that drawer and only one of them works. If stopped watches are right twice a day, then 18 times a day that drawer is a spot-on timekeeper. The one watch that works, my ostentatiously unfashionable Citizen dress watch, is never right, but just accurate enough to set my $30 Timex by. That's the one I actually wear.

In that drawer I have an $1,100 Tag Heuer (known as the cheapo starter Tag), a 10th anniversary gift from my wife. By our 20th anniversary its chic link band had fallen to pieces twice and no amount of wire could hold it together. The bands cost almost as much the Bush tax rebate to replace, so fuck Switzerland and its yuppie watches.

I also have my college graduation Bulova Accutron that fell off my bureau and stopped before I had even checked out of the dorm; five old Citizens and Casios; my father's old watch embossed with a Brown University insignia never saluted by moving hands; and my grandfather's gold pocket watch, as deceased as my beloved Papa. The pocket watch comes in handy for 19th-century theme parties, but why can't I throw the other watches away?

More to the point, why can't anyone make a watch that can at least make a good run against time? That $30 Timex, which I bought 15 years ago while my Tag Heuer was back home in the Alps having its first band replaced, is the only thing that's still ticking. It takes a licking, like the ad says, and it even lights up in the dark with the press of a button, but I'm getting sick of it.

My wife will tell you I'm fixated on watches, even though I only need to know the time to the nearest month. I just kind of like them as steel bling to accentuate my finely carved hand, not as status symbols like those hedge fund managers who wear their earnings statements on their wrists, or those computer geeks with their atomic watches that tell time in every zone in the galaxy.

So it's a Timex, man, and this is reverse snobbery, the best and cheapest kind of snobbery. If I had a Rolex, I'd keep it in my top drawer. And it probably wouldn't work.

Yeah, that's a Speidel watchband. The Velcro one itched.

New cliches, please

2008-04-15T09:55:00.000-07:00

Barack Obama has been pounded as an "elitist" for saying that white males in places like Pennsylvania are clinging to guns and religion because they're bitter. And, of course, San Francisco is getting pounded because this is where Obama said it. Pat Buchanan snarled something about this city's "Chablis-and-Brie set."

Sorry, Pat, Chablis and Brie are for people in places like Pennsylvania. Give us a local artisanal cheese and microbrew anytime.

Okay, so we're elitist, and doesn't everybody want to be part of some kind of elite? At least we're not part of the shock-and-awe set, the oil-and-blood set or the Yale-and-Harvard neo-conservative set. The lie-and-spin set that conjured the war in Iraq is the worst kind of elite.

Even San Francisco elitists can be bitter, though, just like any unemployed Pittsburgh steelworker. No matter how elite we consider ourselves, there's always someone more elite. There's always someone richer, and he or she just might be a math student at Stanford. There's always someone more environmental, with a scheme to turn plastic bags into mosquito netting for Africans. There's always someone who gets to the new hot restaurant before you.

There are always people in San Francisco who beat you to the next big fad. For all I know, failed elitist that I am, it just might be Chablis and Brie. But I'm kind of stuck on Bud and Laughing Cow, because reverse snobbery is the only way to go in a place as expensive as this.

Another cup of coffee, another piece of my mind

2008-02-27T17:02:00.000-08:00

This morning I went to Starbucks (only because the good downtown coffee houses are two miles and a traffic jam away) and it hadn't changed. What was all that free publicity about? All those news reports about the three-hour re-education camp for their employees last night? All that corporate foam about regaining "the soul of the past"?

Just make a decent cup of joe, for chrissakes, and stop giving them fake Italian names. Charge a little less, no, a lot less. And give James Taylor a break.

It was just the same in there. The same commuters, fueling up on burnt-tasting brew. The same unappealing brown pastries in the plastic box. The same soundtrack telling you to get out before you start yearning for elevators.

Of course, the only reason Starbucks closed down simultaneously all across the nation, like some kind of coffee brown-out, was for the publicity. (Florida was blacked out from Daytona to the Keys, and that got less publicity.) The fact is, Starbucks had to do something, what with their stock dropping, stores going belly up and the failure of their plan to put four green Dilbert-traps at every intersection and addict the nation to caffeinated hot, sweet milk priced at $5,000 a barrel.

That's what they're selling, not their coffee, which tastes like eau de ashtray.

If you want the soul of the past, go to Caffe Trieste in North Beach (or even its Sausalito branch). Or go to any coffeehouse where the only uniforms worn by baristas is inked skin and a studded nose. Hell, I even went to a Dunkin' Donuts when I was back in Massachusetts and (talk about the soul of the past) the coffee reminded me of my youth working night shifts, recovering from concerts and pulling all-nighters for exams.

Alas, I hear Dunkin' Donuts is introducing caffe lattes, or as they call them in venti-doppio land, "lattes." It just means "milk," people. It also means trouble. I want my cops drinking coffee regular. Make that "cawrfee regulah."

A mighty windy meme

2008-02-25T16:02:00.000-08:00

There's no "I" in "meme," but there are two "me's." In fact, since I've been tagged by Chilebrown to play this game of "Things You Don't Know About Me," here are five facts about me. Rated PG for pretty gross.

1. The first live concert I attended starred the Kingston Trio.
2. The second starred Peter, Paul and Mary.
3. The third starred Bob Dylan. Most of the Brown University audience was gone by intermission because he couldn't sing.
4. That was in February, 1963, and about three years later I started claiming that Dylan was my first concert.
5. I only stayed because he'd written a couple of Peter, Paul and Mary songs.

I'm supposed to tag five more people, but I'm too much of a geezer to know how to do it. So feel free to do your own "Five Facts" meme or forward your embarrassing musical revelations to, well, me.

Raising McCain with the GOP

2008-02-02T16:11:00.000-08:00

Everybody around here wants to know: Who're you voting for, Barack or Hillary? Everybody around here being a Democrat.

Well, I don't know. If only I were in Chicago and could vote twice. Or, here's another wish: If only I could vote for John McCain again.

That's right, I voted for him in the 2000 primary. I changed my registration to Republican so my vote would count, not for him so much, but against George W. Bush. Even then I knew the Busher was a snake in the brush and, besides, I'd met McCain and like many left-leaning media people, I leaned a little to the right and liked him. "Another media pinko for McCain," as his California campaign manager put it. At the time, in front of San Franciscans, McCain seemed so apologetic about the GOP positions on gays and abortion, almost as if this old Navy fighter jock was embarrassed by the religious nuts who dominated his party.

Anyway, however conservative McCain is - and he is plenty conservative - he would have been better than Bush turned out to be. He wasn't an alcoholic former prep-school cheerleader, a failure at everything, who had to overcompensate for his dad's success by adopting a cracker accent and invading Iraq, failing at that, too.

