The Political Class

Steve at No More Mister Nice Blog points to Frank Rich's "The Good Germans" column and asks if Rich is blaming the victims. It's a good question, and I think he is.

It's easy enough to blame Americans for the actions of their government. We are, at least in theory, a representative democracy. If our elected leaders don't do what we want them to do, or worse do what we don't want them to do, we can put pressure on them using our various civil rights, and we can simply replace them.

In reality, it's more complicated that that. Exercising your civil rights may tend to get you thrown in jail, from which anything could happen. And corporate and lobbyist money so corrupts our system that voting out your elected officials is problematic at best. It can be done, but the odds of accomplishing it are depressingly low.

But even that overlooks the initial problem, which is the media. Frank Rich doesn't get a pass here, either. I'm sure he'd say he didn't suggest he was any less culpable than the rest of us, but if we're getting into collective responsibility, to what extent is he more culpable?

The free press is supposed to be serve the valuable function of anti-propaganda. It's supposed to give us the information we need to know when we're being lied to, and maybe even what we can do about it. But too much of it's been captured by propaganda, and now it lies to us about what's happening, and lies to our elected officials about what we believe and want.

I probably don't have to recount the NYT's specific faults leading up to the Iraq war. While Rich himself may not be individually at fault for their gullible reporting and their belligerent editorial stance, is it fair to ask exactly how responsible the average American is, as well?

I tend to think not so much. It's not that Americans don't care, it's that they don't know. And they don't know because they're not supposed to.

I'm sure they've heard about Abu Ghraib by now, but it's like global warming--they're deliberately being fed the sort of "fraternity prank" storyline that allows them to at the very least be uncertain as to what actually is going on. I can't even tell you how many people I know who honestly think no one died, so how bad could it have been? People did die, of course, but you wouldn't necessarily have known that if you weren't paying attention.

And that's what it comes down to. Americans, for the most part, are in a permanent state of exhaustion and panic. They're falling behind financially and they know it, and they know even more that this makes them moral failures. Because that's what they're told. The Frosts are freeloaders, and so must you be too if you need assistance with anything. The economy's going great, if your budget isn't stretching, it's your fault, you just need to work harder.

The news you get says the war is going fine, or it's not, there's horrible shit going on, but war is hell, right? and you have twenty minutes on the bus to sort out the actual story from the conflicting news on the way to your second job, while you're worrying about bills and the kid's cough and your boss who keeps grabbing your ass.

Personally, you'd rather be worrying like hell that you don't have decent childcare while you work, but apparently the terrorists might at any moment blow you to hell, or so the government keeps telling you.

And this isn't to mention all those other jangling-panic cues Americans are routinely fed: E. coli, pollution, global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, the housing market collapse, the possibility your kids will be shot at school or picked up by rapists online, and Jesus Christ, you'd better hope to God nobody gets seriously sick.

Meanwhile, you have no idea what you're even supposed to feel guilty about, but you know there's plenty. In addition to the war, there's hoping like hell your nephew doesn't enlist for the college money because all you know is people are getting killed over there. And there's other things like global warming, which you don't have time to understand, you've heard talk about genocide in some place you haven't heard mentioned often enough to remember, and now they're talking about war with Iran, or was it Syria, and what the hell is going on in Afghanistan still?

That's just global anxiety. The domestic situation is a mess, too, and it hits you on a lot of even more personal issues. There's work, and rent, and school's back in and all you can afford for your kid is Chinese-made clothes from Wal-Mart, and you know that's not good on so many levels, but your options are? So you buy the probably-sweatshop-produced shit at Wal-Mart and you feel guilty and worried, on top of everything else, including how much gas it took to get there and you realize the kids are getting fatter and that apparently makes you a failure as a parent, at least according to the story you heard on the radio as you were late to work again through the worsening commute.

On top of that, so many of us are literally sick all the time. We don't have insurance, we don't have good insurance, we can't afford the out of pocket or the time off and it's impossible to get an appointment and getting to the doctor's is a pain too, so we just suck it up.

I don't think guys like Rich realize how desperate most of his fellow citizens are from day to day. They're exhausted. They're nearly frantic about the future. They're constantly in pain, and you'd better believe that takes a toll. And then they're blamed for not carving out the sheer volume of time it would take to get through the propaganda they're deliberately being fed by Rich's employers.

Can you blame them for wanting not to have to think about it? Can you really even blame them for wanting to believe the reports that say nothing's wrong rather than the ones that say it's all an increasing disaster and there's nothing we can do about it?

It's really, really hard to care about something so remote you can't imagine it, and that you really have no clear idea what's going on through all the conflicting reports. It's even harder to care when you have no idea what you can do about it and your own life is awash in disasters and near-disasters you have at least some idea how to solve, even if it's not working very well.

So, yeah, as Steve observes, we care more about dead American soldiers--because we knew them, we know their parents or friends or wives.

The Iraqis? Aren't they terrorists who blew up the Towers? Weren't they going to use nuclear bombs on us? Didn't we want them dead?

I really don't mean to be a callous asshole, and I honestly cannot fathom people who voted for Bush in 2004, knowing what we did at that point. But I also know that we have made it very difficult to pay attention, let alone to figure out the truth, not to mention figure out what to do about it. And calling those people "good Germans" is not helpful, nor is it especially fair. What the fuck does Rich expect them to be doing? Get arrested in massive numbers? Is he going to take care of their kids and pay their bills and explain it to their bosses?

None of this is as awful as what's happening to victims of our invasions. But the less power you have, the less right anyone has to call you a "good German" over not fixing it. Especially when you have no power by design, by the design at least in part of the people who pay Rich.

There really is a political class in this country. It consists of people who have the time and the resources to figure out what's going on and what to do about it. The average American does not belong to the political class, but people like Rich do. Even people like me do, and that's a pretty scary thought. I'm unemployed, and have plenty of time to sort through the lies Rich's industry feeds us, and even I don't know what the hell is happening most days let alone do I know what to do about it. And if even our Congresspeople can't stop what's going on in Iraq, is it remotely reasonable to blame people who barely have time to even vote?

And if you got the Frost reference, you belong to our political class too, and what are you doing about it? And why aren't you doing more, why haven't you gotten it stopped yet? Frank Rich wants to know.

Absolutely we should all be trying harder, but working-class Americans are not exactly the top of the blame list, and Rich's industry needs to stop making it harder for them to get the facts and get involved before he or anybody else gets to blame them.

Yes, people who ignore this stuff, or even support it, make me mad. but when you talk to them, you realize they're largely not bad people who want others to suffer. They're mostly decent people who have been told so many lies they don't know where to look for the truth. We have to fix that before we can expect more from them, let alone blame them for it.

Okay, I'll Entertain You.

Briefly, anyway.

Whenever I hear the GOP talk about bipartisanship, rationality filters kick in and this is how it comes out:

"Look, I know I wrecked your car and forged your name to get all your money out of your retirement fund and sold all your furniture for drugs and called your neighbors fags and threw all my trash on their lawn and stole all your prescription pills and got you fired and cheated on you and called you fat and shredded that wedding picture of your mom and dad, but... Listen, I really need a place to stay, and I swear I'll sleep on the couch, okay? Come on, you owe me! If you hadn't told her about the herpes, your sister would never have thrown me out!"

Am I alone in thinking this is the driving force behind Unity '08 as well?

Tuesday Sickcat Blogging

Well, she's put on a quarter of a pound in about two weeks. This is good, they tell me.

She's back to messing on the carpet and has begun pulling out some of her fur. This is less good, but there is no indication that it's a physical problem, they checked for parasites and for infections and for hives or whatever and she's fine, apparently just incredibly stressed out. They offered me some anti-anxiety pills. My partner's comment: "For her, or for the cat?"

Yes, yes, very funny. I declined, on the grounds that she doesn't need any more side effects to correct behavior I'm perfectly willing to live with anyway, and making her take another pill will only add to the stress. With any luck, the housemate will move out at the end of the month (Nothing definite so far, ugh), which should help her a lot.

