New Coke

Some things just don't really need to be "improved".

Somebody needs to tattoo that backwards on the staff at Blogger's foreheads so they read it every time they look in the effing mirror.

For example; the "enter" button on your computer is the exact duplicate of the old "return" button on the electric typewriters that replaced, in turn, the lever ("carriage return") that kicked the paper down one line on the old manual typewriters.

So for about four zillion years (or since the invention of html) a "hard return" - hitting the "return" button - has meant "space down one line and go back to the left margin".

Except for, apparently, the fucking douchenozzles at Blogger. Who have now given us an "option" - it's actually listed on the right hand side of the screen in an "Options" pull-down - to "use (the html symbol for a line break) tag" or "Press "Enter" for line breaks".

And didn't bother to explain that they did this when they forced us into the "improved" template.

Okay then.

Well, I think I'm figuring this damn nonsense out. Slowly. But it's a complete pain-in-the-ass, and so posting may go a little slowly until Blogger gets it's head out of it's fourth point of contact and I figure out what ELSE the damn idiots have fucked up.

Mailbox Monday: Bratz

While not neglecting the really important things in life - our under-construction raised raspberry beds and the current state of the Portland Timbers - I wanted to take a moment to mention this interview with Ed Luce in Foreign Policy.I don't agree with all of it. Starting with the title; "A Nation of Spoiled Brats"? C'mon, Foreign Policy - that's the best your editor could do? Ranger Rick magazine could beat that. Christ.

But outside the bitching I have two main problems with Luce's ideas as expressed in the interview, both of which seem to proceed from his spouting "conventional wisdom" without having any real grounds for believing it.

Specifically;

1. I think Luce (the interviewee) is just bloviating wildly about

"...the swing towards celebrating the child, elevating the child, over-praising the child, boosting constantly at every opportunity the self-esteem of the child, assuming the child is a fragile little eggshell that can be broken at any moment..."

that is supposed to be the cause of educational decline in the U.S. I have kiddos in school AND have taught at several levels and that's, frankly, horseshit.

I honestly think this whole "A Nation At Risk" crap is, well, crap. And, especially this "Nation At Risk From Self-Esteem" crap. I think the problems we're seeing in education - and I think those problems are a lot less significant than they're commonly made out to be - have a LOT more to do with a combination of a) educating more of our population than at nearly any time in our history, and b) the thirty-year cramdown on middle and lower-middle class wealth.

Because the bottom line on education is this;

- Not all kids can "do" a pre-college curriculum, yet that is the current U.S. standard. Prior to about 1975 the kids who couldn't usually simply dropped out, or were shunted aside into vo-tech tracks. Today we're still dropping them out, but a hell of a lot more kids who would have otherwise have been slotted into what when I was in grade school we called the "'tard school" (since non-mainstream kids were retards, see?) are being mainstreamed. I don't know of any parents who want their kids to get a shiny pretty "A" for doing "C" work. But the whole point of a bell curve is that you're going to get 10% of the students in the top 10% of grades. To assume that everyone who breathes can do algebra at a high level? Quit kidding yourself.

- The tighter the household budget, the tougher for the kid to do well.

We've known this since the 1965 Coleman Report. Economic class has always been the single largest factor in predicting academic achievement. There's a number of reasons for that, but as a factor it has never been seriously refuted.

Over the past three decades times have gotten tougher for pretty much everyone outside the 1%, and definitely for those below the top 25%. So I'm not surprised that their kids are not as singleminded about school success. The correlation do well in school (regardless of where you start from) = do well in life just doesn't hold up anymore, and more and more parents, and kids, can see that. IMO that still doesn't give you an excuse to stop trying. But I can see how it would increase the "bad outcome" sort of data.

Either way, I just don't buy this "OMFG, the Republic is collapsing because our schools are shit!" meme. There's no question that we have problems in teaching and learning. But I don't think those problems are anywhere near as simple as over-worked mommies and daddies insisting their speshul snowflake get preferential treatment.

2. Luce seems to start from the conventional wisdom "global is good". At least, that is the implication of his statement here: "...if globalization were put to a referendum in America, it would lose -- which is troubling, and it's one measure of the degree of alarm and distemper felt out there, which I come across the whole time whenever I'm outside of the Beltway." Now, I'm sorry, but I don't understand this whole enthusiasm for "globalization" as an economic religion.

I won't argue that "trade" is usually beneficial for those who engage in it, but how does that follow that it's good for, say, industrial workers here in the U.S. to be pitted in a wage-race-to-the-bottom with industrial workers in China, where cost of living is a fraction of what an American would consider semi-human, where acts that would cost U.S. manufacturers millions - poisoning and killing their workers, dumping hideous shit into the air and water - are simply part of doing business, and where crony capitalism is enjoying a Golden Age (where here it's barely getting back to the Silver standard of our Gilded one...)?

Luce seems to deliberately elide the fact that the greatest period of growth in the U.S. coincided with the time that the rest of the world was either a) walled off from U.S. markets by tariffs, or b) bombed into the Stone Age.

