The Usual Suspects

Tough day. Came downstairs to find the two Shibas had the runs in their crates and the two Shepherds had pooed and peed all over the floor. At least Shibas are small enough to shampoo in the sink and the Shepherds didn't need it. But I have spent the last 15 hours monitoring their digestive issues ready to jump for the backdoor and will probably have to continue through the night. So I have time on my hands, thus...

The Usual Suspects

Suspect #1

Name: Yoshi, former name: Kobe, picked up on the lam in the streets of Long Island and placed on Death Row until NYC Shiba Rescue sprung him. Now he spends his time as owner of Skye, hanging out in a garden reminiscent of his homeland and plotting Shiba world domination.

Suspect #2

Name: Bob Dylan, aka Dilly, Dilly Dog. Former name: Jerry Garcia. Turned in by family for the crime of teething, turned over to NYC Shiba Rescue who, fooled by his adorable and innocent looking face, immediately exonerated him and gave him ownership of Skye. Distinguishing characteristics: He likes to take on the persona of legendary music icons.

Suspect #3

Name: Storm, aka Stormy, Stupey, Numnuts. Family gave him up as incorrigible and turned him over to White German Shepherd Rescue in Harrisburg, PA. from which Skye unwittingly took him under her wing. Believed to be permanently incorrigible due to bleached brain. Known to counter surf kitchens and, when caught in the act, feigns inability to understand the seriousness of his crime.

Suspect #4

Name: Natty, aka Natasha. Childhood filled with promise, molded by the prestigious Seeing Eye Guide Dog School for the Blind. Had absolutely no interest in a life of public service and was turned over to Skye to live a life full of joyful defiance. (Had she continued with the original plan, it would have been a case of the blind leading the blind.)

Suspect #5

Name: Haiku. Birth name: Fabio. Haiku shouldn't even be in the lineup but chooses to go back and forth between living with Skye and living with Skye's daughter, Molly, depending on his mood and he apparently slipped in. The mastermind of the gang, Haiku never carries out any of the crimes himself but leaves it to his subordinates to do the dirty work, and Skye to clean up the dirty work.

Pompous Packer Picked on a Peck of Presidential Poets

Get a load of this...

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/georgepacker/2008/12/presidential-po.html
December 18, 2008
Presidential Poetry
by George Packer

Is it too late to convince the President-elect not to have a poem written for and read at his Inauguration? The event will be a great moment in the nation’s history. Three million people will be listening on the Mall. Many of them will be thinking of another great moment that took place forty-five years ago, at their backs, when Martin Luther King stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Such grandeur would seem to call for poetry. But in fact the opposite is true.

For many decades American poetry has been a private activity, written by few people and read by few people, lacking the language, rhythm, emotion, and thought that could move large numbers of people in large public settings. In response to the news about Obama’s inaugural, Derek Walcott, who is about the only poet I can think of who might have pulled it off, but wasn’t selected, said, “There have been great occasional poets—poets who write on occasion. Tennyson was one. I think Pope was another. Frost also.” It’s not an accident that Walcott couldn’t name a poet born after 1874. And even Frost, who was chosen by J.F.K. to read the first inaugural poem in American history, botched the job, composing a piece of triumphalist doggerel that compared Kennedy to the Roman emperor Augustus. The eighty-six-year-old Frost kept losing his place in the winter sun’s glare, the wind whipped his pages around on the podium, and finally he abandoned the effort, as if he’d never really had much conviction in it, and instead read from memory an earlier and better poem, “The Gift Outright.”

Two poets have been given the honor since Frost. Maya Angelou’s “On the Pulse of Morning,” read at Clinton’s first inaugural, was an overly long ode to multiculturalism whose elevated tone turned out to be badly out of sync with the early months of the Presidency it heralded. And I know you can’t name the poet who read at Clinton’s second inaugural (it was Miller Williams).

On all these occasions, the incoming President seemed to be claiming more for his arrival than he deserved, and to be doing it by pretending that poetry means more in American life than, alas, it does.

A forty-six-year-old professor of African-American studies at Yale named Elizabeth Alexander has been chosen to write a poem for Obama’s swearing-in. She is a friend and former neighbor of Obama’s in Chicago, and her brother worked on the campaign and the transition. These alone seem like the kind of qualifications that entitle Caroline Kennedy to a Senate seat. Judging from the work posted on her Web site, Alexander writes with a fine, angry irony, in vividly concrete images, but her poems have the qualities of most contemporary American poetry—a specificity that’s personal and unsuggestive, with moves toward the general that are self-consciously academic. They are not poems that would read well before an audience of millions.

Obama’s Inauguration needs no heightening. It’ll be its own history, its own poetry.