They've given me another pill for her every other day, it's called Leukeran, and I am advised to handle it only with gloves on and to wash with soap and hot water anything else it comes into contact with. "And this is what you want me to make my nine pound cat swallow?"

Apparently so. They tell me that with the two pills combined, there's a good chance of giving her another two or three years. We got her fifteen years ago this week, so to be honest if not especially tactful I wasn't actually expecting to have her around more than seventeen or eighteen years anyway. Cats have a short life span; you learn to live with it or you adopt only lichens. And they suck to pet.

So that's where we are, for those of you who might care.

Also, my sister got me a book on How To Be A Villain for my birthday. I'm hoping it'll help me deal with the housemate if she decides commuting all the way across Seattle to college is a better deal than paying her own room and board. I'm already practicing my villain laugh: Ah-hahaHAhaHAHAha!

Wednesday Sickcat Blogging

Well, in short, not as bad as they feared, not as good as they hoped.

She's got small cell lymphoma, it seems. It's limited to her intestinal tract, which they assure me is good, and it was, they say, most likely caused by a year-old case of inflammatory bowel disease which we never did anything about.

Small cell lymphoma appears to be reasonably treatable, she'll be taking prednisone and some other chemo drug probably for the rest of her life, but that's not a bad thing because at least it means she could have a couple or more years to really learn to hate me properly. And I'm good with that. They tell me she's probably not in pain from it, and that it could kill her tomorrow or in a few years or she could die of something else completely unrelated in a few years. Well, true, and so could we all. So I'm inclined to just go day by day with this, and be glad she's with us now and every day we get with her.

The prednisone will also treat the IBD, and the way we know it's not working is appetite or weight loss. So we'll keep an eye on that. It's hard to tell how much she's eating, actually. If she doesn't show much interest in something, I open another can. She's got six plates scattered around the house at this point, and one in here with me because she seems like she prefers to eat in my company. She'll come and meow plaintively at me until I follow her into the kitchen thinking she wants different food, at which point she will settle down and start eating what's already there with no apparent displeasure. But if I leave the kitchen, she'll leave the food and follow me. So I'm spending some time in the kitchen reading, and in here on the computer with a plate by my desk.

My partner points out that there's really no way we could have known what was going on a year ago, since there were obvious behavioral reasons for her to have stopped eating, her only abnormal blood test went back to normal quickly with treatment, and even with it advanced as far as it has the only way we actually knew what was going on was for them to cut her open and take samples for testing. "If they'd said they needed to open her up a year ago, would you have agreed to it even though she was feeling better and her tests were normal and there was a very small chance there was actually something to find?"

Well, when you put it that way... But I still feel guilty for assuming she was just being more neurotic than usual when she was actually in pain and really sick. I feel awful for letting her get even sicker. And I feel pretty bad, too, that as mean as I'm being to her right now she still loves me and is following me around, probably because she wants me to make it all better. (I'm familiar with this. When the clusters get bad, I follow my partner around in hopes there's some magical way to make it all better. This is not rational, but what the hell else is there to try?)

On the other hand, the doctor tells me he was afraid after the surgery that it was carcinoma, in which case we wouldn't be talking about treatment options at all. So this is not good, but it's not as bad as it could be either. If she doesn't respond to the pills, we can try injections, or other drugs, or whatever, but he seems to think the pills might actually help and there's no statistical evidence the injections work better than or worse than the pills. And, really, it's a forty minute drive to the clinic with a cat who hates cars twice a week and, you know, my partner's got a job. and I do not drive. So hopefully the pills will work. We'll figure something out if we have to, but with any luck this will work the easy way.

Meanwhile, I've been folding my fingers raw and am wondering what the hell I'm going to do with a thousand cranes dedicated to my cat. You get a wish for each thousand cranes, and I personally don't make wishes, so none of the cranes I send out are "used up", I guess. (Look, I'm pagan. We're superstitious by nature, okay?) But these will be, and it seems reasonable anyway to find something appropriate to do with them since they're for Cypress but honestly she doesn't want more than a couple to chew on.

So the cat clinic may find itself in possession of a very large box of litter that's too pretty to throw away and what they'll do with it I have no idea. There are six doctors and assorted clinicians and tech people and staff, so presumably they could kind of let everybody have a more reasonable amount. They're pretty, but mostly in small doses. A thousand, while traditional, is overwhelming as a gift. Plus my partner is still genuinely baffled at the whole crane thing and gets annoyed when I need help mailing or delivering them. Should be fun, anyway, and anyone who's got some decent ideas what to do with a bunch of used cranes (many with teethmarks and cat drool), please feel free to share that in the comments.

The important take-away message here, though, is that she'll possibly be okay, but at least she's okay for now, and I don't have to feel like the next time we talk to them they're going to need to put her down. My thanks to all of you for the good wishes, and I'm sure if she knew you she'd be perfectly happy to include you in the long list of people she hates as well... but in a good way.

Friday Depressing Cat Blogging

Cypress' ultrasound results came back, and I didn't say anything, because suddenly it was maybe not good news, so they scheduled her for surgery, which happened yesterday, and now it's definitely not good news though we still don't know how bad yet.

Stop reading here if you want, this is going to be miserable.

The ultrasound found a thickened intestinal lining, which might have been diffuse lymphoma or inflammatory bowel disease, neither one of those is great, but they were leaning towards the latter. So they opened her up and took some samples and took a look and they're now pretty sure it's lymphoma, but we won't have positive test results until next week.

She's here with me, sleeping on my foot, and she really seems like she's okay. They shaved a bunch of her fur off, and she looks kind of funny, but she's not acting any worse than she usually does. She's never been a really playful cat, more solemn than anything else. But she just had fucking surgery, so by any stretch of normal she should be absolutely miserable, and the fact that I can't tell that doesn't say much for my powers of discernment, which means I'm not going to know when something's critically, emergency, wrong, which at this point could happen at any time. She really deserves better than this.

So right now she's getting whatever she'll eat, and antibiotics, and prednisone, which is both an anti-inflammatory and a chemotherapy drug, so it's what they'd be trying next on her no matter what the diagnosis turns out to be. She's got a five-day pain med patch on her paw, and she's sprawled on my carpet looking grumpy but really no different, behaviorally, than she's looked for years.

The vet loves her, they all love her, they're so nice to her and they tell me she's quiet and well-behaved and does what they need her to do without fussing, and that she purrs when they pet her. That in itself leads me to believe that she's either really sick and desperate for someone to do something about it, or she was terrified. Either way, I don't blame her. But I'm glad they like her, and they probably like her better than they like me, so they'll want to do what's best for her, not necessarily what's best for me. Because I don't have any confidence that I'll know the difference.

So that's where things are now. Nobody's optimistic. Nobody's happy. She's at least not in pain right now, apparently, and she's eating okay. Both lymphoma and IBD are treatable, but evidently not easily nor reliably treatable. I think she's going to be gone by the end of the year. I miss her already.

On the other hand, when we dropped her off for the surgery, I didn't think I was ever going to see her again, so at least she's home and being petted and told we love her. But this sucks, and I wish I had thought to get a second opinion last year when she stopped eating the first time. She deserves so much better than me. I love Iala too, but Cypress is my baby, she's my favorite, and I don't know what I'll do without her.

If you can, if you want to, go ahead in the comments and tell me about your kitties, or dogs. I don't need stories about how they recovered from lymphoma, or anything like that. But maybe just tell me about something fun you do together, or why you're glad to have them, why you think they might be glad to have you, whatever. I think I could stand to be reminded of why we put ourselves through this. If you don't have anything you want to say, I can understand that. She's sleeping on my bare foot, and that's a reminder, too.

My Cat's On Drugs, Man!

Okay, so Cypress' latest round of blood test results are in, and it's possibly good news. At the very least, they tell me her liver enzymes are back to normal, which probably rules out a liver biopsy, which would have been horrible for her. But her white blood cell count is up a little, indicating some kind of infection.