You can make all sorts of arguments about trade and tariffs, but to assume that a reasoned dislike for the sort of unequal playing field inherent in "globalization" as it currently exists is some sort of "troubling" attitude on the part of U.S. citizens is to assume that U.S. citizens are fools with no sense of self-preservation.

Which is often true! But not in this case, I would opine.But...overall the interview is damn well worth reading. Luce has some terrific observations about U.S. politics and economics, and in particular the way the U.S. seems to be politically incapable of either recognizing, or dealing, with the fairly obvious things that are bludgeoning it at the moment; social and economic stratification (and especially the grossly skewed distribution of the "recovery" since 2008), political distemper, and military hubris. And the problems he sees looming like icebergs ahead because of these. So while he's not perfectly correct I think he sure has some scary ideas, and ones that seem to fit what I see around me.And, sadly, I find myself shaking my head especially ruefully at his final paragraph:

"I hope that in the near future America will be able to remind itself that strength comes from its domestic economic muscularity and the degree to which America can again be a beacon to the world, a model worth emulating, rather than by the range and deployment of its weaponry, or by the spending power of those at the top. But I'm not optimistic -- given the trajectory of the debate today and in recent years -- that things will necessarily shake out that way. I wish I could see more cause for hope."

Because from where I see it, it is by our own goddamn feathers, and not by others' shafts, that we now stricken.

Resurrection

Some time ago I talked about the curious and somewhat dreary phenomenon of "abandoned" or orphan blogs; once gay and riotously convivial places whose owners, tenants, or lovers appeared to one day simply have walked away, leaving the lights on but nothing else.

From time to time I've come across these mysterious blogs and wondered; what happened? Lost job? Broken marriage? Simply lost interest? What? I never know; the blogs are simply artifacts without clues, riddles wrapped in enigmas, drifting endlessly in the Outer Rim of cyberspace.

The one blog in particular I discussed was one called, simply, D.D. Tinzeroes that had caught my eye because it spent some time on Portland history, a subject dearly treasured and laved with much adoration here in the Fire Direction Center.

Well!

It turns out that D.D. Tinzeroes was not dead! It was merely resting; pining for the fjords, the Norwegian Blue! Taking a bit of a nap, having the night off, merely biding its time!

Turns out that the blogger has, indeed, been busy, posting delightful bits of Northwest historiana, including more trolleys, trains, and streetcars as well as the top-rated urinals of the region and, lately, some priceless bits of the past pried from the World's Worst Newspaper, complete with commentary.

Here's my personal favorite, with the blogger's comments included:

"Arthur Davis, a negro who has frequently been sent to jail for roaming the streets after midnight, was tried and convicted in the police court yesterday on a charge of vagrancy. Davis, for months past, has been a hanger-on about some of the lowest dives at the lower end of town, among them a newly incorporated 5-cent all-round liquor establshment, and has made himself conspicuous by his general worthlessness. Davis pleaded that he one time washed a window, and on another occasion a floor. Judge Dement, in passing sentence, told David he had given him quite a number of opportunities to reform, and this time would allow him twenty-five days to debate and think over the subject. It cost Minnie Reynolds 10$ for acting in a disorderly manner and disturbing the neighbors on the vicinity of her residence Monday night. Officer Beach arrested her. She put up $10 bail, amd failing to appear for trial it was ordered into the city treasury."

-May 19 1886

["You are conspicuous by your general worthlessness."
"No! I washed a window, once."
"To see whether the saloon was open yet!"
"And a floor!"
"You were very drunk, and crawling in circles crying."]

Terrific stuff. So I'm pleased to report that D.D. Tinzeroes is NOT dead, but is, in fact, not just alive but very well.Pay a visit, leave a comment...let the blogger know you like his stuff, if indeed you do. That's all the pay we bloggers need.

And just so I can say that I did some bloggage...the appalling picture above is the "Coon Chicken Inn" that once occupied the site of "Clyde's Prime Rib" on NE Sandy.This fowl franchise - it was one of several outlets featuring the same racist trademark - opened here in 1931, lasted until the Fifties, and the original building appears to be in use today; the giant darkie-head has been decapitated and some sort of faux-medieval facade built over the other wing but the outline of the roof on the street side (the left as you look at the pictures) looks pretty much identical.I doubt whether the Inn would have welcomed any of Mr. Davis' descendents, seeing as it wasn't considered one of "the lowest dives at the lower end of town". We forget, now that we're "Little Beirut" the hipster capital of the Northwest how bloody ignorant and brutally racist we were just a generation or two ago.

The only black face the good citizens of white Portland wanted to see was on the front of the building winking.

So - a bit of Portland's scurrilous history for you, and while we're at it another shoutout to D.D. and his blog; long may their pixels phosphor!

Blogrolled!

I'm almost embarrassed to admit that I check the stats for this blog.

Egotistical? Me? (Blush)

Ooooookay, well, yes.

So I was looking over the stats earlier this week and noticed this:See it?

This little blog babbles along at about 600-700 pageviews a day. I assume that the vast bulk of these are poor deluded bastards looking for gay porn - I threw a Tom of Finland picture into a blog post two years ago and that post is STILL in the top five searched posts in the history of this dog. Hopefully a few idle passersby actually take the time to read the thing and like it; maybe one or two (if I'm lucky) make it a regular stop on their peripatetic blogrounds.