In the last few years McCain has put the "ick" in "maverick" by throwing his support to Bush's plutocratic (no relation to this blog) tax policies and threatening to keep us in Iraq for 100 years if necessary. Actuarily speaking, that's 90 years more than we can expect McCain to live and 105 years more than is good for the United States. So what's the appeal of this old goat?

Simply, Rush Limbaugh has warned that McCain's nomination would mean the destruction of the Republican Party and Ann Coulter has claimed that she would campaign for Hillary Clinton before she would endorse John McCain. All of this I want to see.

The Republican Party, as currently constituted, and as defined by a radio-enhanced drug addicts and Jimmy Choo-wearing bigots, deserves to be destroyed.

The only problem would be keeping McCain from winning the presidency. That I leave to the history-making Democratic ticket.

No Unhappy Returns

2007-12-26T10:53:00.000-08:00

Our household, of two, not counting the dog, celebrated a new Christmas tradition yesterday. Well, it'll be a tradition next year, because it worked so spectacularly this first year.

No more guesswork about what the other person might like. We went to a major American shopping mall, gave ourselves a spending limit of $150, and bought presents for ourselves. That is, I bought presents for myself and my wife bought presents for herself. Privately.

This was harder than it appears. You walk through the mall thinking, "Oh, she might like that pashmina shawl." Then you stop yourself and say, "Of course she probably wouldn't. Pashmina is passe, and anyway, I'm shopping for me. Yay."

The deal is, though, that you don't open your own presents. You hand them to your wife Christmas morning and she gets to see the kind of idiotic stuff she wouldn't deign to give you. Sweatshirts in amusing colors. History books by unamusing authors. Then you open the presents she bought for herself and you suffer an insight into her secret desires, ones you could never satisfy during a walk through a mall.

A font program for the Macintosh computer. Face creams, morning and evening. An orange juice squeezer. An ice cream cookbook. Even though it's really a freezebook, I should have thought of that one, but wouldn't have. That's the joy of this Christmas, not to mention the joy of not having to return to the mall.

Also, I loved the sudden grammaticality of saying, "I got me some good presents."

Sweatshirts. Yeah.

Don't Trust Anyone Under 62

2007-12-18T10:20:00.000-08:00

The first thing that happened when I retired four years ago was the onset of a strange craving to eat dinner at 5:30 p.m. The second thing was the discovery of new sections of the paper to read: the grocery inserts listing bargains that I might buy for those early dinners. Then I went down to Long's to take advantage of a sale on tuna and mayonnaise, only to find a crowd of senior citizens in a 9 a.m. rush hour of shopping carts. The tuna and mayonnaise were already gone.

That's what old people eat, and that's when I gave up tuna and mayonnaise and switched to a healthier meals, as well as ones not consumed in front of national news drug ads showing old folks ballroom dancing. Kill me when I start ballroom dancing.

A few weeks ago I felt young and joyful again, despite the fact that I was applying for Social Security in a large office slightly less joyous than the average DMV. I felt like one of the first arrivals at Woodstock. After a surprisingly short wait (there must have been a major sale at Long's), I displayed my birth certificate and military discharge to the clerk, told her I was applying two months in advance, as instructed, and proudly said, "I'm one of the first Baby Boomers."

She was duly unimpressed, even though she couldn't have heard it many times before. I was born in early January of 1946, just 10 days after the trigger was pulled on our reviled and ruling generation. Well, 10 days and nine months after the trigger was pulled. Okay, it's bad metaphor for a generation sired by men returning from war.

They may have been the greatest generation, but we are the biggest and I was not waiting for 65 to get a more bountiful yet still pitiful Social Security check. I'm taking the smaller monthly version when I can, at 62. There are a lot of conservatives out there who want to undo the work of FDR and abolish Social Security. There are a lot of young people, liberal, conservative or apolitical, who also want to abolish it. We are a hated generation.

No one wants to pay into a system that subsidizes the marijuana, margaritas, mayonnaise and tunafish of an unruly crowd that once marched in the streets, lost a jungle war and parked crudely painted Volkswagen buses all over the landscape. Never mind how much wealth we created when we later cut our hair and invented iPods, Microsoft, Starbucks, hedge funds, the World Wide Web and Whole Foods.

We may have hated the system, but by now a lot of it is our creation. Still, I like that old-time Social Security system, and I'm taking advantage of it before a coalition of Democrats, Republicans and resentful baristas pry those tiny checks from our cold, gnarly hands. Power to the new old people.

For Zack

2007-11-09T10:24:00.000-08:00

It was one of those warm, muggy October days that bring the tourists back to Cape Cod. None of us would be going to the beach, though. We were at Otis Air Force Base to meet Zack, my sister's first-born, who was coming home from Afghanistan. I had been living rather reclusively in California and hadn't seen him in six years, and never would again.

I finally understood why our leaders in Washington were so adamant about keeping images of returning coffins out of the news. It's too much to bear.

The plane had been delayed at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware for two hours. Zack's family and friends had plenty of time to sit around a ready room reacquainting, and acquainting, ourselves with each other. We told stories about Zack, a 31-year-old college graduate, filmmaker, rock musician, carpenter and movie-star handsome wit, who tried to find a new path in life by joining the Army in 2005. He became a sergeant and squad leader in two years and in April he was awarded the Bronze Star with a V for valor for rescuing two of his soldiers from a burning Humvee, badly burning his hands in the process, and still organizing a counterattack on the Taliban.

Afterwards, when he called my sister Pam, he didn't mention the Bronze Star. He said, ""Mom, I got a Purple Heart. I won't have to pay sales tax anymore."

That's the kind of young man he was, the kind of self-effacing hero he was. He stayed by the side of his more severely injured comrades in the hospital, and returned to duty in Pahktia Province near the Pakistan border. After he was killed in an ambush on Sept. 29, one of those scarred men, and others who had known Zack as a soldier, came to our sides on Cape Cod.

My sister said that Zack would have hated all the fuss, but we needed it. The family needed to meet those soldiers, and I think they liked meeting us. The extended, sometimes fractured family needed to talk to each other again, feel the hole in its fabric where Zack had been, and try to knit it together with memories and caring for each other.

Even those of us who might have doubted military ceremony needed the honor guard from the 82nd Airborne and the dozens of Cape Cod reservists, recently returned from Iraq, who lined up behind them. Sgt. Zachary D. Tellier deserved it.

We were all out on the tarmac when the plane touched down at Otis, the same base that had scrambled F-15s on afterburner in a vain attempt to stop the airliners heading for the World Trade Center. Now Afghanistan was coming back to haunt us again. We had been shedding tears, of course, trying to dry them with the occasional joke. Jokes failed.

