Who Are You? What Do You Want? Where Are You Going? Whom Do You Serve – And Whom Do You Trust?!
No matter how ticked you may be, do NOT stop on the beltway outside DC, and leave your 4-yr old standing by the side of the road while you drive another 100 miles or so to Richmond, stopping only when you have an accident.
hat tip to a commenter at Blonde Sagacity
Tell us something interesting, funny, exciting, or just plain weird.
AMC is currently playing Suddenly, Last Summer, a film that has long been on my “must see, but never have” list.
Dammit, I’m too worn-out to stay up for this, and too drunk to appreciate it if I did. I must get TiVo.
Oh, but it’s AMC, and they have commercials. Those blighters!
Update: Just a hint at how drunk I am: To get at what is perhaps Kathy’s greatest role, along with this and The Lion In Winter, I first had to reference the cast of Star Trek: Enterprise, which, via Scott Bakula, lead me to Quantum Leap, and Dean Stockwell, who, of course, starred, along with Kathy, in Eugene O’Neil’s unforgettable Long Day’s Journey Into Night..
Later with this: I’m off to bed.
Update II: Still can’t sleep. Man, I still can place this. And could I, were I sober? I’m at the human sacrifice scene. And tell me, folks,: can you tell me Liz’ state-of-mind here?
Update III: It’s over now, and way more questions than answers. C’mon, chime in.
Coca-Cola is sponsoring a commercial program featuring various souls humming the tune to Donovan’s There Is A Mountain. Oh, please, spare me the grief! This purveyor of mindless tripe has become some sort of central ’60s touchstone. I can still recall one of our elementary-school parodies on one of his songs:
Jennifer, juniper, stuck up in a tree.
Jennifer, juniper, has to take a pee.
Watcha’ doin’, yes you know it.
To release it, you must show it.
Watcha’ doin’ Jennifer my love?
This is like, 5th grade. And are not these lyrics better than the original?
Once upon a time in the West— during the eighties to mid nineties, to be specific– there was a sporadic but continuing rumble in the American news media about the so-called militia movement. The journalistic great and the good descended on occasion from their palatial bi-coastal aeries to frown gravely, and unreel serious and lengthy articles about the goings on in fly-over country. Basically, for about a decade, concatenations of good-old-boys in cammies and serious gummint surplus gathered in the woods to play war-games with everything short of light artillery, and bitch about the federal government, the ominous plans by the UN for one-world government, invasion by someone or other, the depredations of mysterious black helicopters, fluoride in the water, and for all I know, the banning of Pete Rose from the Baseball Hall of Fame. I suspect that mostly the guys bitched a lot, and drank a lot of beer. Before the massacres in Rwanda, and the Place Known as the Former Yugoslavia, the mighty military minions of the UN were seen as a potent threat… maybe all the beer would account for that, since in actuality, a brigade of Girl Scouts might have been more effective in some UN-sponsored situations.
But the militia movement was real; it did pull in numbers enough to sometimes make local and federal law enforcement occasionally nervous. (And it gave colonic spasms to movie-makers: see Costa-Gavras’ “Betrayed” for one sweaty fantasy about what all those red-state hicks were getting up to, out in the woods.) And then… the militia movement essentially shriveled up and died, in the months after the truck-bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City by a guy who had militia sympathies, who had hung around on the fringes, who talked the talk… and took it one logical step farther. A lot of people suddenly realized that it was one thing to bitch about the government, and talk about blowing up a Federal building in theory, but in practice, it wasn’t the Federal government that blew up… it was little kids, and secretaries and military recruiters, and tens of ordinary citizens lining up at a help desk to see about social security or some such thing. It was a reality check, the metaphorical slap in the face with a wet haddock; after the Oklahoma City bombing, membership in various militia organizations plummeted. It never recovered, possibly also because even the most paranoid American began realizing that the UN couldn’t find its’ posterior with a map and a GPS fix, let alone institute a world government.
For Americans, 9/11 was the ultimate haddock-whack; you could now spend weeks just totting up blogs and blog entries by the rudely-awakened, and months making lists of people whose political views and assumptions abruptly jumped from the former comfortable track. A couple of small stories I noticed in the spring of 2002 had some small significance: it appeared that members of the IRA, who had formerly been guests of honor at various Saint Patrick’s’ Day parades in northeastern cities and townships were being curtly uninvited to the celebrations. The local fire and police departments— historically a large proportion of who were the descendants of Irish immigrants, and took center-stage at such local festivities— insisted. Firefighters and police, of course, had taken massive casualties at the World Trade Center. And now they took even a dimmer view than formerly, unfogged by sentiment about the Auld Country, of setting off bombs which targeted civilians.
In the last couple of months, the international haddock-whackings have come thick and fast, thanks in part to Al Quaida’s unparalleled talent for crapping in their own mess kit, and an assortment of enthusiastic jihadists taking cack-handed aim at a variety of soft targets. The brutality and indiscrimination of the insurgents in Iraq seems to be making them loathed, despised, and increasingly marginalized— deadly, but marginalized. Two massive bombings of tourist resorts in Egypt, and the murder of the Egyptian envoy to Iraq do not seem to be making them very much more popular in Egypt, if reports are to be believed. Even the Saudis were moved to make a show of effort, after a couple of compounds and hotels went boom, albeit with the usual pious insistence that Islam is a religion of peace.
Theo van Gogh’s murderer has been convicted, after an unrepentant and chilling monologue in the Dutch courtroom—- well that was another haddock-whack, courtesy of militant Islam.