But 2,300 views?

That's ridiculous - nice, but utterly unlike anything I've ever had before (or since, as you can tell. So what was so special about 4 JAN?

Well, this.

I got blogrolled!

Now I suspect that I owe a lot of my fleeting fame to pure nepotism; I've corresponded a little with Fran from BlueGal/Crooks and Liars, and when my son was little he once attempted to use her wonderful rendition of the "World's Meanest Mommy Song"
as a sort of aphrodisiac for the twenty-something he was utterly crushing on (it didn't work but it was sure worth the try, and it's a damn funny song)

But hopefully a little of that was the result of a well-written post, and my reward was a brief moment of stardom, a diurnal flirtation with the Thrones and Dominations of the Big Blog World. For one brief, bright, shining moment I shared the spotlight with Crooks and Liars, thanks to the professional courtesy of a much better blogger than I.

And then it was back to pulling an oar.

But it was nice while it lasted. Funny world, this blogging.

But, hey - thanks, Fran!

The Prisoner's Dilemma

One last political post, and then I really have no more to say about national politics until some genuinely significant change occurs.

I begin with the recent tempest in an e-cup involving the blogger Glenn Greenwald and a post he wrote about Ron Paul.

I don't want to go much further than that - Google "Greenwald Paul liberals" and you'll probably get the crux of the biscuit - other than to say;

1. Greenwald makes a terrific point, and
2. He managed to do it in a perfectly impossible way.

To begin with, the original post was about Ron Paul and the "problem" he presents for liberals, to wit;

"Paul’s candidacy forces progressives to face the hideous positions and actions of their candidate, of the person they want to empower for another four years. If Paul were not in the race or were not receiving attention, none of these issues would receive any attention because all the other major GOP candidates either agree with Obama on these matters or hold even worse views."

Because, as Greenwald points out, among all the Presidental candidates (and, I should add, the candidates for ALL federal offices, high and low, in the two major parties) only Paul "...stands for peace, opposes wars, believes in due process and civil liberties, distrusts the military-industrial complex, (is) devoted to individual rights, transparency and economic equality."

And y'know what?

He's right on the nail on that.

Pretty much every other warm body - from Obama to the wingiest nut in the GOP wingnut farm - is generally pro-war, anti-due-process, pro-social-legislation (read "outlawing things (or at least not legalizing things) involving gays and sex"), anti-transparency, pro-Fed/Wall-Street-bailout, and pro-Drug-War.

The entire business has blown up into this huge contretemps, with people of good intentions, good liberals all, kicking and punching each other because of this. Greenwald himself has posted a second round of the brouhaha, responding to his critics.

But.

Here's the problem.

Paul is "right" (and Greenwald is "right" about him) - in the sense that he is anti-war, pro-due-process, pro-transparency, anti-social-legislation, anti-Fed, anti-Wall-Street-bailout, anti-Drug-War and so am I - for completely different reasons that I think I'm "right" on these issues.

But Paul is "wrong" (and so Greenwald is "wrong" in saying that he holds up a mirror to the establishment liberals in which they see ugly truths about themselves and their candidate(s)") because he's like someone who agrees with you that forcible carnal knowledge of underage girls is wrong - but not for moral and ethical reasons but because sex with underage girls is forbidden by Ubbo-Sathla, the Unbegotten Source and the Elder God has told him so in a series of bloodsoaked visions.

Oh. Yeah. That.

Paul is "anti-war" not because he has a moral, legal, or realist objection to war but because he hates the federal government and wars tend to empower the federal government.

Paul is "anti-social legislation" not because he thinks gays are people and that governments have no business nannying citizens about their personal lives but because he hates the federal government and doesn't want IT intervening - either for or against - groups or individuals. He's fine with STATES doing either or both.

Paul is "anti-Drug-War", again, not because of the effect it has had on our civil rights or sane legal policies, but because of the way it empowers the federal justice system and, again, he's fine with states locking up dopers forever and passing fucked-up search and forfeiture laws.

He'd have gleefully allowed Jim Crow to continue rather than have let the Fed intervene, he would happily see Grandma eating cat food rather than give the Fed power to disperse medical or financial aid. His ideas about economics would have made John D. Rockefeller green with envy, being straight-up libertarian and, thus, utterly nuts in a real world.

He...

Look, let's cut to the chase. The bottom line is that the problem is that Ron Paul IS whack. He's a complete whackaloon and the virtue of many of his political positions has nothing to do with his reasons for chosing them and, in many cases, are fatally weakened by the utter craziness of those reasons.

He's a mysogynist, racist, goldbug goofball that thinks that the Articles of Confederation were a grand idea, that we should really go back to the time when banks printed their own money, and that if life were like a libertarian fantasy world where the people with all the guns and all the money were free of all outside constraints they would act responsibly instead of, as history has always shown and the rest of us know perfectly well is the inevitable consequence of unlimited power, taking whatever they wanted, raping whatever would move and shitting on what didn't.

