A Fine Armful of a Woman

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It would seem that the nominee for Surgeon General is a fine armful of a woman, and this bothers some people.

What? Were no stick figures from the walls of French caves available?

Laugh Track

A student who sometimes reads my blog suggests that, as the biking video suggests, I seem to regard my life as having a sitcom quality, as being a source of amusement (if only to myself), that my good-natured shortcomings are to some degree an appropriate subject for laughter.

This posture does little for my dignity, he suggests, although it does make me approachable, and there may be pedagogical value in that. In short, I do not take myself too seriously, as least as I choose to present myself publicly. This attitude may be constitutional rather than affected. Perhaps, I should keep an eye on this quality, he suggests.

My Cholesterol, My Statins, Myself

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I started a statin -- a nice cheap Kaiser generic -- more than a year ago and finally got around to check and see if it's working. Good news, there. My total cholesterol has dropped from 245 to 147, with all the diminution in the "bad" LDL.

On the other hand, there's now some evidence of diminished thyroid function, which explains .... I don't know what it explains. Give me a day or two, and I'll find something I don't like in my life it explains.

"Penal Colony with a nice coastline"

Image by Amin Tabrizi via Flickr

From Kevin Drum at Mother Jones bemoaning the lass of educational opportunity in California.

And if I had the choice of keeping Cal State universities accessible to everyone vs. shoveling another 10,000 petty crooks into prison, I know which I'd choose. Over the past 30 years my fellow California residents have decided they'd rather become a penal colony with a nice coastline than a land of opportunity. It's not a change for the better.

Charging for Online Content

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I find the notion of a sliding pay scale strangely exciting.

Journalism Online's offering is more flexible and compelling than it may have sounded at first. Far from a one-size-fits-all approach, the company allows news outlets to customize their pay schemes with 15 different variables. Publishers will be able to do everything from selling monthly subscriptions to charging micropayments for individual articles with a sliding pricing scale based on the timeliness of the news. "What we're giving them is a set of dials they can constantly turn," says Brill. "In no case is is simply charging or not charging. It's not simply a pay wall goes up around everything."

My Wife's Cut of Yesterday's Bike Video

It's not her cut exactly. She said that at ten minutes the video was unwatchable and that I should cut it to 50 seconds. (That's what she said. No hyperbole.)

Of course, she's right. But it's *work* to edit. (Originally, I had "edit down," though not all editing is cutting, just the most useful kind for most creators.)

Anyway, here's The Directors Cut of Dr. Peloton and Spiro Go to Richmond.

I Will Enjoy This, and Pat Will Enjoy This And ... That's About It

Hamlet 2: It Likes Me Well

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E. and I watched Hamlet 2 with Steve Coogan Friday night and enjoyed it. It's quite a shaggy tale in that Coogan, as a failed actor turned execrable HS drama teacher, is obtuse to the point of madness. But it's a comedy, though some the pain in his personal and professional life is actually felt, which makes one just uneasy enough to wonder how far the story will go before bending back toward a happy ending.

Maybe it won't. They call it "art" (quotes intended ironically, as all one-word quotations should be intended).

Irony aside, It's knowing the happy ending is coming that makes so much narrative art pedestrian, though no less comforting. Of course, this one had a happy happy ending, with the crazy play within the "play" -- a literally deathless Hamlet; Jesus in a time machine being serenaded with the song "Rock me, sexy Jesus" -- enraging the rubes and touching the sophisticates and thus ending up on Broadway in the best Mickey/Judy "let's give a show" spirit.

What surprised me was the payoff derived to my surprise from the narrative thrust provided by the Coogan character's desire to deal through art with a brutal childhood in which he was apparently sexual abused -- "raped in the face"?; oh no; that cracks the glass.

But see here: In the climax of the inner Hamlet 2, Hamlet forgives his father and Jesus forgives *his* father. And I was touched. No, I didn't see that coming.