There is no more proof needed for me that Britain has been shaken out of old assumptions and into a chilling new awareness than the taking-down of a suspected suicide bomber. Cold, efficient, and with five head-shots… and it seems to have been a tragic misunderstanding, but under the same circumstances, they’d do it again, so they say. After fifty-plus dead in subway trains and busses, two weeks ago, and maybe the same again but for an incompetent bomb-maker, I can’t say I blame British law enforcement in the least. Last night I listened to Robert Siegel on NPR, (who seems to have grown a pair and a spine, too) interview Lord Ahmed, the first British Moslem elevated to the House of Lords, and not only was Islam as a religion of peace not invoked, Siegel actually forcefully asked for an explanation of why blowing up a bus in London is terrorism and to be condemned, but that blowing up a bus of civilians in Tel Aviv or Baghdad is not. For the record, Lord Ahmed burbled something about it being different when F-16s are shooting at people, and there is no democracy— but six months ago, I don’t think the question would even have come up. Even NPR has been haddock-whacked and about damn time, too.
Nothing like having something blow up in your neighborhood— whether in Baghdad, Riyadh, or Sharm-el Sheik, as opposed to someone else’s, far, far away, to begin rethinking that whole concept of sticking it to the infidel at a safe distance. And so, I think we are very close to a tipping point, the grains of sand slowly beginning to slip downhill, the tentative beginnings of an avalanche. People are realizing the danger is here, now, to them, personally. They are moving quietly away from the abyss, even while the militant jihadis plunge headlong, little caring that they will be buried… and the world will move on.
(Do please add your own examples of haddock-whacks and tipping points.)
Later: Regular TDB reader Mike R., who is as he says “Out of the office fighting Indians”, emailed me this last night:
“Fighting Indians is going well. We had a big operation a
few weeks ago to take the city of Hit (the next in the chain
north of Fallujah and Ramadi). We went in very heavy,
expecting a bloodbath not unlike Fallujah, but instead not a
shot was fired. And now, instead of staying a few days and
leaving, we established two permanent bases in the city.
The terrorists have lost the city forever. Our pattern of
week long raids suckered them into not resisting us when we
came into this city, and now they’re blocked out.
Of course, that doesn’t mean they’re impotent. They still
attack with mortars and keep trying to plant IED’s, some of
which are effective, but mostly they’ve been inept.
Unfortunately, two more were killed by mortars. Our
battalion has been in the worst of the terrorist activity
since we’ve been here, we’ve had at least five times more
casualties than any other battalion in our regiment.
Now the terrorists only have a couple more cities that they
try to control, it’s not much longer for them now. In the
Euphrates River valley, only Hadithah and Haqlaniyah are not
completely pacified. The only ones remaining after them are
border towns, where we’ve had to be very “kinetic” in our
actions.
Even better is that we’ve got Iraqi battalions operating
with us now. I was very leery of them because the past few
years have been filled with one breathless description of
how “this time” the Iraqi military is going to actually
work, with only disaster and disappointment following.
However, it does appear that these new guys don’t loot as
much, don’t bugger each other as much, and aren’t
infiltrated by the enemy as much. I am truly hopeful now.”
I just received an e-mail from the West Coast office, which was closely associated with the office which I ran for my previous employer.
It seems that this Kristina Miller was the Kristina who answered the phones, or the e-mails, when ever I called with a matter to sort out between the two locations, until she moved to England to work for her father, last year.
Her boyfriend apparently loved to visit Egypt, and they had planned to travel on to Australia, later.
“…watch therefore, for ye know not the day nor the hour…”
This last week ended on an upbeat note— long sessions at two different agencies on Monday and Tuesday, filing out forms and testing on general knowledge and the more common computer programs. I should like to point out for the record that to the best of my memory, this is the first time since the 5th grade that I have been asked to subtract 5/21ths from 6/7ths. That was followed on Wednesday and Thursday with interviews— potential employers or their underlings. By now, I think I have visited practically every grand high-rise office building with a marble-paneled lobby on the North Side.
One firm is long-established, and only about a block away from the previous employer; I would be one of a number of mid-ranked support staff— no word about exactly what I would be paid, and I am not so crass or stupid to bring that up during an initial interview. (The temp firm that sent me knows very well what I am asking for, though.) Likely, I’d be called back for a second interview— the temp agent was positive I would make the cut.
The second interview was for an executive admin position with a start-up firm, and I met with the man who is starting up the company. He seemed quite frazzled, but enthusiastic, and went into a lot of detail about his plans, and asked very specific things about my experience, to the point where I was a little unsure about which position he was interviewing me for, exactly.
We drove over to look at the building where the office will be— another splendid pile of glass and marble. (Why do I like these palatial office piles so much? It’s probably the result of all those years laboring away in what the military provided: aging temporary buildings, Quonset huts and sagging frame structures held up with forty years of accumulated paint, conblock walls painted pale green, worn industrial linoleum on the floor, and ancient latrines that could be smelt halfway down the hall on a hot day, no matter what sort of cleaner/deodorant was poured into them.)
So, I got the good news on Friday afternoon from the temp counselor who had scheduled the second interview— the letter offering terms of employment will be written up this week. I am about 90% sure I will accept them— the salary is about what I wanted, the location is perfect— about fifteen minutes commute, and I would so much rather be on the ground floor of a startup, reporting to one person and having a say in sorting things out to my own preference… as opposed to having to fit in to a well-established routine and having to juggle the admin needs of a team of people. The first place may yet offer a lot more money… but the start-up draws me, like a moth to a flame. Even if it only lasts a couple of years, or four of five, it will still be an impressive notch on the ol’ resume. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll go back to the temp services, those who have the main line to providing high-end staff, and roll the employment dice again.