And the really insane part is that Paul is the only national candidate taking what I would consider sane positions and he is as nutty as a fruit bat.

So the problem isn't, as Greenwald implies, that liberals are forced to attack Paul because "their" candidate(s) are a bunch of wholly-owned subsidiaries of the financial/MICC industry and "child-killing, secrecy-obsessed, whistleblower-persecuting Drug Warrior(s)".

The PROBLEM is that "The only candidate to articulate sane, realist policies in the current U.S. Presidential campaign is a total whackaloon whose advocacy is based on equal parts idiocy, delusion, vanity, and selfish greed...and I HATE what the FUCK that says about the current U.S. Presidential campaign and U.S. politics in general!"

And I think if Greenwald had phrased it that way all he'd have received would have been a chorus of heartfelt groans of agreement.

GFT's Greatest Hits: Occupy Wall Street, 2008

The discussions we've been having over at MilPub about Occupy Wall Street got me thinking "Hmmm...didn't I write something about that..?" and eventually I went rummaging around in the back of the packrat portion of my mind and, sure enough, here it is from August, 2008.

"The Public Be Damned"

Every so often I run across something that reminds me so forcibly, so violently, of the present desuetude of our republic that I lose my wind just for a moment.

Here's Glenn Greenwald describing the scene at the current Democratic National Convention, where the telecom giant AT&T throws an intimate little shindig for the very people - imagine that - who helped them evade lawsuits for their lickspittle subservience to the criminals in the Bush White House and the NSA who believe that the laws of the land are, in the immortal words of Leona Helmsley, "for the little people".

I challenge you to read it and not throw up a little in the back of your mouth. It's sickening. It's the real face of "American politics".

It's not like this is something new in American politics. The rich are always with us, and the only difference between the New Gilded Age and the Old was that back then, a man like Mark Hanna could openly say; "Come on, you've been in politics long enough to know that no man in public life owes the public anything."

Today we have to pretend to "care" about the Great Unwashed, but the reality of America is that unless we're in the top 1% of all American incomes many of us have much of the freedom of a polled Hereford being prodded up the chute towards that dark building where we await our political and economic fate. Are we better off than some Ukrainian peasant or Zimbabwean prole? Sure. Will that mean much when our job is offshored, or we get sick and run through our insurance, or the highway to our parents' falls apart and we have to drive a 40-mile detour to visit?

No.

Here's Andrew Bacevich talking some hard, cold sense that most of us will close our ears to:

"The military-industrial complex will inhibit efforts to curb the Pentagon's penchant for waste. Detroit and Big Oil will conspire to prolong the age of gas guzzling. And the Israel lobby will oppose attempts to chart a new course in the Middle East. The next commander in chief will inherit an intractable troop shortage. The United States today finds itself with too much war and too few warriors. That alone will constrain a president conducting two ongoing conflicts. A looming crisis of debt and dependency will similarly tie the president's hands. Bluntly, the United States has for too long lived beyond its means. With Americans importing more than 60% of the oil they consume, the negative trade balance now about $800 billion annually, the federal deficit at record levels and the national debt approaching $10 trillion, the United States faces an urgent requirement to curb its profligate tendencies. Spending less (and saving more) implies settling for less. Yet among the campaign themes promoted by McCain and Obama alike, calls for national belt-tightening are muted.

Will we listen? Will we act? No.

Because, in the end, short of violent revolution, with the monetary grip on the levers of power, what CAN we do?

And because, in the end, we'd rather pretend that the future holds "freedom" and green pastures and sunny skies and try not to hear the cries of the other steers and the whisper of the killing knife.

And here's the interesting thing; we had a lively little exchange in the comments section, where, among other things, I wrote this: "...our economy is deeply unsound and shortsighted, our public uninformed, venal and stupid and our "leaders" corrupted and dysfunctional and then somehow insists that our nation will slip under this scylla of disaster.

I have no doubt that there will be a thing called the "United States". I'm not so sure we will like it, or possibly even recognize it. More and more I am convinced that the grand bargain forced on the Wealthy by FDR - that they would restrain their rapaciousness in return for labor peace and domestic tranquility- has broken. The rich will soon force the middle class into genteel poverty or economic servitude. The poor (flayed by immigration, crushed by hopelessness) will become little but serfs, in fact if not in name.

In short, we are returning to the U.S. in the 1880s and 1890s.

Fabius denies this, but his arguments boil down to, in essence, "America is stronger than that."

Bullshit.

We've been there before and there's no reason we won't return."

Now...not to toot my own horn - though this blog IS my little horn and I'm gonna toot it - but with the U.S. of 2011 looking ever more like the U.S. of 1929...and the GOP bound and determined to return it to the U.S. of 1899...should the New York Times not be hammering on my door asking me to write for them, or what?

Fuck, but sometimes I'm just that GOOD.

And ask me what that's worth and I'll cadge a buck off you for a cup of coffee. I'm just as much part of the 99% as the rest of y'all.