The sadness and reality of it all clenched our hearts as we watched the plane taxi toward us. It was moving astonishingly slowly and evenly, like a funeral caisson with a steady turbine whine instead of a solitary drummer's beat.

When the aircraft came to a stop, it took a few minutes for its crew to organize the unloading of its cargo. We had time to collect ourselves - until the flag-draped coffin emerged and the honor guard slow-marched it to the hearse.

That was Zack in there. That was what it came down to. His widow Sara, an incredibly strong woman, collapsed to the tarmac as her sister tried to comfort her. I had heard sobbing in my life, but never as much as that day, and I never knew what the word "keening" meant before.

There was one photographer present, although not from the press. This was Joel, a young friend of Zack's who had lost a leg in an earlier action in Afghanistan. As the honor guard carried the coffin, Joel kept rolling his wheelchair for better angles on the homecoming of his friend. Not many people noticed but the reservists at attention behind him.

They, too, will always remember this day. Unbearable.

Worriers of the World, Unite

2007-09-19T08:04:00.000-07:00

The last time I went on strike, we won. The employees of the San Francisco newspapers marched around the premises with signs, the readers stopped reading management's sad little scab papers and the owners of the papers lost millions in the 11 days of the strike. Yes, they actually made money a decade ago. These days they lose millions without anybody going on strike.

Now all Americans, or the sane 70 percent, are asked to go on strike against our government. I don't think Bush & Co. will be easier to beat than a couple of lousy newspapers, but what else can we do?

In an desperately eloquent essay in the October Harper's, Garrett Keizer argues that we shouldn't wait until the Bush administration is replaced. He suggests that a citizenry that "believes it is already dead" can revive its ideals by starting a general strike on Nov. 7, turning a local election day into the start of a national diselection year.

Rather, we would re-elect ourselves to our rightful place over an imperial presidency.

We may lose, writes Keizer, but "don't tell me what some presidential hopeful ought to do someday. Tell me what the people who have nearly lost their hope can do right now."

So, until Jan. 20, 2009, when Bush and Cheney are scheduled to exit stage far-right, let's hear the chant. On strike, shut it down.

I don't know how I can go on strike without a job, but maybe it has something to do with what gets mailed on April 15. I also don't know whether this would be a strike or a lockout.

If our cities are leveled by natural disaster, we are told to fix them ourselves. If we get sick without insurance, we are told to just go to an emergency room. If we don't like our country invading others without cause, well, speak slowly into the phone because your calls are being monitored for population control.

Yeah, it's a lockout. And marching around with a sign and chanting is hard. What else can we do?

Maybe I'll hold my breath until the nation turns blue.

With Two You Get ... What?

2007-09-13T07:21:00.000-07:00

When I was a boy there was only one way to order Chinese food. My mom and dad took us to the Toy Sun Restaurant in Providence, R.I., a city of perhaps eight Chinese residents at the time, and we ordered egg rolls, egg foo yung and chow mein. Then I went to college and became sophisticated and discovered the new, non-sticky-red way to order Chinese food. My friends and I in Cambridge went to Joyce Chen's, perhaps, and ordered potstickers, a pork dish, a beef dish and a chicken dish, careful not to repeat meats. There were no Chinese patrons sitting near us to make us feel like idiots.

Now it's hard to order Chinese food and, as much as I like the food, I dread the choices. There are too many, and I always feel like I made the wrong ones. I almost always show up with the wrong number of people, too.

Whenever I go to one of the really good Chinese restaurants south of San Francisco where the rich Chinese have moved, there are few tables for two. The Chinese show up in parties of eight or ten and order all kinds of wonderful looking things, always including a giant fish, while we demographically disabled Anglos meekly ask for a table for two, which wouldn't hold one of those fish even if we wanted to look at it, and it at us.

So what do we do? We try to go to places that serve dim sum all day, so we can see the food as it goes by. The problem is, we always show up hungry and order the first five things that survive the passage of the room to our table. Then, when we're full, the chef turns off the clogged deep fryer and starts sending out the wonderful translucent stuff. Too late, always too late.

Today I have to go to the Veterans hospital out at the end of Clement Street in San Francisco, which means I drive past more Chinese restaurants than Chowhound can shake a memory stick at. For lunch, let's see. The choices are harder than trying to find a parking space near the hospital and the results can be as dreary as the waiting room at the blood lab.

The solution is lunch at nine in the morning. The parking is not impossible and the only places serving food are some formica bakeries that serve maybe ten hot items, all out in the open. I always pass on the noodles congealing on the steam table and go for mercifully wrapped items like sticky rice or stuff that's meant to congeal, like turnip cake. Better than it sounds, white kids.

Or maybe I'll skip the blood work (don't worry, nothing serious), and lunch work (always serious). I can always go to the joint in the strip mall near my house here in the burbs. So what if it has a pun name and it's a combination Chinese-Japanese restaurant. That means I don't even have to consider the raw half of the menu. The chow mein is terrific.

Confessions of a Blogger Spouse

2007-09-04T16:03:00.000-07:00

I'm married to a real blogger, one who posts every day and responds to comments. (And yes, you can use the word "real" about a virtual activity often denigrated by the increasingly unreal mainstream media.) "Why don't you go blog," she often says to me when I'm hanging around the house, in the tone of "Why don't you take some vitamins" when I'm complaining about a cold.
Usually I ignore both suggestions, but here I am, confessing that blogging is good. I may not like doing it much myself, but I have seen Vitamin B build bodies, minds and relationships eight ways.

Vitamin B1: The naturally reclusive can converse with numerous people any time they want, preferably all the time.
Vitamin B2: They can do it without showering, getting dressed or even getting out of bed. Okay, so Vitamin B-logy may not build bodies all that well.
Vitamin B3: They can make friends all over the world. My wife has mouse pals as far away as Italy, Japan and Australia, where it's now spring and the little downloading wheels on computer screens spin the other way.
Vitamin B4: My wife is happy. She has people to talk to besides me.
Vitamin B5: I'm happy. She has people to talk to besides me.
Vitamin B6: When she does talk to me, I hear all kinds of good gossip about people all over the world who aren't my in-laws.
Vitamin B7: I get to meet these blogger friends of hers. This is something they don't teach you in mainstream-media school. Bloggers actually get together in meatspace and talk instead of type. They're nice to each other and share food and drink, at least if they're food bloggers. Talk about meatspace. We had a party for some of my wife's blog pals recently, and it was grand. Nobody ranted. Nobody flamed except the guy who dug a pit barbecue in our yard. Everybody linked.
Vitamin B8: "Why don't you go blog." It's more than "Shut up." It's quite a useful phrase, no question mark about it.

Vitamin See You Next Month: My wife said that. She's the blogger.