So they replaced the every-eight-hours appetite stimulant with one that she takes twice a week, it's actually an old tricyclic antidepressant. I note it is not cheering her up. She gets the vitamin drops every twelve hours still, which she hates. She's also getting a squirt of pain meds into her cheek every twelve hours, which she also hates. But now she's getting as well a couple of antibiotics, which the clinic helpfully put into one capsule because the cats hate the taste of one of them. She gets that every twelve hours and hopefully that'll knock out the infection, whatever it is.

She hates that the most, because it's a capsule, so she can refuse to swallow it really easily, and she'll bite into it now and then and then there's the taste. And after I give it to her, I have to squirt a lot of water into her mouth to make sure it's gone down.

Meanwhile, I keep offering her little rocks instead of the treats she knows are normally in all those bags, and she keeps changing her mind about what she'll eat which isn't going to be all that much anyway it seems.

She's been scheduled for an ultrasound next week which might not be necessary if she's doing okay, but I suspect it will be since she's still not eating much and there really does have to be a reason for this. She follows me around anxiously despite the possibility I'm going to make her swallow something awful, and spends a lot of time looking at me pathetically. It's pretty obvious she's hungry, but she only takes a few bites of anything I give her and then wanders away for a while and then comes back again.

The pet insurance covers less than a third of the lowest projected cost of an ultrasound, though so far at least my partner is less bothered by the cash costs of all of this than the time, but isn't actually balking. She really is a nice cat, and everybody loves her. Also, as has been pointed out, the cats pills cost way less than mine.

But they're sounding optimistic though puzzled, and do seem to be ruling out a lot of the really bad shit like cancer or FLV or feline AIDS, and are starting to talk about things like intestinal disorders. I don't know what that means for her, but I guess we'll find out.

I still haven't filled out the other forms for the insurance, I need to do that. Paperwork gives me a rash.

I'll papercraft at you later, I'm tired again. And sorry this wasn't even remotely funny. I tried, but it wouldn't come.

Ego Service Advisory

So, I've managed to convince pretty much everyone who knows me that I'm a total idiot, and I've done so in a remarkably stupid way. I'm not going to offer details, because frankly I feel dumb enough. But, man, sometimes it seems like I've spent sixty five percent of my life being stupid, which wouldn't be so bad, but most of the rest of the time I was asleep.

Take my advice: when you've convinced all the people around you that you're a moron, trying to explain will only make that worse.

I'll be back to my usual haunts when I'm feeling like less of a complete fucking idiot.

Of Sharks And Men

So as many of you may have heard, it's Shark Week on the Discovery Channel.

The whole thing aggravates me, mostly because every year I look forward to it and it never lives up to the hype, disappointing in predictable ways year after year. Their host is generally annoying, often they have some supermodel or other celebrity bimbo who puts on a thong and jumps into a tank with baby sharks, you rarely get more than ten hours of new programming a year, there's a distinct emphasis on great whites, and really, the whole week is probably best described as Shark Attack Week.

Sharks are beautiful and diverse creatures, more than 350 species not including rays and skates. The average size of these sharks is about a foot and a half to three feet. While all of them are carnivores, the biggest, whale, basking, and megamouth sharks, are near exclusively filter feeders and in far more danger from humans trying to swim with them than humans are in danger of being attacked by them.

Something like twenty species have been known to attack humans aside from idiotic incidents where they bite some careless home aquarium owner, and fewer than ten have killed humans, only about four of them have done so repeatedly and without provocation. For the most part, a shark attack, incredibly rare as it is to begin with, is really more of a shark incident, and generally approaches the level of a pelagic squirrel mauling. You are more likely to be killed by a peanut allergy, or a dog, or a lightning strike, or falling in the shower, or tetanus. They kill five to ten people a year, they attack fewer than a hundred.

Meanwhile we're killing, according to many estimates, between forty to seventy million sharks a year, mostly for their fins but also because the occasional random teenager breaks into a public aquarium and stabs and beats juveniles to death with plastic pipes. And this is a heavy toll on a group of animals that mature slowly, live a long time, and pup in small numbers, not to mention shark fin soup and shark cartilage pills do nothing for humans, and we're not even sure how the things are reacting to global warming but apex predators tend to take the loss of the food chain badly.

The list of things we don't know about sharks is incredibly long and includes stuff like why don't they get cancer much, how do they navigate oceans, and, just as a basic thing, how many of them there are and whether various identified species are actually different populations of the same species or, come to that, just a bunch of individuals that travel farther and faster than we ever imagined.

All of these facts are duly recited by the Shark Week host every year, during breaks in the four of the seven or eight new shows each year that recount actual stories of great white attacks on humans or allow celebrities to prove how brave they are by swimming with great whites.

Now, I'm not the world's biggest fan of humans. I freely admit this. And I love sharks, though I'm going to have to say flat out that I'd prefer an annual Mola Mola Week or an Octopus Week or a Riftia Worm Week, or probably a lot of other things. And at least one program a year is pretty good, one year they had Ray Troll talking to paleontologists about extinct sharks. Another year they had Mike DeGruy show us his favorite ten or so sharks under five feet. We got a Mythbusters Jaws special one year, and another year the guy from Dirty Jobs did a couple of hours of shark-related jobs. And I could watch some of these guys all day, though I'd be happier if they'd ditch the supermodels and the actor celebs.

Nonetheless, despite all these incredibly predictable annoyances, I look forward to this every year. This year started off at heights of creepy unreached since the year they programmed exclusively re-enactments of shark attacks on humans.

And this too was predictable, and yet they surpassed my every expectation.

Night One began with a two hour show called Ocean Of Fear, about the Indianapolis. You can probably guess that they would begin this show with the boat scene from Jaws in which Quinn tells the story of the Indianapolis, and you're right, that's exactly what they did. For an added element of flippancy, they let Richard Dreyfuss, who played marine biologist Matt Hooper in Jaws, narrate.

In brief, if you don't know, what happened is this: At the end of July in 1945, the cruiser USS Indianapolis was sunk by a Japanese submarine in the Philippine Sea. About 1200 men on board, three hundred died in the attack and the sinking. As they say in Jaws, nine hundred men went into the water, three hundred came out.

The details are interesting, and as it turns out very few were killed by the sharks as they floated at sea for four days or so, mostly they died of dehydration and drowning and drinking salt water and exposure and their original injuries. They were at sea so long, as the program is at pains to point out, because the Navy, while realizing that the ship was late and having heard chatter about a sub captain sinking a US ship, concluded that in war these things happen, the sub captain was either lying to look good or maybe it was a trap to ambush rescue ships, and the Indianapolis was probably just delayed somewhere, so nobody bothered to go looking. The ones who survived were really only rescued after one of them managed to get the attention of one of a series of planes they'd seen fly over them for days.

The program also takes time to note that the life rafts contributed to their problems, since to save space on ship, they were basically just inner tubes with grated floors hung from them by ropes. This means they were low in the water and harder to spot, it also means they were submersed in water the whole time, even those few lucky enough to get to a life raft, and the sharks could basically nose their way between the ropes and attack pretty much anybody.

The program goes on to note that the Navy court-martialed the Indianapolis' captain against the protests of the survivors, and that he eventually committed suicide, only to be cleared years later.

Other relevant details are brought up, the central point of which is that this was basically a clusterfuck in which at least some of the dead were eaten by oceanic whitetip sharks. The first point is made in recognition of the obvious, the second in deference to the fact that this is, after all, Shark Week.

Bored yet? Well, I'm getting around to my point. As I've mentioned, I find the emphasis on sharks eating people to be annoying, and I find this program to be particularly questionable. I own literally dozens of movies in which sharks eat people. I enjoy even the truly awful ones, and okay, most of them are.

But watching this show, I am creeped out beyond belief by a number of factors, the most prominent of which is the serious blurring of reality and fiction. Quinn did not survive the Indianapolis. Quinn was not real. He was a character in a book and a movie, but one they decided to start off this account of real survivors with, and which they keep echoing with their choice of narrator. Dreyfuss is a fine man, I'm sure, nothing against him. But his presence seemed to raise the whole thing out of the realm of a tragic, horrible incident that killed nine hundred young men and into a work of storytelling art.

