War-Gods of the Deep

Today's weird little movie is War-Gods of the Deep, a.k.a. The City Under the Sea, a 1965 Gothic tale of mayhem under the sea. It's a Corman film with Vincent Price, allegedly based on the poem "The City in the Sea" by Edgar Allan Poe. And on top of that, it was directed by Jacques Tourneur, who's best known for his earlier film noir work. You'd think all this would add up to quite a fine film, but I have to say that this one's less than the sum of its parts. Which is not to say it isn't worth watching, but I'd have to call it a curiosity, not a classic.

We can get the plot out of the way pretty quickly. Generic heroine is kidnapped by the baddie (Sir Hugh, the Captain), and hauled off to his weird lair in a ruined ancient city deep beneath the sea. Generic hero isn't ok with this, and makes his way to the baddie's lair, accompanied by his very British comic-relief sidekick, who in turn is accompanied by a pet chicken. Thrilling adventures ensue, including a long "fight" sequence involving deep-sea diving gear and crossbows. A couple of "gill men" make repeated cameos. There are several long scenes full of our heroes talking to various locals who reveal bits of the backstory, and nothing of any great consequence happens for quite a long time. After much aimless milling about, they eventually they locate the heroine, and our dynamic trio attempt to defeat the baddie and escape to the surface. Eventually they do. Also, an undersea volcano erupts and finishes off the undersea city, so we get some nice satisfying explosions right at The End.

That's basically it. There isn't much of a plot here. The poem isn't much help, either. It provides the setting, but the screenwriters then had to cook up the entire story, such as it is. The movie is a lesson in just how difficult it is to write Poe if you aren't Poe. I do give the filmmakers credit for some of the Gothic elements they dreamed up: The baddie and his henchmen have discovered the secret of perhaps-eternal life, but are condemned to remain forever in the city under the sea. Dry land is nearby, but the men can only go ashore for brief raiding parties, and then only at night. The bells that ring deep in the sea whenever Sir Hugh executes someone. The house perched on a cliff over the ocean, full of creepy guests and secret passages. The glowing undersea volcano and constant earthquakes, providing a constant sense of impending doom. A lot of the sets and visuals are pretty cool, including the main temple room (I'm guessing about the temple part) where Sir Hugh drowns his enemies. The water cascades down between the fingers of a gigantic hand, and of course the hand ends up falling on the bad guy at the end. Other nice visual bits include the matte of the undersea city and the super-cool deep sea diving helmets everyone was using. The US title of the movie is pretty great as well. As soon as I heard the title, I knew I absolutely had to rent the thing. And there's a short bit of Vincent Price reading Poe, which is never a bad thing.

Now for bad things about the movie. The worst, worst, worst thing about the movie is the interminable undersea "fight" sequence. Basically the filmmakers had a few people miling around aimlessly in diver helmets. They all have the same outfit on, and there's no dialogue, so you end up with no clue whatsoever about what's happening. The film tries to liven things up by splicing in some unconvincing reaction shots by our glorious triumvirate, and loud bombastic music to try to convince you something exciting is happening, all evidence to the contrary. This sequence goes on and on. I didn't time it, but I'd bet it ran at least 15 minutes. You keep thinking, surely they must be done now, but no. I don't know if they just needed filler material; or filming underwater was expensive, and they decided to get their money's worth by using every last minute of footage they filmed; or whether the public genuinely adored the novelty of this stuff back in 1965. But looking at it with 2006 eyes, there's just way too much boring undersea footage. And to top it all off, the undersea chase seems to be completely pointless, and our heroes end up back where they started after all that time. Although the pack of nefarious henchmen disappears from the story after this point, and we never find out what happened to them. Nobody bothers to say a simple "Whew, we lost them", or anything, so it's possible the scriptwriters just forgot about 'em after that. And those "gill-men"... Yes, they look like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, except made by an 8th grade art class. If you watch the fighting closely, you can see a number of gill-man scales and costume bits breaking off. To be fair, lots of movies ripped off the gill-man idea, such as Monster of Piedras Blancas and The Phantom from 10000 Leagues. But if there's a gill-man evolutionary tree, the guys from WGotD rank somewhere near the very bottom.

I should point out that the film won no awards for acting. Vincent Price (as nasty old Sir Hugh) is his usual entertaining self, but it's all downhill from there. Both ex-teen-heartthrob (and non-action-hero) Tab Hunter, and alleged love interest Susan Hart can barely read their lines, much less sell them to the audience. He was supposed to be a big star for some reason, which explains his presence in the movie. And she got the job because she was married to James Nicholson, one of the film's co-producers. The love angle just doesn't work -- the only indication we get that they have anything in common is in the very beginning, where she remarks that they are the only two Americans among the house's guests, and she thinks they ought to be friends. That's pretty much it. And after the first few minutes, she's the only woman in the movie. A better movie might have given Sir Hugh a daughter or neice, and set up a rivalry for the affections of dreamy Tab Hunter. A better movie might even deliver a proper catfight. But not this movie.

Meanwhile, David Tomlinson (playing the English twit) is just an insufferable ham. You've seen him in all those 60's Disney movies, and in those he didn't share screen time with a chicken. Ah, the chicken. The business with the chicken is slightly amusing, very slightly amusing, the first couple of times it's inflicted on the audience. And then it happens again, and again. When Vincent Price notices the bird, his eyes light up and he hungrily exclaims "Chicken!". I had my hopes up the chicken might be a goner. But no. One of the reviews linked to below says the studio made the filmmakers add the twit and his chicken. They must've had the movie pegged as a ripoff of 20000 Leagues Under the Sea, except without a submarine, or a giant squid, or any of the other things that made that movie so much fun.

So is it worth watching? Sure, so long as you don't expect a masterpiece. Or a film that makes sense, to be honest, so this may be a great movie to cook up a drinking game about. When you see the chicken, drink!

Other reviews of War Gods of the Deep:
Film Freak Central, RottenTomatoes, 1000 Misspent Hours, Eccentric-Cinema.com (with stills), Monsters at Play. DVD Drive-In, Imaginarium, and Bad Cinema Diary

tags: bad movies tourneur chicken gillmen war gods of the deep vincent price edgar allan poe

OMG PONIES!!! LOL!!!!