Back to the Garden

2007-08-13T16:28:00.000-07:00

Another month, another blog. I'd like to claim I have the romantic ailment of writer's block. There's even a new TV show glorifying the over-glorified disease. In case you're procrastinating, it's on tonight and called "Californication," about a guy with a bad case stuck in a bad show with a bad title.

Writer's blog, though, that's a whole other matter. After a quarter century of being paid to write daily screeds in the MSM, I find it hard to write for nothing about mostly nothing. Although I'm doing it now. My wife, the blogorrheic, says that instead of writer's block I have that affliction that applies to so much in life, DWD, or Don't Wanna Do.

Right now I'm taking the blue-and-red pill, Budweiser, to overcome constriction and open up the blood vessels leading to the typing fingers and the, ahem, mouse. If I find myself still typing four hours later I'll consult a physician or an editor.

Wait, I think I hear one of the latter approaching now. To the point.

So what have I been doing for the last month? Tending the garden. Watering. Old-guy stuff like that. And now the cucumbers and tomatoes are pouring in, the peppers are elongating and the zucchini are already being put in the crisper drawer awaiting the recipes that never quite rid the world of zucchini.

How abundant are those few square feet of former lawn? I went to the farmers' market on Sunday, had tea, people-watched and bought nothing. When I got home I realized the disadvantage of shrinking your foodshed (actual made-up foodie word) to your backyard. I had no more of the little plastic vegetable bags you get at the farmers' market. So I went to Whole Foods and stole a few. Take that, Rahodeb.

Must go. I think I hear fetal eggplant yelling for water, and falling pears screaming to be admitted to the icebox. Or iceboxes. We just plugged in the beer fridge on the patio to make room for, alas, not Budweiser, but our produce. The electrical overload may crash the computer.

Another excuse. Must go.

Back to Back to the Land

2007-07-19T14:01:00.000-07:00

Once again an anti-war army marches on its stomach.

Remember that last long war? We kept trying and failing to get our occupation forces out of a civil war in a small country, so what did we do? Among other things (besides enjoying the much-publicized sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll), we ate better than the establishment and Middle America. OK, we didn't eat that much better, just healthier. We tended to boil up brown rice and kasha and pile on undifferentiated steamed veggies. That's what we called them, veggies, as if they were all the same.

But some of us grew them on our own farms, communes and backyards. Many of us avoided grocery stores and bought our produce from co-ops. A few of us even started communal restaurants. Our West Coast Alice's restaurant, Chez Panisse, was started by left-wingers who found a revolution they could win, the food revolution. No revolution is ever fully won, though.

Now the food revolution is reinvigorated, and it's no coincidence that the nation is in another shit storm of conquest, profit and death. Oil men rule the country, and we have not been able to stop their murder of Iraqis or their poisoning of ourselves, whether by contaminated air, water or food. Maybe we haven't tried hard enough to stop them. We certainly marched harder 40 years ago.

I admit it, I've retreated. I've gotten oral, but off the grid, or off the McGriddle. No fast food. No farmed seafood from China. No water wrapped in plastic. I buy my food from farmers markets, bringing it home on my bike. I've torn up my lawn, and the tomatoes are already ripening. Pretty soon there will be peppers, cucumbers, zucchini and other veggies.

Yes, veggies, but this time around I really know how to cook them. If only I knew how to cook a Bush.

The Lawn and Shortening of it

2007-06-18T15:18:00.000-07:00

Here in suburbia the sure way to watch the arrival of a new generation is to see grass turn into rocks. I don't mean marijuana replaced with crack, which may be the way things change in some urban nabes. No, I mean literal grass torn out, along with wasteful sprinkler systems, to be replaced with small geological objects, tree bark and plants bred to survive nuclear summer.

Jesus, why wasn't this a sign of hipness when I was a kid and my dad made me decapitate a half acre of grass every weekend with a push mower? That's how old I am, push mowers. Now, as I look up and down my new street, I see that slightly more than half the front yards are quarried rather than cultivated. The yuppies, water conservationists and rock-huggers are here, and the Greatest Grassgrowing Generation is dying off.

I'm still stuck with a small, kidney-shaped plot of grass in the backyard. The previous owner assures me the token grass isn't a filled-in swimming pool, although with the current heat wave I've been putting enough water on it to fill a pool. Then, every few days, I go out with a weed-whacker and cut it. It's not big enough to need a mower. It's mostly edge. The process is maddening, so as fast as I can I'm digging up patches of the mini-lawn and planting tomatoes, cucumbers and arugula.

Yes, arugula. It survived ridicule and the '90s, and it might survive my gardening.

I would take her to a dog show

2007-06-03T17:13:00.000-07:00

Today I took my wife to a dog show. And she won best in show. Rather, her dog (our dog), Bean Sprout, was easily the most popular dog at the Marin Humane Society centennial party. A hundred years they've been there, and Bean Sprout (please do not call him or this braggadoggio B.S.) was probably the cutest dog ever seen there.

So here's the thing. Bean Sprout never actually entered any contest, even though dozens (well, three) of the humane society's officers and members begged him to sign up. That is, they begged my wife to sign him up for the small dog contest. He will not run if nominated, and he will not serve if elected, she responded. I begged her to sign him up too, but I must admit my motives were impure.

I had looked around at the competition and knew Bean Sprout count kick all their fuzzy little butts. It was as if a 5-pound, 4-legged, white-maned Lincoln had walked into a 2007 Democratic debate. Hillary who? Obama what? Bean Sprout for prez of the world of dogs.

The truth is, and I knew it, the poor little guy was tired. He might have laid down and curled up embarrassingly in front of the judges (well, judge, and one with an annoying and amplifed voice). He had spent an hour being petted by entranced little children and being chased and licked by bigger dogs who probably wanted to see if he tasted like a dog or a chew toy.

It ain't easy being cute. Ask my dog. Ask me. I got nothing to write about, and I'll be in the dog house for that headline.

Fates Worse Than Mine

2007-05-11T15:20:00.000-07:00

Admit it, one reason to read the newspaper is to see who you're glad you're not. Great not to be a spoiled Yalie named George W. Bush. Good not to be a soldier in Iraq or Afghanistan. But a little close to home, my nephew was just injured in Afghanistan saving one of his men from a burning Humvee. And he was happy being him, and went back to duty instead of to a hospital in Germany. Still, I wouldn't want to be there.

This is a round-about way of getting to the guy in the news I definitely wouldn't want to be: the young man who was driving the car in which David Halberstam died. Christ, it's sad. The thoughtful and generous Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, the man who first exposed Vietnam as the quagmire it was, died in a crash in San Mateo County two weeks ago after giving a talk at UC-Berkeley. Driving him to an interview was a 26-year-old grad student in journalism named ... well, no name. He's got enough troubles, and now a lawyer.

