The Mother of All Orgies

My last post about domestic terrorism seemed to be a bit of a downer, so I thought I should present the "lighter" (sorry, I can't type it without quotes in this context) side of racism and hate in America. The Southern Poverty Law Center has a new article up about a woman in Alabama disputing the title "Wizardess", although it seems she uses it herself quite a bit. The title of this post refers to her statement that the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march in 1965 was "The Mother of All Orgies".

Note Gen. Forrest's tombstone in the picture - I really hope no one puts the words "Untutored Genius" on my headstone (well, urn) - even though I think I deserve it for learning SQL Reporting Services mostly on my own. As for "The First With the Most" - I'll leave that to my wife's discretion, but I'm pretty sure if it's appropriate for a confederate general, I'm the opposite side of interested.

But hey, while you're reading, also remember, the White Aryan Baby Drive really needs your child-rearing leftovers and Al Qaeda needs absolutely anyone with tan skin to serve as some sort of bait, at least according to Fox News.

Domestic Terrorism

Orcinus has a short piece over at his site, The Other Kind of Terror, that addresses what few of us read much about with the war in Iraq and bombings elsewhere overshadowing the impact in the news - that domestic terrorism is pretty much all over the map in the United States (link to U.S. World News); the sort of homegrown violence your see formulated by far-right supremacists, religious separatists, and antigovernment groups. Since 1995, there have been roughly 60 right-wing terrorist plots involving machine guns, plastic explosives, Amtrack derailments, Ammonium Nitrate, bank robbery, anti-aircraft guns, tax evasion, barrels of jet fuel, and more explosives, chemicals and ammunition than seems possible, in states such as Texas, Tennessee, Idaho, Massachusetts, Kentucky,North Carolina, South Carolina, New York, Washington (DC), California, Colorado, Kansas, Arkansas, Alabama, Illinois, West Virginia Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Mississippi, Georgia, Washington, Florida and Oklahoma.

I note two items that caught my attention in the latest Southern Poverty Law Center Intelligence Report:

October 11, 1996 Seven members of the Mountaineer Militia are arrested in a plot to blow up the FBI's national fingerprint records center, where 1,000 people work, in West Virginia. In 1998, leader Floyd "Ray" Looker is sentenced to 18 years in prison. Two other defendants are sentenced on explosives charges and a third draws a year in prison for providing blueprints of the FBI facility to Looker, who then sold them to a government informant who was posing as a terrorist.

April 10, 2003 The FBI raids the Noonday, Texas, home of William Krar and storage facilities he rented in the area, discovering an arsenal that includes more than 500,000 rounds of ammunition, 65 pipe bombs and remote-control briefcase bombs, and almost two pounds of deadly sodium cyanide. Also found are components to convert the cyanide into a bomb capable of killing thousands, along with white supremacist and antigovernment material. Investigators soon learn Krar was stopped earlier in 2003 by police in Tennessee, who found in his car several weapons and coded documents that seemed to detail a plot. Krar refuses to cooperate, and details of that alleged plan are never learned. Eventually, he pleads guilty to possession of a chemical weapon and is sentenced to more than 11 years in prison.

I Like a Good George W. Bush Joke

McSweeney's has one of their lists up:

Although I Like a Good George W. Bush Joke as Much as the Next Guy, Some of Them Seem Gratuitous and Mean-Spirited By Matt Alexander

For example...

"Did you hear that Bill Clinton hired a new intern? It turns out that his
old intern had to go home and spend time with her family after her brother was
killed in Iraq."

Four Unrelated Items

1.) I went to sushi for lunch at Byerly's, of all places, with TallBrad. It was surprisingly delicious - not top of the line ingredients, but good enough that it made an exceptionally different lunch. I had a mixture of ginger, cucumber, tuna, and salmon rolled in rice and seaweed, all for about $7 with tax (not including a soda) - yum. I think I now know where a dinner for my family might come from every other week.

2.) I have learned from my father that my grandmother is directly earning money from Halliburton. She sold oil drilling rights to her land in Montana, and she sold them to Halliburton. It pays very well and if she passes away (I hope she spends her money before then) before the rights expire, I personally stand to make some money from Halliburton. Crap. I'd have to give it to the DFL and charity - if I donate it through work, they'll match it - so maybe that's the way to go.

3.) I was listening to the song "I've Never Been to Me" by Charlene (see the movie The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert for a moving rendition) on Radioblogclub today. Is it just me, or when she breaks into her little rap, does she sound exactly like Zoolander (the male fashion model played by Ben Stiller, from the movie of the same name). Really - listen to it - it must be some weird Canadian accent. And, in case you're not familiar with the words of the rap, please feel free to suffer as I did...

Hey, you know what paradise is?
It's a lie.
A fantasy we create about people and places as we'd like them to be.
But you know what truth is?
It's that little baby you're holding
And it's that man you fought with this morning
The same one you're going to make love to tonight.
That's truth.
That's love.

4.) Finally, I went to Wedding Crashers with some guys from work today. I have to say, the first half was actually exceptional for a crappy comedic buddy movie - really well done. The second half didn't move as fast, wasn't as funny, and felt like they were trying to fit in a whole bunch of humor, all the serious stuff, and extra story line they just didn't have time to fit into a two hour movie, but I sort of got the feeling that if you had been willing to sit for three and a half hours, they might have told you a whole story that was worth listening to. I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would, and Will Ferrell was funnier in his ten minutes in the movie than he was in the entirety of Anchorman. Rachel McAdams as Owen Wilon's love interest was exceptionally good eye candy, far better than Jessica Alba in Fantastic Four, although I'm not sure I can bring myself to ever watch Mean Girls.

Five Boy Scout Leaders Die in VA Accident

Five Boy Scout Leaders Die in VA Accident

Well, if that isn't just disturbing. I'm an Eagle Scout myself, and although I quit giving them financial support until they get rid of their bias against gays (please...I knew several gay scouts and several gay leaders - I was always more worried about my hetero Scouts sneaking off to see a counselor or the Swedish Boy Scouts across the lake at family camp, who were actually co-ed) I follow what they're up to. The Jamboree in question above is the National Jamboree at Fort A.P. Hill, Virginia. It's an immense gathering of Scouts and I went there myself around 1981 (wow, I'm old). The highlight of my time there? sleeping through a live performance of "Elvira" by the Oak Ridge Boys (at the height of its popularlity) because I hadn't closed my eyes in the previous sixty hours.

When I was there, it was not the safest place to be. There were daily (actually a few times a day) explosions -- ground rocking explosions -- as the military disposed of immense pits full of "found" explosives that littered the ground near the testing range. Not just at the beginning of the event either - every day. There were the Scouts who found a grenade and played catch. A live grenade. There were the critters in the lake that prevented us from swimming. Some sort of chiggers/swimmer's itch on acid that pretty much meant falling in the water during boating was out of the question. Not that that stopped other Scouts from ramming your raft and screaming "The South will rise again!" as they tried to flip you. There were the ticks. There were the normal hazards - sharp implements, cooking fires, etc. I spilled a whole pan of sizzling hot bacon grease on my leg and had a blister that stretched from just above my knee to a delta-shaped series of rivulets over my toes - but I felt fortunate that I wasn't the kid next to me at the first aid tent with a hatchet in his thigh (you can bandage around a hatchet until you get to the doc - it's worse to take it out sometimes). There were other immediate dangers, not including getting awakened by the Scottish "foreign exchange" Scouts and their bagpipes at 5 a.m. - but even after I got home, I was getting letters informing me that they had discovered PCBs/Dioxin in the area where the merit badge midway resided - specifically, in the areas where I had played some games.