I was talking to a coworker the other day, complaining about something or other, and happened to say, jokingly, "Also, I want a pony." About ten minutes later, she dropped by my desk and delivered the object pictured above, so now I'm the proud owner of a genuine My Little Pony^TM (Official Hasbro site here, also see the Wikipedia article). I'm told that it lived in a fish tank for a while before I got it, so it's probably full of weird algae on the inside. But on the outside, it's all pony. YAY!

I have a small menagerie of animal toys at my desk, including a couple of turtles, fish, a wombat, aliens, robots, glowing skulls, and a few other items, so this is really not very weird by my usual standards. I'm deliberately cultivating an "eccentric streak", and I've deliberately picked something that's guaranteed to confuse and outrage insecure tech-geek fanboys -- which is even more fun than you might think. Yes, they really do get outraged. Jeezus. Check out this April Fool's Day spoof from Wizards of the Coast, announcing the brand new My Little Pony roleplaying game. It sounds like something kids would really enjoy, if it was for real, but it isn't. And a hearty laugh was had all across Nerdistan. You know, because unlike ponies, D&D is for real, and is a very serious matter, and not at all silly in any way. (*snort* *giggle*)

And who could forget Slashdot's immortal 4/1/06 antics? They started the "Ponies meme", and they've been aggressively marketing it from the very beginning. They're not stupid. They know the core /. audience is dweeby 15 year old boys who don't like their little sisters, and this is a sure way to win their undying devotion.

Updated: This post's actually attracting quite a few search engine hits for the phrase "omg ponies". I figure that at least some of these visitors come from the aforementioned (semi-)lucrative 15-year-old dweeb demographic. I'd so hate for anyone to leave here emptyhanded, so here's something you guys might enjoy (I think). I recently encountered a brand of high-quality graph paper called Rhodia. It's from France, and comes in A4 and several other Euro-licious metric sizes. For, you know, designing your ultimate D&D dungeon, or drawing anime characters in class, or, well, for doing actual work, if the teacher's watching or whatever. I bought a pad, because I'm an engineer and I just know I need graph paper. I don't know why I need it yet, but I just *do*. Simply having it makes me happy, even if it just sits on my desk, unused, giving off positive engineer vibes. If you're in Portland, Canoe carries it in several sizes.

Writing about ponies is way more fun than my usual topics -- war, politics, science, religion, heavy stuff like that. So here are some more contemporary MLP items:

• An account by a guy describing his anxiety over picking up My Little Pony DVDs for his kids at the video store. Seems they're the new male kryptonite, or something. He also freaks out over buying feminine hygeine products at the grocery store. It turns out that the potential opinions of random store clerks are wayyyy more important than I ever imagined. So, so sad.
  
• Curiously, My Little Pony figured in the recent Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarism scandal, with one character in her novel Opal Mehta threatening another with the immortal line "I'll tell everyone that in eighth grade you used to wear a My Little Pony sweatshirt to school every day."
  
• A San Francisco-based writer was moved to exclaim "Omigod, that's My Little Pony!" while visiting Iceland. Right around dinnertime, to be specific. And they eat puffins there, too. The bastards!
  
• You have to move quickly (like Seabiscuit!) if you want to cash in on ephemeral internet memes; somewhere, some poor schmoe is stuck with a whole warehouse of "All Your Base" coffee mugs, and he won't sell a single one until the inevitable wave of AYBABTU nostalgia hits about 15 years from now. Our friends at CafePress are on the ball, as usual, and they'll be happy to slap an "OMG!!! Ponies!!!" logo onto any of their usual articles of clothing.
  
• On the other hand, even though it's been nearly 2 full months since /. pulled its ponies stunt, omgonies.com is still just a bare-bones "Coming Soon" page, and omg-ponies.com is an empty WordPress blog. You snooze, you lose, that's all I'm sayin'. Wait much longer, and it'd be like putting up a new "Dancing Hamsters" fanboi page.
  
• Also, a brand new My Little Pony movie is on the way. I'll set a toy pony on my desk, but I think watching a movie about 'em would be just way too much pony, thank you very much.
  
• On a bit more of a tangent, this article is mostly about the weird fad of using live Madagascar hissing cockroaches as jewelry, another one of those 5-minutes-before-the-fall-of-Rome trends we're seeing a lot of lately.
  
  A quote from the article:
  

  
  ''It's encrusted in a pattern of multicolored jewels, and also comes with a silver chain you can clip on to this belt it has which acts like a leash. You pin it to yourself, and the critter can roam around your shoulders and chest unchecked. Hence, it's a roach brooch. . . . I'm still not sure what is to become of Hissy. I am in talks with a friend to give him to her daughter as a pet. Your first thought is: What would a 5-year-old girl want with a cockroach? But then you have to remember the jewelry angle -- it looks like a demented, post-apocalyptic My Little Pony."
  

  
  
• Here's a concise roundup of all things roach-brooch-related, and this very post makes a cameo appearance, down towards the bottom, for the moment, anyway. Hooray for me! Mission Accomplished!
  
• My obligatory conservation / biodiversity item: Here's a list of rare animal breeds indigenous to the UK, including several breeds of horses and ponies (real, live ones, not made of plastic). Among these are the Eriskay Pony and the Exmoor Pony.
  
• And this is 100% utterly unrelated: The latest voting scandal on American Idol. Quite honestly, I just wanted an excuse to stick the phrase "american idol" in here, since that generates lots of page hits and stuff. And I'm sorry, but this isn't exactly a surprise. If you let Rupert Murdoch run your elections, this sort of thing is inevitable.
  
• Updated: Actually I haven't had a single page hit from anyone searching for "american idol". Those people are smarter than I thought, or maybe they turn up their noses at anything that isn't on MySpace, I dunno.
  
• Two Flickr photosets of 100% pony pics.
  
  
• Stop the Presses!!! I just checked, and the pony's underbelly bears a non-Hasbro logo. It's not a real My Little Pony at all, but one of the "Pony Tales" line from Lanard Toys. Despite the big word "INTEGRITY" that flies around the screen at the start of their big Flash presentation, they seem to have gotten in trouble in the past over cloning other companies' products.
  
• Here's a page devoted to exposing Fakie Ponies, which is what I have on my hands here. A cheap made-in-China knockoff, as opposed to an expensive made-in-China original. I'd go complain to my not-to-be-named coworker, but they always say to never look a gift horse in the mouth. Which is impossible, incidentally, since its mouth doesn't open.
  