Update 10/23: I was listening to the kiddos play LEGOS and eat seaweed for breakfast (the Little Girl, anyway - anyone else have a child that likes dried nori for breakfast?) and blogreading when I came across this, from David Atkins at Hullabaloo, which is so good that I have to quote it at length. To wit:

Simply put, in the 1970s America was hit with an inflation crisis that quickly became a stagflation crisis. There were also oil shocks involved. Simulataneously, the world was becoming increasingly globalized, which made it more difficult for American corporations to compete using American labor. Finally, as Hacker and Pierson have persuasively argued, big business banded together to begin more aggressive and cohesive lobbying efforts. These four trends were devastating politically for the middle class.

American public policy on both sides of the aisle reoriented itself away from a focus on wages and toward a focus on assets. Specifically, the idea was that wage growth was dangerous because it led to core inflation in a way that asset growth did not. American foreign policy became obsessed even more than it had been with maintaining access to oil, both to prevent future oil shocks and to prevent inflationary oil spirals. Wage growth was also dangerous because it would drive increasing numbers of American corporations to employ cheaper overseas labor.

But that left the question of how to sustain a middle class and functional economy while slashing wages. The answer was to make more Americans "true Capitalists" in Reagan's terms. Pensions were converted to 401K plans, thus investing about half of Americans into the stock market and creating a national obsession with the health of market indices. Regular Americans were given credit cards, allowing them to take on the sorts of debt that had previously only been available to businesses. Most crucially, American policymakers did everything possible to incentivize homeownership, from programs designed to help people afford homes to major tax breaks for homeownership and much besides.

Low prices on foreign-made goods were also a policy priority. This had a dual benefit for policymakers: lower prices offset stagnant wages, while keeping core inflation low. Free trade deals were also a major centerpiece of public policy in this context. Few politicians actually believed that these deals would help increase wages and jobs in America. But what they were designed to do is keep low-cost goods coming into America, while increasing the stock value of American companies exporting goods overseas, thus raising asset values.

Low interest rates were also important. Renters and savers suffer in a low-interest rate environment, but borrowers and asset owners do very well. Tax cuts, of course, are also helpful in offsetting the impact of wage stagnation.

Houses and stocks, then, are assets that rise independently of wages. Low-cost overseas goods and the easy availability of loans and credit provide offsets to low wages. Low interest rates and tax cuts help as well keep assets afloat as well. The bipartisan idea from a public policy standpoint was not simply to enrich the wealthy at the expense of the middle class. The idea was to make the American middle class dependent on assets rather than wages. I was at a conference many years back, the purpose of which was to bring corporate bigwigs together in defense of free trade against what they feared might be a protectionist backlash. One executive told me point blank that if only enough Americans were invested in the stock market, they wouldn't gripe about Halliburton and other similar companies because they would say, "Hey, I own part of that company!" When I objected that that only half of Americans were invested in the market at all, and of that figure far fewer had significant assets invested, he retorted that more Americans were invested in the market than I thought, and that policy needed to be designed to push more Americans to invest.

I've often looked at our public policy and tried to figure out "What sane polity would enact policies seemingly designed to return itself to what may have been the least-stable political conditions (the openly-oligarchic period between about 1870-1930) since before the Civil War?" And here's the answer. And Atkins has a simple and exceptionally sane solution:

"The recklessness and stupidity of this sort of approach to public policy should have been proven by the 2008 financial crisis that saw the rapid destruction of asset values in stocks, bonds, and housing. Predicating economic health on asset growth is a pipe dream: most people will never have enough assets to make it work, and asset growth is far too unstable to serve as the basis for a functional economy.

Whether they can articulate it or not, what has most progressives most incensed about the Obama Administration's domestic policy is that it has ultimately hewed to the same asset-based economic model. When the Administration could be progressive on cutting costs or ensuring equality without negatively impacting assets, it did so. That's what the ACA, the Ledbetter Act, the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell and numerous other left-leaning Administration moves were designed to do. But the Administration has been very reticent to take any actions that would negatively impact the value of assets.

America will only return to real economic health when the asset-crazed insanity of the last 30 years is brought to heel, and America returns to a public policy that is far more interested in wage growth and economic stability than it is in asset inflation. Until then, we can expect continued political and economic shocks from an angry electorate and an economy that has run off the rails due to 30 years of deeply misguided anti-inflation, pro-asset-growth ideology."

But sane or not, my skepticism remains. The wealthy have their hands around the neck of the government; they will not be pried loose. And they are no more prescient that their counterparts were in St. Petersburg in 1917 or Paris in 1789. They will destroy the village in order to save their privileges. And the extraordinary coalition that pulled our nation away from the totalitarian abyss that awaited it in 1932 - Soviet communism on the one hand, Italian (and, later, German) fascism on the other - shows no signs of being there to ride to the rescue.

In other words?

WASF.

Storms are brewin' in your eyes...

I should mention that perhaps the most succinct but most comprehensive discussion of the "royal wedding" (see below) I found was over at "Sarah, Proud and Tall"; scroll down to her "Dispatches from the Royal Wedding."Outstanding. Good stuff, and you can say I said so.

And don't leave right after the reception. Sarah is a hoot, and some of her stuff is too funny to be a mere bagatelle. I'd like to think that she and Gloria Vanderbilt really DID kick Ayn Rand's ass back in '57.