All said, it didn't seem nearly as dangerous as the time in Scouts when I slipped on egg residue on a cement floor and nearly broke my tailbone during a skit about brown pants (cunningly incorporated into the play), or the time my friend fell off the climbing tower wearing my sneakers and they took him away in an ambulance with my only pair of sneakers, or the time some fellow counselors rolled a van (I was thankfully on leave), or the time I was at a jamboree where 80+ Scouts contracted hypothermia (and I was the Scout in charge of first aid), or just being a counselor for teen Webelos/Scouts period (poison ivy in the underwear anyone? tied to flagpole naked near the nurses' station? all your clothes up the flagpole? spun in a hammock and then whomped? I was much too pleasant to be the victim of these menial crimes, but a few of my close friends were not so fortunate). I never ended up dead, obviously, but it didn't seem to be for a lack of trying.

Drinking Liberally

I thought I should get a post in about Drinking Liberally before a whole week has passed since I attended. I alluded to my participation in an earlier post - but didn't elaborate. Last Wednesday, they moved their digs from their usual Minneapolis locale to The Muddy Pig in St. Paul - that was close enough for me to sneak out after Pooteewheet got home. What I didn't quite understand was that the drinking part of "liberally" really meant "freaking extensively" and involved being careful not to turn your head lest someone top off your beer while you weren't looking. I met some of the people whose blogs I always read, like Robin from over at PowerLiberal (she remembers me!), The Wege over at Norwegianity, who actually came to my site to comment about, of all things, my post about the Teapot worshippers in Malaysia, and Jackpinesavage (well, part of Jackpinesavage) from over at Curly Tales of War Pigs. The later pretty much rode out the evening with me, and I'm not sure if, by the end, I was putting up with him, he was putting up with me, or we were just having a good time. I needed someone to talk to, because Erik (from work) had to leave before he turned into a puddle of incoherentcy (but not before he outed the bartender to me as A.J. so I could personally bother him all evening
for beer like I was his best friend). Erik was having a difficult time not pumping his glass while Scotty Mortenson told him all about his political positions and opinions for what seemed like an hour. Scotty seems like a nice guy with plenty of great ideas, particularly considering he wants to represent my hometown (Monticello) which is smack in the middle of what is becoming, or is, conservative-central Minnesota, but damn, even from three feet away in an unrelated conversation, he's freaking intense. I actually had a pretty good time talking to a new Minnesotan fresh up from St. Louis as well. His discussion about his employer limiting his access to Yahoo personals and the effect on his sex life pretty much left me in stitches. Anyway, I spent quite a while sobering up from Bell's Two-Hearted, Summit EPA (and others) and politics, talking about music instead, but the damage was done. Regardless of how sober I was when I left (and I was fine), I had prepped myself for a good hangover the next morning - which begs the question, why on a Wednesday? But life usually craps in my favor, and Pooteewheet had a dental appointment the next morning for which I'd already taken time off, so I didn't have to explain to anyone why I was rimming an Advil/Tylenol bottle and hooked to a water IV. I topped my absence off with "I should visit with my Dad (from Tucson) as he's leaving town", and just wrote the day off entirely - mostly taking a nap, reading a bit, and vowing to keep my glass where no one can reach it next time.

Vacation Plans - South Dakota is...the Land of Infinite Variety

Pooteewheet and I are making our plans for our upcoming vacation. My grandmother will be turning 90, so we decided that we'd couple a trip to (the near side of) Montana for her party with a tour of the Dakotas. Not the most inspired choice of a vacation, particularly as it's been 95+ around here and it's usually hotter there, but it will be convenient as we have to come back to Minnesota anyway, and driving completely around the Dakotas is so darned inconvenient, and Iowa always gets in the way on the final leg. So far, we've nailed down one thing we're not going to do, and that's visit the South Dakota Hall of Fame. In case you're worried I forgot a word, like Hockey or Amateur Baseball in the middle of that phrase...nope. It's a museum dedicated to famous South Dakotans, like...oh...

Mary Hart - Know nationally for her work in the news media.
Terry Redlin – World wide acclaim for his beautiful artistic work portraying nature and American life.
Tom Brokaw – Nationally recognized for his contribution to media and journalism.
Al Neuharth – Renowned as the founder of USA TODAY, the Freedom Forum, and honored with the Al Neuharth Media Center in Verimillion, S.D.
Sitting Bull - The famous leader of the Hunkpapa Sioux tribe who was a man of vision and well respected by all who knew him.
Crazy Horse - Known as a brave and generous Sioux Indian Warrior, he is honored at the Crazy Horse Memorial in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
And Many Others!

You'd hate to put any of those Native Americans first, even though they're the most interesting and well known of any of those people outside of Tom Brokaw. Maybe it's alphabetical. Or racialbetical. But "and many others!" includes Jerry Olson, Jack Marken, Vern McKee, Martin Busch, et al. (but not Cheryl Ladd, Sparky Anderson, Ted Waitt, and Katherine Bach, at least not until after the remake of Dukes of Hazard), and some of them aren't native American, so maybe that absolves the ordering decision. I'd refer you to the virtual tour, but it seems to be woefully out of commission. As a service, I'd like to give the museum a hand and reconstruct the tour on my site using powerful visual language, so lean back and imagine yourself standing in the middle of South Dakota - dusty, windswept prairie, waves of golden grass, black-hills style, coal-striated scenery, rattle snakes, packrats, ground squirrels, the weighty history of The Sioux Wars and frontier life and justice, the solemn silence of missing herds of bison and extinct flocks of passenger pigeons one of which once darkened the plains, the other the skies...now...quick! add Mary Hart! (or Tom Brokow...as you please). Ah...infinite variety indeed!

Gonzo

"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always
worked for me." - Hunter S. Thompson

I needed some beer for gaming today, and noticed at the Cellars a four pack of "Gonzo Imperial Porter", brewed in honor of Hunter S. Thompson, tagged with his quote "Good people drink good beer", and offering the strong selling point that my purchase would help fund The Gonzo Memorial Fist. The beer itself is, as you'd expect an Imperial Porter, very heavy - and not something you want to be drinking either right before bed or on the porch in the 95 degree heat. But it's a delicious Imperial Porter and that's good enough to me.

But wait...there's more. So much more. I followed the link to the Flying Dog Ales site and their page about Gonzo beer where they explain the history and interaction of the brewery and the beer and inform me, via another page, that if I'm proactive, I can procure a $95 collector's bottle that possibly contains a golden ticket (like in Willy Wonka) allowing me to go to a dedication of the Fist with Johnny Depp (like a surreal Willy Wonka) and watch Hunter's ashes get blown out a cannon (not really at all like Willy Wonka). That's cheaper and better than a tank ride, though the outcome is obviously not a given. Still, the odds are better than the raffle ticket I buy from the local elementary every year, and the prize is much more interesting than a DVD player I don't need.

Lance, the Tour and the St. Paul Bike Classic

Rather than regurgitate anything about Lance Armstrong and the Tour, which ends tomorrow, I'd like to point you to After School Snack's nice write up about what will undoubtedly be his seventh win, including links to bike technology, Armstrong's greatest moments, and even his (amusing) tactics. If you haven't been following the Tour at all, you've been missing a chance to watch some well-deserving Americans really showing their moxy.

