Tragedy and Memory

It's hard to find anything to say about the horrific events at Virginia Tech. As information comes out, it's looking like one of the hardest things for the families to cope with is that it seems nobody - except the killer - really did anything wrong. And when something this horrible happens, it's natural to not only want to find out who's to blame, but to punish someone for what happened. And the killer has placed himself beyond our reach.

It's been asked why they didn't shut down the campus after the initial shootings. Well, anyone who watches Court TV can tell you that in the case the cops first saw - two dead, a young woman who could have been the target and a young man who just got in the way - the first thing you ask is, Did she have a boyfriend? Her roommate told cops she did, a student at a neighboring college. Not only that, he was a gun owner. They'd all gone to a shooting range recently.

Of course they had to follow that up at once, as the most likely situation was that a fight with her boyfriend had gone horribly wrong. 99 times out of a hundred, they'd be right; the boyfriend / girlfriend / spouse / lover is always the most likely suspect. Within two hours they had actually found the boyfriend and were interviewing him, with every possible reason to believe the situation had been stabilized. Then the reports of carnage started coming in from Norris Hall. It's just a horrible coincidence that one of the few times correct police procedure led in the wrong direction it was the day a guy filled with deranged fury decided to take as many people with him as possible.

This is enough to make anyone shocked and upset, but for me it's done more; it's dredged up terribly painful memories from ten years ago. On December 1 of last year the Times-Picayune ran this article:

On a Sunday morning in December 1996, 10 years ago today, a former employee still bitter about getting fired and two accomplices -- one who had gotten a job as a dishwasher only 10 days earlier -- conned their way into the Louisiana Pizza Kitchen Restaurant near the French Market before opening time. Armed with a .357-caliber Magnum and makeshift potato silencer, they took money from a safe before fatally shooting a manager and two employees as they kneeled in a walk-in cooler.

Dying in the cooler that morning were manager Cara LoPiccolo, 28, and waiters Santana Meaux, 25, and Michael Witcoskie, 24.

I knew all three of them. I was working at the Old U.S. Mint, and my office opened directly onto a courtyard facing the Pizza Kitchen across the street. I was a lunchtime regular and knew all their faces, though not their names until the horrible morning I saw their pictures in the paper. They knew me too. Regulars mean a little bit more to restaurants in a high traffic tourist area. With all the hordes that pass through, familiar faces are nice to see.

It was incredibly difficult to get through that December. The entire French Quarter community was shocked, as a hit on a business like this was unheard of. The restaurant was closed, of course, and people immediately began coming to lay flowers and messages of sorrow against its walls. This became a sort of shrine to the fallen, which just grew and grew until it took up most of the block, not just flowers but mementos, pictures, statues of saints, candles tended around the clock. This made it harder for me, because I just couldn't get away from it. I couldn't put it out of my mind as I had to walk past it every day. Others who worked at the Mint, and who had also known the victims, could at least get to their offices by entering at the other side of the building. I couldn't.

I obsessed about it. I couldn't stop myself from going out several times a day to stare at the shrine, see what had changed. I think I actually became a bit unbalanced for a bit, to the extent that some of my co-workers were starting to worry about me. One Security officer, a good guy named Shelby, came by several times to talk to me, make sure I wasn't coming too unglued. I eventually did see a psychologist for a while, and he helped me find a way to memorialize them in my own way, put them to rest.

After a month or so the shrine was quietly taken down, and some months later the Pizza Kitchen reopened under new ownership. I eventually went back to being a regular, but it was never the same.

I haven't thought much about this for years, but Virginia Tech brought it all roaring back with a vengeance. For a while I was obsessing about it almost as much as I was about that shrine, watching TV for hours and scouring the web. I am getting over it. But I feel so keenly for all those kids, not just the ones who died, but the ones who will carry the scars of this forever. I think I know the feeling, at least a little bit.

Oh, and about the Pizza Kitchen killers:

A fourth victim was shot in the neck but survived. Damien Vincent, 34, played dead, then later crawled to a phone and called police. He was able to identify one of the suspects. Within 12 hours, all three of the attackers were captured.

The triggerman is on death row, and the other two will likely never get out of prison. That's something.

What A Horse!

Dressage is something we don't know enough about in the US, though it's been an Olympic sport since 1912. It is the training of a horse and rider for show performance to the highest possible level, emphasizing athleticism, precision, style, grace, and the horse's sheer love of showing off. So, from the 2006 World Equestrian Games in Aachen, here is Blue Hors Matine and her -- I won't say rider, I'll say partner -- Andreas Helgstrand in the Grand Prix Freestyle finals.

