dip your finger in boiling detergent and rub it repeatedly
I chose to cast my vote in Amman this very day, even though Iraqi exiles have been voting here since Friday. Voter turnout in Jordan was exceptionally lower than in other countries and I was quite surprised to hear some of the same rumours that infest Baghdad repeated over here in Amman.
One problem was the special ink that voters have to dab their fingers with. Many Iraqis were concerned that insurgents would catch them on their way back to Baghdad and recognise people who had voted.
Some resourceful Iraqis had already devised several methods to get rid of the stain. One of these is to paint your fingers with skin lotion before you enter the polling station, wipe your finger clean immediately after voting and before the ink dries, on returning home dip your finger in boiling detergent and rub it repeatedly.
- Zeyad, "Hold Your Head Up High, You Are Iraqi," healing iraq January 30, 2005
posted January 30, 2005 in politicswhat exactly was he waving?
"In the past, Jakks has waved [sic] his modeling fees..."
- Jeff Berg, "Ben Jakks Named 2005’s NakedSwordsman," xbiz January 25, 2005 (via fleshbot)
posted January 28, 2005 in art, sexwork it out, robin!
others in the blogosphere have already weighed in on this, and i get the offensiveness of cheney [in general and specifically here]. mostly it's funny that he looks like such an asshole. and even funnier that a post staffer got away with such a snippy article.
The vice president, however, was dressed in the kind of attire one typically wears to operate a snow blower.
Cheney stood out in a sea of black-coated world leaders because he was wearing an olive drab parka with a fur-trimmed hood. It is embroidered with his name. It reminded one of the way in which children's clothes are inscribed with their names before they are sent away to camp. And indeed, the vice president looked like an awkward boy amid the well-dressed adults.
Like other attendees, the vice president was wearing a hat. But it was not a fedora or a Stetson or a fur hat or any kind of hat that one might wear to a memorial service as the representative of one's country. Instead, it was a knit ski cap, embroidered with the words "Staff 2001." It was the kind of hat a conventioneer might find in a goodie bag.
It is also worth mentioning that Cheney was wearing hiking boots -- thick, brown, lace-up ones. Did he think he was going to have to hike the 44 miles from Krakow -- where he had made remarks earlier in the day -- to Auschwitz?
- Robin Givhan, "Dick Cheney, Dressing Down," Washington Post January 28, 2005
posted January 28, 2005 in delivery, politics, printfor my next trick
i would like to mangle movable type so that it can do a mashup blog posting. like, maybe everything i've said on january 27th of the past 5 years. or random postings that appear on the homepage, so you won't notice when i don't post for weeks on end. i will probably figure it out one of these days, but if you are smarter than me, i could use your help.
posted January 27, 2005 in deliveryit gets better after the jump, believe it or not
My many years as a hooker in New York taught me that true rentboy afficionados rarely go for the drop dead gorgeous but rather the ones who are publicly presentable and who can discuss the merits of Romane Conte 1979 or the Vosne Romane 1981 and who are able to hold their own discussing the lesser Gilbert and Sullivan canon. THOSE are the rentboys that you go to for a theater date and they, my friend, tend to be a lot more expensive than the hookers you buy for a fuck. As you may recall, in my prime I was able to get $1,000 or more for dinner and the theater and never have to take my dick out. It sounds to me like the Johns in Seattle know exactly what they are doing.
- bill, "A Post From The Joint," Bill in Exile January 27, 2005
posted January 27, 2005 in performance, print, sexAll I can do is practice it
[Helen] Vendler does not do e-mail. Somehow this is not surprising. Prolonged reading of her work conveys the sense of a mind utterly devoted to poetry, a woman not at all shy about her bookishness. "I am not interested in groups," Ms. Vendler said during a panel discussion in New York five years ago. "I have never joined a political party. I have never voted. I have never registered to vote. I have never gone to a church. I have never belonged to a club. I've never belonged to anything." For the journalist seeking to interview her, it is something of a relief to learn that she has a telephone. [...]
Small-circulation journals do still publish criticism of contemporary verse. But the reviews often appear to be written in code -- poets making polite, vague noises about one another's work, in an exquisitely cryptic form of logrolling.
For her part, Ms. Vendler, now 71 years old, has stepped back from the role that made her so influential. She is candid about hitting the limits of her interest in new work. After reviewing several generations of rising poets, she says, "you get to a group whose references are not yours any longer. They're talking about the cartoons they watched on television when they were children, the movies they saw, the music they grew up with, the kinds of activities they engaged in. And I fear I have lost touch." [...]