And I'm not comfortable with that. I'm even less comfortable with the fact that they did the majority of the thing as re-enactments. Young men--young actors--pretending to die as men much their age did sixty years ago in a time of war partially at the hands of a Navy that didn't want to be distracted by their absence. It's worth noting that these young actors are all of service age, and I wonder if any of them as they pretended to be these dying sailors considered that they could just as easily be dying in Iraq instead of on a Discovery Channel show with the prospect of safely going home and drying off and having maybe a drink and a nice dinner and a good night's sleep at the end of the day. I'm not suggesting that I'd be happier if these guys were dying in a desert, and I'm absolutely not calling them cowards since I don't actually think anybody should be dying in Iraq, including Iraqis. But I have to wonder if it was at all as surreal an experience for them as it seemed to me, just watching.

To blur matters even further, the actors' lines came, in many cases, directly from the statements given by the survivors long ago. Their shark expert interviewed a couple of the survivors who remain, and then went to the Memorial, again these are real people, not just a script.

And maybe it's my schizophrenia which admittedly makes this kind of line-blurring quite common for me, but this all seemed profoundly surreal and in some hard-to-pin-down way disrespectful. It was at best a vicarious experience for the education of viewers, and at worst a voyeuristic little peep show for the entertainment of viewers.

I'd like to pretend that I'm different from the rest of the viewers who more or less were invited to regard the whole thing as two hours of wild animal snuff, but I watched it all with a deep fascination, like it was a car wreck, though I do have to say I deliberately don't watch those because probably the last thing the victims need is an audience. But in the privacy of my own home I could, and did, gawk like everybody else, and I'm not proud of that.

But it even got worse than that, and more to my mind disrespectful of the actual victims of this tragedy. This year's host is the man who does the Discovery Channel's Survivorman series. He's a guy who goes out into the middle of nowhere with a camera and eats live animals as he tries to stay alive, which would be fine except that it's voluntary subsistence living. He could be sitting in his living room eating a TV dinner, he doesn't have to be biting the feet off toads, and someday I expect to see his ass hauled before a judge for polishing off an endangered species for dinner in front of his camera. This show too is profoundly voyeuristic, more so when you consider that half the commercials during airings of it on The Science Channel are for diet pills and programs, mobility devices, and high tech beds for a more comfortable night's sleep. These are not people--and I say this as one of them--who are ever going to need this information, and if they ever did they'd be dead of a dozen less controllable factors long before they found a turtle to dash its brains out and boil in its own shell. This show too is no more real than a prime time drama, except for the animals killed, for whom it's pretty real albeit briefly.

But, hey, he's been dumped at sea and forced to fend off oceanic whitetips or something, so hell, he's practically empathetic here, except that he's not a nineteen year old Iowa farm boy, and he's got a choice in the matter, and also he lives.

So in breaks in the show, we'd watch Les step in to tell us all of the facts cited above and urge us to do our part to save the lives of sharks and also not to be scared of them. It was beyond weird.

But not as weird as some of the actual commercials. The US Military wants you to go to Iraq, it seems, though they didn't put it quite that way. Mostly what they said was that they wanted to teach your teenage son how to fly cool planes and look you in the eye when he talks to you. I find the appealing-to-the-parents recruitment commercials to be in poor taste to begin with, as to my mind a parent is probably often the only sort of safeguard a kid dazzled by a recruiter's lies has. How many high school boys do you know who understand global politics, or who think there's a possibility they will ever die? So where there actually are parents in place with the wisdom and inclination to display some judgment, I would like to see them do so in the absence of hard sell propaganda.

In particular, though, I wonder about this marketing niche. "Hey, moms and dads, even though you're spending a couple of hours watching us abandon young men to the elements and the sharks because, you know, we were busy, and just because we scapegoated the admittedly heroic captain into suicide, and just because we are more than capable of turning a disaster into an overwhelming tragedy, we promise if you give us your kids we'll just, you know, teach 'em to stand up straight and stuff and then send them off to college. We promise we'll... take... good... care... of them. Really."

And that strikes me as not only creepy and disrespectful, but also as astoundingly stupid. And I imagine that at least one parent got the picture and is spending the week convincing their kid there might be better ways to pay for college. And I have to wonder if any of those dead men would consider the possibility that this may have inadvertently saved another kid over half a century away to be in some small way a fitting tribute.

And I'd like to end this on an uplifting note by saying I think they might, but that's probably fiction too. I say probably, because at least some of these men were heroes in the ways they were able to be, and because they had signed up to go to a war rather than, say, taking up acting, it's not unreasonable to guess that some of them understood they might be sacrificing themselves for the lives of others. On the other hand, they were scared kids, left to fend for themselves, and they died. Whether or not there's anything after this, they're still dead. And we who didn't know them, over half a century away, have no place saying what they might feel about anything.

And Now For Something Completely Dessert

Okay, this one is a winner. I haven't made this in a very long time, and you'll see why. My desserts are, as has been mentioned, legendary. This is one of the easier ones, but it still packs a wallop.

This is a variation on what has been called Cool Whip Mincemeat Pie, but it's more of a simple French Silk Pie without the raw eggs. The original faux mince pie is basically Cool Whip, canned vanilla frosting, and chopped jellybeans or gumdrops. The chocolate variation is chocolate Cool Whip, canned chocolate frosting, I like to use a cream cheese chocolate but your mileage may vary, and you can throw in chocolate chips or not to taste. I've got a chocolate ready-made crumb crust, you can get these in the aisle with the pudding mixes.

My advice is to go with semi-sweet chocolate chips if you plan to use them at all. You'll understand why in a minute, and people who have made this tell me they have added a flavored liqueur or a flavoring extract successfully, but that experiments with Italian soda flavorings were not repeated, which you will again understand shortly.

Put the thawed Cool Whip into a bowl, add the can of frosting, and you can use a whisk or a wooden spoon to mix them together, you can even use a mixer if you want but I don't because I sort of like the marbled look. Fold in your chocolate chips, and spoon it into a pie shell. You may have extra, and that's fine. Don't pile it too high, because it oozes.

I cannot strongly enough urge you to taste some of this stuff. Seriously. Lick the beaters, lick the spoon, lick the bowl, I don't care. But this stuff is rich, slip-into-a-coma-rich, especially if you use the chocolate cream cheese frosting, and you should know exactly how rich before you start cutting big pieces for your guests. A little goes a very long way.

Freeze it for a few hours, and serve. If you'd like to serve it chilled rather than frozen, skip the pie and just spoon it into small dessert cups.

If you make any of my recipes, it should probably be a dessert recipe. This one's easy enough to start with, and people will actually eat it.

Other Good Things You Can Do With A Toothpick

Arts and crafts Monday brings you this wooden treasure chest courtesy of Paper Make It. The PDF contains the appropriate pieces to turn the chest into Terry Pratchett's The Luggage. It's got a few tiny fussy corners, so you'll need a hobby knife, a bottle cap full of glue, and a bunch of toothpicks to do it right. Why, what did you think I was referring to?

It's a free download, check out their other free downloads while you're at it. The dice tower absolutely rocks.

I made The Luggage for my friend who introduced me to Pratchett in the first place, and it now sits on her shelf next to the plush sloth and the Playmobil airport screening playset I gave her. You may be amazed to find she's still willing to be my friend after this sort of gift-giving.

Other Good Things You Can Do In An Apron

Have I got a side dish for you...

Okay, you need a can of Pringles. You can pick the flavors, my preferences are for the Sour Cream and Chives and the regular, though the Pizza isn't too bad. The bacon and ranch flavor prompted pizza orders, but that may be an idiosyncratic thing, and personally I haven't had the guts to try the cheesy stuff. Low fat Pringles are bad. They don't rehydrate very well.

You also need margarine, and you can use some milk if you like, but basically the object is to put Pringles and water together and get mashed potatoes. Too much milk makes it weird, and we rarely have anything but the canned stuff on hand anyway, so we don't bother here.