One of the pleasures of the Internet age is being able to repair to Rotten Tomatoes to see what the critical consensus was last year when the movie was in a theater near you. Among the "top critics," it was pretty much a 50-50 split. And it's true the tale was really shaggy, with a flaw for every two virtues. It's kind of a parody of flamboyant teachers inspiring "ethnic" students, and the parody of the Tucson Hispanic community is cringeworthy.

But, as they say, it worked for me, sweetly surreal, and Coogan *is* a remarkable comedian. I recommend it to you, if only for the blasphemy.

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Haight Street That Great Street (I Just Want to Say)

Image by Sebastià Giralt via Flickr

Lunch today with the Drunk Boyz, those USF patricians, something I used to do far more often when purse was full and liver was limber, able to bench press a quart of the pure Hippocrene and beg for more.

Yes, it's all slowed down, the socializing after work that gives sparkle to the workplace. What changes? Workplace friendship or merely tax law?

This was actually socializing before work in the sense that most of us aren't teaching or working otherwise to advance USF this summer season. That is, it is not something we are on payroll doing, though actually we can't NOT work on USF's behalf at play or rest. We learn and we plan. This joke is now officially at an end: We really do spend a lot of time getting ready for our fall classes, mistrusting repetition. Regurgitating old notes suggests a lack of attention, a surrender to ease. I worry myself with wanting to do better.

Anyway, today was a traditional lunch. We went back to Martin Macks, which burned down a year or two ago and which we had kind of abandoned because the illegal waitresses -- oh sweet Irish lasses about whose county origins we could always joke -- did not quite always get our kidding. But now the refurbished MM, though noisy as the inside of a bell, did have quite a pleasant new waitress/bartender, both curvy and willowy and *a patter*. Old gentlemen like old dogs like to be patted, at which point they growl in their sleep. Her white hands fluttered like birds, distributing attention among the ancients.

At some point a 3rd/4th/5th round of drinks was ordered, and this sweet miss said, "I've got that covered." Ah, that's what keeps us coming back, that courtesy in or cups that assumes we will live to drink another day.

Old friends, old stories and always something new. Did you know goats were grazing at USF this summer, tending the lawn?

BW was in attendance. We hadn't seen him in years -- literal years -- and it was good to see him, the gray in his sideburns and the halt in his step notwithstanding.

Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

That would be your "Ulysses" by Tennyson. What comes first, the drink or the poetry.
Sometimes I get confused.

Kwame Oboglo's Christmas List

KO wants to drop a little hint to his bride about what he'd like to find under his missile shield, make that Christmas tree, in December. What it is is a cupholder for your sniper's rifle.

That's my own holiday wish: May all our snipers be drunk.

(Credit where credit is due: lovingly stolen from Wired.)

Sonia Sotomayor and the 'Anti-Deposition'

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I was deposed in a lawsuit some years ago, a lawsuit of our own choosing with a high-priced lawyer of our own choosing. I was prepped all day the day before the deposition. The basic message was: Listen to the question and answer the question but no more than the question. Make the lawyers questioning you work, and they'll get tired and back off, leaving unsaid some things we might not want said because the question was never quite exactly and precisely asked.

You pick your moments to elaborate if the questioner has set up some point you want to make. You aren't always terse and on point, just *most* of the time.

I'd have to say Judge Sotomayor (as she should) is doing the opposite during her confirmation hearing. Explain, explain and explain some more. Use "context" a lot. Understand that many of the senators are reading from remarks prepared by staff, and that their follow up questions are also prepared. If your answers don't always seem to address the questions, neither will their follow ups if your answers are voluminous and nuanced enough.

Mostly stay calm. When these old crackers see a woman display any kind of emotion, they think:

rag fit

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Reuters Journalism Handbook is Online

I wonder if something like this like is the way to go for my reporting classes? The question is how much of it do you make the students print out. I mistrust the complete elimination of hard copy from the classroom.

Bloggers Are Dissed, Get Sad (Filed to Show to My Classes This Fall)

Two pipsqueaks sitting around talking

Somewhere A Childlike Reporter is Waiting

Big Pat Daugherty twigged me to this.