Sarah; she's good.

Check her out, and you can drop my name when you get there.

Hope you had a good May Day and a good first week of Spring. I've bucked up a bit, and hopefully more regular bloggage will commence.

And I should add that this year there was neither blood nor shit for the Mommy. The kiddos both made her some adorable klutzy kid gifts, Mojo got to sleep in until nearly noon, read a lot, got tons of quiet time alone, and generally seemed to have a fairly good Mother's Day. Which just proves that if you wait long enough your kids will grow into your priorities.

This result may not be typical, mind you.

Nothing Else Holds Fashion

I don't spend a lot of time worrying or wondering who reads this thing.

It's a hobby, like toy trains or dandruff, and like them I just enjoy fiddling with it for my own sake. If you enjoy reading it, well, fine. That's nice. But you note I don't have gimmicks like a pageview counter or stats showing on the pagefront.

So I was a little intrigued when I ambled over to my "stats" tab in the dashboard page for GFT. I spent some time noodling around finding out intriguingly useless stuff like the fact that someone from Brazil, Australia and India has stopped by to read my stuff, and that for some reason January was a huge month for pageviews.

But most intriguing and useless thing was that the second-ever-most viewed post was one titled "Hot for Something: Hakkaa päälle 2".

The most viewed was my Decisive Battles post for La Noche Triste, which I liked; I think that was a good post, the battle of the night of 30 JUN-1 JUL 1520 is both historically important and difficult to find a single good source for online, and the post itself is well written (in my unhumble opinion), a good reference for anyone interested in the event.Nice to know that other people seem to think so, too.

But the other?

It had something to do with education, I thought, since it was part two of another post that had ranted about the recent enthusiasm for deriving U.S. education "improvement" from places like Korea and Finland that were about as similar to the U.S. - any part of the U.S. - as chalk is to cheese. As usual, I argued, wheedled, ranted, discussed, and explained like a madman and got one lonely comment (thanks, tho, Lisa!). Nobody had any interest in discussing education, Finnish or otherwise, with me. I have no way of determining from the stats page but I'll bet that the first post has probably 34 pageviews including three or four from me editing the damn thing.

And yet the second post, which is this tiny little postscript, has something like 2,000 views, almost 1% of the total pageviews for the site in the past year or so.

WTF?

And then I opened the post are realized; it was the one I talked about Finland.

Tom of Finland.

"Lechery, lechery; still, wars and lechery; nothing else holds fashion: a burning devil take them!"

It is said that fame has its price.The price of mine appears to be gay pornography.

November in December

Missed my internal deadline for the Battle for November, so the Battle of Unsan will be coming your way this week. It's just been a busy, rainy week and I've been getting home dirty, tired, and wet. Not conducive to good blogging.

I note in passing the relative insignificance of this little blog, sadly, in comparing the reaction to this post here - nothing - to the same post over at MilPub; a host of comments and discussion about the Christmas Tree Moron and his FBI-fueled fantasy.

I'm glad that people like MilPub. I'm just a little sad to see this place decline into a naething.

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

I wanted to take a moment to draw your attention again to the wonderful blog "Une Envie de Sel" for several reasons.

First, because the blogger, a delightful graphic artist, has several new images up on her site which you can acquire from her online shop here. Her work is just the right side of whimsical; crisp, vibrant, it is "charming" in the very best meaning of the word. That in itself is a good reason to visit.

But the other is her beautiful little girl. Here she is, in just one of the many moods you will find her at her mother's blog.I want you to remember this: little Q is three years old.

Three. Not four, not five. Only thirty-six months from the day of her birth, from the orphanage and the cleft repair and the new family who is laving her with love and wisdom in her new home.

But...three!

For reference, here is FOUR, begging for Halloween candy.See the difference.

Every so often I can see the big girl in Missy. Sometimes I can even glimpse the smallest hint of what she might be like, might look like, as an older girl.

I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

But look at this little girl; the lovely young woman she will be shines out of her like a candle in a night window, illuminating everything around her. I fear she will grow into that haunting beauty, and many a high school youth will long for her, and despair.

And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.

Riddle wrapped in an enigma

Part of the entertainment of blogs and blogging is the mystery of them.

Here's a good example. "D.D. Tinzeroes" the blog seems to have had a lifespan of about three years, from 2006 to 2009.

The blogger, who seems to be a Portland urbanite, possibly a grad student, raconteur, historian, and great consumer of pop culture both present and past, appears to have begun the blog with the idea of documenting some sort of map he was making of old Portland streetcar lines.The map itself and everything connected with the project has disappeared; if you follow the various links you get the dreaded 404 Error - Page Not Found. The blogger seems to have been involved in the "Platial", something called a "social mapping site" that nose-dived early this year. So all Tinzeroe's hard work, all his trolley line maps, are gone into that aetherial void space where lost Internet stuff goes when the website dies. The only remainder are the short blog posts that picket Tinzeroe's site in 2006 and 2007.