How would you like to be the journalism student who killed David Halberstam? The guy who did what the Viet Cong couldn't do and the U.S. Army wished it had?

That may be a bald way to put it, because fault in the crash hasn't been found yet. But still. It will be the invisible ink on the young man's resume. Worse, it will be etched on the young man's mind forever. Should he have made that left turn onto Willow Road when he did? Should he even bother to stay in journalism?

Best to simply read the newspapers, the Cliff's Notes of the Fates, and be glad we're not in them.

A Cardboard-Based Life Form

2007-05-08T07:21:00.000-07:00

Long delay between posts again. Excuse: Moving.
Selling a house and buying a house in a month was stressful enough. (Unemployed and getting a mortgage, you bet your Fannie Mae.) But moving in a week was a test of body and mind. Fifteen Subaru loads, eight U-Haul van loads and one giant truck load of stuff.

You really get to see the ugly truth about the possessions that possess you. You have to face the fact that you're still packing and unpacking things that you haven't used in twenty years. You measure your cardboard footprint.

Right now every room is filled with cardboard boxes. We're living out of some, but most are just sitting around waiting to be unpacked so we can see just how useless their contents are. Just as we did when we packed them.

There are three categories of junk parasitically attached to us (or we to it).

One: Sentimental junk. I wore that lumber jacket every day when I was in high school, and it still sort of fits. My grandfather made that boot jack and it might work on sneakers. For four generations my narcissistic family shot all those photos and someday I may sort through them, for future generations I'm not spawning.

Two: Junk the dump won't take. I've got paint cans from two houses ago. Hey, those were nice colors. No more said about other hazardous wastes. One accomplishment: This move I paid the local sanitation company 35 bucks to shred four Hefty bags of documents and old pay stubs dating back to 1989, or three houses ago.

Three: Junk that you might use sometime. This is the largest category of junk in my house and probably all of America, because we all have unrealistic aspirations. That old Mac SE might be a collectors item someday. I might buy another Velocette motorcycle and use those old manuals and tank badges. Ice cream, we might make ice cream.

Sure, there's the two-year rule. If you haven't used it in two years get rid of it. Ha. It takes us two years just to figure out if we might want to make ice cream with the ice cream maker, even though we don't eat sweet things or frozen things besides daiquiris.

No, the rule in our household seems to be: If you haven't used it in two years, that still gives you the rest of your life to use it. The significant other might find a good recipe for savory or pickled ice cream. If you know her, you know I'm not kidding. So the ice cream maker stays with us, periodically disappearing into cardboard and then emerging in a new location.

This location is our first with a yard fit for a yard sale. But you know how yard sales are. You hate to have people pawing through your junk, and then not offering enough money for it.

Puttering in the garden

2007-04-14T09:00:00.000-07:00

That's what my mom called it. She would take clippers and a trowel and "work at random," as the dictionary puts it, among her plants and bushes. Only thing is, her puttering didn't seem so random. She knew when her little asparagus were going to poke up and knew exactly where to trim her shrubs' little limbs. My mom didn't do much at random. She always worked, though, never being one for watching soap operas.

She loved the unmelodramatic story line of greenery. Well, one time it got very dramatic. That was the morning she woke to find that someone had dug up and hauled away newly planted bushes on the street side of her yard. When she replaced them, I believe she stayed up the next few nights at the window with her dad's shotgun.

My mother was serious about gardening, even though she called it puttering. I'm not sure I will be. I'm more of a not-work-at-random kind of guy, especially when it comes to taking care of plants, lawns and yards. That's partly why I sold a house with three-quarters of an acre of land two years ago and bought a condo with a 300-square-foot patio.

But condos make you feel old, and now I feel old enough to start puttering in the garden, which supposedly makes older folks feel young. I'm sixty-one and it's time to try growing tomatoes, like my mother and grandfather before me. Got to do something before 5 o'clock and the early-bird special. That's why we're abandoning the condo, and the illusion of owning property, for a house with a good-sized yard mostly covered with tree bark, low maintenance plants and very low-maintenance rocks.

It's time bring in some high maintenance plants, and see it they survive this puttering putz.

Bluto Rebloated

2007-04-13T08:22:00.000-07:00

Don Imus tapped into a nasty American slang tradition, and over the years has helped perpetuate habits of speech, thought and action that should have died with whites-only water fountains. But enough about Imus. I must, you must, everybody must talk Imus. Enough, I said.

I am here to celebrate some American slang traditions that are positive, even when they're derogatory.

For example, the part of unincorporated Marin County where I'm buying a house is called Terra Linda, which is developer-mangled Spanish for "Beautiful Land." Over the years, because of certain climatic tendencies, residents have taken to calling Terra Linda "Terra Winda" or "Windy Lindy." Others call this less affluent part of Marin (yes, there are less affluent parts of the richest county in California) "Trasha Linda."

This isn't a great piece of slang, but it is part of the widespread renaming of towns, cities and neighborhoods all over America. When I lived in Orlando, folks called it, reasonably, "Borelando." Down in Southern California, the young people of Escondido call their city "Escondildo." During the 15 years I lived in Mill Valley, the small Marin County town became richer, smugger and more Land Rover-ridden. Thus we called it "Me Valley" and eventually "Mean Valley."

Familiarity breeds contemptuous slang, usually well-deserved.

Sailors always rename the ships that serve as their bobbing prisons. I once worked on an oceanographic ship officially named the Explorer, but known to its crew as "the Exploder" (a precursor to the equally flawed Ford SUV of the same names). Hometown newspapers are renamed. The Orlando Sentinel was "the Slantinel" to its subscribers. These kinds of derogatory names just bubble up from the ground (or ocean) where we live.

It's a good thing. Now, is it worth renaming "Imus in the Morning"? No. Enough.

Pluto disappeared

2007-04-12T07:10:00.000-07:00

Where have I been? Selling a condo and buying a house, a real, more expensive, detached house. Me, I've been anything but detached. This whole thing has taken three weeks in a supposedly cool housing market, and in two more weeks the movers will be here and I'll have a mortgage for the first time in ages.

My brain is burned. It took longer to buy a car.

When you buy a car, first you read all the reviews and Consumer Reports reports. Then you go look at a bunch of different models. Then you go home, think about them, and a few days later come back and sit in them. Eventually you take them all for test drives. You do everything you can to avoid signing papers with a salesman until you're absolutely sure you like everything down to the cupholders.

When you buy a house, you wander through a bunch of open houses and generally see nothing that works. The houses you like are too expensive and the houses you can afford are too small, too close to busy roads or need TLC, which stands for Turn Life over to Contractors.