• But not all is lost: Although they'll never be real ponies, Lanard products do have their place in the overall pony ecosystem. Seems they make great organ donors, well, hair donors, if you're restoring or customizing your Real MLP Pony.
  
• Lanard ponies do have their fans, though, as evidenced by this forum thread. Things get a little testy as the discussion continues. Seriously.
  

You may not believe this, but this pony has a special voice that only I can hear, and on occasion it whispers softly to me. Unfortunately I seem to have acquired a mutant-clone insane neocon wingnut pony, and it's convinced me, in its cute cuddly-wuddly way, to pledge eternal warfare against the infidel Care Bear evildoers. So if I ever come across any, it's going to be all-out "Shock and Awe" time, for sure. And don't even get me started about the Axis of Weebles. tags: my little pony ponies

Greetings, NSA Spookbots!

I'd started writing an outraged post about the latest NSA spookiness, but didn't quite get it polished off before RL work intervened, and I had to go dink around with some Linux Itanium makefiles for the umpteenth time. Which as it turns out was a good thing; I reread what I'd written, and I clearly needed to chill out a little. Simply swearing at the bastards won't help, even if they are reading this -- and I have to assume they are. I don't mean an actual person reading this, of course -- I'm merely a multicellular microbe in the TTLB ecosystem, after all -- but rather a bot scraping the net for keywords. I'd hate for the poor little bot to go away without any keyword hits whatsoever, so here are a few, just off the top of my head:
Osama, Plutonium, Fallujah, 9/11, Anthrax, Zarqawi, Saddam, Hijacking, Kerry, Subway, Sarin, Reactor, Syria, WMD, Pipeline, Jihad, Ahmadinejad, Yellowcake, Bush, Cheney, Oil, Afghanistan, Jesus, Rapture, Chechnya, Armageddon, Sheehan, Baghdad

I'll structure this as one of my usual bullet-point lists. I find bullet-point lists to be oddly calming. If you can just set everything down in a tidy structured list, the world can't have gone completely off its nut. It's like aromatherapy for engineers, I guess. The Jameson is helping a little as well, but not nearly enough. Some links I came across, along with various points as they occur to me.

• We'll start out with the original USA Today story. I have to wonder how other big media types feel right now, having been scooped by USA Today? They also had a very good editorial accompanying the main article, which ended in the rather chilling line "The White House declined to provide an opposing view to this editorial.".
  
• One of the best stories I've seen about the reaction to the news, from the San Jose Mercury News. Looks like Dubya's just scared the living daylights out of everyone in Silicon Valley, especially since so many tech workers come from overseas and routinely make international calls, things that the NSA's data mining operation would be sure to zero in on.
  
• The liberal blogosphere is having a cow, of course. Here are some reactions at DailyKos, Unclaimed Territory, Firedoglake (also here). Not much at Wonkette that I can see. But as soon as one of the key figures wears something interesting, I'm sure they'll be right on it.
  
• A long piece at The Moderate Voice rounding up today's MSM hubbub.
  
• A good Seattle Times backgrounder on exactly what "social-networking analysis" is all about.
  
• One of the pieces mentioned in the last item is a great Eugene Robinson piece at the WaPo. He boils it down to a few very simple points, the biggest being that whether or not the program is technically legal, Bush flat out lied to us about it. Looked us in the eye, all sincere and everything, and lied to us.
  
• I'm proud to say I'm a Qwest customer. I never thought I'd say that. Their broadband offerings are a little behind the times compared to what Verizon offers (Verizon serves the 'burbs here in PDX), and their record on fixing things quickly and correctly isn't the best, although it's vastly improved over what it was 6-7 years ago. But I can still call up the in-laws and talk smack about Our Glorious Leader, and he won't ever know about it. Thank you, Qwest!
  
• As I've said before, it's inconceivable that this administration would give itself this kind of power, and accumulate this much information, and then not seek to abuse it for purely partisan ends. They insist all of their domestic spying (that we know about) is done strictly against "enemies" of the country, and I expect they genuinely believe that's what they're doing. I'm sure they feel they have the best of intentions. But then, conservative types are always lecturing us on how anyone who disagrees with the president is a freedom-hating evildoer. So we can assume the NSA and its Bushevik masters are using an extremely broad definition of "enemy".
  
• If the program really is constitutional, which they keep telling us it is, why aren't they sharing this info with law enforcement? Surely that would be a fantastic idea, one that nobody could possibly oppose. I mean, assuming the NSA program is legal.
  
• A piece from the 9th, just before the latest story broke, speculating that the Hayden nomination was Karl Rove's idea. The piece argues that Karl and friends think domestic surveillance is a great wedge issue to use against Democrats in November, and Hayden was nominated to get the issue back on the front burner again. Possibly they're rethinking that now. Or possibly not. I really have no idea how this is going to play in Peoria. I no longer pretend to have even the foggiest clue about how those people think. Maybe they'll absolutely love it, and Dubya's numbers will be back over 50 the next time they run a poll. They voted for the guy twice, so I'm not sure there's any limit to the amount of BS they're willing to believe.
  
• Some people have even speculated that Bush & Co. deliberately leaked the story, for the reasons given in the last item. I don't know what to think about that, but I certainly wouldn't put it past them.
  
• I also doubt the latest news will change the minds of any of the 31-percenters out there. They drank the Kool-Aid^TM a long time ago. Patiently telling them about the latest outrage won't help matters; they love the guy precisely because they assume he is doing this sort of thing, and they wish he'd do a lot more of it.
  
• I'd like to go out on a limb and offer a prediction: By this time next week, they'll trot Cheney out to do his usual routine, questioning the loyalty and patriotism of anyone who isn't thrilled about being spied on. I'm betting he'll surface on one of the weekend talking head shows, or if not that, a staged photo op in front of cheering soldiers.
  