Escaping the Ambush

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Today at the neighborhood farmers' market we stumbled upon a couple cages set up by Oakland Animal Shelter volunteers -- two cages, four kittens, a handsome Bengal pair and a less handsome grey kitten lumped over an even less handsome black kitten.

It was the latter pair I warmed toward, of course, always on the side of the undercat and remembering our two black cats: Lawrence, who died young of feline leukemia; Oliver, who died in bed next to me last December, almost 17.

They were loving kitties, quite insistent on worming in and huddling up. Also, I've read many places that black cats have a harder time getting adopted and are often cruelly tormented, such cruel fools so many people are. So I think I now must always have a black cat, just to put a grain of kindness on the scale.

But no kitties today, not until E. retires, which I am beginning to think she never will do. I want her to be home with kittens, enjoying them and bonding. This next batch could be our last batch, actuarially speaking. Even if we survive this next lot, I'd not get kittens again but some fine old homeboy or homegirl, ten minutes from execution.

That will be then. This is now. So: kittens! But not today. We mutually tore one another away from those beautiful kittens in the cage, all fuzz and fun and big neonatal mugs.

Tonight I find in Daily Kos a bit of a tearjerker about euthanizing a beloved cat. Mine were certainly jerked. I don't understand people who don't like cats. I prefer cats, but I like dogs. Maybe these people saw their parents having sex ... with dogs?? Bowwow Oedipus, I guess. Got to be some explanation other than a withering of the soul.

What My New Bike Looks Like

Almost too pretty to ride, though it rides like a dream.

Mr. Abbott and Mrs. Costello

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E. is reading her NY Times and says, "My ex-boss from Alameda County and you look like the Pillsbury Doughboy."

I said, "What?" a couple times, and she said the same thing. This was hurtful, and I finally said so because we all have a quiver of zingers -- mostly sly and indirect, which makes me wonder if you keep boomerangs in a quiver -- but comparing me to the Pillsbury Doughboy is definitely not in my wife's repertoire because I am not totally unlike said yeasty fellow.

Oh that's not kind, I said.

What? Oh. Hah! she said. No. Yoo not you. John Yoo, the Bush enabler who brought shame to a regime that already had its full share.

Big old plump John Yoo. We laughed and laughed, and I sucked in my stomach.

Howard Dean on Health Care Reform:

Biking: Return of the Kings

Image by richardmasoner via Flickr

Pat and I biked today, but the little camcorder needed fresh batteries,and so only an account is available, not the eyeballed version.

Beautiful day on the Bay trail! My new bike is quite nifty, lighter than the ones I borrowed from Peter and Chris and suited to my frame. (Peter is several inches shorter than I am,and Chris is several inches taller.) The simple fact of 'yours-ness' also counts for something. I am *one* with the *machine*. Or, to put it another way, I didn't fall off, not once.

We'll do this once a week. My heart will soften at the beauty of bayside, and my buttocks will harden. (They darn well better.)

Fact Checking: I'll Park This Here Until School Starts and Then Show It to the Kids

The Bike. The Man. The Adventure.

Today I bought a Trek 7.3 Grand Something-Or-Other bike. Last year Big Pat and I were riding weekly on the Bay Trail between the Berkeley Marina and Richmond Marina -- I believe there's a video back there somewhere. But I was riding borrowed wheels, and last year the owner of the last set asked for them back.

I tried to buy a bike on College Avenue, but the bike they were going to bring over from the Orinda store never arrived. I called a couple times, and then a few weeks later someone called and asked if I still wanted them to bring that bike I was interested in over from the Orinda store. But by that time I had lost faith.

The clerks at a Piedmont Avenue bike shop ignored me. The baby-faced girl clerk at the Berkeley bike shop was so damn grudging and uninterested in my antique quests that I slunk away in shame.