------

Oh pleeeze. History, the very thing that provokes feelings about the March on Washington and other great events, tells us a little poetry can be a very good thing when it comes to the leader of the free world.

Kennedy said in 1963:

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concerns, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

Arrogance, corruption, narrowing of concerns? Sounds like an Administration we know too well.

Packer writes:

Three million people will be listening on the Mall. Many of them will be thinking of another great moment that took place forty-five years ago, at their backs, when Martin Luther King stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Such grandeur would seem to call for poetry. But in fact the opposite is true.

Elizabeth Alexander will also be thinking of that other great moment forty-five years ago because she was there, taken as a little girl by her parents to the Washington Mall to hear King. And whoever said Martin Luther King wasn't a poet in his own right? Just as Barack Obama is.

Finally, Packer writes that designating a poet to write a poem and read it for the inauguration is "pretending that poetry means more in American life than, alas, it does."

Alas, dude, that's the whole point. If a President believes in the importance of words as Obama does, enough to have poetry as part of his inauguration, than he's sending the message that poetry and all the arts are an important part of life.

Maybe Packer can't relate, but America is made up of millions of ordinary people who find poetry in their daily lives. Whether it is rap music or a passage in the Bible or a protest song or an afternoon fly fishing, it surrounds us. If Packer was able to pull his head out from his ass he might even notice it himself.

As Elizabeth Alexander wrote in Ars Poetica #100:

Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,
overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way
to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)
is not all love, love, love,
and I'm sorry the dog died.
Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,
and are we not of interest to each other?

What's in a name?

The law says it's confidential because they're minors and the children's names are not to be released to the media. But the names were originally THE issue, ever since dad told the press he was outraged that the local Shoprite wouldn't put the name of his 3-year-old son on a birthday cake.

The market said it was "inappropriate" to write on a cake: HAPPY BIRTHDAY ADOLPH HITLER. Yes, the boy's name is Adolph Hitler Campbell, brother of Joyce Lynn Aryan Nation Campbell, 1, and Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie Campbell, seven months.

Dad, Heath Campbell, has Nazi tattoos on his arms - just below Pebbles Flintstones and Winnie the Pooh (so then why not Pebbles and Winnie?) He and his wife say they aren't fans of Hitler. They just like the names.

Now DYFS has taken the children away and won't release their names.

'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
-Wm Shakespeare

I think the whole thing stinks for the kids, especially what the parents did for whatever friggin agenda. This, from someone who never classified any word as "bad" ("You bad bad word, you!!) The parents' name should be mud (not to desecrate any further the good name of Dr. Samuel Mudd who didn't know his patient, John Wilkes Booth, had just murdered Pres. Lincoln, but hey...)

On another note (this was all local news in the Delaware River valley of NJ and PA)...

After UFO sightings, alien hunters to gather here

What started with a single UFO sighting over a Middletown Mexican restaurant last January has turned into a science fiction sensation. Spaceships were spotted over Sesame Place. Black boomerangs were reported over Citizens Bank Park during the Phillies National League Championship series. An extraterrestrial even was seen recently in the men’s department of the local JCPenney, smiling at our women.

With more than 50 reports from Bucks since January, the Pennsylvania Mutual UFO Network says it now will gather here for its next alien hunter conference Jan. 24 at Bucks County Community College. State MUFON coordinator John Ventre is scheduled to discuss what he calls the “Pennsylvania UFO Wave.” The list of speakers also includes self-professed local abductees, including history professor David Jacobs of Temple University. Bucks County also was profiled in a documentary - “UFOs over Earth” - on the Discovery Channel.

No doubt, MUFON will have a lot to talk about that day. The encounters reported to the organization are lengthy and, at times, almost too incredible to believe.

blogs.phillyburbs.com
------
Now don't get me wrong, I believe in UFOs. I've even seen a UFO. If we were the only ones in the universe, it would be, like Jody Foster said in Contact, "an awful waste of space." It wouldn't make any sense if we were IT. But I also think they'd be advanced enough to do thermal scans or something and avoid abductions, anal probes, and other bad press. Especially if these aliens, uh, undocumented, want to avoid some yahoo in the back woods taking a pop at them.

Type-set

I was going through some old boxes containing objects from my childhood and found a scrapbook from my early days. Inside, I had clipped pictures from magazines of things I liked most and pasted them to the pages. There were the predictable ones of German Shepherds and a few rocket ships but most fascinating were the pages and pages where I’d clipped and pasted pictures of typewriters. I mean, what kid does that?

It wasn’t as if they were particularly old like the machines I now collect from garage sales and family attics, the ones that only came in black with names like Royal and Remington (yes indeed, one in the same as the gun manufacturer). To be sure, the only exception to the antiques in my collection is a toy typewriter that was given to me before I was out of kindergarten. Being the pre-plastic days, it is made completely out of some unidentifiable metal with rough snowflake-like impressions and medium blue in color except for the bold black letters across the entire top spelling out my name in Magic Marker so nobody would mistake it for theirs.