Dressage is sometimes called horse ballet. But I never thought I'd see a horse dancing disco. Enjoy.



[h/t Andrew Sullivan]

The Coming Hydrogen Economy

Ain't gonna happen.

Here's a fascinating article by engineer Robert Zubrin from the journal The New Atlantis that explains in detail why the vision of cheap, efficient, clean hydrogen-driven cars humming down our highways is a pipe dream at best, a hoax and swindle at worst. And, as Zubrin says, "Incredibly, the Bush administration swallowed it, hook, line, and sinker."

The crux of the matter is that while hydrogen can be used as a fuel, it is not an energy source like petroleum. Burning petroleum returns so much more energy than it takes to extract that it's basically free energy. Technically I suppose oil could be seen as millions of years of sunlight from eons past stored in the earth for us to find, and in chemistry the energy scales always balance. But on any human scale it's just free energy waiting for us to find it.

But there's no natural source of pure hydrogen on earth. It has to made, and any known process consumes much more energy than you get back when you use it as fuel. So it's hopelessly wasteful compared to oil in energy terms, and then there's the practical problem of distribution. Hydrogen is dangerous stuff, as some zeppelin passengers found out in 1937. Accordingly, the economics of any conceivable hydrogen fuel system quickly becomes ludicrous. Would you want to pay $1,000,000 for an inefficient car that was likely to go up like the Hindenburg at the first fender-bender?

We do desperately need to find a solution to our energy problem. But hydrogen isn't it.

Rachmaninoff = Big Hands

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the concert hall . . .

Scenes from New Orleans

Broadmoor is a residential area in the heart of New Orleans, just a few miles up Napoleon Ave from where I live. It's one of the lowest lying areas of the city, so it was very severely flooded after Katrina struck and the levees failed. The residents are fiercely loyal to their neighborhood, though, and are absolutely determined to recover. "Broadmoor Lives!!" is a sign you see all over.

The predominant style of architecture is not what most think of as "classic New Orleans." Broadmoor was developed mainly in the 1920s, and most houses were built in the Bungalow style, which originated in California around 1910 and became widely popular throughout the country. The Bungalow style emphasized simplicity and comfort, houses that were easy to live in, and was well suited to mild climates like Los Angeles or New Orleans. (The house I grew up in, in Berkeley, CA, was classic Bungalow.)

The original developers were not unmindful of the flooding threat, however, and raised Bungalow houses were common, with a half-floor giving an extra two or three feet of elevation above street level. Since Katrina, some homeowners have taken the "raised" aspect to new heights, determined, like this fellow, that their homes will never, ever flood again:


(As always, you can click on the photo for a better view.) A typical Bungalow house is fairly modest in size, but this one is substantial and clearly worth going to great lengths to save. The bottom of the exterior, where the light colored stucco breaks off, would have been sitting directly on the ground, originally; it's now about twelve feet off the ground. The blue front door probably had three or four steps leading up to it; now it will probably have about fifteen. This example of drastic raising is pretty dramatic, but it's not the only one I've seen, far from it. It's quite a project. You have to cut all the utilities, separate the house from its foundation, and jack it up inch by inch, adding structures of wood pilings to hold it up. Then, with the house hovering over your head, you pour a new foundation and whatever support pillars are needed, eventually removing the pilings very carefully! Finally you build new access stairs, reconnect the utilities, enclose the lower area, and stucco it to match the original.

It's a huge job, but you can be very sure that this house will never flood again.

To illustrate the scale of the task, note this guy working near the front corner pilings:

How The Other Six-Billionth Lives

On a lighter note, it's amazing what you can learn from listening to podcasts. NPR has a weekly satirical news quiz show called Wait, Wait ... Don't Tell Me. It's worth listening to, and pretty funny. I've been catching up on previous shows, and one revealed this story.

Roland Mesnier, who was pastry chef at the White House for 25 years, retired and published his memoirs, All The Presidents' Pastries. (I'm not responsible for that, I just report.) The book tells this story. In the 80's, Prince Charles came to the US on an official visit and called on President Reagan, who received him in the Oval Office where tea was served. Specifically, a fine porcelain teacup filled with steaming water and with a teabag next to it was set before the prince on the coffee table, as he and the President sat on the couch to talk.

After a while, Reagan noticed that Prince Charles had done nothing with what had been offered, and asked politely if there was a problem. The Prince said, "I'm sorry, I just didn't know what to do with that little bag."