Today Big Pat took me to his favorite little bike shop opposite the Claremont Hotel -- which I *think* is in Berkeley, but the boundary ebbs and flows in that area. A nice lady in her 30s calmly walked me through my price range, and to my surprise one of the bikes on the floor fit me fine. I wobbled around the Claremont parking lot just to satisfy the nice lady and Big Pat -- as if a wobbly 50 yards could tell me anything. Well, they told me this is a pretty nimble bike, and I can get on and off it without doing any damage to latent dreams of fatherhood.

Video to come.

On the Runway with Today's San Francisco Chronicle

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It rolled off the non-union presses for the first time today, color photos bright and appealing. It was very pretty and very thin, like a supermodel.

Sarah Palin: Headin' South

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"Watch the skies, everywhere! Keep looking. Keep watching the skies!"

Hiking the Alaska Trail

Just two words: Sean Connery

Michael Jackson: Vied with Sean Connery for the Title of Most Macho Heterosexual

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You see, as I noted so long ago and so long never wrote about in scholarly journals (as if!), one of the most useful tools of the columnist (and what is the average blogger but a columnist, marginally informed but totally involved) is contrarianism, which stance cuts through the haze of uniformity.

As Kevin Drum noted in a post today about the receding number of links in the posts of many bloggers:

I write as much as I ever have, but in my posts I link more to news sources and less to other bloggers than I used to. I'm not sure why. Part of it might be related to another evolution I've noticed: the political blogosphere increasingly seems to latch on to four or five outrages of the day that suck up most of its attention. It seems like every blog I read posts about the same few political nano-scandals every day, and since I mostly find this stuff kind of boring I don't link to it very much.

Same take on the same subject: One size fits all, and where's the fun in that? So there's a tip. But how to make that contrarian position thoughtful and useful even when insincere? (A headline, more's the pity, doesn't make a post.)

I believe our 50 minutes is up.

Life is Not Smooth. It is Filled with Kinks, Which Makes It a Marvelous Spectator Sport

Nate Silver, the FiveThirtyEight political numbers guru, who some of us were previously acquainted with because of his esoteric work with baseball statistics, explains today that he became interested in politics only a couple of years ago. Turns out he was supplementing his baseball numbers-crunching biz by playing poker online for money.

This online gaming came to the attention of Congressional bluenoses. They concocted a bill to stop it, which they velcroed to the bottom off an unrelated bill.

(F)ollowing the debate over the (Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 ) was one of the primary motivators that got me into politics. It took a "dirty trick" -- attaching it to an unrelated conference report that couldn't possibly be voted down -- to get (it) to become law, although then again, this was undertaken partly in response to another "dirty trick", which was the process of anonymous holds that was preventing the bill from coming to a floor vote in the Senate (where it would probably have passed on its own merits). I found the whole process of watching the sausage getting made alarming -- but also utterly fascinating. Without poker -- and without that bill -- there probably wouldn't have been any FiveThirtyEight.

What did Hamlet say? By indirections we find directions out? If I hadn't taken an education class my junior year of college that involved observing an eighth grade classroom once a week and if I hadn't been afraid of eighth graders as a result, I would never have applied to grad school, which I did not to pursue a career but to avoid having to begin one for as long as I could.

And if E. hadn't missed supper that same year and asked me to drive to the Outpost Cafe to pick up a little something for her to eat -- and thus tipped the balance between hesitation and yearning with which I regarded her -- I might never have *claimed my reward* for fetching that meal (the reward being a date to go to the movies).

I'm not saying everything in life is contingent, just more than we think. I don't believe in destiny, you see, that soporific compounded of vanity and excuse.

I don't believe in luck either, but I know it when I see it.

Isn't It Pretty to Think So? Nah. It's *Beautiful*

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

From Jack Shafer in Slate:

Let me say it another way: The barriers of entry into the journalism business have been battered down, making it easier than ever to enter the profession. That will read as small consolation to the journalists who have had their publications shot out from under them—the Rocky Mountain News, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Ann Arbor News (come July 23), and magazines too numerous to tally. But please notice that I'm not saying there has never been a more lucrative or prestigious time to become a journalist. The cash and status associated with the profession are fairly recent. Until the early 1970s or thereabouts, the average journalist made an average salary (if that), and his societal standing was modest.