Immediately I must caution you not to save the leftovers. Potato flake leftovers can be saved for a couple of days if you refrigerate them immediately in a tightly sealed container. But they do breed a nasty bacteria at room temperature, so it's really best if you don't do it too often. I don't know if the same holds true for Pringles, since they are cooked in the factory rather than just dehydrated, but really, why risk it, and they get way too weird when you reheat them anyway.

So, boil some water, and crush your Pringles. I've got one of those jar-and-blade chopping things that are designed for nuts and the like. You don't want them powdered, so I'd probably avoid the coffee mill. Really, you could put them in a cake pan and put another cake pan in on top of them and crush them that way, it gets you a decent size to work with, or you could go over them lightly with a rolling pin, which is what I do if I've got an audience because there's apparently just something inherently humorous about a rolling pin.

You'll need about a quarter cup of water for every ten Pringles, more or less depending on how crunchy you want them. A can of Pringles is about ninety chips or crisps or whatever they call them, and to be honest half of that is a good size side dish for three people. So, about two and a half cups of boiling water for the whole can, you can do the rest of the math on your own.

And the water must be boiling. Because it's going to take a while for the chips to rehydrate, usually about fifteen to twenty minutes with some stirring. I like to make them in a thermos to keep them hot. I suppose if you'd rather you could just pop them in the microwave to reheat them once they're the right consistency.

Add a little margarine to taste. Proper Pringles Mashed Potatoes should still be a bit crunchy. You can sprinkle chives on top, or parsley flakes, or you can add sour cream or whatever, it's entirely up to you. I like to add parsley and pimentos on top for a little color, it's very festive.

The first time you do this with new victims, you don't want an audience. Because this is an opportunity that will not be repeated: Your diners will surely ask you what's up with the mashed potatoes. This is your chance to admit, somewhat hesitantly, that you were afraid they might come out a little salty/crunchy, and you're sorry about that, but "Well, I forgot to get the potatoes."

This is a fabulous comedic moment, not to be missed. If you can time it right, you want to give a little space between the "thought it might be salty" and the "forgot the potatoes" for your diners to all thoughtfully take another bite so they can agree with your verdict. I promise you, you will enjoy the reaction. At least if you've had the foresight to lean back a bit.

They'll probably get used to it, eventually. In my home, Pringles Mashed Potatoes counts as a good solid side, often served with meatloaf. I don't have a horrifying meatloaf recipe, so you're off the hook. But next time, dessert!

Monday Arts and Crafts

Canon has a bald eagle paper model up. My partner wants me to build it and mail it to Stephen Colbert, because my partner has a crush. I'm not getting involved.

Meanwhile, there's this extraordinarily cute and easy little guy over here at Marshall Alexander's site, you may need flash player to see it. It's a little guy in a hazmat suit looking quite alarmed at the test tube of pink stuff that's just exploded all over him. I painted the pinky-haz-goo stuff over with a couple of coats of clear glow in the dark nail polish when I was done building.

Wednesday Blood Test Results Blogging

I've spoken to the vet. He says Cypress' liver enzymes are a bit elevated, but not too bad, it's consistent with her just not eating very much. He says her white blood cell counts are normal, which probably rules out cancer and various infections. He points out that the results basically tell us what's probably not wrong, but not what is wrong, and obviously not why, and suggests we take her to the cat clinic for fuller diagnostics including a liver biopsy.

So when I note that Cypress hates you? It's nothing compared to the white hot rage she will cherish in her seething heart for all of humanity for the next, oh, call it eternity. And I'm not prepared to blame her for that.

We have Veterinary Pet Insurance on the cats. We've had it for years, and have never made a claim. Basically the reason we have it is so that when the cats wind up with something horribly expensive wrong with them, I don't have to decide between bankrupting my partner and letting the furmonsters die. But since it's mostly for extreme emergencies like that, we haven't used it yet, admittedly mostly because paperwork makes me break out in hives, so I'll be looking into how to file a claim in the upcoming days. I have a feeling the cat clinic is not cheap. I'll report back on how useful VPI is, if anyone here has used it, feel free to let me know what you thought.

The vet says, essentially, that it's quite likely that Cypress is just bored with the food she gets, as they get older their tastebuds die off (So do yours, you hairless primate. Don't look so smug.). This wouldn't especially surprise me, since the reason we took her off the prescription food is that she just had no interest in eating it. And while you might be able to say "You're going to sit there and not get anything else to eat, young man, until those lima beans are gone", this is not a tactic that works on the cat. Not Cypress, anyway. She's perfectly capable of holding her breath till she turns blue. And I'm a soft touch, and my partner spent two hours going to a half dozen grocery stores and pet food stores last night collecting a variety of food brands and flavors.

My theory continues to be that years ago we fed her something that she was okay with at the time but didn't know enough to know was the best she would ever get out of us, so she sort of turned up her nose at it in feigned disinterest to see what else we'd offer. But it never got any better than that, and she's still waiting for us to get a clue and try it again.

So the vet backed off on the prescription food suggestion and said, in essence, feed her freaking Meow Mix if you have to, but she has to eat, and she has to eat a certain amount, or the fat will start migrating into her liver. As nearly as I can tell, neither of my cats has ever eaten the amount, volume-wise, of food they're supposed to, they just don't get much exercise so it's allowed them to get pretty hefty. (This is my problem, too, for the record.)

So I'm not sure that she's ever going to eat the right number of calories or the right amount of food by weight, but right now she's pretty much just licking the sauce off the food we're giving her, and that's not enough. Today I got sneaky and started mashing the food together so she can't get the sauce without eating at least some of the food.

The vet has also offered vitamins in liquid form, and something called a "pilling gun", which I'm looking forward to attempting to use. I hope it comes with a self-suturing attachment.

Because she can't actually talk, I have a feeling we're going to end up getting a bunch of plastic plates, putting a forkful of each of a dozen or so foods on each one and labeling them, and then ignoring her to see what she finishes. That should be loads of fun, as well.

Bottom line: we still don't know, but it's probably nothing life-threatening, and we'll more than likely actually be able to afford to find out what's wrong with her. And for right now, that's pretty good.

I, meanwhile, thank you for your kind wishes. She won't, but again this is nothing personal, but the next person I send cranes to will get some Pre-Chewed for Your Convenience, and that's a kind of thanks, sort of.

You are invited to leave in the comments your advice on foods for finicky cats (The vet advised us to go lightly on the fish flavors, and beef seems to make her barf, which is understandable because I would guess it's been thirty thousand years or so since a cat was last capable of hunting and eating anything like a cow.), your own personal love for the Spot Bot or the Dyson pet-specific vacuum cleaner, stories of vet bills and pet insurance and a lack thereof, cat-related stories of any sort, dog-related stories because you are not a cat person, or pretty much anything else except the recipe for Pringles Mashed Potatoes because I plan to do that here in the next couple days and hate people stepping on my lines.

Tuesday Catblogging

This is Cypress. Cypress hates you. Don't take it personally; Cypress hates everyone. Cypress marginally accepts my right to exist, most of the time anyway. Beyond that, she hates everyone, regardless of species or personality or generosity in their dealings with her.

Cypress is fourteen or fifteen years old, I'm lousy with dates, and has spent nearly all of it scheming to open cans of cat food. She almost had the can opener sorted out, I'm convinced another year would have had it, when they started putting pop-tops on the cans, and now she's back to square one, a little older, a little wiser, a little more pissed off at an often capricious humanity in general. But if she could figure out the pop-tops and how to extract ice cubes from the freezer, she'd quite contentedly do away with every moving thing on the planet bigger than a toad. This includes me, and I do not take offense. She's entitled to her fantasies; so are we all.

There's no particularly good reason the cat lives her entire life at a point just below the Rage Threshold, that I can see anyway. There's the usual stuff: vets, tooth-brushing, fur-combing, vacuum cleaners, and the presence of the Emergency Backup Cat Iala, but on the whole Iala contends with all of this with unfailing good nature so I'm inclined to assume Cypress is just neurotic. Some people are, after all.

This isn't something I take personally and I encourage you not to either. She's an extremely beautiful cat, and she's good at spotting when I really need her to purr at me or smack me in the face with her tail. If she could tolerate you, I'm sure she'd extend the same empathy.