She quotes a favorite verse from Dylan Thomas:
All I have to give I offer"It means that you offer your little capacities," she explains. "And every generation is astonished that the capacities on offer are not better. 'Are we all there is?' you say to yourself. And you wish you were better. You wish your tastes were more catholic, perhaps. But all you can do is offer what you have.
wine, bread, and halter.
- SCOTT MCLEMEE, "The Grand Dame of Poetry Criticism," the chronicle of higher education January 28, 2005
posted January 27, 2005 in printsometimes people say really helpful shit
my farm is in pennsylvania. an hour and a half from brooklyn. like you, i grew up in the suburbs. but coming from meager roots doesn't mean you can't accomplish great things. suburbanity killed me. the city awoke me. the country has instilled peace. correct. you don't learn to farm in the mall. i spent happy college summers with dirt below nails and between toes, on farms. it was - and is - the happiest i have ever been. i left the city when i threw Success (conceptual) to the dogs and realized i wanted to spend time talking to myself instead of others.
there are some days i don't know what to do. but i have learned to sit still. these years feel like an endless meditation that is fruiting slowly. i love being able to provide for myself. your question mark is worth answering. there is a simple beauty in that phrase: sustaining yourself off the land. it is very thoreau, but there is an irrefutable eloquence in the quiet grace of nature. plus, i have the long empty roads and the honda 360. the wooded hikes with my dog. lots of steamed kale. hours of physical labor. good things, all.
how do i want to live? simply. as a steward. with love. companionship. good health. it is the most important question to ask and often the hardest to answer. often i still feel like a caveman scratching in the dirt with a stick, trying so hard to put the words and intentions inside together into tangible symbols.
but i never stop scratching.
- anonymous commenter on "BLAHG: the passion of the sandwich," christina mazzalupo january 21, 2005
posted January 26, 2005 in print[Fwd: Camera Equipment]
-----Original Message-----
>Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2005 3:37 PM
>To: J-School Students
>Subject: [j_school] [Fwd: Camera Equipment]
>
>
>To all students... From the Equipment Room:
>
>The Broadcast Department would like whoever it wasanyone
>who has checked out a Canon 10D camera to return it to the
>Equipment Room by tomorrow morning at 9:00am. If unable
>to do so please contact [email protected]. Whoever itAny students who do not turn in the cameras will be fined
>was
>fifty dollars a day even though we forgot to write down youras stated in the
>name and don't know which student you are
>Broadcast Equipment Policy until the camera is returned.
>
>Thank you!
Stretch
"The gayest thing about me?" [the rock] ponders. "Probably all the gay porn I did. Everyone was nicknamed Stretch after me. Oh, that's terrible."
- Laura Brown, "The Rock: Inside Dwayne's World," details december 31/2004 01:15:07 AM (via Brotha2Brotha)
posted January 24, 2005 in print, sex, speechlike an evil parent
Americans who come into our real town are either surprised or disappointed or both. They see some of us sitting on the curb smoking Sweet Caps, wearing tube tops, and they don't like it. They pay good money to see bonnets and aprons and horse-drawn wagons.
A tourist once came up to me and took a picture and said to her husband, now here's a priceless juxtaposition of old and new. They debated the idea of giving me some money, then concluded: no.
I speak English, I said. The artificial village and the chicken evisceration plant a few miles down the road are our main industries. On hot nights when the wind is right, the smell of blood and feathers tucks us in like an evil parent. There are no bars or visible exits.
- MIRIAM TOEWS, "excerpt: 'A Complicated Kindness,'" new york times January 23, 2005
posted January 23, 2005 in printthe love broken pieces of a vase feel for the glue
[John] Donatich is the director of Yale University Press and his wife is the literary agent and writer Betsy Lerner. They are very different types. Donatich, external and gregarious, was raised in New Jersey by immigrant Croatian parents, while Lerner, the child of a Jewish middle-class family, always had an internal personality. They fell in love when he, following up on a friendship they had formed at a poetry workshop, visited her at a psychiatric hospital she had checked herself into; she has a history of manic-depression, recounted in her book, "Food and Loathing." (Lerner is always called "B" in "Ambivalence," as if the book were a case study.) Donatich's attraction to Lerner is the love a boy good at technical things finds in an almost insolvable puzzle, while her love for him is the love broken pieces of a vase feel for the glue.
- D. T. MAX, "'Ambivalence, A Love Story': The Good Husband," new york times january 23, 2005
posted January 23, 2005 in printif they would just embrace their destiny, the gay community could save comics
in a pinch, torture will do
Ridge told BBC News 24's HARDtalk: "By and large, as a matter of policy we need to state over and over again: we do not condone the use of torture to extract information from terrorists."