The thing is, the trolley line posts are really pretty fucking brilliant. The author finds old city maps as well as historical photos of the trolleys and their surroundings. And Tinzeroes is a good enough historian to know that history is just people living before the reader, so he makes sure to bring the human interest.Like here, where he memorializes a completely forgotten tragedy that struck four families on April 27, 1897 (he wrongly reports the accident date as the 28th, which was the date it appeared in the New York Times) when a trolley on the Mount Tabor line derailed crossing the trestle that bridged the Hawthorne Springs slough - in itself a fascinatingly forgotten piece of Portland, the wetlands and watercourses that drained the then-boggy inner East Portland lowlands - and fell into the water, killing three people; one W. W. Blanchard, described as a "laborer",
Newton Hanson, an eighteen-year-old who may have been either in high school or also working as a "laborer" and an unfortunate woman identified only as "(a)n unknown young lady". Tinzeroes says that a fourth was so badly injured that he, or she, died in hospital later, but I cannot trace the source of this.There must have been a Blanchard or two, perhaps a Missus Blanchard, a set of Hanson parents, a beau of the unknown young lady, or perhaps a sister...all of them grieved for their beloveds, drowned in a ridiculous trolley crash; April 27th must have been the most terrible day in history to them. Tinzeroe's momento mori brings these people, their families and friends, their lovers and loves, back to life for a brief moment. I'd say that's not a bad sort of gift to give.Or this gem of a little post, about the Portland Heights line and its timber trestle that ran from downtown Portland to the Vista Heights neighborhood along what was then Chapman Street. Chapman has disappeared, either subsumed in SW 18th or dug out to create the Vista Ridge tunnels in the late Sixties and then developed for the narrow, off-camber streets now typical of the flanks of the Heights.Look at this tremendously Victorian creation, vigorously free of guardrails, safety barriers, or, indeed, any sort of fall or crash protection at all.Which gives you pause when you read that a car crashed two days after the structure was opened in February, 1890, while on July 11th, "Car No. 13 broke loose from the cable at the powerhouse & rolled down 18th to Jefferson where it overturned. Car No. 18 then did the exact same thing & slammed into the overturned Car 13!"

Hmm. Maybe I'll walk.

The blog is full of this stuff, along with the random old building, idiosyncratic restaraunt reviews, historical trivia, personal maundering and marginalia that makes blogs so entertaining.Or at least to me. But to the blogger of "D.D. Tinzeroes", eventually, not so much.

The great days of the blog, the times when bandwidth fairly sang with trolleys and other Portland history, are over by 2008; suddenly the blog becomes almost exclusively about local 'zines and comics, random observations by the blogger, and review of science fiction and kaiju films. By 2009 things are getting sparse, and the final post, in May of this year, is a rather wan reflection of the time when "D.D. Tinzeroes" bestrode the narrow world of Portland historical blogging like a colossus; a snapshot of the urinals at Oaks Park, "near the roller rink".And that, it seems, is that.

Who was the man that knew so much about trolleys? Why did he start blogging? Why did he just stop caring about them? What is he doing now with the curiousity and knowledge that we get a glimpse of on his apparently-defunct blog?

We will probably never know. The result of his hard work and interest in the old rail line of Portland were his maps in Platial, which are as vanished as Lineal A.

Meanwhile his blog remains, idle in cyberspace, waiting like a left-behind book on an empty park bench for the passerby to stop and read, yet of its author- how he came to it, why he took it where he did, why he abandoned it - it is a mystery. It tells us nothing.

And never will.

Battles in July

At a bit of a standstill over the battle for July.

Tons of "decisive" battles in July for the American Civil War: Vicksburg and Gettysburg in 1863, Atlanta in 1864. But I have a hard time seeing the battles as decisive in and of themselves. Perhaps Vicksburg, but then, the entire campaign really led to the fall of the City. There are good arguments that the battle at Champion Hill, fought in May, really broke Pemberton and set up the collapse two months later. Gettysburg is really a replay of Antietam; Lee might have won if he'd let Meade come at him, but he didn't, and the Army of Northern Virgina was never really able to get over its notion of itself as the Shield of the Confederacy. It fought like hell in defense, but always seemed to lose its focus when it crossed the Potomac.

One "decisive" battle I'd hate to do but think that - along with Verdun, which is my choice for next February - is important in history is the first month of The Somme. The decisive nature of the battle wasn't on the ground but in the minds of the English generation of 1916 and generations thereafter. I'd argue that even today, if you try and propose to many English or French the notion of a hard-fought war you have to argue against the memory - however many times removed - of the pointless slaughter of the Somme and Verdun. Of the two, though, I think Verdun was by far the more terrible, and it had an effect on France much graver than the Somme had on England. So perhaps the one can stand for both, and of the two, the Meuse Mill would be my choice.

So...any candidates for the next two days - it's not too late! Vote for your favorite battle in July before the dog days of August commence...

Well, it pretty much sucked after Season Three...

So, you know I'm a chump for genre fiction, kaiju films, and goofy serial TV, right?