Today, though, Cypress hates my guts, even more than normal which again is a considerable amount. Yesterday morning, she and Iala seemed to decide it was the perfect day for a Biggest Hairball Ever competition, which in the morning had me exasperated but by the end of the day had me concerned.

A year and a half ago, Cypress stopped eating, we never did figure out why. This caused bad things to happen to her liver, but she got pills and blood tests and more blood tests and prescription food she hated and more pills to make her want to eat the prescription food she hated and more blood tests to see how that was going and after a while the vet delivered himself of the opinion that she was probably okay now.

After that Cypress, who had always had the same sort of appetite you see on the Discovery Channel in late July, suddenly became ultra-finicky and stopped eating nearly all treats she was offered along with pretty much everything else until we settled on the new line of Fancy Feast, which she will eat as long as she doesn't get the same flavor twice in a day and as long as I replace the plate with a new one as soon as she indicates she's bored with it.

I'm unemployed and rarely go anywhere and don't sleep much, so this has worked out reasonably okay until yesterday, when she picked at her food a little, and kept barfing. She's always been a hair-trigger regurgitator, mostly because she would eat fast and then throw it up when it made her stomach hurt. We've learned to live with this, and we don't own any heirloom rugs nor do we keep electronics equipment or books on the floor. We do a lot of laundry and we own a Spot-Bot.

But yesterday she wasn't eating much, and sometime around four AM with me worried since about noon, she went into the bathroom and managed to throw up what was essentially just bile. (I'd warn you guys about this sort of thing but after the recipes there's probably no chance people with delicate constitutions read here anyway.)

So at seven thirty when the vet opened, I called, and we took her in at eight thirty after I wheedled a bit. They know I'm paranoid, and they mostly assume it's probably nothing when I call, because it usually is, but they do try to humor me presumably because they have kids in college.

I'm not the sort of person who digs suspense in real-life situations, to be honest even when writing fiction I like to warn people that X bad thing will happen but that nobody will die as a result of it. So if the vet had laughed me out of the office and told me it was nothing, you may safely assume I'd have told you that to start.

What he did say--after taking her temperature twice and deciding she'd lost some more weight and taking her blood and giving her an injection of something to keep her from barfing and giving her some IV fluids, and telling me she was drooling in my hair (by which time I was definitely less than calm about demanding to be told what was the problem)--was that he didn't think it was intestinal cancer, which was something that hadn't even occurred to me and therefore I was not overjoyed to have it mostly ruled out, but that it might be her liver again and they won't know till they get blood tests and here's an appetite stimulant.

As an aside, the appetite stimulant my cat is getting is one of the drugs that my neurologist has me on to mitigate the effects of the Inderal zombies, and I would possibly argue that giving someone at my weight an appetite stimulant borders on the insane. It's manufactured by Cypress Pharmaceuticals, though, which is entirely irrelevant but has led to some confusion over bottles the last time she was taking it.

So, if you see me restlessly haunting your comments sections, clicking on your blog twice in an hour, or commenting in an even more incoherent fashion than usual, it's because I have a cat fitfully asleep on my foot and I can't pace, which is what I really want to be doing.

If you can, and it's the sort of thing you do, please spare a few good thoughts for her to whoever or whatever it is you may find yourself praying to. Because she's my baby, and I don't want her to be sick or to hurt, and I really don't know what I'll do without her when she eventually dies and I'd like to put that off for a while.

And though she does indeed hate you, it really is nothing personal.

Arts and Crafts Monday

Ah, it's allergy season again. I can't help with that. But I can offer you this cute little Japanese paper toy. It's a kleenex dispenser shaped like a bus. You get little flat anthropomorphic animal characters to cut out and glue together and you can stick them into slots in the various windows so they're riding in your bus! Yay, a toy and it's kinda useful. Or it would be if Americans still sold small tissue dispensers anymore. Instead we get tiny packets where you open one end and slide them out like they were a stack of notebook paper. Still. You'll probably figure something out, and it'll give you something to do that's not work.

Various other paper toys from the same site ("KidsGoo", apparently) found here, and there's some accessories and stuff for the Paper Museum dollhouses here, scroll all the way down and click on the floating characters. If you want the houses they go with, get them at Paper Museum, it has additional ones not found on the other site, and is easier to navigate.

And if none of that catches your fancy at all, here's the Custom Paper Toys site, with Gnarley, paper gargoyle.

Unless otherwise noted, all I've mentioned here are free downloadable pdf files. (If you click around a lot on the Paper Museum site, you may eventually get to pages that will lead you to pages that will try to sell you, in Japanese, pre-printed versions of stuff. I assume you know how not to enter your credit card numbers though. You'll be fine.)

I may have to put together a separate blogroll for my paper toy sites I like.

It Always Looks Like So Much Fun When They Do It

Please allow me to present the voice in my head that is apparently Bill "Culture Warrior" O'Reilly's biggest fan, and the Watch It Like A Wingnut movie review, crossposted at No More Mister Nice Blog, where I can't even keep my fonts straight.

Wow! We finally got to see the Transformers movie, and it just goes to prove everything I've believed all along! But first, a confession. My partner and I went to the theater in our brand new car, which is a tree-hugging hybrid, and a foreign car at that. I'm pretty sure this means my partner is a traitor to the idea of America. I'm so ashamed. And I was even more ashamed after seeing the movie because it is, quite simply, the most American movie… ever.

For starters, it's very pro-military. And even better, pro-defense spending. If we hadn't been pouring all that money into military research, we would never be able to defeat the evil alien robots, so thank God for that, and also for the NRA, which helps us all defend ourselves from evil alien robots.

The movie also makes the point that an alien invasion would establish the president's legacy as a take-charge, leadership, kicking-ass kind of guy. So I'm pretty much rooting for that now, since really, if you think about it there was very little collateral damage, so the president wouldn't even have to go to any funerals, and besides it just looked cool.

Now, there was a recruiting ad for the Marines before the movie, but that's okay because the movie itself proves what I've been saying all along: You don't have to enlist to fight in the War on Terror! The main character, some skinny nerdy guy whose name I can't remember, doesn't do that. Instead, he buys a car. A gas-guzzling, American car. Which turns out to be a cool alien robot who's both his bodyguard and a really good way to get the chick the guy wants. And with the help of the chick and the car robot and the other good robots (all of whom, I note, were good American cars and trucks, big ones, too, and none of those lame hybrids.) and a couple of military guys who were just sort of hanging around and a couple of hackers, the nerdy kid manages to save the world. How? By buying a car! And also by memorizing lines from cartoons.

Even the hackers helped save the world, so now when your mom tells you you'll never amount to anything just sitting in front of the computer eating Cheetos all day, tell her she's wrong. If alien robots come, you'll be needed to save the planet, which is way more important than sitting in a kiddy pool in the desert somewhere with all those other guys who got basically blown up when they weren't expecting it and none of their weapons helped very much, so you have to stay here and make sure you're safe, because if you enlisted and got your arms blown off, for example, the whole world would be destroyed when you couldn't type anymore. It's like that thing Spock was always saying about the good of the many. And anyway, one of the robots gets killed and another loses his leg, so it's not like we're not all on the frontlines in the War no matter where we are.

But, okay, at the beginning, in the opening credits, there's something about the movie being produced in association with Hasbro, and the whole audience started laughing, because Hasbro is a pretty funny word. And then there are the military guys in a helicopter, and one of them keeps speaking Spanish, I guess, which annoys the other guys because they don't and they know he speaks good English, so why is he doing that? He might be making fun of them, and how would they even know? So they keep yelling at him to speak English, which makes sense, and he won't, and I think he gets eaten or killed or something or maybe it was some other guy, I couldn't really tell them apart.

Anyway, at some point the military guys end up in an Iraqi village, and they yell at some kid's dad that they need a telephone, and he just points to it, so everybody in Iraq speaks English well enough, too. I think this just proves how stupid the Left is when they say things like, oh, but we should keep the Arabic translators, even if they do keep being gay. Clearly they just want to use the military as a social experiment to integrate the gays. Which is pointless because we don't need them anyway. I mean, even the robots speak English.