But he said it was "human nature" that torture might be employed in certain exceptional cases when time was very limited.
- "US 'should not rule out torture'," bbc news january 14, 2005
posted January 14, 2005 in politicsYou win a victory when the discourse turns civil. They win when they get you to shout.
An excerpt from the book Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate.
The following is a letter I received while writing this chapter. It arrived several days after I had appeared on a TV show, NOW with Bill Moyers.
I listened to Dr. Lakoff last Friday night on NOW with great interest. I love the use of words and have been consistently puzzled at how the far right has co-opted so many definitions.- George Lakoff, "How to Respond to Conservatives," Rockridge Institute (via annie reid at maud newton) january 14, 2005 posted January 14, 2005 in politics, printSo I tried an experiment I wanted to tell you about. I took several examples from the interview; particularly trial vs. public protection lawyer and gay marriage and used those examples all week on AOL’s political chat room. Every time someone would scream about [John] Edwards’s being a trial lawyer, I’d respond with public protection lawyer and how they are the last defense against negligent corporations and [are] professional, and that the opposite of a public protection lawyer is a corporate lawyer who typically makes $400-500/per hr., and we pay that in higher prices for good and services.
Every time someone started screaming about “gay marriage” I’d ask if they want the federal government to tell them who they could marry. I’d go on to explain when challenged that once government has crossed the huge barrier into telling one group of people who they could not marry, it is only a small step to telling other groups, and a smaller yet step to telling people who they had to marry.
I also asked for definitions. Every time someone would holler “dirty liberal,” I’d request their definition of “liberal.”
The last was my own hot button. Every time someone would scream “abortion,” “baby-killer,” etc., I’d suggest that if they are anti-abortion, then by all means, they should not have one.
I’ve got to tell you, the results were startling to me. I had some other people (completely unknown to me) join me and take up the same tacks. By last night, the chat room was civil. An amazing (to me) number of posters turned off their capitalization and we were actually having conversations.
I’m going to keep this up, but I really wanted you to know that I heard Dr. Lakoff, appreciate his work, and am trying to put it into practice. And it’s really really fun.
Thanks, Penney Kolb
the delicious wassef ali hassoun
i don't know about this deserter business, but i do know a hottie when i see one.
5,500 desertions since invasion
An estimated 5,500 men and women have deserted since the invasion of Iraq, reflecting Washington's growing problems with troop morale. [...]
The Pentagon says that the level of desertion is no higher than usual and denies that it is having difficulty persuading troops to fight. The flight to Canada is, however, an embarrassment for the military, which is suffering from a recruiting shortfall for the National Guard and the Army Reserves. [...]
The penalty for desertion in wartime can be death. Most deserters, however, serve up to five years in a military prison before receiving a dishonourable discharge. [...]
During the Vietnam war an estimated 55,000 deserters or draft-dodgers fled to Canada. There were amnesties for both groups in the late 1970s under President Jimmy Carter, but many stayed.
- Charles Laurence, "US deserters flee to Canada to avoid service in Iraq," Telegraph january 9, 2005
posted January 14, 2005 in politics, printsizzler
my usual schtick is to not read reviews of a movie i plan to see until afterwards, so it's not till now that i'm reading the praise of "sideways" and a. o. scott's talk about its overratedness (which i agree with [note before knee-jerking: this means i liked it but was not overwhelmed with its perfection. you know when the "wings" guy fucks cammi, the sizzler waitress? the movies of 2004 were the sizzler restaurant, and "sideways" was cammi. incidentally, how much would it suck to answer the casting call for an overweight sizzler waitress? and be chosen as the person who fits that model? maybe i'd shut my mouth after seeing the paycheck.]):
the reaction to "Sideways" is worth noting, less because it isn't quite as good as everyone seems to be saying it is than because the near-unanimous praise of it reveals something about the psychology of critics, as distinct from our taste. Miles, the movie's hero, has been variously described as a drunk, a wine snob, a sad sack and a loser, but it has seldom been mentioned that he is also, by temperament if not by profession, a critic.i think he's right. and it sorta bothers me that i feel myself changing into this critic type just a little bit, that my tastes are getting all complicated and i can't get to the point when i talk about things the way i used to.The contrast between him and his friend Jack is partly the difference between an uptight, insecure epicurean and a swinging, self-deluding hedonist, but it is more crucially the difference between a sensibility that subjects every experience to judgment and analysis and a personality happy to accept whatever the moment offers. When they taste wine, Jack is apt to say "tastes good to me," and leave it at that, whereas Miles tends not only to be more exacting in his judgment ("quaffable but not transcendent," which is about how I feel about "Sideways"), but also more prone to narrate, to interpret - to find a language for the most subtle and ephemeral sensations of his palate.