Then you see a house you can live with, or in, and you immediately have to start bidding, signing papers and indenturing yourself to banks. You don't get to test drive the house. You just go around saying, "The couch will fit here" and things like that. At closing, you live with the choice for the rest of your life or until another sucker comes along.

The rest of my life starts in two weeks. And you know what? I'm happy about it. That's the weirdest thing about home buying. It's a form of hope that needs paint and new carpets.

How Expensively Does Your Garden Grow?

2007-03-14T09:53:00.000-07:00

Spring is here, and so is the Smith & Expensive catalog. Smith & Hawken, of course, is the outfit that turned gardening into a fashion statement. They've gradually weeded out most seeds and plants from their line of goods and replaced them with outdoor furniture (Do you prefer "Avignon Lounging" or "Canterborough Lounging"?) and the likes of "bunny topiary." At $89 a bunny, it's a Chia Pet for the Lexus set.

Ah, but there are two pages of actual garden tools in the Spring Sale catalog. "Why Smith & Hawken tools?" asks the catalog. "A great partnership with an English toolmaker (in business for 200 years)." Sure enough, these carefully sculpted tools look like props for the help in country garden scenes on "Masterpiece Theater." The catalog provides handy descriptions for the kind of modern Americans who only develop calluses inside their Manolo Blahniks.

"Long-handled Shovel: For lifting and throwing gravel, compost, soil or sand." Who knew? For further instructions ask one of your Guatemalan lawn guys.

You can have your $59 shovel and your $39 "Perennial Hoe." My favorite new Smith & Hawken tool is the Dibber, an 11-inch carbon-steel pointy thing with a finely crafted wooden handle "to create small holes for planting seeds or small seedlings."

The dictionary says a "dibber" was originally called a "dibble," which comes, natch, from the Middle English "debylle." Whatever you call it, it costs $25 plus shipping so you can poke holes in the dirt.

As my wife says in Middle American: "I got sticks for that."

Will Eat for Money?

2007-03-12T11:00:00.000-07:00

I realize that because of a generous mention by Sam, anyone reading this is probably a foodista. You may even be reviewing restaurants online, and more power to you and your gut if you are. But if you're thinking about going into dining as a line of work, there's something you should know. (Apologies if you've heard this old standard of mine before.) Restaurant reviewing is a lot like prostitution.

You take a normal bodily function, perform it over and over again for money, and put a lot of strange things in your mouth.

Sure, restaurant reviewing is fun for the first couple of years (I don't know about prostitution), but if you must do it for any length of time, here's some advice:

One: Don't do it in the late 1970s. That's when I took up the fork and pen as a way to break into newspapers. Food was barely invented then and I was forced to do battle with salads of hacked iceberg lettuce and glopped protein called "continental cuisine." Most of the latter was previously frozen, so I assume the continent in question was Antarctica. A line I used at the time.

Two: Don't do it in B markets, if you can help it. I dug through the ancient cuisines of Palo Alto and Orlando and, except for some good stuff served on Formica counters, the best that could be said then was that Palo Alto was an hour's drive from Chez Panisse and Orlando was two days' drive from New Orleans. At least I was sort of qualified for the job, having worked at several bad restaurants in my youth, and having a sharp-tongued, super-tasting partner in the detection of culinary crimes. Thank you, Cookiecrumb, for your patience in the misuse of your palate.

Three: No matter where on the time/space continuum you choose to become a restaurant critic, just try going back to your favorite places for your favorite dishes. You can't do it unless you're seriously bankrolled and seriously bulemic. You have to keep moving on, free-ranging (well, forced-ranging) through good restaurants and bad. The worse they are, the more times you have to visit, to make sure you're right about how wrong their food is.

No, if you want to eat well, do something else for a living, something that doesn't eat you.

Discomfort food

2007-03-09T12:14:00.000-08:00

No more jokes about precious food. The new food joke is on all you real men who made fun of fancy restaurants serving tiny dabs of delicate delicacies. At the best of the new American restaurants you'll feel like Anthony Bourdain in Namibia staring at a plate of fried rodents' anuses. Only you're the asshole. You should have enjoyed the microgreens while you had the chance. Now you have to eat offal.

Eating the whole animal is the new thing. You must honor its sacrifice, its humane slaughter after years of coddling by kindly organic farmers, by eating hunks of its lowest, innermost or most extreme parts. Are you as squinty tough as Jim Harrison, well are you punk? That's the question posed by the new upscale-downbeast restaurants like Incanto in San Francisco.

As my wife delighted in a risotto made with duck tongues and cocks' combs (roosters' secondary sex characteristics, she called them, as if disappointed in not savoring the primary), I stared down the blackened vertibrae of a roasted lamb's neck. It was Alien meets CSI San Francisco, Special Gourmet Unit. I passed the gag test and indeed it was great, once the collagenoidal hunks of meat (honored by being roasted perfectly medium rare) were pried from the nooks and crannies of the bone and gristle that once supported little lambikins' cute head.

There was so much meat in there that, alas, I was forced to skip a morsel of rooster sex characteristic proffered by my wife. Okay, I wimped out. In my own defense, earlier I had scoffed up, tongue and jowl (mine and its), jellied pig head. The restaurant and I prefer to call it porchetta di testa. Testing the pig, I think it means.

I was tested, and found offal not so gawdawful. But good, as the old song about moose turd pie has it. That, by the way, will be one fad too far.

Hail to the dead unelected president

2006-12-29T14:22:00.000-08:00

Happy Ford day weekend, to crib a phrase from Wonkette. Our other unelected president, GWBush, has declared Tuesday a federal holiday in honor of the recently deceased Gerald R. Ford. Bush will be spending his extra day off cutting brush in Crawford and figuring out how not to cut and run in Iraq. The decider needs time off to decide, as if he hasn't had enough paid days to figure out what to do in Baghdad.
Which brings us to the big question: Why the huge media fuss about Jerry Ford? And how come he's getting so much respect now when he got so little in the late '70s?
Obvious. Compare the old clips of Ford as president with the one of Bush mumbling nice things about him. Bush seems insincere, hungover and stupider than anyone ever would have accused Ford of being. Ford was the guy who declared our long national nightmare over, and here we are in the middle of another one. There is no Ford in the wings waiting to take over from Bush. This long national nightmare has two more years to run.
Every media tribute to Ford is a rebuke to Bush, and a wish for simpler, non-Nixonian times. That's the way I read it. And Bush, paranoid drunk that he is, seems to read it that way, too. Thus he won't be coming to Ford's funeral.
He has hundreds of others to plan, and won't attend any of them either. He calls it a surge. Rhymes with dirge.

Heckuva job, Rummy

2006-12-15T19:26:00.000-08:00

Donald Rumsfeld was demobilized from his job at the Pentagon, a few years too late. There is little chance of demobilization anytime soon for the soldiers and Marines in Iraq. Instead they're likely to be stuck in the quagmire for another two years, with the National Guard called back again and again.