I won't ruin the movie for you, because you should totally go see it instead of giving your money to Michael Moore to see his stupid hypocritical movie (If he was really interested in health care, he'd lose weight!). But I want to tell you a few other really cool things about the movie. At some point the Secretary of Defense tells some weaselly guy who looks kind of Arabic to me that he should do what the military guys want because "Losing is not an option with these guys" or something like that, and the whole audience just cheered! So those polls about how Americans think we're losing in Iraq, I don't know who they're polling, maybe they're just calling up the offices of CounterPunch and The New York Times or something. Because where I was sitting in that theater, everybody thinks we have no choice but to win!

Also, and I don't want to ruin this, but I don't know how they did it, they made the perfect argument for pardoning Scooter Libby—sometimes you have to defend your friends or family out of loyalty, and it's not right that you should have to have a criminal record just for being loyal. Loyalty is supposed to be a virtue, after all.

I also want to point out that the movie makes a great point that you shouldn't go around destroying dams just because the fish-huggers think you should, because they might be there for a very good reason, and it would endanger us all if the government had to explain why they needed to leave any dam where it is. We should just trust them, since they know more about this stuff than we do. And while we're at it, it's clear evidence that Hollywood has finally rejected that failed "theory" of evolution—the aliens are cars, not dinosaurs!

And, really, I think the whole thing is basically an analogy for Iraq—part of it is even in Iraq—where the Autobots are America, and the Decepticons are Al Quaeda insurgents, and Optimus Prime is Bush. Because the Decepticons want to take over the planet to get something from us—just like the oil in Iraq—and they also think humans should be killed because they don't deserve freedom. So the Autobots have to fight them because they think that Iraq, or in this analogy the humans, should have freedom. So, really, the Megatron guy just hates us for our freedoms, which is what the president has been saying all along.

Finally, I just want to encourage everybody to go see it. At last, at long last, the liberal secular progressives who control Hollywood have given us a movie that's not about hating Christ or about loving anal sex, but is instead about patriotism. I haven't been this proud to eat American theater popcorn since Independence Day came out and proved that guys with computers can defeat an alien invasion. Booyah!

Independence Day Not Exactly Random Ten

I've got rather a ton of good, lyric-based trenchantly cynical or wistfully ideological music appropriate for this Fourth of July, so let's see what the first ten that come up that seem appropriate are. And yeah, if "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" pops, you'll hear about it, as trite as that seems.


American Idiot, Green Day. I figured to mostly get folk songs out of this, but this isn't a bad place to start. Newer can be good. Random can be apt. (Though, I grant you I skipped some Weird Al to get here. If it'd been "Biggest Ball of Twine", I might have felt compelled to go with it.)
"Welcome to a new kind of tension/All across the alien nation/Everything isn't meant to be okay."

God Bless America Again, Bobby Bare. You might recognize this as the song at the end of Canadian Bacon. I was kind of hoping this wouldn't turn up. I'm pagan, I know a bunch of y'all are atheists. Nonetheless...
"God bless America again, you must know the trouble that she's in."

I'm A-Lookin' For a Home, Pete Seeger. Hard to believe this is current again, innit.
"If anyone should ask you why I sing so shrill, tell 'em I'm a discharged soldier a-waitin' on the housing bill."

Seatbacks and Traytables, Fountains of Wayne.
"Trade one town for another, delayed now why did we bother. X on the calendar square, new city, same stuff."

This Land Is Your Land, the Woody Guthrie classic. I was hoping this would come up, but since I have about twenty versions of the damned thing, it wasn't bad odds. You don't know the lyrics to anything but the chorus? You should. Find another set of 'em here.
"Near the relief office, I see my people. As they stood there hungry, I stood there askin', is this land still made for you and me?"

To Have and Have Not, Billy Bragg.
"I've come to see in the land of the free, there's only a future for the chosen few."

Do Re Mi, Woody Guthrie. (I admit it, I skipped "We Shall Overcome" with Pete Seeger. It seemed a bit cloying for the day.)
"California's a garden of eden, a paradise to live in or see, but believe it or not you won't find it so hot if you ain't got the do-re-mi."

I'm Afraid of Americans, David Bowie. I'm laughing too hard to keep going, I think. At least this balances out the Bobby Bare:
"God is an American. God is an American."

Okay, no more. My iTunes is clearly possessed. Your ninth and final song is the Arrogant Worms, We Are The Beaver.
"You might think a rodent is a pretty lame choice for a national animal..."
Never mind. The lyrics are here, there's no way I can do it justice.

Feel free to speculate in comments on what the tenth song might have been. I was holding out for Woody Guthrie's I Got To Know, but the way things are going it's more likely to have been some punk cover of that Simon and Garfunkel song and then I'd never have respected me, which would suck 'cause I'm the only one who bothers.

Good News, and More Zombies

You've seen this page before, but I thought after the Bigfoot model, you guys might enjoy a zombie model. (Page three of the haunted house diorama, called "Skeleton". He's clearly a zombie.)

There's also this page, which has a variety of way cool toys on it, including some little games, and a lot of nice spooky coffin boxes, and... a zombie mask. Well, okay, everybody knows that tigers won't attack you if they think you can see them. (I suspect this is wrong, but whatever.) So as everybody also knows, if you wear a mask backwards on your head, any tigers in the vicinity will conclude that you are looking at them and will leave you alone. (Again, this seems doubtful.)

Originally I had stuck a Futurama rubber Brain Slug on my head, facing backwards, but it falls off a lot, so I dug out the Ronald Reagan Halloween mask. If Zombie Reagan can't deter the Hallucinated Zombies, we've got more problems than I care to think about. Unfortunately, it creeped out my partner something awful, so I instead printed out the Ravensblight mask and assembled that. Seems to be working fine. Farther down the page there is a set of tiny zombie standees, if you want your own army.

On the excellent news front, and likely not entirely unrelated to the zombie bigfoot infestation, the housemate has gotten financial aid and will be moving out to go to grad school in September. And no, none of you can move in now that I have a spare room, okay? But I'd be glad to help you ScotchGuard your new box.

I Wasn't Done With Thursday Yet!

My partner is considering getting me a toolbelt to keep my zombie-poking spoon in.
"Hey, if you're going to invite Crazy in, you might as well let it sit down on the couch and offer it some lemonade."

In that spirit, today's random ten: Be What You Are, Even If That Happens To Be Crazy edition.


Crazy Mixed-Up Kid, The Smithereens. Album, Especially For You.
Yeah, yeah. I should have taken a mulligan, I suppose.
"I guess she's just a crazy mixed-up kid."

Tunnel of Lungs, The Minus 5. Album: I Don't Know Who I Am (Let The War Against Music Begin Volume 2).
I have to say, this song sounds like a migraine.
"It's not all right, it's never okay."

So Long, It's Been Good To Know You, Woody Guthrie. Album, in this case, a compilation called That's Why We're Marching, though I have it on others as well.
"I've sung this song but I'll sing it again."

Worthless, The Young Fresh Fellows. Album, Because We Hate You.
It's like this. There's a special place in my heart for Scott McCaughey, California-born but Seattle-famous songwriter with the world's worst case of ADHD. I'm convinced he's a shark, if he stops moving he'll die. But I own nearly everything he's ever done in various guises (and a lot of what people he's done stuff with have done with other people), and he's the guy behind The Minus 5 as well, including a vinyl more-or-less bootleg of the YFF doing a charming piano version of "Shake Your Love", I'm not making this up so stop looking at me like that. Anyway, few people turn a phrase as slyly as he does, and I love him for it. This is maybe not one of his better efforts, however.
"I don't know why I should try to explain a thing."

Whistling in the Dark, They Might be Giants. Album, Flood.
This might be some kind of euphemism. Or it might just mean what it says. Hard to tell, with them.
"Be what you're like, be like yourself."

Emergency, The Tragically Hip. Album, Day For Night.
Not my favorite song here.
"Things we say here stay here forever, amen."