Reflect on that. Prince Charles, about 40 years old at that time, had never seen a teabag before and had no idea what to do with it!

Man. By comparison, the silver-spoon Bush clan are raging populists.

What A Disgrace

You've heard of FEMA? The Federal Emergency Management Agency? Here in New Orleans that's a four-letter word, and nastier than most of the familiar ones. In a competition between the Army Corps of Engineers, which built the levees that failed, and FEMA, which couldn't deal with the resulting disaster, it's neck & neck which is despised most by Orleanians. Mardi Gras is tomorrow and the parades have been running for ten days, and the parade Krewes that feature political satire have been hitting those two hard.

But there's plenty of blame to go to the White House, as spelled out in this New York Times Editorial. FEMA's distribution of federal funds in response to a disaster is governed by the Stafford Act, which requires matching funds from states to get federal moneys. The basic standard is that the state supplies 25%, and the Feds supply the rest. This is reasonable, for ordinary problems, like localized flooding from a bad rainstorm.

When the damage gets worse the standards change, and the basis is the monetary loss per capita, the cost of the damage spread over every member of the state. When the amount goes over $110 per person in the state the state portion drops from 25% to 10%. And if the damage is really severe the federal government, at the direction of the White House, can waive the matching funds requirement entirely. Since 1985 this has been done 32 times, when per capita damage was high and especially when it was a high profile incident.

In 1992 Hurricane Andrew hit the US, first in Florida and then in Louisiana. While four people were killed in Louisiana when it arrived here, the worst damage by far was in Florida with massive property damage and about sixty deaths. The federal matching fund requirement was waived. The per capita damage amount for Floridians was $139.

The horrible terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon cost 3,000 lives, traumatized millions, and seared our minds forever. The physical damage in New York, though, was limited to a fairly confined area of lower Manhattan. But recognizing the magnitude of this disaster, the federal government again waived the matching fund requirement. The per capita damage amount for New York state residents was $390.

The Katrina disaster zone, augmented by Hurricane Rita's, is orders of magnitude beyond these. The flood damage zone just within the city limits of New Orleans is nearly eight times as large as all of Manhattan Island. The actual damage zone extends over much of two states. Thousands of people have died, and hundreds of thousands were forced from their homes, many never to return.

One bitter fact is that the true death toll will never be counted, and not just because of the bodies that were swept away in the storm. We here all know stories of those who managed to evacuate out of state to safety but simply could not rally. These often were people ill and elderly, ripped from their homes, sometimes the only home they had known, with no hope of going back. Many simply gave up and died, and I count in this group a very dear friend of mine whom I will always miss. But since these people did not die in Louisiana they will not be counted as victims of the storm, though we here all know that they were.

So in the face of all this what has been the federal policy? Have they waived the matching funds requirement, to help us out like they did Florida and New York?

They have not. The per person damage cost here is not $139, as it was in Florida after Hurricane Andrew. It is not $390, as it was in New York after 9/11.

It has been estimated at $6,700 per person in Louisiana. And they will not give us a waiver.

Imagine that.

Now this is cool

There is an extraordinary thing called Project Gutenberg. It is an amazing, huge, non-profit project which aims to put as much of the world library on line, in searchable form, as possible. Here's what they say about their origins:

In 1971, Michael Hart was given $100,000,000 worth of computer time on a mainframe of the era. Trying to figure out how to put these very expensive hours to good use, he envisaged a time when there would be millions of connected computers, and typed in the Declaration of Independence (all in upper case--there was no lower case available!). His idea was that everybody who had access to a computer could have a copy of the text. Now, 31 years later, his copy of the Declaration of Independence (with lower-case added!) is still available to everyone on the Internet.

Hart essentially invented the e-book at that time, long before anyone but defense researchers at DARPA had heard of the Internet. As of now, they have about 20,000 books online, available to all, totally free. They range from ancient classics to history to Sherlock Holmes to early 20th century writings. The only requirement is that they be public domain. They have online writings in Chinese, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Tagalog. That's just the major languages, with more than 50 titles each. The minor ones include writings in Afrikaans, Catalan, Frisian, Mayan, Napoletano-Calabrese, Romanian, Sanskrit, and Welsh, to name but a few.

They take the best available copy of each title and scan it. They also work with Google, which is engaged on a similar and highly publicized project, that of scanning the total contents of many major libraries, and making at least a sample of them available online. By sticking to public domain materials, Project Gutenberg is avoiding the nasty copyright fights that Google is already getting drawn into. I'm afraid the re-thinking and re-definition of copyright is going to be THE biggest and nastiest issue of the developing online information world.