If the downside of the battered-down barriers to entry is less pay and lower status, the potential upside is that a flood of new entrants into the field could portend a journalistic renaissance. No, I'm not saying that every junior blogger and pint-size videographer will immediately stand as tall as Barton Gellman and Errol Morris and that the Washington Post and NBC News should be flushed. But journalism has generally benefited by increases in the number of competitors, the entry of new and once-marginalized players, and the creation of new approaches to cracking stories. Just because the journalism business is going to hell and it may no longer make economic sense to maintain mega-news bureaus at the center of war zones doesn't mean that journalism isn't thriving.

Rose and Her Sweet Sweet Man. Got to Have His Picture on the Mantle of Her Heart

If I Could Sing Even a Little, I'd Put This on YouTube.

Addendum: I showed this to my wife and said, "I wish I could sing."

"You try," she said. And that's all she said.

Another addendum (or I could go back and change it all to addenda):

I told E. that I recorded each of my little snippets twice and picked the better one. She thought about this: "You are not completely tone deaf," she said. "You can carry a little bit of a tune." She thought about that for a minute. "A little bit of a tune," she said.

Michael Jackson, India and Globalization

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Media Studies colleague Vamsee Juluri explains:


But the coming of Michael Jackson to Indian television was also the equivalent, for good or for bad, of the empty bottle of cola that falls from a plane into a remote African village in the movie The Gods Must be Crazy. Michael Jackson was not just a pop star for us; he represented the world beyond India we had only heard about as well as the possibility of catching up with it. Michael Jackson was the first symbol of aspiration for a generation that went from denial to obsession about it almost overnight. In the 1980s, bootleg VHS copies of Thriller went from home to home, even as we sought to work hard and study and buy into the first signs of consumerism that had started to appear. By the 1990s, with economic liberalization and the rise of satellite television channels like MTV India and Channel V, Michael Jackson, his music, image, and charisma all became a part of India, like globalization itself, culminating in his 1996 Mumbai concert and his now poignantly never-to-be promise to return.

I Continue to Guide Young Minds

A former student on his way to Frisco writes:

hey doc
we have to reschedule to tuesday. my truck is in a shop in Santa Cruz right now. brakes went out today.

And I reply:

Tuesday just as good. On the road with George. You need a dog and occasionally to pick up hitchhikers, whose folksy wisdom you quote in the book based on your travels.

Oh one other bit of wisdom. I was talking Friday with a prospective adjunct who said the economic bust has really hurt the independent film business, that he now advises would-be movie makers they should certainly use all the wonderful new cheap tech to make their movies -- but do it for its own sake, since the product will never be picked up, distributed, marketed, seen by anyone other than friends and family.

Yah, I said. I always tell my students if they want to succeed as journalists, marry money.

And he replied: Tell them if they want to marry rich, they must *date rich*.

Sometimes the truth hits you like a blow.

Lost in the Shuffle: Democrats Do This Kind of Thing with More Animal Joy, Less Angst

Fanne Foxe (born Annabelle Battistella on February 14, 1936 in Nueve de Julio, Argentina) was a dancer best known for being involved in a 1974 sex scandal surrounding Arkansas Congressman Wilbur Mills, until then one of the most powerful members of the House of Representatives. (In 1972, he was a contender for the Democratic nomination to be president.) Mills was having an affair with Foxe, who was then working as a stripper.

On October 7, 1974, the two of them had been drinking and were driving near the Tidal Basin in Washington at around 2:00 AM. The park police pulled the vehicle over, and Foxe attempted to flee the scene and jumped into the Tidal Basin.

The incident attracted much publicity, and eventually led to Mills' resignation two months later as Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. He was re-elected to his congressional seat in 1974, but he did not run for re-election in 1976.

Foxe continued working as a stripper, changing her stage title from "The Argentine Firecracker" to "The Tidal Basin Bombshell." She published a book, The Stripper and the Congressman and eventually returned to Argentina.

-- from Wikipedia

The Annals of Man (Cont.)