Those pasted into the scrapbook were much more modern - a Smith Corona (the beer?) in a soft teal blue case with white keys, an Underwood in gray - the typical typewriters of the Fifties and Sixties.

I don’t know exactly what my fascination is with those lined up letters of the alphabet nor that I had apparently had it from the beginning.

I do remember how much I adored spy kits for writing secret messages in code and I remember how thrilling it was to see my typewritten words on a “TV screen” for the first time when we got an Atari 800, complete with QWERTY keyboard.

I’ve kept every laptop I’ve owned no matter if I’ve swapped most of the guts out to other computers. My favorites are those with the worn off letters on the keys used the most. I guess it was predictable that the typewritten words from a mechanical device would be the tool of my trade.

Which leads me to this that I read with my morning coffee today:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/opinion/07egan.html?_r=1

December 7, 2008, New York Times
Guest Columnist

Typing Without a Clue
By TIMOTHY EGAN

The unlicensed pipe fitter known as Joe the Plumber is out with a book this month, just as the last seconds on his 15 minutes are slipping away. I have a question for Joe: Do you want me to fix your leaky toilet?

I didn’t think so. And I don’t want you writing books. Not when too many good novelists remain unpublished. Not when too many extraordinary histories remain unread. Not when too many riveting memoirs are kicked back at authors after 10 years of toil. Not when voices in Iran, North Korea or China struggle to get past a censor’s gate.

Joe, a k a Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, was no good as a citizen, having failed to pay his full share of taxes, no good as a plumber, not being fully credentialed, and not even any good as a faux American icon. Who could forget poor John McCain at his most befuddled, calling out for his working-class surrogate on a day when Joe stiffed him.

With a résumé full of failure, he now thinks he can join the profession of Mark Twain, George Orwell and Joan Didion.

Next up may be Sarah Palin, who is said to be worth nearly $7 million if she can place her thoughts between covers. Publishers: with all the grim news of layoffs and staff cuts at the venerable houses of American letters, can we set some ground rules for these hard times? Anyone who abuses the English language on such a regular basis should not be paid to put words in print.

Here’s Palin’s response, after Matt Lauer asked her when she knew the election was lost:

“I had great faith that, you know, perhaps when that voter entered that voting booth and closed that curtain that what would kick in for them was, perhaps, a bold step that would have to be taken in casting a vote for us, but having to put a lot of faith in that commitment we tried to articulate that we were the true change agent that would progress this nation.”

I have no idea what she said in that thicket of words.

Most of the writers I know work every day, in obscurity and close to poverty, trying to say one thing well and true. Day in, day out, they labor to find their voice, to learn their trade, to understand nuance and pace. And then, facing a sea of rejections, they hear about something like Barbara Bush’s dog getting a book deal.

Writing is hard, even for the best wordsmiths. Ernest Hemingway said the most frightening thing he ever encountered was “a blank sheet of paper.” And Winston Churchill called the act of writing a book “a horrible, exhaustive struggle, like a long bout of painful illness.”

When I heard J.T.P. had a book, I thought of that Chris Farley skit from “Saturday Night Live.” He’s a motivational counselor, trying to keep some slacker youths from living in a van down by the river, just like him. One kid tells him he wants to write.

“La-di-frickin’-da!” Farley says. “We got ourselves a writer here!”

If Joe really wants to write, he should keep his day job and spend his evenings reading Rick Reilly’s sports columns, Peggy Noonan’s speeches, or Jess Walter’s fiction. He should open Dostoevsky or Norman Maclean — for osmosis, if nothing else. He should study Frank McCourt on teaching or Annie Dillard on writing.

The idea that someone who stumbled into a sound bite can be published, and charge $24.95 for said words, makes so many real writers think the world is unfair.

Our next president is a writer, which may do something to elevate standards in the book industry. The last time a true writer occupied the White House was a hundred years ago, with Teddy Roosevelt, who wrote 13 books before his 40th birthday.

Barack Obama’s first book, the memoir of a mixed-race man, is terrific. Outside of a few speeches, he will probably not write anything memorable until he’s out of office, but I look forward to that presidential memoir.

For the others — you friends of celebrities penning cookbooks, you train wrecks just out of rehab, you politicians with an agent but no talent — stop soaking up precious advance money.

I know: publishers say they print garbage so that real literature, which seldom makes any money, can find its way into print. True, to a point. But some of them print garbage so they can buy more garbage.