• I have to say this is a bad time to be a pessimist, which I am, because every time I think I'm finally pessimistic enough, something else bad happens. But here's my pessimistic view of how this is going to play out. Of course nothing will change as a result of the latest disclosure. Congress won't provide any meaningful oversight. Hayden will be confirmed, in a grotesque rerun of the Alito charade. (Surely he has a photogenic wife who's willing to burst into tears at key moments in the hearings.) We're seeing a few quotes from Congressfolk indicating they're feeling a tad more riled than usual, but nothing will come of it. In the end, they'll just end up legalizing whatever Bush is up to, anyway. The D's will run away from the issue at top speed, like they did with the last wiretapping scandal, and Feingold's censure motion, and all the other issues that have come down the pipe in the last 5 years.
  
• Updated: Well, we have our answer, at least our initial answer, on the public reaction to the latest NSA news. They absolutely love it. Or at least that's what they say when asked about it over the phone. I was afraid this was going to happen. People just don't care about their basic civil liberties anymore. The bastards. The Bill of Rights would never pass in this country if we put it up for a vote.
  

You know, I'm not actually feeling any better. But at least the solution is obvious, as hard as it may be to achieve. ITMFA!

tags: nsa surveillance spying bush cheney hayden impeachment itmfa

Mmmm... Ortolans... (Mmmm!?)

In the previous post, I made a rather rash comment to the effect that I'd be willing to eat just about anything, if I thought it might taste good. Let me qualify that, please: I do firmly draw the line at chowing down on endangered species, in case you were wondering, or getting ready to picket me, or something.

I mention this because while I was rifling through some old cookbooks full of (mostly) icky food while writing that last post, I came across a real gem. This recipe comes from an old, fussy 1972 cookbook of mine, "Great Classic Recipes of Europe", which combines two of this blog's continuing fixations: Weird food, and cute wildlife. I am referring, of course, to "Ballotine de Faisan Villeneuvoise Flanquee d'Ortolans" (the book omitted any vowel accent marks in the name -- it's not my fault!) , which the book translates as "Pheasant Presented in Sausage Form, Flanked with Game Birds", proving again that everything sounds tastier in French. But the English translation is inaccurate, in that not just any old "game birds" will suffice. No, this recipe calls for ortolans, small birds which are both a legendary French delicacy, and a highly endangered species. A footnote in the recipe explains that ortolans are "Tiny birds (buntings) much prized as delicacies in Europe. Gourmet stores sometimes carry the small birds canned, or halves of very small Cornish game hens could be used as a substitute". So I think the authors were sort of aware the birds were scarce even in 1972, but failed to grasp the environmental implications of that fact. I'm not going to reproduce the recipe in full here, because it's exceedingly complex, and 95% of it concerns the tedious preparation of the pheasant ballotine, which doesn't really concern us right now. Among the 36(!) ingredients, we require 6 ortolans, and 6 pastry shells. The relevant instructions are simply: "Braise ortolans 5 minutes in fat. Salt and arrange them in individual flaky pastry tart shells".

That cookbook isn't the only book I've got that mentions ortolans. They also appear in a fascinating 1834 natural history volume titled System of Natural History (although later editions are known as The Naturalist's Library, and the book's more commonly known by that name), compiled by one Augustus Addison Gould. The University of Michigan has a searchable online version of the book here, with images of the original text's pages. Here's what the book has to say about ortolans:

THE ORTOLAN ²
Is somewhat less than the yellow-hammer. The plumage on the upper parts is brownish chestnut, mixed with black; the under parts are pale rufous. These birds are common in France and Italy, but are not found in England. They are caught in numbers to fatten for the table. This is done by including them in a dark room, and feeding them with oats and millet. By this process they become so fat that they would die from that cause alone, were they not killed for sale. In this state they will sometimes weigh three ounces, and are accounted the most luxurious repast of the epicure, being, as it were, one lump of exquisite fat.

² Emberiza hortulana, LIN.

A few more E. hortulana items:

• In case you missed it in the Wikipedia article I linked to above, ortolans were served in the traditional style as part of Francois Mitterand's last meal.
  
• Photos of ortolans in the wild, taken by a birder in the UK.
  
• A page (in French) with instructions on how to capture ortolans in the wild and fatten them up for the table.
  
• An allegedly Italian recipe in Japanese for "risotto dell ortolan". If the photo is correct, I don't see an actual bird in the dish, but maybe it's under the rice or something.
  
• A project on ortolan conservation in Norway.
  
• And a paper by Finnish researchers noting a crash in the ortolan population [PDF] in southern Finland, due to agricultural development and the resulting loss of habitat. You'd think you'd see the habitat loss argument being advanced as an excuse by militant ortolan devotees, but they just don't even bother trying to explain themselves.
  
• Recipe-For.com has several recipes for ortolans, beginning with Broiled Ortolans in Papers. Click the "Fried Ortolans" link to go on to the next one, a tasty sounding concoction with bacon and a white wine sauce. And so on.
  

Like I said, I'm not actually in favor of eating these poor little creatures, even if I'm providing recipes. They're strictly for you to marvel at, ok? Eating ortolans is one of those things people indulge in when they have far too much money and not a clue about how to enjoy life. Sort of like caviar, Havana cigars, and luxury SUVs. Blech. But the ortolan phenomenon is still fascinating to me. It's a mystery how, of all the species of tiny birds out there, this one gets singled out as an ultra-high-end delicacy. And it's amazing how, once something like this gets going, it feeds on itself, and continues unchanged for centuries. It doesn't translate into afficionados switching to other tiny helpless songbirds when the ortolan becomes scarce. Passing laws against the practice has no effect, since ortolanophagy is typically restricted to the rich and powerful, people who can and regularly do ignore the law with impunity (which is why the bird's probably doomed in the long term). No doubt that's the real thrill for a lot of ortolan-munchers. And even if the birds weren't being captured from the wild, and they weren't endangered, the traditional force-feeding process would still be unbearably cruel. And on top of everything else, the Mitterand link (above) notes that many first time ortolan diners are overcome with nausea, which suggests people don't eat the birds for the taste. It's just one fresh horror after another here. This is true decadence in the Roman style, and not in a good way. No, this is 5-minutes-before-the-fall-of-the-Empire, profoundly pessimistic, joyless decadence. The nihilist's last meal, sucking the last bitter juice out of the world, leaving nothing behind but an empty husk, and not caring a whit about it. A cullinary "Après moi, le déluge".

Compared to that, grinding up rhino horns as an aphrodisiac seems almost civilized. Almost.