Anyway. This original scan really just produces a photo of each source page, which is not machine readable, not searchable, meaning search engines like Google can't find the data in them. So they use the best Optical Character Recognition software available and have it make a transcript, one that can be edited like an ordinary text file, and can be accessed and indexed by search engines. But even the best OCR software is not perfect, especially when dealing with odd typescripts or old microfilm. Its output has to be reviewed by an intelligent mind that can recognize letters obscured by smudges and piece things together from context.

That's where we come in.

There is an affiliated project, called Distributed Proofreaders. It's a clearinghouse for volunteer proofreaders who want to help Project Gutenberg prepare texts for final release on the Web, and I'm helping them out. Every text goes through several stages. First is basic proofreading, which is all I've done so far. A split screen shows you the image of the original scan and the best OCR transcription. You compare them, and correct the transcript. Once you've got it done as best you can, you click a button, the page is saved and sent onto the next stage, and they send you another page. There are later stages of further proofreading, then formatting, and eventually HTML versions are created for the Net.

I just LOVE this. It's not just a service to civilization, by my standards, but it's a hell of a lot of fun. It's similar to the pleasure I took at dealing first hand with collections materials at the museum. It's so cool to know I may be the first person in over a hundred years to really read this stuff. Things like:

• A literary and social journal published in London around 1838, containing a memoir of the legendary actor Edmund Kean playing Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, as well as a review of the latest from Mr. Thackeray. Also were some gossip notes from a young American lady visiting Paris. She wrote of her visit to an elderly exiled Polish prince and his young wife, who made exquisite embroidery and sold it at an annual bazaar to benefit other Polish exiles. She also wrote about visiting an archive where she examined plans of French fortified towns, including the one where Napoleon's nephew was imprisoned.
• An essay from a scientific journal of the 1880s, inquiring into the precise definition and determination of death, by exploring suspended animation, namely how close animals could be taken to true death and then revived. Remember that this was a major issue at a time when you you could not scan for brain activity to settle the matter, and many people were terrified of falling ill, becoming unconscious, being pronounced dead, and then buried, only to wake up imprisoned in a coffin to die of suffocation in terror. This was important.
  
• A collection of speeches by Bertie, the Prince of Wales, in the 1880s and 90s, before his mother Queen Victoria died and he became King Edward VII. A lot of routine speeches -- the anniversary dinner of the Royal Geographical Society, opening a hospital -- but intriguing at this distance in time, at least to me.
• An issue of Stars and Stripes, the US Army newspaper, published in France in 1918, during World War I. Lots of letters and articles complaining bitterly, and from experience, of the incompetence of the people who designed and manufactured the uniforms they had to wear and the weapons they had to fight with. Also ads about how to wire their wages back home to their families via Wells Fargo.
  

Is this cool or what? I'm having a ball doing this. It can be disjointed, it's not like reading a book or an article straight through. You get presented with pages out of sequence, due to other proofreaders working on the same project when you're offline. But when the final version is published on the Gutenberg Project, you can read it if you wish, straight through.

I think this is great fun, and a great thing to do for a civilization that needs all the help it can get. And if I were offering advice to somebody like -- oh, I don't know, a nephew or someone who might need to find a good senior project in a few years -- I'd say he could do a lot worse than to check this out.

Anthony Castro

This is simply heartbreaking.

Get Ready

The most salient fact about the Katrina destruction in New Orleans is that it was not a natural disaster. The storm was, but the flooding was due to the failure of the levees built by the Army Corps of Engineers. Their design was inadequate to the need, and their construction was inadequate to the design.

What too many people forget is how much of the country is just as dependent as New Orleans was on levees designed and built by the Corps. So it's not good to hear that the Corps has identified 142 specific levees around the country that are in serious danger of failure in a major flood. 42 of them are in California, which suggests the Sacramento river area, a large agricultural area between Sacramento and the Bay Area, flatland heavily dependent on levees to control flooding.

Now, I have a lot of family living in that area, so I'd really like to know just what levees are at risk, and just what areas are in danger. But there's a problem. The Corps won't tell us. They will not identify the specific levees.

What does this mean? Times-Picayune columnist Jarvis DeBerry knows from first hand experience what it's like to lose a home due to the incompetence of the Corps. In his excellent column in today's paper he offers a little perspective:

This, America, is the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in action. This is the agency that told New Orleans we had a level of flood protection we did not have. This is the agency culpable in the drowning deaths of more than 1,000 New Orleanians. This is the agency that knows of more than 12 dozen suspect levees nationwide and feels justified in keeping their locations secret. This is the agency that's supposed to be protecting you.

