Where the Unemployed Could Profitably Be Put to Work

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That is, as phone operators who would actually be standing by when you call state or federal offices. Today, even as I speak, E. is on the phone sorting out some things with social security.

I should say trying to sort out. Menu after menu seems designed to discourage callers from persisting in their query. Sometimes it almost seems *as if these bottlenecks were designed*.

Well. Anyway. E. was battling her way through this maze of What Did You Say? and Press Five for Other when her frustration mounted to the point -- some little trick question had knocked her back to the first menu -- that she laughed heartily.

At which point the mechanical voice said: "I don't understand.," which allowed E. to say, "That makes two of us."

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How Should the Law Be Applied if One of Two Conjoined Twins (Popularly Know as Siamese Twins) Commits Murder While the Second is Merely an Onlooker?

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I'll cut to the chase:

As actors under American criminal law, conjoined twins present paradoxical obstacles to the application of traditional methods of criminal punishments. The Western notion of individuality precludes such duplicitous beings from orthodox measures to remedy criminal action, particularly the crime of murder. Constitutional limitations of due process and guarantees of life, liberty and property militate against equal treatment of these actors under the law. I believe that within our Constitutional framework, the only thing to be done in this situation is to release the conjoined twins.

So says 3rd year USF law student Nick Kam, to whose blog I was directed by my standing Google news search for stuff pertaining to my employer.

And what if the innocent twin was a reporter and the killer twin was his source? I'll figure out a way to shoehorn this into journalism ethics the next time I teach it.

Parked for Future Enjoyment: Haven't Been Paying Much Attention to JibJab

People Thinking About Adopting Cats Spend Time Looking at Cat Videos

Is Religion a Male Disease?

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E. just said that, having read in the Financial Times about another attempt on the life of a/the Danish cartoonist who disrespected The Prophet.

(We try to kill people who disrespect The Profit. That's another story.)

One of the reasons it would be nice to be retired would be that I'd have the time to Sit and Read and Come to a Conclusion. Does religion do more harm than good in the conduct of human affairs? I tend to think it does, but I may not be making a judgment on the distortions religion visits on us but on our fundamental distortions as human beings that invent religion as a rationalization.

Perhaps, the fault is not in our gods but in ourselves? On my. Quipping so easily trumps thinking.

Tonight the Dude Will Abide

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By which I mean we are going to the home of H. and of N., a surviving Chronicle reporter, for a little New Year's Eve fictionary.

She is not the Dude. The Dude is the hero of the Big Lebowski and will be a topic of conversation if I am called upon.

Or if I choose to thrust myself forward, which I may: My wit bears fruit if watered, though isn't it a grand language in which one may be watered with things other than water? I mean after the second glass of wine I may feel like being heard. But with what thoughts shall I bruise the air?

Thoughts about the Big Lebowski. I just got done reading today's Arts section of the New York Times for the express purpose of finding stuff to talk about with the bright middle-aged things that we will be thrust among tonight.

And in an article therein I learn that The Big Lebowksi is:

the decade’s most venerated cult film. It’s got that elusive and addictive quality that a great midnight movie has to have: it blissfully widens and expands in your mind upon repeat viewings.

Its fans have yearly conferences at which they, well, vaguely drink, I guess, and play trivia with names and dialogue. (Nice marmot??)

And just now a volume of Lebowski Studies has been published by Indiana University Press, filled with so-called scholarly articles by so-called scholars, some of which sound like satire on themselves, but journalists are such little bitches, aren't they?

More than a few of this book’s essay titles will make you groan and laugh out loud at the same time (“ ‘The Big Lebowski’ and Paul de Man: Historicizing Irony and Ironizing Historicism”).

Is it all Pomo nonsense, applying academic electrolysis to the shaggier elements of popular culture?

I'll get back to you after the conversation tonight. I haven't decided which end of this stick I will grab and start flailing about.

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What I Am Going to Do Over Vacation

Oh many things, including growing my goatee back, and this is why.

Since most of the kids in my Journalism Ethics class are seniors, it being a "capstone" course, I always take a field trip on the last day to the legendary Pig and Whistle on Masonic near the U. It serves food, so the under-21 are welcome.

This year the guys in class showed up late -- all two of them -- so at first I was seated at a long table with ten young woman. The happy acccident of my sitting at a table with ten such females -- damned handsome, as the Brits would say; just lovely -- was much admired by the guys at the bar. There were approving looks, and banter.

You know I was vaguely embarrassed, though I'm not sure why.

Matter and antimatter. Tiger and anti-Tiger?

The young ladies were very proper. Two or three had a single beer, several had soft drinks and two or three had nothing at all, having been warned more than once against roofies, I guess. I had a couple Guinness (a very nourishing and wholesome beverage, a fine lunch substitute), and the total bill was still only 33 bucks and change.

"You didn't put on much of a show," Chris the bartender said.

Anyway, the guys from class finally showed up and had a beverage, and one of them said how disappointed he and a couple other guys who had me for journalism classes were that I had shaved off my goatee.

"It makes you look like your evil twin," he said. "We really liked it."

What an irresistible idea, looking like Bad Spock in the episode set in the antimatter -- or, at least bizarro, universe -- where good Kirk suddenly discovers what fun it is to be a bad boy for a while. (If you have a taste for chewing scenery, evil is always the more savory .)

So I'm growing back my chin rag, my face fungus, my stud stubble.

Does he or doesn't he? Is he or isn't he?