Linkage: "Ortolan Buntings, Qatar" at 10,000 Birds

tags: ortolans environment nature food

Blurry Photos of Tater Tots

I realized I hadn't posted anything here since Thursday. Then I realized I couldn't think of anything to write about. Ah! The dreaded Blogger's Block! I've actually been trying to write a post about Portland's South Waterfront mess, but I decided I need a map to really explain what's going on, and I'm still figuring out how to use that pesky Google Maps API. So it may be a while before you get to see that post.

Also, I'm bored. Every now and then I peek over at the xterm where g++ is grinding away on my HP-UX build box. It's been doing that for a couple of hours now. My, what an exciting job I have.



Luckily I had some really poor photos of tater tots just lying around, so I figured I'd write about those instead. You might think this is a really pointless topic. Perhaps you didn't realize that tater tots are a matter of life and death. Or at least they are in San Antonio.



Perhaps you're also unaware of tater tots' key position in our national cuisine. Here's a vast archive of recipes for Tater Tot Casserole. Before sneering, please recall that "casserole" is a French word. So clearly it can't be that bad. The Boston Globe goes much further, offering a recipe for Cod with Truffled Leek Sauce with Tater Tots. Although I'm not sure this is truly a tater tot recipe per se, since they merely serve as the starchy side dish and aren't actually combined with the cod or the leek sauce. I suppose you could mash it all together on the plate with your fork, though, if you felt you needed to. The article claims the recipe's originally from a book titled "Spice: Flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean". Doesn't sound all that Mediterranean to me, although on the other hand I'll bet tater tots would go great with hummus, come to think of it.



Our very own Oregonian gets in on the act, with a recipe combining tater tots and crab. It's a shame that I don't really care for crab very much. Maybe if it was combined with crispy golden potato ambrosia, I'd find it more palatable. Perhaps.

And here's something novel: Rather than using store-bought tater tots as a raw ingredient, here's how to make your own tater tots. Pasta began to be considered an upscale, gourmet food once you could buy a special gadget and make your own at home. I entertain high hopes for a similar transformation of the humble tater tot.

Note: Not to be prissy or anything, but everything below this horizontal line here is at least a little gross, and none of it has much do with tater tots. So if you're strictly here for the tater tots, you could quit now and not miss much. Between the first line and the second, it's mostly just funny (well, I think so, anyway) and maybe a little gross, if you're a wuss. Really the first line is there as a buffer between the food and the more offputting material. After the second line it gets a lot grosser, and it may or may not be funny, depending on your sense of humor. So you were warned, sort of, I guess. Actually I'm mostly doing this to give this post the appearance of structure. But if I can ward off any litigious nutjobs before they decide I owe them beeeeelion$ just because I made them feel all sad and confused inside, hey, that's all the better.

---

I do realize that for a lot of people, tater tots straddle the line between tasty food and gross food. I don't, but I do think gross food is awfully funny sometimes. I recently bought an extremely funny book about gross food, Wendy McClure's "The Amazing Mackerel Pudding Plan: Classic Diet Recipe Cards from the 1970s". If you're cheap, or you just want to try before you buy, some of the material is also up on the author's website. Observe her difficulties in captioning the photo of "Liver Pate en Masque". More gross recipes may be obtained here. And here are even more of 'em.

Updated: Here are a few more icky food resources, for your entertainment, or at least for mine:

• The legendary Steve, Don't Eat It!. I say "legendary" because think I'd heard of this page before I saw it today. Pickled pork rinds!? I'll eat just about anything, if I think there's any chance it might taste good. I'll happily chow down on normal pork rinds. And I'm also a big fan of just about anything pickled, especially if there's a big pile of garlic involved. But combining the two things... ugh... And those photos...
  
• A post at Deanaland titled "Remember the 50's?", including a horrific jello mold, and the surprisingly straightforward instructions for making "7UP in Milk". Mmm!
  
• A Slashfood article, "The stuff of nightmares: 1950s food ads", which in turn links to Plan59, a site devoted to mid-20th-century commercial art.
  
• "The American Food FAQ". As in, questions frequently asked by Swedes about US food, along with amusing answers. Don't worry, the page is in English.
  
• A page from Sri Lanka, covering a few things the author thinks are gross, including haggis and chitlins.
  
• And for dessert, why not visit Bad-Candy.com. You may not realize this, but if you've been raised exclusively on candy churned out by large multinational conglomerates, you're missing out on the best and the worst the confectionary world has to offer. And it gets far, far worse than you could have reasonably imagined.
  

Ok, here's that second horizontal line I warned you about. I'm even adding some whitespace as a bit more of a buffer.

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I was disheartened to learn that there's (supposedly) an extremely painful-sounding sex act called "tater tots". Click here only if you're absolutely sure you really want to know. No photos or graphic descriptions, thankfully. Honestly, I bet someone just made this up, and nobody's ever really tried it. Ow! OW!!! But if you didn't want to go away from this blog with that particular image in your mind, today's your lucky day! Here's a completely unrelated item from over at K5, where some weird guy claims he cured his asthma by giving himself intestinal parasites. Hint: It involves a trip to Cameroon, and a lot of walking around barefoot in the local latrines. And now you know. tag: tater tots

South Waterfront (I)

[I was originally planning to embed a Google map in this post to help illustrate the situation I'm describing, but the Tribune article this leads with is a week old now, so I figure I might as well post this, and just post again when I get the map thing figured out. 5/13/06 ]

[Updated: Ok, I found a decent pic of the general area, although it's centered somewhat to the north of the South Waterfront area proper. It links to a fascinating and unusual site all about highway interchanges. Even more I-405 freeway geekage here and here, if you're interested. 5/15/06]


Friday's Portland Tribune carried an article about the looming transportation nightmare in the city's soon-to-be-ultra-ritzy South Waterfront district. (Google Map of the area here, at least until I figure out that Google Map API.) It seems that a streetcar line, an aerial tram, and a completely rebuilt street grid in the area won't suffice to transport the idle rich between their condos and whatever it is they do with their time. Seems they're also going to need a MAX line, and a new bridge over the Willamette, things the city's not eager to talk about.

Now, I'm all in favor of new MAX lines, and I think the city desperately needs at least one new bridge in that general part of town. But if current trends at city hall hold true, the MAX line and bridge we end up with will be designed without considering the good of the city as a whole.