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I just slipped and fell down moving boxes of books, and I skinned my knee. I'm not going to clean it off till my wife gets home so she can commiserate.

I didn't cry. Later on at the ballgame, I will buy myself candy, possibly a stuffed animal albeit a *manly* stuffed animal.

Don't Cry for Me, South Carolina

Jazzbo Robertson and his Two-Minute Panoramic Tour of the Eastern Sierras

We Go Birding and Eydie Gets Sick. Damn You, Birds, Damn You to Hell

O'Reilly Really is an Asshole, or Content Analysis is Our Friend

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I read on Poynter.com that fark.com is not just for the Frat 'n Hooters crowd, so I go there, and I find a link to Roger Ebert, who I think of as a somewhat-overrated movie reviewer, and I follow that link to what he thinks of Bill O'Reilly and I find it thoughtful and persuasive.

What are TV shouters telling their viewers? They use such anger in expressing their opinions. Who are they trying to convince? They're preaching to the choir. Their viewers already agree with them. No minds are going to be changed. Why are they so mad? In a sense they're saying: You're right, but you're not right ENOUGH! I'm angrier about this than you are! Viewers may get the notion that there's unfinished business to be done, and it's up to them to do it.

He links to a summary of an Indiana University study that adds it all up.

Wisdom from the Ivory Tower

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A colleague recalls when a dean told him that you really never know someone until after they are tenured.

Lady Demosthenes

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E. was at Oakland city council till 1 a.m just so she could speak out, claiming her right to be on the city's "golden handshake" list, which would give her a nice incentive to retire sooner rather than later. The program is just one facet of Oakland's efforts to get out from under an $80 million deficit. She should have been on the list but wasn't because of clerical error. You know bureaucracies. Once something is written down, it is reified: It can't be changed. You aren't you. If you were you, it would say so right here.

So she waited six ten hours to speak to council for 90 seconds explaining why she should be on the list. Her reasons were sound, her logic impeccable. It will make no difference, but she spoke up, and her speaking up made us both feel better.

I was at home for the first part of this ordeal, figuring she'd be done by 9. But by 10, no Edith and no word. I was not worried, but I was concerned. That's a long day in her cowboy boots, which she wore to make herself taller. And no lunch nor dinner, she had told me about 6.

I went to the Burger King drive-through and got a couple Whoppers, and we had a little picnic in the lobby outside Oakland city council a little before midnight. No ants, just politicians.

A Birthday Thank You to Those Who Remembered

Edith's Adventures in San Francisco

Lake Merritt Goslings (I Remembered my Flip)

Old Habits and Dying Hard

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Happily, I am back to my old habit -- which the events of the past semester interrupted -- of driving E. to work, parking our car and walking home past Lake Merritt. I wish I'd taken the camera this morning.

In spring and early summer, sometimes you see geese and goslings. Today next to the lake I saw a whole ... clutch? clump? I saw elder geese standing by while the little ones -- their stubby wings as flightworthy as thumbs -- huddled together next to the lake.

That's the lesson of warm blood. It's good to get close.

But then they/you/me grow up.

There were about 20 of the brown little dandelions, as fuzzy as mold. E. told me that when you see so large a group of young geese and only a few adults, that's because the stronger geese seize the offspring of the weaker geese and create a little tribe of ours and everybody else's. So somewhere bereft parents honk plaintively, instinct rewarded and then thwarted.

Still, I wish I had a picture of the babies and their bandit parents. Mother Nature's a Rorschach, isn't she?

Ten Songs About Newspaper Journalism (Thank You, Paste Magazine)

This is what I'd call a file post. I'll come back later and listen.

Good Advice to Journalism Grads. (Good Ain't Always Pretty)

Barbara Ehrenreich talks sense to Berkeley journalism grads.

How do you think it feels to be an autoworker right now? And I've spent time with plenty of laidoff paper mill workers, construction workers and miners. They've got skills; they've got experience. They just don't have jobs.

So let me be the first to say this to you: Welcome to the American working class.