If you like to bike, and the Tour has you in a mood, might I suggest you take the time to get in your early registration for the St. Paul Bike Classic. There's still a week left to get in at the lower fee. The route is about a 30 mile loop around St. Paul (there's actually a 15 miler up Ramsey Hill if you prefer your rides short and exhausting - in the past you've gotten a button for making it to the top. I'd like to point out, however, that if my very pregnant sister and retired father could make it up last year, so can everyone else) and most of the route is closed to traffic, making it that much more fun. In the past, I've seen no less then one squirrel who rather than be squashed, learned to fly, a woman run over a street sign in front of a policecar and then run away while he shook his head and continued to watch the ride, the biggest dead snake I've ever seen in Minnesota, a guy dressed like a silver condom, and so many happy bikers that you can't help but be happy yourself. (link, once again, for good form)

Bruce Campbell

Mean Mr. Mustard recently posted about Bruce Campbell and his new book and an article on Salon. For him, and any other Bubba Ho-tep fans out there, Bruce will be doing a book signing at the U of MN bookstore (Coffman Memorial Union) on Wednesday, July 27, 6:00 p.m. Get a line number at CMU and have your copy of "Make Love!* *the Bruce Campbell Way" (by Bruce Campbell) personally signed.

TankRide.com

I got my copy of Save on Everything in the mail today, a coupon book that comes every other month and offers me savings on various things like food, squirrel control and siding for my house. I always look through it in the hopes that there will be something worth my while, like the coupons for LaFonda's. This time, there was something new. A coupon offering me three riders for the price of two ($250) at Tankride, at the Westbranch Gun Club in Princeton. The add promises me, "Ride in Real WWII Tanks and Shoot Real Machine Guns" (Gift Certificates Available). I can't quite explain the allure this seems to have as far as I'm concerned (it's probably all those WWII-era board games I play) - loading Kyle and Dan into a T-34 (with a German logo, so presumably a T-34 captured by the German's for Kursk or something, or maybe they're just trying to provide wish-fulfillment for both Russophiles and Germanophiles - ah, never mind, the site has the skinny: "This tank was built in late 1944 by the Russians. It is believed that it was captured by the Viking Division of the German Army during World War II. When we bought the tank from the Polish Government, it was painted in German field gray over the original Russian green. This is why we have retained the German markings on this Russian tank.") and tooling around a gun range while firing a machine gun. If they promised me I could shoot the main armanent once, I'd be seriously considering reservations. This is undoubtedly why Mean Mr. Mustard's wife has her reservations about me - she knows that deep in my liberal heart I could still find some enjoyment driving a tank around for no reason whatsoever and not feel particularly guilty that I was driving a vehicle intended to blow up other vehicles and the people therein (albeit, I'd be more comfortable driving a Sherman or T-34 without the German markings, and when confronted with buying my little girl army men or dinosaurs, I happily grabbed the plastic dinosaurs). But sometimes a 60 year old tank isn't really a symbol of anything anymore, it's just, well, an empty tin can that can safely take you back to a time with a fascinating history that you'd never want to visit in person - and wanting to drive one, well that's just the idiot in me wanting to drive something approximately thirty to fifty times bigger than my Saturn or Ford Focus.

My practical side would never allow me to go on a $125-$250 tank ride. When I think about that money, I think about 6-12 months of Netflix and the 4-6 hours a week I spend watching movies with Pooteewheet, several trips to a nice restaurant for two, perhaps Sushi, a ticket to Tucson to see my parents or part of a trip to England, a large chunk of my Christmas outlay, an iPod, 1% of the flex loan I'm trying to rapidly pay down before home loans sneak back up to 10%, the tile for the bathroom I've been too lazy to finish, a serious donation to the DFL, and $500 in company-matched funds for scholarships and the arts. Taking an expensive tank ride would seem too much like just putting the money in a jar and driving over it with big treads. But if you have money to burn and tank rides are for you - tankride.com. Let me know what I missed.

Welcome Blotters

I see I made blog of the day on the Blotter. I apologize if you were expecting a post more recent than 3 days old, but I spent yesterday recovering from the St. Paul Drinking Liberally. You'll find a weird mixture of content on my blog as I tend to mix the personal and anything I find interesting, with a particular interest in the intersection of religion, politics, and hate crimes (at least lately).

Malaysian Teapot Cult

In the spirit of publishing weird things about Malaysia for Ming, this was on Boing Boing today: "A Malaysian cult devoted to the icon of a large teapot has been attacked. Some local Muslims are said to be angry that the group, which promotes interfaith harmony, is "stealing" converts from mosques." (BBC Link)

Stupid Quotations

The Blotter has what's obviously going to be my favorite quote of the day unless someone really puts their mind to it...

"If this happens in the United States, and we determine that it is the result of extremist, fundamentalist Muslims, you know, you could take out their holy sites."

-- Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO), when asked what should be done if terrorists struck several U.S. cities with nuclear weapons

Clay Commission Leaves 10 Commandments Posted

Steve, by way of Christy, pointed me at this article about Clay County, West Virginia, (in the Hur Herald) and their fight to keep the ten commandments in their chambers. Doesn't exactly seem to be about the historicity of the document when you read quotes such as:

Sheriff Randy Holcomb received a standing ovation when he told the
audience that man-made laws are secondary to God's laws, indicating he will not
follow constitutional rulings - "I don't have to go by man-made law."

Personally, I only want my Sheriff to follow man-made law when using his man-made gun and driving his man-made car around my man-made city within man-made county lines (sure, they follow rivers sometimes, but they're usually straight on at least one side). It simply makes me more comfortable, because I can seldom tell what God is telling him/her when I'm pulled over for a broken tail light. You can also read the article over at Dave's Mountain Blog.

CLAY COMMISSION LEAVES TEN COMMANDMENTS POSTED - Over 200 Declare County
"Nation Under God"(07/14/2005) By Bob Weaver Clay County's three county
commissioners voted unanimously before an audience of over 200 yesterday to
leave a plaque of the Ten Commandments on the wall of their chambers, declaring
Clay a "nation under God." Commissioner Jimmy Sams told the audience the
Commandments will stay in place, where they have hung for six years. A member of
Clay's Library Board, Jacob Nichols, defended the religious symbol, saying "The
reason we don't want other religions is because they are false." He said Jews
and Buddhists shouldn't have the same constitutional rights as "the one true
religion."

Otherkin

I'm something of a Wikipedia junkie. I love hitting random articles, or finding an article and just following link after link until I find something new and amusing. So, based on that, and my interest in weird religion, I point you at this particular gem - Otherkin.

And might I point out the associated link to Draconity. While I tolerate a lot of weird things, I'm not sure I could deal with someone who felt the need to identify with an Anne McCaffrey book as a way to organize their life. If you have to base your dragonish-life on a book, I'd prefer if you were my friend that you used Tolkein or that weird TLC special.

Ways of being otherkin
..."Sometimes a combination of non-human natures is professed, such as being both elf and werewolf, or angel and cat.

Some otherkin claim to feel wings, tails, and other organs from past incarnations that are not part of their human body. This sensation is similar to the "phantom limb" (phantom pain) condition, though not limited to human limbs; i.e. phantom tail, phantom wings, etc.
Otherkin often describe unusual behaviour traits that would not fit in with the mainstream of their culture. Although none of these traits are common enough to be considered identifying traits, there are some which are repeatedly mentioned by different members of the same otherkin type. Otherkin may describe strong traits or cravings which are not immediately associable with their type.