Lance Armstrong wins seventh Tour de France:
Stage 20 results
1. Alexandre Vinokourov (Kaz), T-Mobile
2. Bradley McGee (Aus), Francaise des Jeux, same time
3. Fabian Cancellara (Swi), Fassa Bortolo, s.t.
4. Robbie McEwen (Aus), Davitamon-Lotto, s.t.
5. Stuart O’Grady (Aus), Cofidis, s.t.
6. Allan Davis (Aus), Liberty Seguros, s.t.
7. Thor Hushovd (Nor), Credit Agricole, s.t.
8. Baden Cooke (Aus), Francaise des Jeux, s.t.
9. Bernhard Eisel (A), Francaise des Jeux, s.t.
10. Robert Förster (G), Gerolsteiner, s.t.Overall
1. Lance Armstrong (USA), Discovery Channel
2. Ivan Basso (I), CSC, at 4:40
3. Jan Ullrich (G), T-Mobile, at 6:21
4. Francisco Mancebo (Sp), Illes Balears, at 9:59
5. Alexandre Vinokourov (Kaz), T-Mobile, at 11:01
6. Levi Leipheimer (USA), Gerolsteiner, at 11:21
7. Mickael Rasmussen (Dk), Rabobank, at 11:33
8. Cadel Evans (Aus), Davitamon-Lotto, at 11:55
9. Floyd Landis (USA), Phonak, at 12:44
10. Oscar Pereiro Sio (Sp), Phonak, at 16:04
This from Rachel Lucas:
HOUSTON (AP) – Like a scene from the horror movie “The Birds,” large black grackles are swooping down on downtown Houston and attacking people’s heads, hair and backs.
Authorities closed off a sidewalk after the aggressive birds, which can have 2-foot wingspans, flew out of magnolia trees Monday in front of the County Administration Building.
“They were just going crazy,” said constable Wilbert Jue, who works at the building. “They were attacking everybody that walked by.”
The grackles zeroed in on a lawyer who shooed a bird away before he tripped and injured his face, Jue said. The lawyer was treated for several cuts.
It appears that the birds are protecting their offspring. On Monday a young grackle had fallen out of its nest and adult birds attacked people who got too close, Jue said.
Another bird attacked a deputy county clerk.
“I hit him with a bottle,” said Sylvia Velasquez. “The other birds came, and one attacked my blouse and on my back.”
Two women came to help her after she fell to the ground, and the birds attacked them as well. The group escaped by running into the building.
A little research on this phenomena indicates that blackbird infestation seems to be a problem all over the US, east of the Rockies. Here in California, we thankfully experience these loud, annoying birds only occasionally. But, when they move in, they seem to displace about every other bird in the area – save for the equally aggressive seagulls, and the hawks, which likely find them rather tasty.
I commented on this post over at Wizbang by Jay Tea earlier today and the thought has stuck with me all day and I think some more discussion is in order:
I think that the average high-school graduate of today is better educated than the men who founded this country and wrote our Constitution and are perfectly capable of grasping the ideas behind it without a lot of external interpretation.
Discuss.
Yesterday, our Secretary of State, Condolezza Rice, visited the nation of Sudan as part of her Africa tour. According to Fox News in this story, members of her entourage were roughed up, not once but several times, during a visit to the Sudanese President’s compound. This angered Ms. Rice, as it well should have, and I’m sure that Sudan will pay for this incident in many ways.
That whole African continent, for the most part, is ruled by thugs, criminals, and outright terrorists, not the sort of place that I want my tax dollars going. I would be much in favor of the US government doing a deep, healthy review of our giveaway policies. I’ve always favored holding onto our dollars until AMERICANS are fed, housed, and cared for. We seem to just give away money to anyone outside our own country with a hand outstretched, while we have homeless veterans, starving children whose single mothers have no education, no help, and no hope, as well as elderly folks who have to choose between food, medicine, or a roof over their heads! Come on, Mr. President, come on, congress! Let’s do something to help our own, and maybe then we can help those foreigners who want to share in our bounty. I have nothing at all against that kind of prioritization.
And we should squeeze extremely tightly on the nutz (if existant) of those idiots in Sudan who dared to insult our nation by putting their filthy hands on our SECSTATE’s staff and PA folks!
I really don’t know enough to make a qualified argument here, But, as I own the soapbox, let me make the initial assertion, and then yield such time as any qualified commentator might wish, to make their point:
Resolved: As evidenced by the mischief they have caused, the Archangels Gabriel and Satan are one-in-the-same.
Joe, as our resident lay-authority, I invite you to take the first stab.
In response to the almost off-the-cuff response of my readers/contributors to my previous movie trivia puzzles, I have decided that the best way to “kick it up a notch” is to invoke a “Six Degrees of Separation” format; while, albeit, tonight’s puzzle does not involve Donald Sutherland, Stockard Channing, Will Smith, or even Kevin Bacon. 🙂
So, first, a dip into the wading pool (especially for this readership): Correlate these two names: Harrison Ford, Raymond Loewy?
Oh, and like I said: This is but a wadding-pool gig. We are only at one, or perhaps two (depends upon where you draw the line) degrees of seperation.
The poor moth-eaten ghost of Joe McCarthy has gotten as much mileage in the op-eds of the wise in the last couple of years as zombie movies have in the multiplex these days. When in doubt, drag it out, shake it around and yell “Oooogah-booogah! Red-baiting! Black-list! It’s a new McCarthyism! Save the women and children! Oooooga-boogah!” It has always struck me as amusing, how the significance of McCarthy’s anti-communist campaign, the HUAC hearings and the whole Hollywood blacklist thing loomed over the chic intellectual set. In retrospect, it’s almost as if a child’s balloon magically expanded over time to the size of the Hindenburg. Popular memoirists and movies describe the whole period, as if Joe McCarthy was blotting out the sun, casting dark shadows over the land of the free, while everyone cowered behind the doors of their houses, afraid to speak above a whisper for fear of the dark, jackbooted minions of the (cue scary music here!) HUAC would break down the door and drag them away to an unspecified but horrible fate in some barbed-wire gulag.