Heckuva job, Rummy. That's essentially what our willful idiot president said to Rumsfeld at his resignation ceremony. Bush said "he always put the troops first, and the troops know it."

Unfortunately, he didn't put in enough troops at first, and looting and insurgency quickly spiraled out of control. He wanted to follow his obsession of smaller, more mobile forces instead of following his generals' advice that it would take hundreds of thousands more troops to pacify Iraq. By all accounts, when the statue of Saddam came down, Rumsfeld started to lose interest. But before he went back to his pet project of transforming the military, he made some crucial bad decisions that have transformed the military in deadly ways.

First, he wouldn't accept any advice from the State Department, the British or anyone else on managing post-war Iraq. The "consummate bureaucratic warrior" had to keep control within his office. Second, he created the insurgency as we know it by ordering colonial administrator Paul Bremer to demobilize the Iraq army and fire all Baath party members from their jobs, thus rendering the institutions of the country unmanaged and creating 350,000 armed enemies.

While he was putting his troops first, he did so without giving them adequate body armor or adequate strategies to deal with the enemies he had put on the street. And he refused to listen to the few generals who dared tell him his notions were wrong. In fact, he tended to fire them. The man's arrogance is such that he has compared himself to Churchill. If you think he bears no resemblance to Churchill, remember that Churchill was the man who gave Britain Gallipoli. Rumsfeld has given America a four-year Gallipoli.

Before Rumsfeld left the Pentagon office he held so long, he said a few words, typically stubborn and obtuse, aimed at keeping American troops in Iraq. "Today, it should be clear that not only is weakness provocative, but the perception of weakness on our part can be provocative as well," he said, among other things.

Who created that perception of a weak America? It was the triumverate of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld who conjured a war we cannot win and shouldn't have waged, a war that has killed tens of thousands, shamed our nation and broken our military.

That's the word, "broken." Even the Army chief of staff used it, when Rumsfeld was safely halfway out the door. He left as the second longest-serving secretary of defense after Robert McNamara, who also left behind a hopeless war. And a broken military.

Unlike McNamara, though, Rumsfeld won't suffer a guilty conscience. A conscience is required.

I'm the Indecider

2006-12-13T09:38:00.000-08:00

"President" George W. Bush is delaying his speech detailing his new strategy for Iraq until early 2007. There could be any number of reasons for this.

One: He still doesn't have a strategy to announce. He hasn't had one for almost four years, so why should he have one now?

Two: He can't announce that the troops will be home by Christmas until after this Christmas.

Three: A speech now would cut into his vacation, so he has to run back to West Texas. There's brush to be cut.

Four: The electronic box under his suit that feeds him speeches is on the fritz.

Five: Dick Cheney hasn't made up his mind yet. He's a quandary, because someone finally gave him what-for on the subject of Iraq, and someone with more pull in the oil biz -- King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.

Six: The family intervention by the Iraq Study Group didn't take and Bush is laid up with a bad case of Jack Daniels.

Seven: All of the above. Whatever the reasons, the decider is the avoider and Congress should be the impeachers.

Live slow, die old

2006-12-11T15:32:00.000-08:00

Sorry, that previous post self-destructed somewhere in the middle and I was too discouraged to start over. No one is out there reading anyway, so who the hell cares? It was just some garbage about how the phone never rings once you've left your job. Even most of the telephone solicitors and wrong numberers seem to give up on you.

Here are some more things you don't have to worry about when you get oldish and leave your job (engrossing details later):

Buying clothes. You find you have all the clothes you'll ever need for the rest of your life, except possibly sweat pants and socks, which tend to wear out while padding around the house. My closet is filled with beautiful pressed shirts, which I swear someday I will wear fashionably untucked with sneaks and linen pants so I can look like a rich beach bum. But I'm saving them for something, and wearing T-shirts and jeans, looking like a bum, sans beach. Of course, I've switched to long-sleeve T-shirts (a little expenditure there) because I'm an oldish guy and in the summer I fear skin cancer and in the winter I don't run the heat very high because I fear heating bills. Sweat shirts and fleece, that's the answer, and the universal oldguywear.

Bad service in restaurants. No, you don't have to fear that because you stop going to restaurants or you go to them when the staff is standing around waiting for customers to arrive, around 11:30 a.m. or 5:30 p.m., the official AARP dining hours.

The high price of gas. Who drives? No wonder old people are always crashing into farmers markets and store windows. They're out of practice. After you leave your job, the desire to get on the road with people going to their jobs fades pretty quickly, along with the desire to drink bad office coffee.

Bad weather. The funny thing is, the first thing in the paper that old people turn to is the weather report, and the last thing they'd consider is going out in the weather — bad weather, anyway. We're probably going to sit around the house in our sweats and fleeces, no matter the weather, so who the hell cares? But we care, probably so we can gloat that we don't have to go out in it, ruining our clothes, wasting expensive gas and enduring bad service in a restaurant. Instead we sit here, knowing the phone's not going to ring.

One of these days I'll get out there and use these coupons.

So what have I been doing?

2006-11-25T17:18:00.000-08:00

Nothing is the short answer. That's about all I've been doing since leaving my job three years ago. Selling a house, buying another, riding my bike every day, losing weight, eating well. Sorry, all that counts as nothing. Have you been writing, everybody asks. Do you have a job?

No and no. I'm living off pensions and investments and reading. I'm getting ready to write by reading others. That's what I say. Oh, yeah. And I say I've started a blog. To be exact, I've started three blogs. Two had to be abandoned because I got tired of them, in-laws were reading them and I didn't like their names. Those are all good excuses for Blogger abuse. Blogger must be filled with dead blogs containing a few half-hearted entries. It's got to be a huge electronic drawer for America's unfinished novels and memoirs. It must be a horrible mess in that drawer.

About the reading I'm doing: I'll read almost anything that strikes my interest, but what most strikes my interest is the literature on the Iraq war. I've read them all. Cobra II, Fiasco and that Emerald City one about the teeming Republican life inside the Green Zone. Yes, I've read them all, if you include Blood Money, which I'm just finishing, about the corruption and incompetence of the "rebuilding" effort in Iraq. This is the least publicized of the Iraq war histories, but author T. Christian Miller lays out the complete criminal negligence of the Bush-Halliburton program. They stole money from the taxpayers, from the Iraqis, they got thousands killed for their own profit and they shamed our nation.

If you're ever unemployed for just long enough to read one book about the Iraq disaster, I recommend this one. It's the book with the least publicized fuck-ups in it. It follows the money, unlike Bob Woodward's books, which follow his finger in the air or up some powerful person's poo-hole.