Therianthropes and vampires, especially, describe unusual cravings such as needing to eat raw meat [15] or to drink blood. [16] Many dragons describe a strong tendency to hoard, although this is a common tendency across Western society.

Therianthropes and furries may make animal sounds such as growling, purring and hissing. This may become an automatic response."

Jebus is Coming

Apparently Mean Mr. Mustard should hurry up on that conversion. Christ Lutheran in Eagan is pretty sure Christ will be here in only a week. Personally, I thought he'd be staying a bit longer - I'd have bet on a week at least.

Stick?

Yesterday Eryn and I went to Blackhawk Park to play at the playground. This turned out to be a bit of a mistake as even Eryn's enthusiasm can be boiled away in 90+ degree heat. She wandered around listlessly for a while until I suggested we head down to the lake, so at least we could walk in the shade. When we got down there, there was this huge de-weeding machine, which was actually two machines, the smaller one looking just like a ramp to move the weeds out of the lake, and the larger one looking like nothing quite so much as what you'd get if combines, lawn furniture and paddleboats could actually have sex.

Eryn ran across the wood bridge a few times, getting progressively pinker, and giving me orders about when I was supposed to cross or park myself (my favorite order, as it involves water, shade and a book). During one of my trips to the far side with her, I noticed what looked absolutely like a leg bone in the water: knobby on one end, then a long white part, then neatly sawed through at the other end. So, noting that they'd been dredging and might have turned something up and having actually known someone whose dog brought back human bones, I felt I should at least check it out. So, with two year old in tow, I crawled over the bridge onto an extra pontoon-type platform, broke about an 8 foot branch off a water-soaked tree, laid down, stretched as far as I could, almost into the water, and began to move weeds and pull back the....stick. At least I'm 99% certain it was a stick - I never did get it all the way back, it disappeared in the muck, and Eryn began to assure me in no uncertain terms that she too wanted an 8' stick so 'Eryn go fishin' too' - which pretty much put an end to any further work. I'm going to assume it was a stick, particularly because it seemed heavier than you'd expect a bone of the same size to be and acted like a stick when I got to flip a few times - but I don't really know the physics of bones and water and whether they get saturated/etc., so I can't say for certain.

Rape Spurs Anti-Hispanic Backlash in Ohio

This article from AP is certainly engaging after reading Orcinus' (Dave Neiwert's) Death on the Fourth of July. It has all the hallmarks he addresses in his book, particularly a community with a rapidly changing racial makeup.

"HAMILTON, Ohio - It started with the spray-painted, misspelled "Rapest" on the house of a Hispanic man accused of sexually assaulting a 9-year-old white girl. Then the house went up in flames in a suspected arson.

Confrontations, name-calling and threats against Hispanics followed. Men roamed the streets wearing pillowcases with eye holes, and Ku Klux Klansmen in hoods and robes showed up to pass out pamphlets. There were rumors of assaults and beatings.

Now this small Ohio river city's booming Hispanic population is cowed, the streets in their neighborhoods nearly deserted."

Mothers in the Workplace

For ****'s sake, get out of the past and grow the *** up. This kind of crap should have been left behind decades ago. There are plenty of mothers I work with that I'd hire before I ever hired myself.

"To a large extent, mothers are rated as less hirable, less suitable for promotion and deserving of lower salaries because they are believed to be less competent and less committed to paid work."

Soldiers of God: White Supremacists and Their Holy War for America

Well, you can probably tell that I have a slight obsession with reading about Christian Identity and racism lately. As a matter of fact, I'm fascinated with Orcinus' posts about eliminationism and am really looking forward to "The Fire Next Time" on PBS (Sunday or Monday). But I'm going to take a break, as all that radical right/racial right reading sort of gives me a headache after a while - I grabbed four Terry Pratchett Discworld books this time (I'm sort of treating it as a single 1000 page book - Klund pointed me at them, I think I'm currently on books 5-8) and I won't even bother to review them - there's plenty of commentary out there about Pratchett, mine would be extraneous.

Soldiers of God is an excellent book about Christian Identity. The authors try their hardest to be non-judgemental and just report about the religious movement from the perspective of those within the movement, and with very few slip ups, that's exactly what they achieve. While it's not inclusive of everything about Identity, it does cover a lot of ground. So, rather than focusing on what Christian Identity is (it's "racial religion" - white people are the chosen people, you just have to read the Bible the right way), I'd like to point out a few of my favorite things:

1.) When we came back from the Scottish Festival in Farmington the other day, there was a KKK documentary on the History Channel, and Katie asked, "why the heck are they all wearing kilts" (good question if you were just at a Scottish Festival). Soldiers of God provides the answer..."It's not a cross-burning. It's a cross-lighting."..."The cross does burn, of course, but that's not the point. It's not some kind of Satanic thing or a desecration, but a Christian ritual that originated in the Scottish highlands. It represents the light of Jesus Christ in the world, the advancement of Christian faith. Do the news reports ever tell you that?"..."Cross-lighting is also a call to arms, " Jim Stinson adds. "The old clans of Scotland would signal with burning crosses on the hillsides to call their people. We're doing the same thing--calling our people." And, of course, if you're black and they're burning them in your yard, it's either a.) a sign that they're calling people to arms in your yard or b.) there's a call to arms going on and you're not part of it, so you better be worried you're on the wrong side. (p. 160).

2.) The authors were around the racial right too much - as my sister would say, Oriental is not a race or a type of person, it's a rug.

3.) Many on the racial right are obsessed with nordic symbology - neo-Odinism, runes, fake runs (writing in "Viking" in class), etc. I can't imagine what this says about Tolkein. (p. 213)

4.) Everything is a conspiracy. I tried to explain this to BiggTree today - even global warming is an attempt by ZOG (the Zionist Occupied Government) to get all nations to work together toward solving an issue just to trick them into working together so much they embrace the U.N., and subsequently, the United Nations, driving us further into their nefarious grasp.

5.) The Number of the Beast is everywhere, whether it be 666 or 616. Soldiers of God notes: "One woman, a fundamentalist Christian of the non-Identity variety, makes the observation, "They already have a central computer somwhere in Europe that has access to every bit of this information. And do you know what they call this super computer? It's called the 'Beast.' You can't believe in prophecy and at the same time believe that this is some kind of coincidence."" (p.130). Let me point out that I work for a company that gathers and republishes an amazing amount of information, the kind of company whose executives you might find in an e-Week article meeting with Capitol Hill to discuss data security and the recent leaks of other companies, the kind of company you worry might know so much about you that it frightens you - the kind of company that gave me XML today that noted a particular document was scaned in 3020 and related to events that took place in 6010. That's right, they can predict the future almost 3000 years out. More appropriately, this should tell you that even in the most data-centric companies, in the most anal-retentive data-should-be-perfect companies, there are errors in the data. You should be less worried about 666 and more worried about the fact that you're going to end up the victim of a data error, like in Brazil.