Oddly enough, my parents who were in college at the time don’t remember anything of that kind. In fact, they remember Joe McCarthy being pungently described as a headline grabbing blow-hard politician and all-around scumbag who never managed to come within a country mile of a Russian spy, or keeping his stories straight. They remember him being denounced in no uncertain terms— everyone they knew had McCarthy’s number down to the third decimal place, recognized him for just another self-serving, glory-hunting pol, attaching himself like a remora to the issue of the moment. And, as we now know through the Venona transcripts, there was something, underneath all the popular hysteria; there had indeed been an assortment of Communists, fellow travelers and paid Stalinist stooges wandering at will over the home of the free and the land of the brave for decades.
Some of them were politically naïve and hopelessly gullible, the kind of people these days who respond to Nigerian spam, who believed (against every indication to the contrary) that Russia under Lenin and Stalin was the last, best hope for mankind, the shining light of the future, the brave new world. Others were genuinely anti-fascist, who had the misfortune to become politically aware during the hungry Thirties; revolted by the excesses of Italian and German fascism, they took refuge in the arms of what seemed like it’s political polar opposite, only to be brutally disillusioned by the brutal realpolitik of the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, and whiplashed once again by Stalin’s volte-face in 1941. Still others were indeed dedicated but conflicted Communists, cheering on the brave new Marxist world from the comfort and security of Brentwood or the Upper East Side, and seeking absolution and permission to lie about it in court.
McCarthy generated a great deal of headline noise, but not much useful light on the subject, aside from afflicting the comfortable Chablis socialist set. My parents’ contention that he was a paper tiger, expanded by bombast and hubris to a towering but fragile edifice is supported with the speed and thoroughness of his deflation and collapse… a collapse initiated by a single pin-prick of a question asked by a soft-spoken and gentlemanly lawyer, in front of a television camera. He was seen for what he really was, and in a remarkably short time, the cruel jest was that it wasn’t “McCarthyism” it should be “McCarthywasim”. But it surely must inflate the egos of those who ran afoul of him and the “red scare”, to paint McCarthy bigger, crueler and more dangerous in hindsight, to burnish their own heroism in opposition. The other thing that strikes me, besides the fragility of the McCarthy red-baiting machine, is the willful cluelessness of so many of the alleged “reds”, so in love with their fantasy of the perfect Marxist new world, they managed to entirely overlook the varied horrors of Stalin’s rule… the famines, the purges, the show trials, the gulags and all. Either that, or what is most reprehensible, they worked overtime to justify and excuse them, so in love with the fantasy were they.
In love with a seductive, rose-tinted glasses fantasy; not the first to do so, and lamentably, not the last to fall for the heroic vision of the brave freedom fighter, even to see oneself as one. But the subtle danger of fantasy is that it turns our eyes from the real, messy, grubby and corrupted as it might be in comparison; the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be. Our heroes and great ones ought to be—as the military cliché goes— ten feet tall and bulletproof, served up to us on the front page of the major media outlets, with a book and movie deal to follow after. And yet, in Iran there is a man, a writer and reporter, who is on a hunger strike— near death, it would seem— in defense of the freedom to think and communicate what he sees as the truth. Here is a person who values freedom of thought, freedom of communication, freedom of the press, so highly, he would give his life for it… and yet all the traditional defenders of the free press seem to look in the other direction.
We heard enough about the alleged targeting of journalists in Iraq by the American military; I have heard nothing about Akbar Ganji on NPR, nothing in my local paper. I wouldn’t know anything at all about Mr. Gangi if it weren’t for e-mail and the internet. A quick google search this Wednesday afternoon goes to three pages before listing a story about him in the major Western media sources. I can only assume that one set of stories favors the fantasy, the other doesn’t. But this is reality, not the lovely fantasy— and this reality matters. I have a computer, a blog, a collection of readers, and a facility with the written word— and the freedom to put my words out there, without fear or favor. Michael Moore, the staff of the Wall Street Journal— a million or two others, great and small also have that freedom, although most of us do not have the income to show for it. Like oxygen, we wouldn’t notice it, until it was not there— as the oxygen of a free press is not there for Akbar Gangi. We have heard a great deal in the last couple of years about freedom of the press. Let’s hear how much it matters for Akbar Gangi and the people of Iran… and everyone else who values freedom of the press and heroes in the real world.
Although, candidly, a hunger strike (and a strict program of excercise) would do Michael Moore no end of good.
(Links courtesy of Ron Wright and Instapundit)
at least we don’t have to hear or read the words SCOTUS Watch anymore…because really…it just sounds like something you don’t want your Mom catching you doing.
I was sort of sleeping through tonight’s rebuild on a ’68 Satellite convertible, until I saw the crate motor they were putting in – A FUCKING HEMI!
OH-YEAH BABY!
Dude – you idiot: I am currently watching tonight’s episode of Blow Out. And Jonathan Antin’s innocence has me sort of taken aback.
He’s just done his QVC bit, and talking to his “Jonathan Product” people, is wondering how they can be “sold out.” He’s wondering “why can’t we just make some more?”
Dude, it’s a fucking commodity product. Of course you could kick the plant up, and double production. But it’s all fucking hype. Why do you think Ferrari is not going to build any more 575 SuperAmericas, even though their whole production run is sold out?
Judging by her comment on my earlier post, this AP report from Brian Murphy should make reader Kayse quite happy:
BIRMINGHAM, England — Ten days after Islamic radicals carried out deadly attacks on the London transport system, Britain’s largest Sunni Muslim group condemned the bombings.
On Sunday, the group issued a binding religious edict, a fatwa, saying the July 7 suicide bombings were the work of a “perverted ideology.”
The Sunni Council denounced the bombings as anti-Islamic and said the Qur’an, the Muslim holy book, forbade suicide attacks.
“Who has given anyone the right to kill others? It is a sin. Anyone who commits suicide will be sent to Hell,” said Mufti Muhammad Gul Rehman Qadri, the council chairman.