There was a time when I wanted to be like Sting, the singer, belting out, “Roxanne …” I guess that’s why we have karaoke, for fantasy night. If only there was such a thing for failed plumbers, politicians or celebrities who think they can write.

------
Maureen Dowd is off today.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Muffin top?

The ads I keep getting on a regular basis on facebook are all about Oprah’s latest diet. They say it works. I haven’t seen much of a change in Oprah, though I’m not a regular having seen her last on MSNBC in the crowd in Chicago on Election Night with some unknown white guy with glasses and a big head blocking most of her except the tears rolling down her cheeks. Maybe that guy should try the diet. All I know is I’m busy on facebook letting the world know who I am. I don’t really want to explore who I could be. The Washington Post’s Rachel Beckman, on the other hand, has taken the mouse-click leap into the online ad world. And lived to tell about it:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/02/AR2008090202956.html

Facebook Ads Target You Where It Hurts
By Rachel Beckman, Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 3, 2008; Page C01

My Facebook page called me fat.

Maybe it’s my age, my sex or the fact that it knew I was engaged, but the site decided I was a gal who needed to drop a few pounds. And it wasn’t shy about its tactics.

This was not a close friend taking me aside, telling me in gentle tones that she’d noticed I’d put on some weight and was there anything going on in my personal life that I needed to talk about?

Oh, no. Every time I logged in to my home page, Facebook’s ads screamed at me with all the subtlety of a drill sergeant: “MUFFIN TOP.” This particular ad had a picture of someone with said affliction. For those blissfully unacquainted with the slur, it’s when a woman wears too-tight jeans and a roll of flab hangs over her waistband.

I posted a status update that said, “Rachel doesn’t appreciate her Facebook page telling her that she has a muffin top.”

Facebook targets its advertising to users based on the information in their profiles. This is not a new concept, of course. Kids usually see toy ads while they watch Nickelodeon, and women get ads for birth control pills as they watch Lifetime.

But Facebook’s data miners know much more about us because we tell them a whole lot more. Facebook knows my birthday, my relationship status and which book I’m reading, among other personal tidbits. The site started turning this information into dollar signs last November with the launch of Facebook Ads, which targets users’ presumed areas of interest (or psychological soft spots).

Basically, the subliminal goal of product advertising is to make you feel inadequate and ashamed, because you’re not perfect. Your teeth are yellow. Your armpits stink. You’re fat. And hairy.

The targeting technology itself will be familiar to users of Google’s Gmail, which generates ads based on what its users type in the body of an e-mail. TiVo and Netflix both suggest programming based on what you’ve been watching. (Remember the “My TiVo Thinks I’m Gay” episode of “The King of Queens”?)

Facebook spokesman Matt Hicks summed up the appeal to advertisers thus:
“If you’re a wedding photographer, do you want to waste your money advertising to a general audience? Or do you want to reach those that are engaged?”

After my quaint status update about the muffin top ad, Facebook got even more vicious, like a schoolyard bully provoked by my initial reaction. With the knowledge that I was engaged to be married, the site splashed an ad across the left side of the screen playing into a presumed vulnerability. Do you want to be a fat bride? You’d better go to such-and-such Web site to learn how to lose weight before the big day.

I fought back harder. I clicked a little blue link that said “Report” and filled out a form.

A drop-down menu gave choices: Was the ad “misleading, offensive or pornographic?” I chose offensive. Facebook thanked me for the feedback and said it would take appropriate action, though I shouldn’t expect any notification about this action.

Nothing changed. Facebook continued its onslaught of muffin-top and fat-bride taunts. I averted my eyes and tried to remember that saying about rubber and glue. I didn’t spiral into a body-image crisis, nor did I start to diet. But there’s got to be some kind of psychological toll wrought by so many weight-loss images each week.

I decided to investigate further, and obtained a document for advertisers called “Common Ad Mistakes.” In it, I found this nugget:

“Text may not single out an individual or degrade the viewer of the ad.” It even gave an example of a diet ad that uses unacceptable language: “You’re Fat. You don’t have to be.”

The muffin top ad is no more; whether the advertisers stopped using it by choice or by force, Facebook spokesman Hicks wouldn’t say. There are other changes afoot at the site. Last month, it beefed up its advertising guidelines, in part to address the diet ads. Any ads that refer to health or medical conditions can go only to users 18 or older, and they must “present information without portraying any conditions or body types in a negative light.”

Also in July, Facebook launched its new interface, which includes “thumbs up/thumbs down” buttons beneath ads so users can receive the ones that are more relevant to them.

I assumed that the diet ads would subside after I changed my relationship status from “engaged” to “married” in May. They did. I now receive these:

“Trying to get pregnant? Visit our site now. We’re a national network of fertility specialists treating male and female infertility.”

Thanks, Facebook, for calling me barren.