Feeling safe?

More Bush Insanity

And I mean insanity. This is sheer raving delusion, and while it may not come from the Oval Office itself, it is being enabled from there.

There are many things I will never forgive Bush for, but high on the list is his trashing of science, like asserting the idea that evolution vs. creationism is just a difference of opinion, like whether a Mac or a PC is better, and trying to make that non-existent ambivalence policy for public education.

But every time I tell myself that they just can't get any more fucking batshit insane than they have, they prove that they can top themselves. Here we go again. The National Park Service is being required by the White House to refuse to discuss the age of the Grand Canyon in order to avoid contradicting the biblical account of creation:

Washington, DC — Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees. Despite promising a prompt review of its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah's flood rather than by geologic forces, more than three years later no review has ever been done and the book remains on sale at the park, according to documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

"In order to avoid offending religious fundamentalists, our National Park Service is under orders to suspend its belief in geology," stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch. “It is disconcerting that the official position of a national park as to the geologic age of the Grand Canyon is 'no comment.'"

So the Grand Canyon was carved by Noah's flood, and this is what Bush's fundamentalist supporters want to teach park visitors, with the support of the White House. This isn't funny. It's absurd, insane, ludicrous, mad, but it isn't funny. It's dangerous. That the most powerful nation in history has fallen into this kind of ignorance, fantasy, and religious fanaticism, right up to the highest levels, is not funny at all. It's terrifying.

Lickety Lick

You may not think you know who Boots Randolph is, but you do. He's an American saxophonist, born in 1926, who in 1961 made a 45 record that is deeply embedded in the psyche of all of us. To our benefit, I would add. It is "Yakety Sax," and you've heard it a thousand times. Basically, it makes anything funny. "Benny Hill" used it a lot, as have "South Park" and "The Simpsons". Even a pretty grim movie like "V for Vendetta" used it when the irreverant gay TV comic Gordon Dietrich (Stephen Fry) was mocking the all-powerful High Chancellor, though he got squashed like a bug for his trouble.

"Yakety Sax" is inherently funny. Other things are also inherently funny, one of the funniest being when you smear some peanut butter on the top of a dog's nose and watch him lick it off. Dogs adore peanut butter, but reaching the top of the nose requires pretty extreme tongue effort.

Put them together and the result is hilarious.

Done In Our Name

This is so infuriating I don't know where to start. Jose Padilla is an American citizen, to start with. Yes, he's a convert to Islam. Yes, it's possible that he had some ties to terrorist groups when he was arrested several years ago. Yes, it's possible that he was actually plotting something terrible, an attack against US civilians.

It's possible, but we don't know, because the Bush administration locked him away as an enemy combatant and refused to give any information about the charges against him. Not until the threat of a Supreme Court ruling forced them to. So they changed his status to an ordinary criminal defendant, with charges against him that -- tellingly -- include nothing about the terrible things they told us he was plotting to do when he was first arrested, in a very high profile bust.

Now the New York Times is finally giving us a glimpse of what he's been subjected to, since as an ordinary criminal defendant he -- finally!! -- is getting the right to proper legal representation, and his lawyers are finally getting some facts out. What's coming out is horrifying.

His lawyers have released photos from an incident when he was taken to the prison dentist for a root canal. Judging from his overall treatment, he must have been in agony before they would agree to such basic medical care.

To get out of his cell for this, he first had to stick his unshod feet through a hole so they could be shackled.



He then had to stick his hands out another hole to be shackled as well. Then military guards in riot gear, including full face masks, went in to retrieve him.








He was brought out, and by his lawyer's reports, and those of psychologists examing him, he is an utterly broken man, unable to tell between delusion and reality. He is also utterly passive, completely beaten down, with about as much initiative and aggression as a piece of furniture.







And yet they not only shackle him for a trip to the dentist within the prison, but blind him and block his hearing.



Why are they doing this? He's not the Incredible Hulk, he's a broken shadow of a man, and they know this better than anyone else because they're the ones who broke him. What justification can there be for this? And we know this much about Padilla because he is an American citizen. Just imagine what's going on at Guantanamo.

Besides, just look at the pictures of those military guards. Look at them! There have been many SciFi novels and movies about society degenerating into a dystopia of totalitarian terror, with government whipping us all into line in the name of keeping us safe. Safe for democracy! Safe for freedom! In those stories the rulers say that because of the emergency -- there's always an emergency -- they're taking democracy and freedom away for a bit and putting them both into cold storage, safe keeping you know, and they'll let us have them back once this is all over. Trust us. And do as you're told by the nice policemen.