Well, as far as the continuing search for a means of affording luxury goods such as books and DVDs from Amazon, a new central heating plant and repair and repainting of the house exterior goes, this weekend defiantly saw things looking a little rosier. A bidding war for the services of your humble and obedient correspondent may be shaping up. No less than three local temp services are in play. Two of them seem to have a sideline specialty in placing very high-end and experienced executive support staff. This is not a commodity for which there is a very broad market— rather like original Chippendale furniture, Revere silver and Renoir paintings— but when one does come onto the market, those few who have the yearning need and the lucre are most desperately keen to acquire, assuming they are informed of the availability. As the staffing counselor at the first agency remarked,
“He’s terribly busy, but you’d be perfect… I am trying to get an interview set up before someone else hires you away.”
That’s a boost to the ego, anyhow you slice it. I have an interview on Thursday afternoon… I will go past the bank afterwards and deposit the paycheck from the previous employer. The fact that I closed out that office halfway through June, and yet my salary will be paid (although at a slightly diminished rate) until the end of August may be the strongest affirmation of my value, over and above said previous employer’s affirmation that I am worth my weight in gold, and my ability to find old files and seek out obscure information approaches black magic. The second agency called me in last Thursday; the senior counselor wanted me to re-write my resume, and do some re-training on various commonly used office software programs. I re-wrote on Friday, and spent this morning at their local office, running through the refresher courses, familiarizing myself with the newest versions and re-testing. Up to par after four hours in front of a computer, in a chair not nearly as comfortable as the one I had at the previous place (why didn’t I snag the chair, that last day— I could have, the boss let me take my computer!), with a slight stress headache— the senior counselor wished to put my re-written resume before a large manufacturing concern which has— with a great deal of pomp and ceremony—consented to open an operating location in San Antonio. (No, I am not going to name the company, but anyone who has followed local business news will be able to guess at it.) A position as an executive assistant/secretary would be a breathtaking leap, about as high as I would be able to go, in this sort of thing, locally. A bitch of a commute… but a hell of an opportunity… and the employee discount would be absolutely awesome.
The third agency is having me come in tomorrow, to test for computer skills, all over again. They have me in mind for a position at a local accounting firm, supporting a number of senior executives and coordinating the other staff… but of course, they want some test scores, first. (Never mind that the skills you need for this sort of thing— the ability to accurately judge people and situations, comfort in exercising authority, an encyclopedic memory and a facility with making logical connections, and the trust of those you work for— there is no real test for that kind of thing, only the hard experience.)
I would like so much to have the freedom to choose thoughtfully among available options, to be able to think about which position would be the one which would be the best match for my skills, interests and needs. More than anything else, I don’t want to have to feel rushed into accepting the first position offered, just because the bills need to be paid, and the cats’ dishes must be filled with high-quality kibble. It strikes me now, that may be the rarest freedom of all, to honestly be able to chose for whom you will work, and what are the terms of your employment.
I do need to get to work, though. The house is very clean… and I am hanging around in the neighborhood altogether too much.
They don’t want our voices, they want their own. This from Jean-Claude Shande Tonme in the NYTimes:
We Africans know what the problem is, and no one else should speak in our name. Africa has men of letters and science, great thinkers and stifled geniuses who at the risk of torture rise up to declare the truth and demand liberty.
Don’t insult Africa, this continent so rich yet so badly led. Instead, insult its leaders, who have ruined everything. Our anger is all the greater because despite all the presidents for life, despite all the evidence of genocide, we didn’t hear anyone at Live 8 raise a cry for democracy in Africa.
Don’t the organizers of the concerts realize that Africa lives under the oppression of rulers like Yoweri Museveni (who just eliminated term limits in Uganda so he can be president indefinitely) and Omar Bongo (who has become immensely rich in his three decades of running Gabon)? Don’t they know what is happening in Cameroon, Chad, Togo and the Central African Republic? Don’t they understand that fighting poverty is fruitless if dictatorships remain in place?
Even more puzzling is why Youssou N’Dour and other Africans participated in this charade. Like us, they can’t help but know that Africa’s real problem is the lack of freedom of expression, the usurpation of power, the brutal oppression.
Neither debt relief nor huge amounts of food aid nor an invasion of experts will change anything. Those will merely prop up the continent’s dictators. It’s up to each nation to liberate itself and to help itself. When there is a problem in the United States, in Britain, in France, the citizens vote to change their leaders. And those times when it wasn’t possible to freely vote to change those leaders, the people revolted.
Summer heat is at its’ worst in July and August, in Texas now as it was in Southern California when I was growing up, sequentially domiciled in the White Cottage, Redwood House, and Hilltop House. The summer heat seems much more merciless in Texas, even if it is broken on occasion— like it was Friday afternoon, by a thunderstorm blowing in— a violent wind lashing the tree branches, a blinding grey veil of falling water, the garden momentarily flooded, and the street running ankle-deep— everything momentarily cool and damp. This weekend, it will be humid, the mosquitoes encouraged no end; everywhere on the highways and byways Friday afternoon were reports of auto accidents. It has been nearly a month since the last good drenching, so the asphalt roadways have acquired a slick of oil, mixed with water, floating above the surface— to the great detriment of anyone trying to brake suddenly. But the rain cooled things down, even if only for a few hours, and I am grateful for not having to run the sprinklers. The garden was starting to look a bit limp and droopy— this storm perked up the plants enormously for the next couple of days. And the dry asphalt street and concrete sidewalks suddenly developed that curious indescribable smell, compounded from bone-dry surfaces suddenly wetted.