For example, I have a funny feeling that the new bridge they have in mind won't carry auto traffic, because a.) it's cheaper that way, and b.) city hall's mass transit idealism knows no bounds. The existing connections between downtown/I-405/I-5 and SE Powell and McLoughlin are pretty awful, and much of the current infrastructure dates back to the mid-1940s or even earlier, when this was a much smaller city. I've complained before about the way traffic flows in that area, especially around the west end of the Ross Island Bridge, and the surrounding, historic Corbett-Terwilliger-Lair Hill neighborhood. Though there are (supposedly) plans afoot to tinker with the bridge approaches a little, in the end I think a new bridge is needed. The west end of the bridge is simply in the wrong spot to serve cross-town traffic.

The transportation problems in the area have been studied fairly extensively, most recently in the South Portland Circulation Study [PDF]. But unfortunately, fixing stuff costs money, and fixing it properly costs even more money.

Consider, for example, the problem of east-west travel in the area. The aforementioned tram is supposed to connect OHSU and South Waterfront. This does nothing for the disgruntled citizens of the CTLH area, so the city's throwing them a rare bone, and is planning to build a pedestrian bridge over I-5 so they can walk over and visit their high-rise neighbors/rivals on the other side of the freeway. There still won't be any convenient way to drive from one side to the other, because that would cost more.

And it's worth pointing out that pedestrian bridges do very little to create a sense of neighborhood unity, for example look at the amusingly named "Failing Bridge" in North Portland, or the bridge over Naito Parkway near the Ross Island Bridge ramps, which connects SW 1st and the so-called "Bermuda Triangle" area.

The biggest problem is geography, pure and simple. You've got a narrow strip of land between the steep West Hills and the Willamette River, and this constricted area is home to several major north-south arteries (I-5, Barbur Blvd., Macadam Ave., Naito Parkway), and a historic neighborhood that won't stand for being ripped up by transportation planners yet again, and a major university (OHSU), or two if you include Portland State in the area (it sits just to the north of the I-405 loop). And the current infrastructure accreted haphazardly over most of the 20th century, much of it designed prior to any modern notion of how to do a major road properly. The designers of the area certainly assumed that nobody would ever want to walk or bike anywhere ever again, since cars are so much more modern and convenient. So whatever work ends up being done in the area will consist in large part of trying to correct previous screwups, without tearing up the fabric of the neighborhood any further.

While we breathlessly wait for The Powers That Be to figure out how to do that, here's a webcam where you can watch the condo towers going up.

Misc_Wildlife

The two pics shown here come from new research being done on oceanic zooplankton. You probably don't care all that much about zooplankton (please don't take that personally, I'm just talking statistical likelihood here). But you have to admit the pictures are kind of cool.

Surprisingly, FOX News has the story as well, although they play up the Bermuda Triangle angle. Because the rubes love stupid crap like that. Still no sign of Natalee, though.

If your cup of tea doesn't include plankton, here are some newly discovered frogs in Laos. I get the impression that if you want to make a name for yourself in biology fieldwork right now, you want to be working in Laos, where just about everything is a species previously unknown to science, including whatever it was that you just ate for dinner. Grilled Laotian Rock Rat, anyone?

The feds have decided to list a couple of coral species as "threatened". It's a mild step, to be sure, but it's still more than I would've expected from the Busheviks. Maybe some wealthy campaign contributor is a scuba diver in his spare time, or we're getting ready to bomb some random Third World country and we're planning to use "protecting the coral" as a handy excuse. Nothing would surprise me these days.

A couple of cute pictures of blackbirds, from across the pond. Baby birds usually aren't cute, but this is a notable exception.

Turning to the plant kingdom, India is facing the loss of many species of wild banana trees. I didn't realize bananas were originally from India, but apparently they are. Which means that when you see the trees growing elsewhere, in the Carribbean for example, they aren't truly wild but instead are feral bananas.

M is for Meltdown

Today brings more evidence that the warmongers are going into full meltdown mode: The "august" Wall Street Journal published a piece by Shelby Steele (his real name, apparently) titled "White Guilt and the Western Past", in which he suggests that the answer in Iraq is to basically just carpet-bomb the hell out of everyone, indiscriminately and without mercy. This childish ranting is not the sort of thing you'd hear from a major-thinktank conservative if they thought the war was going well. And the WSJ wouldn't have published it, under normal circumstances. Not very buttoned-down or respectable, certainly. But they know they've screwed up, and they're desperately looking for someone or something to blame. Other than themselves, I mean. The fact that they control all three branches of government, the military, the media, and so forth, makes this a bit difficult. They can try to pin the whole thing on a few scruffy left-leaning professors, but that sort of lacks the proper scope and grandeur, so the current spin is that it's the fault of some sort of vague vestigial namby-pamby liberalism that suffuses the entire culture and rots our souls from within, or something.

A couple of good takes from the blogosphere, from Unclaimed Territory and Orcinus. One perceptive comment from the first story, from Anonymous Liberal:

Wow. Sometimes arguments just leave me speechless. Steele's argument reminds me of someone who is losing a game of chess and in frustration picks up the board and throws it, scattering the pieces everywhere.

When the going gets tough, just bomb the hell out of everything. That'll work.

Throwing the chessboard. That really is the perfect metaphor for what we're seeing. And there's an epidemic of chessboard-throwing going on these days, over in the cons' parallel universe. Witness this pro-Steele post over at Blogs for Bush. Apparently it's a really courageous and noble act to assert that your country is superior to everyone else. And then he goes on and on about it, blah, blah, blah, since simply saying something over and over again makes it true, or at least it does over in the other universe. Also, in the other universe, abandoning your nation's core principles at the first sign of trouble is a sign of strength, not of weakness, I gather.

(Even the ever-spineless New Republic gets in on the Steele-bashing act just a little. The Steele article's low-hanging fruit, quite honestly, and they need to occasionally do something to prove they're still not Republicans yet. So now that's done, and they can go back to bashing dangerous radicals like Alan Colmes and Joe Lieberman again.)

You do have to admit that Steele knew exactly the right moment to toss the grenade. This sort of talk is guaranteed to upset the left regardless of the hour or the season. And with right-wing types a.) already riled up over race issues with the ongoing immigration debate, and b.) starting to play Desperately Seeking Scapegoat over Iraq, Steele's piece pushes all of the right buttons.