I'd like to expand on that whole motif, by the way. The Wikipedia article about The Number of the Beast/666 is wonderful. You get great trivia like:

"The anti-impotence drug Viagra has a molecular weight of 666.7 g/mol."

and

"The first Apple Computer, the Apple I was sold for $666.66."

and

"Former U.S. president Ronald Wilson Reagan had six letters in his first, middle, and last name. He also lived in Bel-Air California, in house number 666 on his block, until wife Nancy Reagan had it changed to 668. Another interesting numerological oddity regarding Reagan, is that the sum of the enumerated phrase "Ronald Reagan President and Chief Executive of the United States of America" equals 666."

Guess I should have saved all that for Halloween! As a matter of fact, Boing Boing had an article just yesterday about 666, RFIDs (the little chips you put under your hand for GPS and credit card use), Katherine Albrecht, and a slide show that urges you, "FLEE FROM IT!". Sure, but primarily because they're poking you with a hollow needle, not because they're checking whether you're on the can or running your hand over the scanner at Home Depot and chintzing on a $4 hammer instead of the kind with the tuning fork in the handle.

"Turns out, Albrecht also believes that RFID tags may be the Mark of the Beast described in the New Testament's Book of Revelations. (Link to Snopes.com page about RFIDs of the Beast.)"

Gil's All Fright Diner

I grabbed "Gil's All Fright Diner" by A. Lee Martinez at the library off the new book shelf solely because it had a rather amusing looking eyeball monster sprouting out of the center of a diner in the desert. Eryn's rather glad I checked it out as she likes to flip through the chapters and identify the eyeball monster at the beginning of each chapter. I'd rather not give too much about this book away as I have friends and a wife who might actually want to read it, but suffice to say, if you like Christopher Moore, you'll probably enjoy this book. While it's not as well written as Moore, and feels just a bit like a first book, the story is much more interesting than a few of Moore's books I've read, like The Stupidest Angel (it gives "Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal" no competition, however). Rather than focusing on a small town dealing with a stupid angel, this book instead focuses on a small town dealing with a rogue teenager (the back of the book refers to her as a "jailbait sorceress") trying to call up the old gods. After that, it smells very much like Moore - strangers with unusual secrets who meet unusual love interests under unusual circumstances (and instead of an unusual fruit bat, an unusual ghost dog). There are some moments of inspired writing and even more inspired, well, inspiration that genuinely made me chuckle. It's probably a must read for Tall Brad and Klund, the later of whom will probably wedge it somewhere near the middle of his Christopher Moore hierarchy.

Publishers Weekly sums it up on Amazon:
"Earl (aka the Earl of Vampires) and Duke (aka the Duke of Werewolves), who are looking for a place to eat as they drive through Rockwood, a small desert community besieged by cosmically weird stuff. Soon after stopping at Gil's Diner, the pair help Loretta, the formidable owner-operator, fend off a zombie attack. Determined to do the right thing, the two supernatural misfits take on further challenges, such as trying to prevent Tammy (aka Mistress Lilith, Queen of the Night) and her loyal but dumb boyfriend, Chad, from ending the world."

Onward Christian Soliders

The City Pages' Jim Walsh wrote a great, short article that just hit their site, "Onward Christian Soliders", about Grace Church in Eden Prairie and a recent service supporting U.S. troops - "Righteousness Exalts a Nation." He's a little tongue in cheek about the whole service and makes it a point to note the lack of women involved in the service, right down to the historical figures:

"Two massive video monitors broadcast the morning's actors/parishioners, who portray Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Patrick Henry, Ben Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and other founding fathers, who speak of Jesus Christ, country, and family. The lone woman is Abigail Adams, whose message is, Stand by Thy Man."

Read the article, you'll probably laugh out loud, as I did, at statements such as (by Bob Dees): "We have heard all about weapons of mass destruction. There's been a search for weapons of mass destruction. I'm here today to testify that we have found the weapons of mass destruction. It is Satan's artillery."

Malaysians In Minnesota

My friend Ming, a Malaysian, once told me that you could fit the number of Malaysians in Minnesota into a movie theater. Besides being a strange method of internment and a peculiar ice breaker on a way to a burrito, this assertion generally seems to be proven true by the lack of Malaysians you meet walking around the streets of Eagan. So, it was with some surprise that I noticed the new web site being pushed by MNSpeak, MNStories (don't go there with a slow connection unless you have some time, it's video blogging) has a video blog entry by a local, Malaysian blogger (who happens to paint). While two Malaysians isn't enough to fill a movie theater, I think Ming would agree with me it's two more Malaysians that should have ever seen the third Matrix movie.

The Wild Dreidel

My friend Klund has some advice for Mean Mr. Mustard about blogging, but I think Elise at After School Snack's posting about a Christian theme park and how to abuse your tax-exempt status should concern him more, as I'm sure they'll target his daughter with free tickets in order to get to him. I'm having a difficult time imagining what sorts of rides would convince you that Christianity was better than being Jewish, or do they just push you through guilt-themed funhouses? And now that I've considered that, I'm picturing a Jewish theme park with maybe a "Wild Dreidel" ride, and klezmer music pumping in the background... Maybe they need such a park in order to draw business away from this one.

"ORLANDO, Fla. -- A Florida judge has ruled in favor of a Christian theme park seeking an exemption from property taxes. The Holy Land Experience in Orlando is operated by a nonprofit, nondenominational Christian ministry called Zion's Hope, which is devoted to converting Jews to Christianity. It had been granted only limited exemptions for administrative and education facilities. The Orange County Property Appraiser's office had denied the group's broader request in 2001, arguing the park was a tourist attraction rather than a church. But Judge Cynthia MacKinnon said all of the park is tax-exempt.In her ruling, the judge said Zion's Hope is using The Holy Land Experience "to spread what it considers to be God's word." The park features scenes from ancient Jerusalem and biblical settings complete with costumed characters. The $16 million, 15-acre park opened in 2001."

Small Town Newspapers - My Sister and the London Bombing

"Two natives of Sidney feared for the well being of their daughter, son-in-law and baby granddaughter when they heard the news of the explosions in London Thursday..."


I love small town newspapers. Not only news about the people who live there is news, but so is news about their children, grandchildren and even great grandchildren, and if you can make a big story have a personal, local connection, so much the better. Thus, I present my sister (and brother in law and niece), star of the most current edition of the Sidney Herald (Montana, not Australia, note the spelling difference, even though my brother in law is from Australia). I'd like to add that my wife pointedly told my father not to consult me in the spelling of Amelie, because I'm clueless...but I know better than to spell her name Amalie.

MN Scottish Festival

I didn’t get much time to write today because I was avoiding the house. Not because I was in trouble or anything, but because my wife was working on applying cleaning compound to the deck, and I didn’t want to feel guilty about not helping. So I took Eryn to the Mall of America, relaxed in the hammock, watched some videos, etc…whatever it took to ignore her exertion and pain. But the sound of the power washer kept overriding whatever we were doing, so it was obvious Pooteewheet was outside working and really suffering in the heat, and I didn’t need that sort of guilt trip laid at my feet, so I refrained from blogging just so she couldn’t accuse me of enjoying myself while she was in the 100 degree heat.

So, really what I wanted to blog about was Saturday and the Scottish Festival at the Dakota County Fairgrounds in Farmington. My friends Katie and Dan (and Connor) found us advance tickets, so even though it was approaching 100 and a 72 dew point, we were constrained to attend. Was it a good time? Except for the heat it was. Was it as exciting as Scottish Festivals in the past? Not really – there were about 1/3 the bands and there weren’t as many clans attending (noticeably, not my own, McLean – of which my family is a sept) – I heard someone noting that Farmington was just too far away for people from north of 694 – understandably so, particularly when it’s almost 100 degrees. Were the competitions exciting? Sure, if you could bear to stand in the heat to watch them. Was the marching band and parade of tartans fun? If you could bear to stand in the heat to watch them. What about the sheep dog show and children’s activities? Sure, if you stayed under a tent and out of the sun. How about the red faced, heat exhausted children? Were they fun? Not so much. Getting the picture?