It’s as evocative as the feel of it, walking barefoot on the black asphalt in the late mornings, crossing the street to get my mail out of the community mailbox drop. The concrete sidewalk is comparatively cool, especially in the shade of the trash trees, my neighbors’ green lawns are also comfortable to the feet— although they are getting a bit dry and crunchy— but the street itself? This might be another meaning to the phrase “hot-foot”: Ooohh! Eeegh! Owww! Eeek! The soles of my feet are not as tough as they were when I was eight or nine, and going barefoot throughout the summer; I scamper across the street, unlock the mailbox and scamper back. It is as painful as it was, those summers when we went to swim in various pools, since Mom was convinced that flip-flops were bad for our feet. But perhaps it made the coolness of the water, all the more refreshing, all the more rewarding.
There were only a few places for natural fresh-water recreation when we were growing up— hardly any lakes, and the braided streams in Big Tujunga Wash were usually only at best knee-deep: no quarries full of ice-cold water, and snapping turtles, no muddy swimming-hole. An airline flight, on low approach towards any city in the southwest reveals where Pippy, JP and I explored the joys aquatic; the hundreds of translucent turquoise swimming pools, rectangular, square or bean-shaped cut gems, set into the green or tawny background of suburbia. Those children of one or two households in any given neighborhood who had a pool were guaranteed popularity everlasting, especially in the summertime— it was either that, or going to the public pool, which however well-chlorined, was always slightly suspect. And besides that, was full of eagle-eyed life-guards bellowing “Stop running!” “Stop fighting!” “Stop cannon-balling off the side!”
It was not like that, up the hill from Redwood House, at Waynes’. Possibly there were other households with pools nearby, but Wayne was JPs’ friend, so JP and I were there frequently. Mom didn’t let us go nearly as often as we wished, not wanting to impose on Wayne’s parents, but it truth, his parents hardly ever seemed to be present. We never went into the house, and in fact I have no recollection of ever seeing the inside, or his parents at all. The outside was fascinating enough, a hillside of pasture and a couple of horses, and a huge mulberry tree… and of course, the pool. Wayne seemed to live a sort of Pippi Longstocking existence, coming and going as he pleased. Although I am sure he went to school, he certainly didn’t have the extra lessons that we did… including swimming lessons.
We had learned to paddle, after a fashion, by floundering around in the shallow end of various pools, before Mom decided that lessons were in order. Several times a week, over several summers, we were loaded into the Plymouth and ferried to a large house in La Canada, which boasted a near-Olympic sized pool. Two women, mother and daughter, both of whom had been on the American Olympic swim teams in their respective younger days, briskly drilled an assortment of small and not so small children in necessary water skills. They were kindly but exacting teachers, not well disposed towards inattention or disobedience. Pippy, nervous in the deep end but a fair swimmer for all that, stubbornly refused to swim out of reach of the pool side. They patiently tried to talk her out of that bad habit, but she still refused to swim out into the middle. Finally, one of them picked her up bodily, slung her into the middle of the pool… and when she swam back to the side, howling, the instructor plucked her out of the water… and slung her into the middle again. I was at the other extreme; I didn’t want to admit I wasn’t up to something— like treading water.
On the very first day, we were directed to go off the diving board, come up, tread water for a minute and then swim to the side. I had never done that before, but didn’t want to admit it in front of all the other kids, and a teacher who went off the diving board and into the water with barely a teacup of disturbance in the water, which closed with a tiny splash and a schooping sound over her toes. It looked easy enough! I went out on the diving-board and went in, came up to the surface all right, and tried to do what the kids before me had done. I think it was the senior instructor— she must have been a little short of my grandmothers’ ages, who jumped in and swam me over to the poolside before I went down, gasping and choking for the third time. Sensible and practical woman, she didn’t let me out of the water. As soon as I finished gasping and spitting out faintly chlorine-tasting pool water, I got a hasty lesson in treading water, and rejoined the rest of the intermediate class. It was indeed easy enough, to make your body into a straight arrow, from fingertips to toes, as the Olympian woman coached us over the next couple of summers, to hit the water in a clean and focused movement, with only the tiniest of splashes, moving down into this strange cool element of water.
This was our refuge, in blistering dry heat, to stand on the diving board, and look down at the cool, embracing water, and taking a deep breath before diving in.
Tell you what, nothing except being stuck in an abusive relationship will do quite such a demolition job on your ego and self-respect as the hunt for gainful employment does. The day or two after sending out a round of resumes (Email, fax and snail-mail) to a crop of twelve or fifteen promising potential employers— all interesting-looking, all offering the right sort of compensation, all within your capabilities and experience— and being met with vast indifference… that is the worst. Here you have distilled your experience, your talents, the inestimable value and enthusiasm you could bring to any employer, poured it all out on a single sheet of paper… and the phone doesn’t ring, except that it is some dumbass trying to sell you satellite TV service, and there is nothing in the email inbox but some Nigerian dirtbag trying to arrange a money transfer… oh, and a message from an HR weenie who can’t figure out how to open a WP doc attachment— your resume! The working world, apparently, can get along just fine without you, and the reminder stings.
But there are lumps of cynical amusement to be mined out of the clay of the want-ads (both on-line, and dead-tree), although of late the SA Express News seems to have wised up about those deliberately vague little ads which promised all sorts of goodies but never saying what it was that prospective employees would be actually working at. Or even the name of the company. (Nine out of ten it’s A***y, people, A***y. They won’t say so up front, but it’s A***y or some other pyramid sales scheme which has you flogging crap to your family and friends, or what you’ll have left of them after turning every social occasion into a sales pitch. Beware, my children, of any place that has group interviews that start with a video… flee, flee, the moment it becomes clear! Plug your ears, and flee!)
