I Wish Kucinich Were A Tall Hot Black Guy

If we nominate Clinton, McCain's going to win. If we nominate Obama, Obama might win, but as my brother put it at dinner last night, the nation's youth will be badly brokenhearted. The most change he represents at this point is the color of his skin. Which isn't nothing, but the people excited about Obama really want what Kucinich was offering - a change from the current power structure that runs our lives - but Kucinich is a short guy with a weak voice and kind of weird. Obama's a tall hot black man with a voice to melt a tree and who's probably moving to talk to and probably great in bed. But he has no policies to speak of. I think he has a couple ideas concerning prescription drugs or something. He represents the antithesis of the current administration because he's black. Which, bizarrely, has made him highly electable. So I wish Kucinich was a tall hot black guy with a great speaking voice so he were more electable, because he's the only one calling a spade a spade.

Jake Takes a Stand

I am committed to the possibility of being courageous, free, honest, healthy, and at ease.

Woohoo!

"Obama Aims To Keep Race Out Of Equation"

...but goddamn if we're gonna let him!

It's also nonsense. Not only is he a human being and has a race, which is therefore in the equation, and not only do all the voters have races as well, adding even more race to the question, but

Obama has emphasized that he is not pursuing the presidency as an "African-American candidate."

What does that sentence even mean?

"Jake Miles has emphasized that he is not pursuing his life as a 5'6" white male."

I'm a 5'6" white male. My name's Jake Miles. If I pursued the presidency, that's how I'd pursue it. Not only that, if I were black and running for president, if I said anything at all on the matter I'd say "I'm a black man, I choose to be a black man, and goddamnit I'm running for President of the United States!"

I've now been lying in bed for about 7 hours, hoping for a REM cycle or two, my brain a shark at sea. As I turned on the light at 4:45am or so, giving up, I became aware of three things - the heavy pain in my left leg, the empty taste in my mouth, and the weight of my body standing up out of the sheets. The pain is from my old chronic friend cellulitis, an infection I get in my leg a few times a year when I'm run down. The taste is from lying in bed trying to sleep for 7 hours. As I stood up out of bed, the combination of the infection and the taste in my mouth suddenly felt exactly like my first cellulitis infection in 8th grade, when I was in the hospital for two weeks on I.V. antibiotics, lying in bed endlessly, aware of the sensitivity in my leg every time I rolled over. I felt just now, vividly, as if I had an I.V. in my arm. I've had many, many I.Vs over the years. Only this week when I had bloodwork done did I first watch the phlebotomist put the needle in. It's actually easier than looking away; I didn't clench up the way I usually do, looking anywhere but at my arm, trying to disappear from the planet until the needle's out. It's still unpleasant when you watch, but you realize how much more natural it actually is, and that your longtime fear that they're going to stab right through the vein, like that novice nurse in 8th grade did, is, while not unfounded, out of proportion. Watching, you feel more in control. I've had a few IV mishaps, both involving a nervous technician who put the needle right through the vein. In one case this was immediately evident, but in another - when I had an MRI - although the guy was clearly insecure and rushed, I didn't know anything might be wrong until halfway through the (two-hour long!) MRI, when the computer injected the contrast and instead of flowing into the vein it rushed into my arm and filled my bicep. That hurt. And in an MRI lasting that long, you don't know whether you should squeeze the panic bulb they placed in your hand, knowing this will invalidate the whole scan, or just incorporate the new pain into the hallucinations you're already swimming in from the noise and darkness of the MRI machine. I literally heard church bells, people laughing, all kinds of noises - the brain trying to make sense of the jackhammer solenoids riveting on all sides of your head. I remember being afraid the whole time that one of the solenoids would come loose in its housing and fly through the enclosure and kill me. The imagination is a blessing and a curse. For example, it keeps me from sleeping.

Ye Fish of Winged Feet

The New York Times posted a study on tuna mercury levels in New York City, which are much higher than previously thought. Cooking does not affect the mercury level, but more expensive tuna tends to contain more mercury, so sushi contains the most:

"In general, tuna sushi from food stores was much lower in mercury. These findings reinforce results in other studies showing that more expensive tuna usually contains more mercury because it is more likely to come from a larger species, which accumulates mercury from the fish it eats. Mercury enters the environment as an industrial pollutant.

In the Times survey, 10 of the 13 restaurants said at least one of the two tuna samples bought was bluefin.
...

By contrast, other species, like yellowfin and albacore, generally have much less mercury."

This table lists all the restaurants and stores tested. Basically, if you want high quality tuna with negligible Mercury, shop at Fairway on the upper west side. Somehow their mercury level is just 0.10 parts per million, as compared with Blue Ribbon's 1.4 parts per million - 14 times as much. According to the FDA's standards, that means you can eat either 71.7 pieces of Fairway tuna regularly, or 2.6 pieces of Blue Ribbon Sushi, before you've absorbed too much mercury.