Anyway, we did stay for a very long time – long enough for Eryn to get hot, tired, worn out, and nut-kicking angry when I picked her up at the end because I didn’t want to stand around in the heat in the middle of the road (that’s for Mean Mr. Mustard who thinks my daughter behaves most of the time…I’m pretty sure Emma doesn’t give him what for in the goolies – she didn’t do it on purpose, but it hurts nonetheless). So on to the pictures of the festivities…

This is the helldog who guards my back yard. It has nothing to do with the Scottish Festival. It’s just scary. And once again, on-and-off readers can appreciate how hard I have to work to kennel her with cinder blocks, wire, wood stakes, leashes, and wood reinforcement. I feel like I have a pit bull and live in a trailer home instead of a nice suburban abode.

This is actually from the Scottish Festival. It’s Eryn petting sheep. That face is her "eatin" face. She's thinking about how tasty that sheep will be when it ends up on some pita, with a side of yogurt, at Christo's in St. Paul after a saganaki (flaming cheese) appetizer.

Not too much later, these sheep were being herded by a sheep dog. Eryn petted the dogs as well, not noticing how nervous those sheep looked standing in the field (maybe it was the wool coats they were wearing – they might have been worried the dog was going to keep them in the middle of that field until they dehydrated).

There was the March of the Tartans. My favorite part is the clans who don’t actually have kilts, or dresses, or bagpipes, or anything even vaguely Scottish looking other than their heritage (usually furry and red if you’re a Scotsman). I tried to leave them out of the picture, they make me sad.

The March of the Tartans was followed by the mass band march. As noted previously, there weren’t nearly as many bands as in years past when you could have probably heard the Macalester grounds from Hamline if you were so inclined. However, the Minneapolis Police were there, which begs the question, why do you need, oh, twelve (?) uniformed police to guard the fairgrounds when there are 24-30 there without (police) uniforms on playing bagpipes, pipes and drums? Don't tell me! It's rhetorical!

This lute player was pretty funny. Pooteewheet and I have seen him somewhere before – we figure Half Time Rec, though we can’t be sure. But he was forced to play a lute in the wind next to several practicing bagpipe bands, with the Lakeville women’s tug o’ war team grunting in the background behind him, and the caber tossing (plus cheering) going on to his left, with an extremely touchy microphone – yet he still managed to be good natured, informative (did you know many lute songs don't actually have titles because at least one of the premier lute players felt he was above such things?), and loud enough to be heard. Eryn spent a considerable amount of time dancing under a tent to his stylings.

Speaking of the Lakeville Women’s Tug Of War team…this one’s for you Brad…just picture them all making out everytime they scored a win.

And speaking of Caber Tossing…this was my first attempt at a picture. Pretty sad, but I think it really captures the essence of caber tossing.

And a more successful second attempt (there were quite a few people watching - it seemed to be the most popular event of the whole fair. We watched a considerable number of people fail at flipping the pole end over end before someone succeeded [the most I've ever noticed failing before a success], and as soon as someone succeeded, most of the spectators wandered away - it was almost as though they breathed a collective sigh of relief that at least someone was going to manage to do it in all that heat).

Finally, some random pictures. A bunch of dressed up individuals near the Scottish Guard.

Eryn and Connor having some traditional Highland Scottish popcorn (I actually had some weird Welsh pancake-cookies that were extremely good, although as a Minnesotan, I had an urge to smear butter and pour maple syrup all over them). Does she LOOK hot? Does he LOOK like he's a little pink?

And…and this takes the cake…the “Baby Care” room. IT WAS ALMOST 100 G-DAMN DEGREES OUTSIDE!!! If baby care means cooking yourself and the baby to somewhere just shy of medium-well, then this was the room for you. I didn’t even take a leak the whole time I was there, after several sodas and some water, because I was sweating so much I couldn’t drink fast enough, and they wanted people with children to take those children into an enclosed room in the middle of the field without so much as a tree hanging overhead? There are probably a dozen people in the room already in this picture, they’re just crisped into little piles of salt and chemicals on the floor.

Just Weird Crap I Want to Unload

1.) My sister, brother-in-law and niece are fine. They did not die in an explosion in London - they were closer to the edge of the city. This is good. Sure, they let us stew for 28 hours or so before letting us know, but at least I don't have to inherit their poodle.

2.) David Neiwert (at Orcinus) actually published an excerpt from my review of his book Strawberry Days. That's even cooler than finding out my blog is listed at the top of the MNSpeak aggregator list (through sheer chance - it's alphabetical. If I had just been "Nod to Nothing", I'd have been much further down).

3.) It seems to me that there's something very wrong about taking your daughter to the NickJr. site to play Dora the Explorer's "Big City Adventure" only to have Dora and her Mami get their tires jacked by Swiper the Fox.

4.) There's a rabbit my wife often sees running around the neighborhood who has a tumorous growth. She refers to him as "cancer bunny". A search of +cancer +rabbit on Google doesn't really seem to turn up anything comparable. She's recently discovered that cancer bunny lives in my co-workers ex-husband's yard (he moved in two down) while watering his yard for him.

5.) Go Lance!

6.) I'd like to summarize my day: "When faced with a quad processor 2.7 ghz Xeon Pentium Biztalk 2004 box, one should remember that given the default installation settings, the High Watermark value of 200 actually translates into 200 memory-resident messages per CPU and that the hyperthreading of the Xeon processor actually doubles the watermark level, resulting in 200x4x2, or 1600 memory-resident messages. A savvy BTS programmer will note that she/he should multiply the high end of their average (XML) message size by 1600 to get a firm idea of how much memory that BTS host will consume, keeping in mind that even if it runs above a gig and a half, 32 bit Windows systems will typically max out around 1.5-2 gigs. Remember that this is above the memory used to operate the system generally, and possibly above the memory used to run orchestrations if you instantiate those orchestrations on a separate host instance." Just between you and me, a History/English undergrad and Writing Master's don't prepare you at all for that sort of workday.

Death on the Fourth of July

I'm in a bit of a mopey mood at the moment, and I think a large part of it has to do with reading David Neiwert's Death on the Fourth of July, immediately followed by the first half of Soldiers of God: White Supremacists and Their Holy War for America, supplemented by Wiki-ing all the hate crime groups and terms I didn't already know, and the fact that my sister still hasn't called from London. On top of that, I bothered to tune into KQRS this morning (I simply cannot bring myself to read anything on Powerline, so I go for a pulse of Minnesota conservatism with which I can deal) and got to listen to an exchange that sounded just like something out of Strawberry Days (speaking of which - BoingBoing has a good post linking to WWII anti-Japanese posters). A listener noted that part of the problem with trying to catch terrorists like those in London was there were "generations" of "infiltrators" - an absolute rehash of the old "they're not assimilable" argument used against the Japanese and Chinese in the U.S., even those who were third generation citizens, in part to justify internment camps. I'd worry that history repeats itself, but I don't think the attitudes ever changed or went away, they just keep finding a new focus.