This week’s potential employer giggle was afforded by a certain local institute of higher learning, which advertised for an administrative assistant for an academic department head. Eh, it looked interesting, and in the neighborhood of what I am looking for. They have the job description posted online. Oh, my; a page and a half worth of expectations and duties, everything but actually teaching a class of freshmen, handing tissues to the department chairman in the restroom, and making homemade jam for faculty teas. Everything else was there, though, all for the salary of a little over $9.00 an hour. Nothing like expecting Cadillac Escalade service for the price of a Geo Metro— I think the job has been open for a bit, cannot imagine why. Maybe they have a hell of a benefits package, one hopes so for the department chairman’s sake.
My last job hunt was a desultory affair— I scanned the want-ads for a year, and noticed that there was a revolving door at certain employers; either it was a sucky place to work, or they had a monster in the cellar that they were throwing human sacrifices to. Oddly enough, the local public TV station is one of those which constantly replaced employees— in contrast to public radio, which people only leave when they die, or their spouse is transferred out of town, (I work there, I know. Public radio and public TV have nothing to do with each other, actually but some of the regular staff cross over, on occasion. And it is a small town.)
At the urging of Robin, at Ranting n Raven, I did drive over to fill out an application at a commercial radio station, which wanted an administrative assistant/receptionist. The offices were at the top of a 12-storey building, with a view— only about the third radio station I have ever been in, which had a view. I went up in the elevator with one of the announcers— believe me, I can pick out a radio voice— who showed me there the office was… it was the one with about fifteen other women in the waiting room, all filling out forms. I should have sucked up a little more—I didn’t get the job, but I am not sure they could have afforded me, anyway. Basically, what commercial radio wants, is someone just out of a broadcasting school, who will work for minimum wage just for the éclat of working at a real radio station… and has boundless ambition, maybe a modicum of talent and tits out to here, although that last usually doesn’t apply to the guys. Me, I’ll take the money. (Besides I already work at a radio station, mostly out of sentiment, and a desire to keep my skills fresh. They can’t afford me, either, strictly speaking.)
So, on Monday, I had an e-mail complimenting me on my “impressive” resume, and thanking me for my interest, but that potential employee has already focused on several other people whose qualifications more nearly suit their needs Well, fair enough… at least I can be assured they got the damned resume but it’s a hell of a way to start off the week. Things might be looking up a little, though: I am on the books at a couple of temp services that do the more high-end, executive staff placement, and one of them had me come over to their office this morning and do a couple of tests that the employer likes to spring on all potential staff hires… and tomorrow I have an interview and form-filling session at another. They both think they have something that will suit. We shall see.
When the catalogue music place was closing, one of the other ladies and I derived a great deal of merriment from what we both claimed would be our last, desperate bottom-of-the barrel employment option. The phone-sex line operators were running advertisements offering a salary of $10.00 and benefits…Better than a university is offering these days, for an admin assistant to a department chair. We were handicapped, though, by our inability to talk dirty without breaking out in giggles.
The special room created for this Fred Astaire classic was later employed in a video by Lionel Richie.
There may be intelligent life in the universe, but if they landed at the multiplex this week, chances are they saw what was playing, barfed and departed in disgust. They, like me, can probably wait until the current collection comes out on DVD… and goes on special, marked down 50%. Even at that, the movie makers may go on waiting for my entertainment dollar. Looking at the cinematic joys on the schedule now and in the near future makes for depressing reading. Movie versions of comic books. Remakes of old and not so old movies. Movie versions of old television shows. Bloated special effects extravaganzas, by auteurs whose own self-importance is nearly as bloated as their production. Historical melodramas, whose actual fidelity to history is merely coincidental, of the sort that my mother used to describe as an “Urp-ic”…. Frankly, it’s all enough to make me barf as well. The last movie I went to see in a theater was “Phantom of the Opera” and only because Blondie dragged me, kicking and screaming; the one before that was “Return of the King”. Since then, it’s been all downhill, or at least, me looking at the movie reviews and schedules and thinking, “Bleah…I have better things to do… like wash my hair…brush the cats… haul mulch to the back yard… experiment with do- it-yourself-root-canal surgery.”
I shouldn’t have to tell you how sad and pathetic this is for our once-vaunted American movie industry, which still bestrides the world like a colossus, but is doing somewhat less well in American markets. Nearly fifteen years ago, my daughter and I rotated home from a decade spent in Europe, and counted one of the blessings of coming back to our home country, (along with having a telephone AND a washing machine in our house!) that of being able to go see a movie… the very day that it opened! To go and see a movie, ten hours after I read the review of it in the newspaper, instead of waiting six months until it appeared on the AAFES circuit for a couple of showings! Bliss was it to be alive in those days, to hit the multiplex in Layton for a weekend matinee, with a ten-dollar bill and a couple of supermarket candy bars tucked into my purse. (What, you think I am made of money, I want to pay the markup at the theater? Do I look like an idiot??!!) We loved going to the movies, I even had subscriptions to Premiere, and to Entertainment Weekly.
And then it just began to seem like all the fun of it, all the joy and anticipation just drained away, as if the plug on a lovely pristine pond full of goldfish and bordered by rushes and banks grown with violets all drained away, and there was nothing left but a baking mud flat, a couple of carp skeletons and a desiccated fringe of dead shrubbery. Going to a movie began to seem like a grim chore, a duty, something you had to do. There is a word for something you have to do, it’s called work. (Line stolen from someone else, not my own) Nothing much I read about movies lately, nothing much about the current crop induces me to spend two hours and the first run ticket price…it’s all too damn much like a grim duty and obligation.
I don’t want to see explosions and buildings collapsing— I’ve sort of been off that kind of thing since 9/11— I want to see sparkling conversation, not brief and easily translated sarcastic remarks filling in the short interim between explosions and buildings collapsing. I want to see stories about people, interesting, or admirable people, or at least people I wouldn’t mind knowing. (Sgt. Mom’s criteria for characters: “If you wouldn’t want to spend fifteen minutes with them stuck in an elevator, in real life… why the hell do you want to spend two hours and change stuck with them in a movie theater!???”) I don’t much care for graphic violence (emotional or the other kind) , torture, or spurting arteries, and no, I don’t much care for it in slow-mo or artistically choreographed, either. And I don’t care for car chases as a substitute for intelligent (or coherent plotting), and if that makes me the Little Mary Sunshine… well, I have been withholding my movie-jones dollar for a couple of years now, and it looks like a lot of other people are as well.