The nice policemen in riot suits and masks who look just like the ones being so nice to Jose Padilla.

IF Padilla knew anything about terrorist threats to the US, the interrogators got it out of him long ago. Not only that, but whatever he knew is stale info, as the bad guys have changed plans and tactics a hundred times since he was arrested. There can be no justification for continuing to treat him this way, unless it's just an exercise in pure sadistic cruelty. The ultimate irony may turn out to be that they've damaged his mind so severely that he's legally incompetant and can't be prosecuted.

Maybe Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld just needed to prove to themselves that they're the meanest badasses on the planet. Can you imagine what sort of Gitmo torture-porn photos have crossed the desks of these people? I would shudder to think that they literally beat off in the john looking at such photos, but I can no longer put it past them.

Bad Craziness

Weird, weird things you run across. Andrew Sullivan has noted, along with many others, how much Pope Benedict XVI has tastes in vestments that are far from sackcloth and ashes, running more towards Gucci and Prada, albeit within the strictures of how the Pope is to appear. As Sullivan puts it, for this pope, every aisle is a runway. For example, this lovely hat is quite correct, very tasteful, and no doubt very expensive.



I saw this when Sully referred me to a slide show of Benedict's taste for the fabulous in the Italian magazine L'Esspresso. What startled the hell out of me was seeing this image on the sidebar of ads, right next to Benedict:



It's promoting an article in the "Style and Design" section (yes they do it in English), and the caption is "Eros d'autore." I don't think that's hard to translate.


What a juxtaposition! Of course, Benedict didn't have anything to do with that. It was the magazine. Or somebody. But the snicker factor can only get higher so long as he keeps denouncing gays while surrounding himself with hunky young priests. Like Monsignor Georg Gänswein, his personal assistant who is described as "inseparable" from the pope, seen here exploring phallic symbolism.



Cummon, guys. Find a room.

Singing Engineers

My brother Don works for an Infamous Megamultinational Corporation, as he puts it. If he thinks it discreet not to identify it on his blog, neither shall I, though what he designs very likely has a lot to do with the computer you're using to see this.

But if megamulti it is, heartless it is not. They like to do a lot to help people -- they sure have the money -- and one project to promote a United Way fund drive was an in-house talent show competition at the facility where he works, near Sacramento. Actually, it may have been company-wide, for all I know, and maybe that's why it was videotaped. Looks like it was fun but -- believe me, I know -- the line in these cases between fun and terror can be a thin one indeed. Don put it succintly:

Risk-taking is one of the Corporate Values by which we are exhorted to live our work lives. Given that when it comes to public musical performance, the less the talent, the greater the risk, some of the performers truly took that particular value to heart.

He did good though. He and a few friends had been having a lot of fun in the last few years working up barbershop-quartet-style numbers, and they did a few for the show. Not bad for a bunch of engineers.



Did they win big? Don doesn't say, so I suspect not. He is, by the way, second from the right. You will notice that he employs by far the most extravagant and theatrical hand gestures of anyone in the group. So yeah, he's straight, but obviously we do share SOME genes.

Dobson Insights

It's always interesting when Dr. James Dobson's in the news. Not necessarily good, but interesting. Recently, when Rev. Ted Haggard's little secret came out, Dobson quickly announced he wanted to be part of the team of clergy and experts who would set about "curing" Haggard of homosexuality. Not any more. He just told Larry King:

I was asked to serve on a three person restoration panel and I originally wanted to be of help and said that I would, but I just don’t have the time to do that. And I called my board of directors, we talked about it at length and they were unanimous in asking me not to do that, because this could take four or five years and I just have too many other things going on.

These are the people who urge us to put our trust in Jesus, because He will never let you down. I'd find that easier to believe if I saw that kind of faithfulness in those who claim to be His followers. They can't even stand by each other.

On the other hand, Rev. Ted may be better off in the end without this guy's help. Remember, Dobson has a Ph.D. in child development and is a licensed psychologist. He puts out a daily radio show and monthly newsletter both called Focus On the Family. While he will happily expound on the eeevil gay agenda at the drop of a tract, his main emphasis is on families and child rearing. I've seen his syndicated column in the local newspaper. He has published 31 books, one of them titled Bringing Up Boys: Practical Advice and Encouragement for Those Shaping the Next Generation of Men.