This makes him, among other things, an embodiment of the critical disposition, and one of the unusual things about "Sideways" is that, in the end, it defends this attitude rather than dismissing it. Yes, the film pokes fun at Miles's flights of oenophile rhetoric—all that business about asparagus and "nutty Edam cheese"—but it defies the usual Hollywood anti-intellectualism in acknowledging that, rather than diminishing the fun of drinking, approaching wine with a measure of knowledge and sophistication can enhance its pleasures. There is more to true appreciation than just knowing what you like.
- a. o. scott, "The Most Overrated Film of the Year," new york times January 2, 2005
also, movable type is wicked slow as i'm gradually moving old hand-coded posts into the system.
posted January 14, 2005 in delivery, film, printif ya'll want somebody 2 be fukin' [sic] in or yourvideo durin' the rio carnival
Below is the result of your feedback form. It was submitted by (madddoggin@...) on Friday, December 31/2004 01:15:07 AM at 11:49:49
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mississippi changed its mind
GULFPORT, Miss. Jan 11, 2005 — A library board reversed a ban on comedian Jon Stewart's best-selling satirical book, which it had passed because of its image of Supreme Court justices' faces superimposed on naked bodies.
The Jackson-George Regional Library System board of trustees was criticized by local residents and in e-mails from out of state after it banned "America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction" last month. The trustees had said they objected to the image.
But the board voted 5-2 Monday to lift the ban, and the book was returned to circulation in the system's eight libraries Tuesday. [...]
Robert Willits, the library system director, said ... [the] majority of the messages criticizing the move came from out of state.
"We got some absolutely nasty e-mails and telephone calls that you would not believe," Willits said.
"We were communists and fascists at the same time."
- associated press, "Libraries Put 'America' Back on Shelves," abc news january 11, 2005
posted January 11, 2005 in politics, printanother snob understands me
NEW YORK CITY has long been a magnet for pretentious individuals from the heartland. Reared in stolid communities whose bedrock values discourage intellectual flamboyance, not to mention preciousness, the incipiently affected find that their witty aperçus regarding Couperin's keyboard filigree and Henri de Montherlant's curiously anachronistic Iberian imagery are not well received.
This is particularly true in regions where a rigorously proletarian ethos prevails, where the mere mention of Bossuet, Tacitus, Poulenc, Unamuno or Hildegard von Bingen can result in social ostracism, physical violence, even death. It is hardly surprising, then, that New York, home to some of the most pretentious human beings this side of ancien régime Versailles, can ceaselessly replenish its stock of home-grown show-offs with fresh recruits from the provinces. [...]
The first on my block to own Deryck Cooke's controversial "performance version" of Mahler's unfinished 10th Symphony, I soon became aware that I was brandishing my rapier in an arena where no one else could spell épée. I knew I must eventually make my way to New York, where a veritable army of the precociously snooty would be in a position to give me a run for my money.
- JOE QUEENAN, "The Snob's Comeuppance," new york times december 9, 2005
posted January 09, 2005 in art, music, printbodies do not pose a risk of infectious disease
Scientists say that, contrary to popular belief, bodies do not pose a risk of infectious disease. The mass graves, however, could simply worsen the suffering of survivors. [...]
But they do not expect such diseases to come from unburied bodies - diseases and putrefaction are caused by different microorganisms.
"Someone who died without cholera isn't suddenly going to generate it," says Jean-Luc Poncelet of the Pan-American Health Organization, a WHO regional organisation, which in September 2004 published a scientific review of the health risks posed by bodies after disasters (New Scientist print edition, 2 October 2004). Even in people who died with infections, he says, the germ also dies quickly, certainly after several days of decomposition.
"People repeat so often that bodies have to be disposed of to protect public health, that people assume it must be true," says Oliver Morgan, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
This causes problems, Morgan says, when disposing of bodies takes resources away from survivors - as when hospital wards are converted into morgues, as has been reported in Sri Lanka.
Dead bodies can release faecal bacteria into water, which can cause problems if people drink the water. But removing dead bodies will not stop this: flooded sewers and the living release also faecal bacteria, usually in closer proximity to survivors. Better, says Poncelet, to concentrate on getting clean water to the living. [...]
And in countries where survivors are paid compensation, such as India, people cannot get it without an identified body and death certificate. After the El Salvador earthquake of 2001, says Yates, mass graves had to be exhumed for this reason.
- Debora MacKenzie, "Dead bodies pose no epidemic threat, say experts," new scientist january 5, 2005
posted January 09, 2005 in print