Well, here's someone who is totally more whack than I am, reviewing the Hitler History Channel series "World War II":

"Let's start with the bad guys. Battalions of stormtroopers dressed in all black, check. Secret police, check. Determination to brutally kill everyone who doesn't look like them, check. Leader with a tiny villain mustache and a tendency to go into apopleptic rage when he doesn't get his way, check. All this from a country that was ordinary, believable, and dare I say it sometimes even sympathetic in previous seasons.

I wouldn't even mind the lack of originality if they weren't so heavy-handed about it. Apparently we're supposed to believe that in the middle of the war the Germans attacked their allies the Russians, starting an unwinnable conflict on two fronts, just to show how sneaky and untrustworthy they could be? And that they diverted all their resources to use in making ever bigger and scarier death camps, even in the middle of a huge war? Real people just aren't that evil. And that's not even counting the part where as soon as the plot requires it, they instantly forget about all the racism nonsense and become best buddies with the definitely non-Aryan Japanese."

Hilarious. Go read the entire thing.

Orphan out of Carolina

I wanted to point you to a very good essay about adoption.

I've followed Lorrie over at Clueless In Carolina for years. She's that rare blogging combination of thoughtfulness and literacy that makes for genuinely good reading. She's hit a rough patch lately, and I hope things look up for her, but she's still a good read.

And her latest post was about adoption - her own.

I blog about adoption quite a bit. I have to; when a quarter of your public is adopted it kinda gets in your face. So it was painful to read;

"Today I realized for the first time that there is an unbridgeable gap between an adopted child and a person who can pick up the phone and call the people who brought them into the world and point to the bed where they were conceived. "I dread Father's Day," I told Roger tearfully. "I've lost two fathers."

And realize that there's really nothing you can say beyond that.

You know our story; we lost a daughter. Lorrie lost a father. Twice. Which is more heartrending, to lose the future, or to lose the past? I don't think that grief bothers keeping score.

I once wrote something about the effects of grief, and said;

"I realize anew reading "We must never limit the universe." from my friend's blog that what this old grief scar does do IS limit my universe. I'm perfectly functional, but I've taken the big wound. I can't ever again KNOW that something good is on the way. Because it was once and what arrived was pain and loss and sorrow. And nothing I could do - and I once foolishly said that anything that wanted to hurt my family would have to kill me first - was enough to stop the awful emptiness that still exists, a tiny universe of nothing but Dark Matter, in the locked room at the top of the stairs in the back of my head."

And now Lorrie knows that she, too, has that locked room where she can climb the stairs, and stand in the doorway, and see the face of Loss and say, welcome, old friend, old enemy.

Have you come to stay with me for a while?

I think you can sum up the entire business by remembering that every adoption begins with tragedy.

We Americans are especially bad at tragedy. We're the ultimate shiny happy people, and in a lot of ways that's a good thing. But not here.

I wish I had some words of wisdom or consolation for Lorrie. I don't. Some things are just pure grief.

The loss of her fathers, like all losses, like all griefs, can be softened by time and distance. As they are for all of us; the grieving parents, the harrowed soldiers, the bereft adoptees.But they will always be there, waiting, at the top of the stairs, waiting patiently to ask us if we want to sit with them on the top step and remember all the pain and heartache of the end of our yesterdays, and our tomorrows.

One Thousand

"It's early days yet, but I'm hoping to use this place to talk about politics, soccer and adoption. Hang on while I get myself organized and I'll be back."

That was Monday, the 17th of July, 2006. 1,423 days ago. Three years, ten months, twenty-three days, some hours, minutes, and seconds ago.1,000 posts ago.(Almost exactly 7/10s of a post per day, for those of you keeping count, BTW...)

I would say that I've fulfilled the promise I made to talk about politics and adoption. Soccer? A bit. Birding? Not so much. But bike racing and music and cool things in North Portland and geology and parenting and kiddos and travel and love and fear and success and failure. I hope that all that has been worth coming around for a read now and again.

As for us, along that way we lost a dog, lost (or perhaps never really had...) - and then gained - a daughter, aged three years and change, retired from the Army after 22 years, changed jobs, changed cars...

It's been quite a ride.

I have no idea how much longer I'll keep doing this. I suspect that I may have a few more posts in me. But as long as I continue to enjoy it...and as long as there are a few friends along to upbraid me and keep me straight...I will be here doing business at the Fire Direction Center, perhaps for another thousand posts.And let me just, for a moment, turn this back on you the readers. I've gained more than I've given over the past 1,423 days from your comments and observations. I will always regret and miss those of you who no longer visit; Atomic Mama, Wicked Witch, Millicent and Floyd, Beeb, wzgirl, Dee, holly. And I treasure, and enjoy, those of you who still do. If this place, this thing, this "blog", means anything, it is in the interaction between you and I, between what I write and what you write back.

I had a conversation recently with someone who was contemplating removing herself from Facebook - not all that horrific an option, IMO - but compared it to the "epistolary friendships" of the Nineteenth Century. And so this has been, in a way, a long conversation carried on in writing, between those of us who have visited here and elsewhere.

So, in honor of this 1,000-mile mark, of you all, and of myself, a pint raised to us; who's like us?

Damn few.

And they're all dead.

Thanks for the last thousand. Hope we're here for the next thousand more.