And, from that newsletter, published with Dobson's approval, here is reparative therapist Joseph Nicolosi explaining how fathers should act to guide their young sons in properly developing a strong masculine identity, advice on how to guarantee your son grows up straight:

[T]he boy's father has to do his part. He needs to mirror and affirm his son's maleness. He can play rough-and-tumble games with his son, in ways that are decidedly different from the games he would play with a little girl. He can help his son learn to throw and catch a ball. He can teach him to pound a square wooden peg into a square hole in a pegboard. He can even take his son with him into the shower, where the boy cannot help but notice that Dad has a penis, just like his, only bigger.

.....
.....
.....

That last sentence is just so disturbing I don't know what to say. And this reflects the thinking of the fundamentalist right's leading expert on bringing up kids? No wonder these people are so fucked up.

Helping Out

I had a pretty quiet Thanksgiving, no guests or anything, but I did go out earlier to help the NO/AIDS Task Force with its deliveries. They have a program, Food for Friends, for delivering food to HIV+ people in the New Orleans area who have trouble getting out and shopping for themselves. They needed a few extra drivers for an extra push getting some hot food to clients on Thanksgiving.

So I showed up at 11 AM at Covenant House on North Rampart St., at the edge of the Quarter. It's a shelter for homeless teenagers and young adults, and they were letting us use their kitchen facilities. It was an easy gig. I only had to make a few stops, dropping off some packages of stuff in plastic grocery bags.

Doreen, the Task Force volunteer director, was running the show. She was very concerned about the safety of her drivers, and there were about half a dozen of us. When I asked, she said it was not about lawlessness or violence, but just the physical hazards of this damaged city. It seems a lot of HIV clients who had nowhere else to go to have come back to places that aren't very safe. She told me of a nice old lady who is not only living in a condemned building, with a red sticker on the front, but on the top floor of a condemned building. Not the situation she wants to send a volunteer into. (FYI, with that old lady, she has her people yell up from the street that her delivery is ready, and the lady sends someone down.)

So as Doreen was marshalling her forces today, she said quite firmly, "At the top of your route sheet is my cell phone number. When you complete your route, you WILL call me. If you do not do so, if you do not check in, I will go one block down the street to the First Precinct office and report you as missing, and you WILL be on the Six O'clock News."

She got 100% compliance. From me, at any rate.

Excellent Question

One of my favorite opinion columnists is Leonard Pitts, Jr., of the Miami Herald. He's syndicated, so I get his columns here in the Times-Picayune a day after they run in Miami. Recently he did a column contrasting the experiences of the Rev. Ted Haggard and actor Neil Patrick Harris, star of Doogie Howser, MD, both of whom were involuntarily outed recently. The news about Harris was no surprise to gay folks, and when the issue was brought up directly on an online gossip site, he responded with a statement that included this wholly admirable sentence:

I am happy to dispel any rumors or misconceptions and am quite proud to say that I am a very content gay man living my life to the fullest.

Ted Haggard, in contrast ... well, I think you know what happened there.

Pitts also asks the following question, in reference to Haggard:

Between this guy, the late gay-bashing former Spokane mayor, James West, Pat Robertson biographer Mel White, and Michael Bussee and Gary Cooper, leaders in the "curing homosexuality" movement until they fell in love with one another, can't we now safely assume that any conservative who rants about the homosexual agenda is a lying hypocrite gayer than a Castro Street bar?

Ah, Leonard, some of us have been asking that question for a verrrry long time.

Humor for a Good Cause

Speaking of Haggard (we were, weren't we?), while his actions are certainly a serious matter, they still can be nicely perked up with some ruthless sarcasm. One M. Spaff Sumsion provides us with some, based on Dick Van Dyke's big number in the old "Mary Poppins" movie.

Donald Lund performs it here.

* * * * * * *

I used to be a master of the anti-gay crusade
Until a butch disaster blew my pastor masquerade
But if it's true I'm pounding more than pulpits, don't blame me
It's 'cause I caught my hooker-tweaker-stud's infirmity

It's
Supertelevangelistic sex-and-drugs psychosis
Worse than plague and bird flu crossed with osteoporosis
We were playing doctor and he gave this diagnosis:
Supertelevangelistic sex-and-drugs psychosis

Umm Haggard Bakker Swaggart umm Tammy Faye
Umm Haggard Bakker Swaggart umm Tammy Faye

I found the perfect therapist - the kind that gives massage
I like to drive my Escort and I park in his garage
I swear he only serves me crank when all his Coke is gone
And then he helps me straighten out my Peter, James, and John