As for a review of Death on the Fourth of July - everything that worked fairly well for Strawberry Days worked exceptionally well in this instance. Neiwert does an exceptional job of contrasting a single, modern incident with a legacy of bias crime and the lack of anti-bias crime legislation both historically and presently. His chapter on the Mythology of Hate is one of the most reasoned explanations of the myths surrounding bias crime legislation, from both sides, that I've ever read. And any problems I may have had with not going deep enough into historical legislation in Strawberry Days are not a problem here.

I think the most artful work Neiwert does in Death on the Fourth, however, is that he sets you up with something you might think is amusing or ridiculous, racists yelling "Kung Fu...we want to fight you" and "ching chong" and getting so worked up they can only flex their muscles and roar with rage, and then he dumps you into lynching and bias-crime scenes so horrifying they give you nightmares. And he does a superb job of tying those extremes together to make you understand that it is just writing this behavior off as idiotic or not worth noticing that engenders a culture that doesn't address these issues until they are no longer only words and threats, but violence and the intimidation of entire segments of society. While Neiwert doesn't use the word, it is terrorism plain and simple - the application of violence to control or coerce the behavior of another group.

Neiwert's chapters on lynching (that's the Wiki for lynching in the United States - warning, it's incredibly graphic) and anti-lynching laws are wrenching, and appropriately juxtapositioned to highlight how not passing anti-lynching laws has strong parallels to not passing anti-bias laws. The point, Neiwert makes clear, is that the laws, regardless of whether they work or are prosecuted, let individuals know that the behavior and the attitude are unacceptable, and in doing so, changes the root social attitude. And lest anyone believe that this was a southern issue instead of a national issue (and draw a similar conclusion that gay-bashing is a red state prerogative), they only have to look at our very own Duluth (link to MNHS photo of the lynching):

"Not all racially motivated lynchings in the United States took place in the South. One such incident occurred in Duluth, Minnesota on June 15, 1920, when three young African-American travelers were dragged from their jail cells (where they were confined after being accused of raping a white woman) and lynched by a mob believed to number more than one thousand. The event became the subject of a non-fiction book, The Lynchings in Duluth, published in 2000, by Michael Fedo."

All of that said, I'd like to point out a contemporaneous example that shows how this culture of hatred doesn't go away if it's not addressed, but just morphs into other forms. This is a description Neiwert provides of an "'Official Running Nigger Target,' it was labeled. It showed a cartoon silhouette of a black man with a large Afro and monstrous lips, sprinting, arms akimbo, in apparent full flight. Numbers designated different scores for different parts of the anatomy, with a relatively low score for a head shot, and the highest score for hitting his feet." (p. 81).

And then more recently on his site, we see this Liberal hunting permit:


And then Smartie at The Power Liberal points us at a few more. At first, it might seem stupid, to the point of being harmless, but it's about an attitude and the development of that attitude and the social sanctioning of hatred as an American value. While I'm sure I feel safer than a black man in the post-reconstruction South, the casual dismissal of this sort of thing encourages increasing levels of hate and violence. When it's sanctioned by Karl Rove and other administration employees and not countered by our President, a segment of society starts to believe this sort of behavior is acceptable and even encouraged. If I need to spell it out, yes, I'm stating that many individuals in the current administration are guilty of facilitating hate crimes. If the culture and attitude don't yet exist in our nation, they certainly do in the halls of the White House.

In conclusion...read Neiwert's book and take to heart his central tenet about anti-bias/hate crime laws, that, "Their purpose is less to protect any "groups" than to focus approbation on a recognizable social pathology in its expression as a crime." (126). Every bias crime makes America a smaller place for some group. Every bias crime chips away the freedom of some group. Unfortunately, there is no shortage of people who embrace that bias.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Harry Potter Party at Red Balloon Bookshop Celebrate the arrival of "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" with a day of special events - 07/16/05

I hear that when you attend, there's a guy dressed as Dumbledore in a detention cell, and you read him the new book so many times (“[A] female interrogator took an unusual approach to wear down a detainee, reading a Harry Potter book aloud for hours. He turned his back and put his hands over his ears.” ) that he drops dead.

Worried - London Bombing

I am officially starting to get very worried about not hearing from my sister, brother-in-law and niece as they left for a wedding in London two days ago and we haven't heard directly from them yet this morning, or second hand about their status from my parents or brother. LissyJo, Blimey is very upset and wants to know how you're doing.

AP - Four blasts rocked the London subway and tore open a packed double-decker bus during the morning rush hour Thursday, sending bloodied victims fleeing after what a shaken Prime Minister Tony Blair called "barbaric" terrorist attacks. At least 40 people were killed and more than 350 wounded.

The neo-Nazi movement's Olsen twins

Addendum: Mean Mr. Mustard pointed out to me over coffee this morning that the name "Prussian Blue" is actually a reference to the color of the residue left behind after gassing Jews at concentration camps...lovely - I wonder if the girls came up with it on their own. Mr. Mustard did sarcastically append..."you know, if that ever happened."

Southern Povery Law Center's Intelligence Report has this wonderful article about a mom and her two daughters who are poised to be the breakout sensations of the neo-Nazi movement.

I must quote:

If it weren't for the electric guitars on the stage behind them, the flag with the "life rune" symbol on it, and the white-power lyrics, they could be singing hymns in church. Instead, they are entertaining a room full of neo-Nazis.

"Strike force! White survival. Strike force! Yeah," they sing, punctuating each "Strike force!" with miniature sieg heils. Some of the men in the audience return the salute, and when the girls finish, thunderous applause fills the room.

TCBC Watermelon Ride

My annual July 4th event is to participate in the TCBC Watermelon Ride. I've been doing their pre-registration for all but one of the last five years or so and have had the pleasure of doing the fifty mile ride, the twenty-five mile ride, the twenty-five mile ride with my inlaws, the fifteen mile ride that was really a twenty mile ride with my inlaws and a Burley with my daughter in it, and this year the fifteen mile family ride without getting lost with my inlaws, daughter in a Burley, and wife. It's always a good time, except the two hour wait in the morning before my co-riders show up (I have to have registration forms there early, and when you tack trying to get the bikes and burley in the appropriate cars, including Pooteewheet's munchkin bike that doesn't have a crossbar that works on the rack appropriately, but you don't believe it, so you try four of five configurations before finally dismantling it and stuffing it in the back of whatever is available), but this year I solved that little dilemma, not by doing two volunteer activities, but by hauling along a lawn chair and a Neiwert book. I'd recommend the ride to everyone else as it comes complete with picnic - but if you're a nonmember family the $40 day-of price runs a little steep if there's just 2 or 3 of you (but it's perfect if there are 6 or 8 of you). TCBC is a great organization even without the Watermelon ride. There's a fairly large stable of rides you can attend, usually more than one a day in some part of the cities. There are plenty of fun people to ride with at all levels. And, they have insurance, so there's double safety if you have an accident.

On to some pictures:

Here's some random biker I don't know at all at the Vadnais-Snail Lakes rest stop. I didn't know him, but I did bump into an Order of the Arrow member I was in OA with (a Boy Scout thing) back in my high school days. He was the leader over in Buffalo.

Here's a picture of how much I have to pull, sans a 35# little girl and my sizeable frame. That's lemonade on my seat, not one of those trucker urine bombs.