Which brings us to the obvious question: WTF does "white guilt" have to do with Iraq? Look closely the next time you see a picture of a crowd of Iraqis. Do they look even remotely nonwhite to you? Are they somehow just "honorary" nonwhite people because of their religion? Is that it?

If you'd followed the link on Steele's name early in the article, you'd have noticed that he's a black conservative, a la Clarence Thomas, which means his day job at the Hoover Institution is to gibber on about nothing but race relations, day in and day out, saying all the crap it isn't respectable to say if you're a white conservative. I guess it's ok for him to talk about Iraq, so long as he tries to tie it to his area of expertise, and makes it clear that whatever's gone wrong in Iraq is 100% completely the fault of those civil rights evildoers way back in the 60's. Amazingly, this makes perfect sense to the 32-percenters out there. Perhaps I'm biased, as a non-boomer, but am I the only person out there who thinks conservatives' obsession with the 1960's has become more than a little pathetic? I mean, next year marks the freakin' 40th anniversary of the "Summer of Love", but they still talk about it as if it was the Apocalypse. It's ancient history. Get over it, already, and find some new material. No, wait. Keep doing what you're doing, and keep lecturing the kids of today about obscure cultural events that happened decades before they were born, and expect them to care. Go ahead. It'll work out just great for you. Fantastic, even. I'm sure of it. Trust me.

Steele's useful at the moment, because Iraq scapegoats are thin on the ground. The cons figure they may as well trot out one of the hoary old classics, the civil rights agitators, and Steele's just the man to do it. Who cares if it's true or not? If conservatives cared about truth, we wouldn't be in Iraq in the first place, after all. But Steele's only useful for this one narrow purpose, and I expect he'll slink back into the dark shadows of Barad-Dur-by-the-Bay (the Hoover Institution, using "by the bay" fairly loosely) as we ramp up for the next wars the neocons have in store for us. If anything, the people of Iran are even more Caucasian-looking than Iraqis, which I understand is a point of pride within Iran. Heck, even the name "Iran" is related to the word "Aryan", and the neocons' beloved Shah gained the Peacock Throne after his father was deposed for supporting Germany in WWII. So there's really not a lot of raw material here for Steele's usual schtick. And Sudan is even worse; we can't very well go and slaughter the Arab Sudanese on behalf of the African Sudanese, and then blame the whole thing on white guilt if it goes badly. That wouldn't make a lot of sense, would it? And even if Syria's the next target, the best Steele could do is rehash his current argument about Iraq. I don't see it convincing a lot of fence-sitters this time around, and I doubt it'll work much better the next time around either.

The really obscene thing about Steele's article is that he plays the race card to justify the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians. Seems the best way for conservatives to show just how much they hate Al Sharpton is to turn Ramadi or Tikrit into the next Dresden. That'll show him, for sure. And after a few of these new Dresdens, our decades-long liberal cultural malaise will be exorcised, the 1950's will magically come back, women will all stay home and have babies, "separate but equal" will be the law of the land, and true Christian morality will rule the universe. Or whatever.

When they wax nostalgic about about our supposed ruthlessness in WWII, the cons conveniently forget that 60+ years of technological progress have happened between then and now. They seem to think FDR would've refused to use smart bombs if he'd had the option, I guess because dumb, civilian-killing bombs are so much more manly. These bombs may primarily fall on nearby things with no military value, but that's ok, apparently, and is definitely not a waste, because "collateral damage" gives us a really nice cathartic feeling, all the more so when it's done deliberately. Steele's bio doesn't say he has any military experience, so I'm inclined to think he has none, which would be par for the neocon course. It's interesting how chickenhawks are always so much more enthusiastic about killing civilians than actual military people tend to be.

Of course, killing all those civilians is purely theoretical at this point, and we can all hope it remains so. Steele's aim seems to have been to present a (hopefully) unrealistic strategy for "victory" in Iraq, and then assign blame for the fact that it's not being followed. It's a whiny, childish chickenhawk game, and what's more, two can play that game. In that spirit, I submit to you that we'd be in a lot better shape in Iraq if we just had the services of a vast army of clones, kinda like in the recent Star Wars movies. But those head-in-the-sand conservatives are blocking this sure path to glorious victory with all of those pesky religious objections to cloning, stem cells, and the like. There. That was easy.

Updated: Here's another article in the same vein as Steele's, this time a long screed from the Ayn Rand crowd titled “Just War Theory” vs. American Self-Defense. The article gets fairly tedious and bogs down in Objectivist jargon here and there, but I gather they're arguing that the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians is not merely desirable from a coldly practical standpoint. In fact, they argue, it's the one and only truly moral option. I always knew the Rand crowd were raving lunatics, but this really takes the cake. And here's a classic wingnut "nuke-em-all" tirade, from way back in 2004. Clearly some people have even shorter fuses than Steele does, although the WSJ hasn't quite stooped to granting them dead-tree space just yet.

Updated II: But wait! There's more! Here's a piece at the Wash. Times just titled "Lessons for Iraq", again arguing that "liberalism" is somehow sapping our national resolve, and repeating the cons' bizarro-world "First Law of Holes", namely, "If you find yourself in one, just keep on digging, forever if necessary." They're no longer bothering to offer the public any hope things are going to improve over there. But we're still supposed to keep doing the same things as before, and then expect the results to be different this time. Right. That always turns out well.

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Besides Mr. Steele, the Hoover Institution also boasts a motley collection of cultural elitist types in the Allan Bloom / New Criterion mold. These guys are forever popping up in the media, wanting to lecture us about their own narrow spin on Western culture, from Thermopylae to TS Eliot. While I may think they're a bunch of silly bowtied fuddy-duddies, I'm going to take a page from their book and wrap this post up with a bit of poetry apropos to the moment, just to demonstrate my impeccable elitist credentials, which is Very Important. Appropriately enough, today's poem is about colonial war in the Middle East, and it happily takes the colonizer's side. And naturally it was written by a dead white Anglo-Saxon male. Well, Scottish, if we're going to split hairs here, but definitely dead, white, and male. And what better way to mark the right-wing meltdown than with the martial gibbering of a man universally regarded as the godawful worst poet of all time?