Blame
Supertelevangelistic sex-and-drugs psychosis
That's my greatest guilty pleasure next to Guns N' Roses
Good thing there's no ban on it in all the books of Moses
Supertelevangelistic sex-and-drugs psychosis

Umm Haggard Bakker Swaggart umm Tammy Faye
Umm Haggard Bakker Swaggart umm Tammy Faye

It seems all pious public figures bugger on the sly
But Jesus loved republicans and sinners; so must I
Say "Holy moley, Mister Foley! That boy's underage!"
But I believe the congressman has turned another page

Oh!
Supertelevangelistic sex-and-drugs psychosis
Next time, better cut me off at handshakes and Mimosas
No more meth and men for me - at least in overdoses!
Supertelevangelistic sex-and-drugs psychosis!

(Just a spoonful of crystal helps the prostitute go down...)

A Good Cause, dammit

I'm sure my hordes of readers, all five of them blood relations, know all about Ted Haggard, the evangelical superstar preacher who imploded so spectacularly just before the election. When a gay hustler spoke up and identified ol' Ted as a long time customer for meth-fueled fuck fests ("he's definitely a bottom"), it did raise a few eyebrows, hmmm? It may even have been among the final straws that helped tilt the opinion of the electorate against the hypocrisy now in power, tilting it towards Throw The Bastards Out.

But whatever you think of Ted, the guy who outed him is also worth being concerned about. He has found a blogger champion, Joe.My.God., who has this to say about him:

It was at this time last week that the last bell finally rang on the 2006 election, delivering the House, the Senate, and the majority of state governships into the hands of the Democrats. The map is blue again. And so is the sky. My face is sore from smiling and my feets are aching from all this happy dancing.

And playing a possibly vital, perhaps pivotal role in this triumph was not a politician. Not a party strategist. It was a private citizen. It was a gay man. A man who although he was risking his personal livelihood, risking his arrest, and surely risking his physical safety, he came forward and did the right thing at the right time.

That man is Mike Jones.

Regardless of your personal opinions regarding Jones' chosen field of work, you cannot ignore his unprecedented accomplishment of almost completely upending the Republican Party's last minute campaign to divert the nation's attention from the true issue of the election: the Iraq war.

Talking Heads: "The terrorists have just blah blah....gay marriage referendum blah blah....stem cell legislation blah blah...millions of illegal immigrants blah blah. Um, wait a minute. We have a breaking bulletin: Pastor Ted Haggard! Head of evangelical movement! Homosexual! Prostitution! Crystal meth! Close to the President! More! More! More! More!"

Repeat on every channel.

Headlines on every paper.

For five days.

The five days BEFORE the election.

All the billionaire George Soroses in the world could not have more effectively eclipsed the Republicans' usual last minute diversionary tactics. It was pure delicious serendipity. It was kismet. And most of all, it was KARMA, baby.

Since then, Mike Jones has been getting death threats from all those good kindly Christians. He's unemployed and at least temporarily unemployable, and may even get evicted from his apartment. Oh yes, the cops are hassling him too. He lives in Colorado, after all, not in New York City. Not the friendliest place to be a nationally known gay prostitute.

What disgusts me the most is that all the gay rights political organizations are giving Mike the ten foot pole treatment. He did something very courageous, running a greater personal risk than any of these lobbyists will ever dare, and they snub him. They are assholes. Period.

Joe of Joe.My.God., however, has stepped up to the plate where those pretentious prisses would not. He has set up a way for anyone to send a donation to Mike Jones through PayPal. Joe's post on this is here, and gives you a link to help Mike out if you're so inclined.

And Joe says that in the few days this has been going forward, it has helped:

He tells me that yesterday's donations have allowed him to get caught up on his car payments, his utilitities, and even more importantly, as he put it to me, "I can eat again."

Holy shit. This man, who so many would dismiss as trash, a mere hustler, took a huge risk because he thought it was right. And he's suffering for it.

I have made a donation to help Mike get through this. He did good.

Update: Just learned something interesting about the timeline of this story, something I didn't know before. Mike Jones learned that the client he knew as "Art" was actually Ted Haggard when he saw him on the TV in August, campaigning for the anti-gay-marriage amendment on the Colorado ballot. That's what spurred him to action. Within a few days, he went to a local news radio station with the story, which sat on it for TEN WEEKS while their lawyers looked it over. Only when the election was dangerously close did Jones force the issue by going to a competing station. So Mike didn't just blow the whistle on Ted, he had to fight to blow that whistle. I like him even better.