Eryn likes to stretch before she gets back in the Burley - there's a lot of pedaling involved, and she worries about pulling a muscle. That, or she's a super hero, saving other riders at the rest stop from a falling tree. Hard to say. The bandaid on the knee is actually one of two she got that day - before we made it from Mom's car to my car, she'd tripped and skinned both her knees. I have blood on my shirt to prove it, but I won't post a picture of that.

There was picnicking with a nutritious meal - we were pleased she actually ate her hot dog and lots of watermelon. We thought she'd eat the box of Nerds she'd scored and the cookie and be done:

And no picnic or ride is complete without grandpa getting arrested for peculiar behavior on the playground. The guy in the background, with the glasses, is actually an undercover cop assigned to follow him around on a permanent basis - you'd think he'd have noticed by now.

Finally, there was no t-shirt or water bottle - but a very nice hanky we can wave at Twins games if they ever make it to the Series again, in 2005.

My Fourth of July Present

Every day is a potential Father's Day at my house. Proof of point to the left. Unfortunately, I forgot to stipulate that the new hammock was mine and perhaps unavailable for sharing unless I was in absentia. When I looked at a hammock and stand two weeks ago, the total price was around $200 + tax and I passed - I can't justify that much money, even though the cost per hour enjoyed was probably going to come to something like 10 cents an hour by the time I was done. Then Pooteewheet found the hammock on Overstock for about 60% of the price, and the stand went on sale at Home Depot for $25 cheaper then it had been last week. That was a sign, in particular, a sign that I shouldn't be expending my limited energy on trying to sink a post in the back yard, or trying to attach one to the deck. As a bonus, the stand is moveable, so I can keep it upwind of the dog pen. I look a little low in it - but there's still some chain to take in, so I'm in no danger of ass-scraping. As an added feature, here's how it looks from my perspective while I'm reading or using my laptop.

Casualties and Information Aesthetics

I noticed this fascinating link over at Information Aesthetics that is an "animated visualization simulating the US & coalition military fatalities that occured in Iraq, shown in the context of time & (geographical) space." It's really worth checking out (and so is Information Aesthetics - it always has links to new ways to present traditional data), particularly because it does so much to immediately show you where trouble happens in Iraq -- you hear about the corridors/roads being exceptionally problematic, on this map you can see it -- and because it's so horrible to watch the small, reinforcing explosions that are actually soldiers dying. It also dispells any illusion that Baghdad is a safe place and under any sort of control.

Strawberry Days

I finished Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community by David Neiwert (aka Orcinus) several days ago (see a link about reviews at Neiwert's site here). I actually picked it up as part of one of the "buy this book and the author's other book and get a good discount" deals on Amazon (and by the time you buy two hard cover books, you're into free shipping and handling, which I hate paying, so it's too tempting to pass on). The other book was Death on the Fourth of July, but I'll discuss that one in a later post.

Let's start with a simple statement of fact: I really enjoyed Strawberry Days. Read it. If you're not an inveterate library patron or a friend of mine who will just borrow it, buy it to encourage David to write more. It wasn't the best book I've read about anti-Japanese (and more inclusively, anti-Asian) laws, but what it lacked in in-depth analysis of the laws and their history and a nationwide view (it's difficult to address the anti-Asian/Japanese history of the U.S. without talking about Hawaii and sugar), it more than made up for with actual interviews of the Americans affected (his book addresses first through third generation Japanese immigrants and citizens) and the focus on a single town, Bellevue, and how anti-Asian laws and Japanese internment dramatically affected a single community, allowing the reader to extrapolate for themselves how many similar communities were affected throughout the West. Neiwert has a habit in both of his books (that I've read) of alternating policy/legal history chapters with chapters that focus on discrete communities and individuals within those communities. The result, though simple and obvious, is a powerful, concrete, contrast between how Americans legislate their relations with minorities within their borders, and how those minorities flourish and contribute despite that legislation (or lack of it) and how, through their example, we gain the opportunity to learn from citizens who prize their citizenship and their opportunity despite the effort to stiffle their participation and economic advancement. And if, like Michelle Malkin, you feel this is an old story that primarily contributes as an excuse to lock up other minorities, you can get a hands-on parallel, and local, example here in Minnesota, by following the travails of the Hmong. Though they haven't been subjected to anything like WWII internment camps in the U.S., the arguments over their participation in Minnesota culture have been long and loud - arguments about the number of them, their language, their customs - all the while, new generations integrate into our local tapestry and bless us with their literature, their art, and most recently their leadership as our politicians. If there's something to be gained from Japanese internment, it's not a lesson about who to lock up and how to lock them, but that perhaps in some cases we're maturing enough as a people that it no longer takes three to four generations to make a difference, but just one or two.

Like Sasha at Left in SF, I wish there had been more about actual life in the camps. The focus was often more squarely placed on those who managed to escape the camps, whether to work on WWII labor-shorted farms in the Midwest (believe it or not, it wasn't always Hispanics), or to enlist in the army when the U.S. started allowing them to join a segregated unit (which, like segregated black units of the time may have been more casually thrown at dangerous, high-casualty situations), and on their activities before the War and after the War, when they came home to ongoing persecution, burned-out houses and confiscated farms. I agree with David that his sparse style, focusing on the people and not their situation, actually helps to move the book along and make it compelling in its way, and it's obvious that those who were interned in some cases do not want to discuss the experience in detail, but the reader is left longing for more about what it was like - not in Schindler's List detail, but more nonetheless.

The last chapter, "The Internment", is an attempt to contrast the internment of the Japanese in World War II with current apologists and their calls for the legality of similar actions versus other minorities, like post-9/11 American Muslims. As such, the chapter feels slightly "tacked on", but the inclusion is a valid one (and Neiwert is foremost a journalist), particularly because it resonates with Japanese Americans. There is a wonderful anecdote about a JACL employee being contacted numerous times after 9/11 by Japanese Americans having bad dreams about internment. When you read in a previous chapter that there were "claims that the Japanese internees were being fed better in the camps than were American G.I.'s" (p. 205) you get the willies and immediately begin thinking about Guantanamo and lemon chicken (excuse me for not linking to either Malkin's pages about internment or Coulter's diatribe about chicken, I find them both offensive). That's simply not a lot of forward motion since the Dies Committee (yes, it did evolve from criticizing minorities and Nazis into the persecution of communists and the New Left).

Finally, as a teaser to get you to buy David's book, I'm going to include one of my favorite stories from Strawberry Days (and it's not how Tule Lake was close to where my family lived in Klamath Falls, Oregon, yet they never took me there):

"The most incredible thing was when they produced childlike drawings of the Panama Canal showing...drawings of how the locks worked. The hearing officer took these out and asked, 'Mr. Yasui, what are these?' Dad looked at the drawings and diagrams and said, 'They look like drawings of the Panama Canal.' They were so labeled, with names of the children. Then the officer asked my father to explain why they were in our home. 'If they were in my home,' my father replied, 'it seems to me that they were drawings done by my children for their schoolwork.'
"The officer then asked, 'Didn't you have these maps and diagrams so you could direct the blowing up of the canal locks?' My father said, 'Oh, no! These are just the schoolwork of my children.' The officer said, 'No, we think you've cleverly disguised your nefarious intent and are using your children merely as cover. We believe you had intent to damage the Panama Canal.' To which my father vehemently replied, "No, no, no!' And then the officer said pointedly, 'Prove that you didn't intend to blow up the Panama Canal!'" (p. 149-50).