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My Wife Says It Will Be a Tsunami, But My Money is On a Giant Mutant Squid

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The famous Pier 39 sea lions are now famous by their absence. The Chron tells me the docks are bare. A couple months ago the count was 1,700, and now it's zero.

In a science fiction movie, such an exodus would be a harbinger, and pretty quickly the first undersea upwelling would kill a diver, or the diver could wander too close too an area near the Farallons (let us say) where chemical waste or nuclear debris or Barry Bonds urine had been dumped and suddenly: mangled diver and a trail of bubbles heading toward SF.

Of course, it could be an earthquake, though why would sea lions care? I'd think the curtain raiser for that would be a stream of urban wildlife heading across the Golden Gate Bridge toward Muir Woods -- where they can lie in wait for the throngs of weakened refugees.

Yum.

Meanwhile, here in Oakland we pray that it will be a tsunami and a splendid future, here in the low hills, as beachfront property.

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What Did Our Guests Put Down the Garbage Disposal?

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Whatever it was, it is now on its way to the sea, nudged along by the nice young man from Abante Plumbing, who took the plumbing course at Laney College and certainly must make Laney proud.

E. thinks it was a gradual buildup, and we shouldn't blame the Boxing Day revelers, but I think Bob yelled, "Cheese it! It's the fuzz!" once too often, and thus the disposal was abused.

Also, the water backed up into the dishwasher, and now it won't work. "Proust's Dishwasher" -- that's the scholarly monograph I want to read.

Went to work with E. As of the 30th she is officially retired, but she wants to get the jobs she's passing off to others in flawless order. In my opinion, that's like polishing eyeglasses for the blind and giving a tuning fork to the deaf, but that's just my opinion of some of the people she works with, who make the people I work with seem like bunnies in Eden.

Which is quite a compliment, since Post-Lapsarian bunnies are quite fetching, so pink and twitchy.

Graded a stack of "big stories." Grades aren't due till next Monday, and we weren't going anywhere, so what's the hurry? Some of the big stories were good, with some good reporting and clever news writing.

This was not a semester during which I thought I did a particularly effective job. But apparently I didn't *ruin* anybody.

The Greatness That is the Robertsons on Boxing Day

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Our Christmas tree this year is the hugest of the huge because E. has spent the last four Christmas holidays in Florida with Moms Landrith, and thus we went treeless since it's a job of work to hang the many lights and ornaments we own. You need time to do it, and you want time to enjoy it.

But Moms died in September so not only were we home together for the first time in several years, we also needed a bit of a morale boost. It's a strange messy unease when a parent dies who is very old -- Moms was 98.5 -- and a drain both financially and emotionally but still sporadically alert, even vital. One is sad, but one is also just a little glad, and one's accountant breathes a sigh of relief.

So I thought this year's tree must be a landmark or at least a hallmark. We hit the lot at East Bay Nursery, and in the first 30 seconds I said, "That one."

That one was a big one, a full 12 feet we later figured out, and thus about a foot too tall for our downstairs study, which is a pretty tall room as you may have noticed in the video from earlier today.

I am quite in awe of our tree, possibly the greatest tree ever but certainly the biggest tree ever because I will measure more accurately in future years. So impressed was I with our tree that I talked E. into scheduling a Boxing Day party -- which would be your December 26th -- so people could see as soon as possible The Greatness That is the Robertsons' Tree.

But after the invitations were sent, I began to wonder if anyone would show the day after Christmas. The day after can be a time of physical and emotional exhaustion since with some frequency Christmas is not what it could be, should be or -- perhaps most vexing --what it was. Even if actually it never was what it was.

However, Yoda I must be, for the party last night very good was it. I felt a special gratitude to those who showed up -- and not all that ungrateful to those who didn't, since we had 30 guests, about as many as our house comfortably holds. And Yoda Squared I unknowingly was because the quantity of food and drink the guests brought you wouldn't believe. That's the prism through which to look at the day after Christmas, a day when the crumbs of abundance overflow, all the stuff you couldn't eat or drink and welcome the opportunity to get out of the house.

A special gracias to Peter and Anita, who brought trays and boxes of leftovers from their traditional holiday feast to which the foodies throng, festooned with booze and tasties. Peter brought the remnants of this Alsatian thing with six (or maybe nine) kinds of pork, including blood sausage.

Also, a bottle of Clos du Val Cabernet Sauvignon 1996 that somebody gave Peter, which Peter said was a "cult favorite" and worth tens and dozens and possibly even hundreds of dollars. I sipped. Sigh. My tongue is as ignorant as ever.

It was fun. It was also apolitical. For years I did not explicitly recognize that all our parties had a political undertone, the politics of the workplace. That is, our party guest list was always larded with coworkers, by definition those from whom you want something or those to whom you pay obeisance or those who for one reason or another should be paying obeisance to you. I knew this without quite knowing it, though I certainly was aware I paid court to various people and resented it when certain people did not pay court to me, particularly years ago when I was an editor at Atlanta magazine, and I did not so much invite as summon Atlanta freelancers to our apartment on Lindbergh Avenue, convenient to several of the many Peachtree roads, boulevards, courts and terraces.

But now I have quit inviting those from whom I want something, and God knows I no longer have anything anybody wants, not the good folks I work with for sure, and we are pleasant but distant, and what's wrong with that?

So at party time we are content with friends, neighbors and acquaintances. It certainly is less urgent, and now I can drink as much as I like.

Now you can? Now?? my wife says.

Hmmm. There are things I still want from her, so let's leave it there.

The Greatness That is Our Christmas Tree