Crazy Love, Volume 2, Paul Simon. Graceland.
This came up last week, too, I note.
"I have no opinion about this."

It's Only Me, Barenaked Ladies. Album, Disc One: All Their Greatest Hits.
"It's just natural, it's only me."

She's Got A Problem, Fountains of Wayne. Album, um, Fountains of Wayne.
My partner thinks this song is hilarious for some reason.
"She's gonna do something dumb."

All of a Sudden (It's Too Late), XTC. Album, English Settlement.
"Life's like a firework, you're only lit once, you must stand and radiate correctly."

You are cordially invited to leave your own in comments, or to just tell me ten songs you like, or anything else you want. I'm pretty easy.

My Dinner With Bigfoot

Okay, last week should have softened 'em up, and this week they will be more than willing to order pizza, as long as it looks as bad as what you did last week. I know they say, when creating garnishes, that the first bite is with the eye, but I've found that in reality, as opposed to in trendy four star restaurants, the first bite is with the horrified ear of the imagination.

So you start by calling and instant messaging around on the pretext of finding out when people will be home, but in actuality you're just putting them on notice that You Will Be Cooking. Make sure you find out when they'll be home first, and then explain casually that you've got a very special meal planned. This hasn't been going on long enough in your home at least for people to know the range of bad, and they will most likely agree to come home anyway, just to see what you've got in mind now.

In my home, they already know how bad it can get, and while we are all creative occasionally, I am the undisputed master of sadistic cookery. But most of the time they get white rice and frozen pot stickers and random bottled sauce, or a fairly reasonable lasagna or citrus chicken I do, or just some random noodles out of a box with Spam stirred in, which believe it or not counts as a decent meal around here. I suppose I should note that most of the time it's nobody's night to cook, and we operate under Forage Rules, where you find something frozen and heat it up for yourself. (Forage Rules: Anybody who knows where the freezer and microwave are kept gets to eat. Anybody who doesn't know where they are or how to use them, doesn't. This is your fork, if you lose it you will not be issued another.)

So when I ask who's going to be home and when, it's not an automatic Spam And Cheez Whiz Quiche Red Alert, it might just be when should I start the rice cooker. I find this introduces an element of existential dread into the whole thing that people really appreciate. So fair warning doesn't necessarily mean they'll come up with an excuse to eat out, though it might mean they'll eat a burger on the way home and pretend they haven't, but for you, dear readers, odds are good their survival instincts haven't cut in yet and they're still stuck in the bemused curiosity phase.

In any event, tonight we'll be making something that smells good but looks awful, and yes, that means Spam. There's something distinctly unfoodlike about the color of Spam, even if you like the flavor, which is basically salty ham lunchmeat. We're out of leftover rice at the moment, and I could make some fresh, but why bother.

What I do have is a Gladware container full of leftover mashed potato fakes. They're Betty Crocker Potato Buds, regular flavor, made according to the package directions and the leftovers refrigerated fast. You can probably make some to start with, but they really need to be refrigerated for about eight hours after you cook them, so they clump up and get weird. (No, really, that's a good thing.)

We also have some leftover canned corn, so we'll be throwing that in if nobody ate it yet, and a can of pineapple tidbits.

My advice is to just cube the Spam. I tried it with a melon baller once, looking for a more festive way to serve it, but there was, really, a lot of wastage, so I don't bother anymore.

Our sauce tonight will be a bottled Sweet & Sour, but we're going to add a little red food coloring for that really nice laser red color.

So, heat up your wok, and dump the Spam in. You just want it browned for the moment, so keep stirring it. Then throw in your pineapple, and you can add some ginger if you like, give that two minutes or so. Next the mashed potatoes, breaking it into clumps about the size of cauliflower florets. So stir that all around till everything's nicely browned, by which time it should all be cooked through, and then throw in the corn, which won't take too long at all to heat up.

Pull it all off the heat and dump it into a bowl, add the sauce, toss gently to coat. You could garnish with parsley, but we don't do that much in my house because my partner, a Penn & Teller fan, and I have spent the last several years playing their Parsley Game, where you try to sneak yours onto their plate and to keep theirs off yours. So I'll probably go with thin slices of orange and maybe some extra pineapple tidbits in sort of a flower design. These thoughtful touches mean so much.

Once again, you'll need to thunk it onto the table, clatter the forks next to it, and yell "Are you guys gonna come eat or what?" By now they know the rules, and believe me, that sauce is a deeply disturbing red, especially contrasted with the Spam pink. So you might be able to get halfway through the dish-title-as-description before they're arguing over who's buying the pizza.

Enjoy that, you've earned it. But be aware that they're probably not ordering a ham-and-pineapple. And if you do find yourself eating Sweet & Sour Spam And Mashed Potatoes With Pineapple And Corn, relax, it's actually not bad. And that's not just me saying that because I'm crazy, the kitchen bigfoot agree.

Arts And Crafts Wednesday

I had, all weekend, the sort of headache you could break bottles over, so I forgot all about arts and crafts Monday. To apologize, may I offer you this link?

Jamstec has a new addition to its line of deep sea critters. It appears to be an isopod, though I could be wrong. At Deep Sea News a while back, they pondered the critters and concluded eventually that they were a tripodfish, a crab, an angler, a manta ray, a snailfish, and a shovel nosed ray, in addition to the dumbo octopus.

As far as the migraine goes, I can actually hang onto one for weeks at a time, until I give up and head to the ER for a fun-filled evening of sitting in a waiting room watching Caillou. I haven't actually had one of those since we started the new meds, and I am grateful. They're why I'm still dealing with the zombie bigfeet instead of giving up and demanding we try something else. So when this migraine stuck around through the weekend in the old pattern, I was definitely worried. But as it turns out, somewhere last night the damned thing just... went away. Pretty much. I of course still have the headache, a point I like to make just so I can keep my headache record intact. (Eighteen years and counting! Woot!) But I'm still without migraine meds, and unless it's the Inderal, there's really no good reason for this.

So, if it's this and the bigfeet or even the zombies, or the two week migraines with vomiting and only my usual run of hallucinations, I think I'll be keeping the big guys around. Though I think they might be stealing my shoes, but I'm not a huge shoe person anyway, so what the hell. I'm pretty sure it's the zombies, for the record. Mine would never fit the bigfeet.

I Have No Taste

No, the zombies haven't complained. My taste in music, that is. So, just because everybody else gets to, here's a Friday Random Ten, "Losing It" Version, with lyrics.

King Of Bedside Manor, Barenaked Ladies. Album: Gordon.
"You know he was quite a singer, quite an actor, quite some time ago."

Days Of Wine And Booze, Minus 5. Album: Down With Wilco.
"Who will pick up when you call in?"

Standing By, Actual Tigers (Or Willis, depending on what album.) Album (in this case): Gravelled and Green.
"In the age of information it's so hard to be a saint."

Crazy Love Volume 2, Paul Simon. Album: Graceland.
"Well, I don't claim to be happy about this, boys."

We Want A Rock, They Might Be Giants. Album: Flood.
"Where was I? I forgot the point that I was making..."

Mister Blue, Charlie Chesterfield. Album: Studebakersfield.
"Sometimes I feel like some sad old goddamned song that everyone knows the words to but just won't sing along."

Lost Track Of Time, Young Fresh Fellows. Album: This One's For The Ladies.
"There's no way that I fit in the way I did before."

It Ends Tonight, The All-American Rejects. Album: Move Along.
"The walls start breathing..."

Bukowski, Modest Mouse. Album: Good News For People Who Love Bad News.
"Who would wanna be, who would wanna be such a control freak?"

Shop Vac, Jonathan Coulton. Album: Thing A Week I.
"If you need me, I'll be downstairs with the shop vac. You can call but I probably won't hear you because it's loud with the shop vac on."

I'm going to skip the bonus, you guys have put up with enough. If I had to pick one of those albums to tell you to go buy, I think it'd be Gravelled and Green, a choice which even surprises me because there's a lot of good stuff on that list. Of course, I say that as someone with no taste at all.

Display your own in the comments, or just mock mine.