Beyond that you turn into little metallic pellets that your friends can play with on the floor, watching you break apart into magnetic blobs that glom together over and over while your friends unknowingly absorb you through their skin and get brain damage, the way all our parents did after breaking open thermometers as kids and playing with the balls.

And then there's the emotional journey of chiseling a marble scrotum.

Team America 101

This article, We Own The World, is a really clear (and fairly brief) illustration of U.S. foreign policy for the last 100 years or so, by Noam Chomsky. A pretty smart guy, worth reading. The title sums it up, but the article proves in simple terms and with simple facts that our country's central belief is that we own the world, and the rest of you should shut up about it. This isn't just about Bush, this is about Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, everybody. It's about what our government actually does to the rest of the world, and how it's essential that the public be kept in the dark about it.

If you have gone to the best schools and graduated from Oxford and Cambridge, and so on, you have instilled in you the understanding that there are certain things it would not do to say; actually, it would not do to think. That is the primary way to prevent unpopular ideas from being expressed.

The ideas of the overwhelming majority of the population, who don’t attend Harvard, Princeton, Oxford and Cambridge, enable them to react like human beings, as they often do. There is a lesson there for activists.

He demonstrates in the article - with fact, not opinion - how limited the range of mainstream political discourse is in America, and how that's intentional, because it keeps most of the country stupid and isolated and feeling powerless. At this point it's bizarre to me that people don't see this - listen to any candidate or news program and think of how little they're actually talking about. Someone said this, the voters seem to want this, gay people want to get married. Who gives a shit? We're funding people that chop off people's hands.

Most news today is entertainment, to give us something to talk about while we torture and kill and damage the lives of millions of people on a routine basis, in order to dominate the globe and stay rich. Because talking about that on the news would be pretty depressing and enraging and upsetting, and the general public might outright revolt or boycott or in some other way make the money dry up. It certainly wouldn't attract ad money.

Sorting Your Blogger Archives in Reverse Order

Exciting times. If passengers will direct their attention to the right, they'll see an Archives list sorted by date descending: the most recent months appear at the top rather than the bottom. Blogger, in one of its many mysterious and/or lazy design choices, sorts them the other way and provides no way to change this. You'll find many solutions to reverse-sort them via Google, but here's one more for the pile that I think is a little cleaner than others I've seen.

The idea is to create the list in Blogger's order, but give it a style attribute of "display:none", meaning it will remain hidden in the page and won't affect the layout. Following that is a list that's visible but contains no items. When the page loads, a little javascript moves the items from the invisible list into the visible one, in reverse order, and we can all go to sleep happy.

I like this solution because it keeps the javascript and html separate, as opposed to creating the html tags with javascript like some other solutions I've seen. I don't like to do that because it's error-prone, mixes apples and oranges, and just looks a mess. Instead I use html to define content, and javascript to apply logic to it - a clean separation of concerns as they say.

Rather than repost the html and javascript here, I direct your attention now to the source code of this page. For anyone new to html, you can view the html, css and javascript that make up any web page with a menu item in your browser. This is a great way to learn - just look at the page source of sites you like, and imitate and experiment. To view the page source, in Internet Explorer 6 it's in the View menu under 'Source', and in Firefox you just right-click anywhere in the page and select 'View Page Source'.

In the window of source code that opens, search (Ctrl-F in Windows, Apple-F on Mac) for 'reverseArchives' for the javascript, and 'BloggerArchives' for the associated html.

All for now. Peace out me bloggies.

Bravehead

That's me in a kilt. In October my friend Gary got married, and he had his groomsmen wear full kilts, complete with a dagger we kept in the sock. ...it's funny, I'm trying to think of things I can report about this wedding, but every one of them is secret for one reason or another. Anyway, this is me attaching the clip of my pocketwatch to the jacket - Gary also gave all his groomsmen custom-designed pocketwatches. There's a story behind mine, which has a picture of Leonard Nemoy embossed on the cover, but I need to think about whether I can tell that story, because the vital part of it is that we never discuss it. We also all vowed never to tell if we were wearing underwear. Which was difficult, because it's the only thing the women at the reception wanted to know, to the point that one lifted my kilt from behind while I was shaking my booty on the dance floor, to the glee of the videographer. I only realized my kilt was rising just in time to slap it down and whirl around...I think. I haven't seen the video yet.

Actually, this wedding was being filmed for a sort of small-scale reality show on couples getting married, so since I don't have a TV you might know before I do whether I turned around in time.