Is there a quiet, unfocused and non-centralized boycott in effect? Over a decade ago, Michael Medved outlined some of the discontents attendant on the contemporary movie industry—disrespect to religious values, to conventional families, to communities in fly-over-country, willful disregard, in other words, of every conventional standard in values and tastes. He detected a slump in movie attendance then, a slump that bears a resemblance to an avalanche in recent months.
All I can say is… thanks for catalogues of VHS and DVD movies and television shows— if it weren’t for the old stuff available to watch at home, I’d not have anything to watch at all.
(Discuss amongst yourselves)
The major media is portraying the suspicions, that the London 7/7 attacks were suicide bombings, as something rather ominous, I see it quite differently: this is further evidence that we are winning. This is somewhat like Patton rolling into the Ardennes, and, seeing the horse-drawn wagon tracks, knew the Nazis were on their last legs. We must differentiate these attacks from America at 9/11/01, or Madrid, 11/03/04. We will see that these attacks are getting not simply less sophisticated. but also more desperate.
This is an enemy on its last legs.
This last Friday, at the workforce commission office, I asked the veteran’s counselor for an honest answer: “What does veteran status, really, really get you, as a potential employee?”
To which he replied,
“You get a preference with the state or the federal government. Other than that, all it means, is you get to see a counselor ahead of all those people out there.”
Which kind of confirmed the impression I already had, from my last three or four adventures in job-hunting— that all those glossy, uplifting TV spots we used to air on AFRTS about employers looking on us veterans with special favor— are pretty much a crock. Unless the business is owned by a veteran, or there are enough other veterans already employed to tilt corporate perceptions favorably, you are pretty much judged on the strength— or lack of it— on your resume. I only ever walked into one job, and was hired on the spot because of status as a veteran— and that job was a once-a-week gig, walking around the neighborhood next to mine, putting a local give-away newspaper on the front stoop of every house. Good exercise, but paid f**k-all. It was one of the four simultaneous part-time jobs that I held down just after retiring: the other three included up-scale retail sales, fill-in shifts at local public radio, and entering catalog data for company that sold classical music CDs. I also had some voice-over jobs; one day I walked into my bank with five paychecks, and the teller looked at me and said, “Lady, is there a place in this town where you don’t work?”
The catalogue job was the mainstay; fairly well paying, and the bennies included the pick of freebie CD releases brought around regularly by the distributors, but it didn’t last long enough to be included on my resume. The owners relocated, out of state and took only the office manager with them— all the rest of us readjusted our priorities in about fifteen minutes flat. The office manager lamented that the only reason we all seemed to show up was to use the fax machine to send out resumes, and our breaks and lunch hours to do interviews.
It took three weeks for me to find something else, but I wound up hating that job, the owner of the company, the working conditions, the owner of the company, my cubicle, the working conditions, the irregularity of bonuses, the owner of the company, the way I left every evening at five PM with a stress headache… oh, and I hated the owner of the company. Very little in life so far has given me the equal of the pleasure of giving my notice to him. I should have done so before and often…he was most marvelously civil to me for the last week. A year later I had to contact them again, regarding an IRA they had set up for employees… I discovered that in the space of a year I had been replaced three times over. (I had lasted two and a half years, the last year of it plotting my escape, like a prisoner in Colditz.)
That escape brought me to the job that has— like the catalogue job— just quit me. It is now just about history, although my salary is generously paid (and with luck, the checks will not bounce!) to the end of August. The office doors closed in the middle of June, and I went to working from home on getting the last bits of work done for clients. There are only two of them left with uncompleted work. I am waiting for them to do their part— when they finally come across with it, it will just be a bit of computer time, an-email to the printer, and a quick meeting at the management office which is very kindly letting me use their conference room for this purpose. My focus in the last two or three weeks has turned to my next bit of gainful employment which I pray will be… remunerative, interesting, and a twenty-minute commute away. (Thirty minutes, tops) Congenial surroundings, sensible bosses and co-workers who are not barking-at-the-moon nuts would be nice. Internet access would also be nice, but not essential.
This has been a very discouraging week. I had three very pleasant interviews late in June: one of which was for a job I would have liked very much; it was for a nice, up-and-coming enterprise newly come to San Antonio, which offered a good salary and benefits… alas, as it turns out, the company is transferring in one of their current employees for that position. This happens a lot, in San Antonio; it’s almost axiomatic that any really nice, plum jobs probably won’t go out locally. Having a story about the company, their new facility and their ambitious plans for the local market published on Friday in the local paper did not make me feel much better about it all. Thanks for the salt and the assurance to keep the resume on file. I had a file of old resumes in my desk at the old job. We never had call to look at them again, and they went into the big rolling canvas trash bin three weeks ago.
The second interview was… well, I liked the look of the place, and I would have enjoyed the work— I think!— but I didn’t feel good about how far out in the country it was. Given any sort of choice, I would have turned it down, regretfully, but they beat me to that. There are parties you don’t mind dumping, but you really feel offended at being dumped by…They sent me a letter thanking me for my trouble, but they were hiring someone else. They would, however, keep my resume on file. The third interview was a temp service, they think they can place me someplace; they’ll call me when they can set up an interview.
The only call I got last week, aside from strictly personal, was some asshole wanting to sell me a TV satellite service, and no, I am not in a very good mood, even if my salary is paid until the end of August, and I have spent three hours— like I have for the last couple of Sundays— answering various newspaper and on-line want-ads and filling out an assortment of on-line applications.