So I'm lying here, watching Iraq and the United States go down the tubes, and you know what astounds me most? The histories of this disaster have already been written. The killing, corruption and lies are still happening, and the books about it are all lined up at your local Borders. It wasn't until the war in Vietnam was over for several years that the histories came out and the lies exposed. In this war, the first, second and third drafts of history have been written and the war goes on.

And Bush goes on. But he has an excuse. He doesn't read.

I still can't believe it

2006-11-13T13:59:00.000-08:00

A week after the election and (see headline). After six years of rule by ignorance, malevolence and indolence, George W. Bush has gone poof. Just a couple of months ago, the war in Iraq was on a great course and Bush was staying it. Just a couple of weeks ago, Rummy was doing a heckuva a job and staying, of course. Suddenly, that's all history, one of many subjects that never interested Bush very much.

Daddy Bush's grown-up colleagues have suddenly appeared on the scene to save Junior from the neo-cons who conned him into this war. The president, who never really was elected president, is revealed as the nasty, cowardly pipsqueak some of us always knew he was. Perhaps most amazingly, the day after the election network news broadcasts started referring to "the failed war in Iraq." Their correspondents on the scene have known for years that the war is a disaster, but news executives have been afraid to let them say it outright. Now everyone is saying it.

Right after the election even Bill O'Reilly told David Letterman that "knowing what we know now" about the lack of WMDs he wouldn't support invading Iraq. (Never mind that it was illegal and stupid.) Methinks the bully wasn't cowed by the facts so much (after all, when have facts mattered to him?), but by his finger in the air telling him that even Fox News viewers have turned against the war.

Bush is now in the same position Nixon was at the time of Vietnamization and Watergateization. Even Republicans have turned against him and those with senses of humor are making jokes about him. Rush Limbaugh said he was relieved not to have to carry water for the administration, so now the only water he carries is what he needs to wash down the Oxycontin. The only thing missing from this scenario is a waiting helicopter.

That takes the threat of impeachment, which isn't possible unless two conditions are met. The first is the presence of high crimes and misdemeanors, defined as any crime higher than lying about sex. The second is control by the opposition party of the House and the Senate. Hmmm.

Oh yeah, there is one more condition. You can't have Dick Cheney as vice president. So put them both on the same impeachment ticket. After all, why impeach the ventriloquist's dummy without impeaching the ventriloquist? President Pelosi. The first woman president, the first Italian American president and the first San Franciscan president. It sounds good to me.

How come it took so long for nation to wake up to the pathetic reality of George W. Bush? Or is it that this is all a dream? Don't wake me while it lasts.

Living like a Republican

2006-11-03T12:00:00.000-08:00

Vote Democratic, live Republican. That's a line credited to Joseph Alioto, the late mayor of San Francisco who lived very well indeed. (Of course, he said that back in the days when the Republican image did not include chewing tobacco.) Nowadays, a lot of us who vote Democratic live Republican. Let us count the ways.

Some of us play golf, the game having undergone a certain democratization in recent years. Still, if you want to join a country club, remove the "Impeach Bush" sticker from your car. The ratio of Dems on the greens is approximately one in every two foursomes. (The number of Greens on the greens is approximately zero.) Count me out because of the very Republican clothing.

Many of us drive ritzy cars, usually foreign, though. Remember the days when Republicans drove Caddies and Dems drove Chevys? Now Republican get-out-the-vote campaigns target owners of Chevys because they're 99 percent Republicans. Cadillac owners can be counted on the get to the polls themselves, generally to vote Republican, if they don't crash into a farmer's market on the way. By the way, always innovative Toyota took the lead from Volvo in Republican-free cars by producing the Prius.

Democrats mostly eat better than Republicans, and often expensively. Republicans are still eating steak, but in the closest thing they have to an election strategy, Democrats are letting them take the lead in artery cloggage. The last red-meat-eating red-stater should be dead when about the time the Dems have a viable candidate for president. The latest survey shows that 78 percent of Republicans think "extra virgin" has something to do with abstinence education.

Now here's the rub. Unlike our New Deal-era forebears, most of us Democrats are invested in the stock market, even if it's only through our generally inadequate 401(k) plans. That means we have an interest, however small the interest, in Republican tax cuts. Most of the tax cuts have benefitted the very wealthy, but down here below the median income family, a few of us are living in the classic Republican manner. We're coupon clippers, in the old sense of living off investments. And also clipping coupons for specials at Walgreen's.

I ought to love Bush and his Republican henchmen. Most of my income comes from investments, and although small, it either is tax-free or taxed at only 15 percent. I'm a Democrat who is a Bush profiteer. But I'm voting Democratic anyway. Even if it means higher taxes, it also means the other inevitable will be less of a worry for American troops in Iraq. I'm tired of all of us being trickled down upon.

The inheritance that hinders retirement

2006-10-29T10:05:00.000-08:00

Before I retired I was nothing like my father. I didn't have the same confidence, arrogance or skill set. I couldn't keep a neat desk, administer a university or understand superconductivity. Now that I am retired, I have become my father. The one I had after he retired. It's frigging scary.
I'm happy doing nothing but sitting in front of a TV while reading a book, just the way my dad did until the day he died. Like him, I enjoy going out in the morning for coffee to prepare for a hard day of reading, warming up with a New York Times and maybe a Wall Street Journal. I check the stock market to see if the nation is still financially alive, something neither of us ever did when we worked in different sectors of the nation's economy. I lust after fancy cars even though I really have nowhere to drive anymore. Unlike my dad, I don't buy those cars because I don't have as much money as he had.
Actually, I could have bought a Beemer instead of a Suburbaru, but my wife has a magical way of exercising vetoes. Debby merely invokes my dad's name, ""You're becoming Bob."
That straightens me right up. Fortunately, I have a few ways to assure myself that I haven't become a replicant of retired Bob. That is, I'll think of a few, and I do have time.
Bob never had a blog, that's one.

Small world made smaller

2006-10-27T12:57:00.000-07:00

"Pluto is dead," said a guy at Caltech. By astronomers' vote, it's no longer a planet, but a dwarf planet. And, we suppose, Mickey's pet is now a dwarf dog, making eight dwarves in the Disney firmament, which doesn't seem right. I just like the phrase "Pluto demoted," which appeared in headlines across the nation after the astronomers' referendum.
Man, do I know how that little planet feels. After a quarter of a century as a columnist filling blank space at the furthest reaches of American journalism (the joke theme-park towns of Orlando and San Francisco), I was essentially fired. Well, I managed to get a buy-out, which in journalism is like being paid to get in one of the Titanic's lifeboats.
So no bitterness, not all the time anyway. I was given the opportunity to enjoy retirement before 60 — and write about it as a dwarf columnist.
That's what a blogger is, right?