Without further ado, I present to you The Battle of Tel-el-Kebir, by the singular William Topaz McGonagall:

YE sons of Great Britain, come join with me,
And sing in praise of Sir Garnet Wolseley;
Sound drums and trumpets cheerfully,
For he has acted most heroically.


Therefore loudly his praises sing
Until the hills their echoes back doth ring;
For he is a noble hero bold,
And an honour to his Queen and country, be it told.


He has gained for himself fame and renown,
Which to posterity will be handed down;
Because he has defeated Arabi by land and by sea,
And from the battle of Tel-el-Kebir he made him to flee.


With an army about fourteen thousand strong,
Through Egypt he did fearlessly march along,
With the gallant and brave Highland brigade,
To whom honour is due, be it said.


Arabi's army was about seventy thousand in all,
And, virtually speaking, it wasn't very small;
But if they had been as numerous again,
The Irish and Highland brigades would have beaten them, it is plain.


'Twas on the 13th day of September, in the year of 1882,
Which Arabi and his rebel horde long will rue;
Because Sir Garnet Wolseley and his brave little band
Fought and conquered them on Kebir land.


He marched upon the enemy with his gallant band
O'er the wild and lonely desert sand,
And attacked them before daylight,
And in twenty minutes he put them to flight.


The first shock of the attack was borne by the Second Brigade,
Who behaved most manfully, it is said,
Under the command of brave General Grahame,
And have gained a lasting honour to their name.


But Major Hart and the 18th Royal Irish, conjoint,
Carried the trenches at the bayonet point;
Then the Marines chased them about four miles away,
At the charge of the bayonet, without dismay!


General Sir Archibald Alison led on the Highland Brigade,
Who never were the least afraid.
And such has been the case in this Egyptian war,
For at the charge of the bayonet they ran from them afar!


With their bagpipes playing, and one ringing cheer,
And the 42nd soon did the trenches clear;
Then hand to hand they did engage,
And fought like tigers in a cage.


Oh! it must have been a glorious sight
To see Sir Garnet Wolseley in the thickest of the fight!
In the midst of shot and shell, and the cannons roar,
Whilst the dead and the dying lay weltering in their gore


Then the Egyptians were forced to yield,
And the British were left masters of the field;
Then Arabi he did fret and frown
To see his army thus cut down.


Then Arabi the rebel took to flight,
And spurred his Arab steed with all his might:
With his heart full of despair and woe,
And never halted till he reached Cairo.


Now since the Egyptian war is at an end,
Let us thank God! Who did send
Sir Garnet Wolseley to crush and kill
Arabi and his rebel army at Kebir hill.

tags: shelby steele iraq mcgonagall

Wisteria

Three pictures of wisteria, taken earlier today. You don't often see it growing in Portland, although it grows perfectly well here. When I lived in the deep south, the stuff grew like a weed. Which is kind of a problem, actually: Some wisteria species are native to eastern North America, and others are nonnative imports from Japan and China. This page from the National Park Service describes the nonnative wisterias as aggressive, invasive species that can crowd out native plants and strangle trees. Which is true, and alarming, and it's clearly a bad thing, of course. But it's also an awfully photogenic invasion, you have to admit. And all the intensive herbicide campaigns in the world won't do any good if people keep buying the stuff at their local nursery and planting it everywhere.



The invasive species that keeps people (well, certain people) up at night in the Portland area is English Ivy, which is just as aggressive, and also doesn't have flowers. A local group called the No Ivy League has been campaigning against the stuff for 10 years now. It's too early to say who's winning. They'd probably hate my neighborhood, where the public spaces are planted almost exclusively in ivy. I'm not sure what sort of ivy, but the landscaping was first done in the 60's, and they probably used whatever species seemed hardiest, which probably means it's the bad kind.



And let's not even get started about kudzu...

Updated: Ahh, how could I have forgotten our other local invasive vine, the Himalayan blackberry, not to be confused with the various native blackberries and related Rubus species native to the Northwest. And also not to be confused with the region's commercially cultivated varieties.

Last summer a fungal condition called Phragmidium Rust Disease was detected in the state for the first time, and it apparently attacks only the Himalayan blackberry and one cultivated species. So on one hand, there might now be something to check the spread of nonnative blackberries, but the "cure" seems to be yet another nonnative organism. Oh, lucky us.

Unrelated Mideast Items

Two clusters of links about current events in the Mideast. I'm not saying there's any connection between the two, because that would be wrong. Please note I've even put a big HR tag between the two lists, so that we're all clear on this. [Note for the irony-impaired... oh, never mind...]

First, some items about the current controversy about that recent "Israel Lobby" article. I'm far too chicken to even think of publicly offering an opinion of my own about any of this stuff, but here are a few links I came across, which I'm also not going to offer an opinion about either way:

• The original article, at the London Review of Books.
  
• Two articles about the resulting controversy.
  
• Comments by Uri Avnery, an Israeli peace activist and former Knesset member.
  
• A recent Molly Ivins column.
  
• I'm not usually a big Robert Fisk fan, but he has a current piece about the controversy as well. Which, again, I'm not, not, not going to offer any opinion about whatsoever.
  
• A long-ish analysis of the article by Gabriel Ash.
  
• A piece at Salon also analyzing the paper.
  
• Jeff Weintraub has compiled an extensive list of critiques and rebuttals of the article.
  

Updated: I would like to go out on a limb a little, and suggest that in this ongoing debate the word "Israel" could often be usefully replaced with the more specific "Likud", as in "Likud lobby", so as not to smear an entire country for the behavior or ideas of a small minority of highly vocal wingnuts. It's also worth pointing out that Likud and its ideas were decisively rejected by the Israeli voters in the recent election, something that doesn't seem to have sunk in yet on this side of the Atlantic. If I was Israeli, I would've probably voted for Meretz in the recent election. I also think the separation barrier is a fantastic idea, and furthermore, construction ought to have started the day after the 1948 war wrapped up.

For what it's worth, in general I just shrug in resignation when it comes to political lobbying. By anyone. Money and influence are what DC is all about, sadly, and everyone plays the same game. So long as the goal behind all that lobbying is harmless, or at least reasonably benign, I don't get worked up about it. If it's a matter of financial aid, or genuinely defensive military assistance, that's fine by me. And quite honestly, the $3B a year that M&W get all heated up over is just a tiny drop in the bucket so far as the Federal budget is concerned. But when the goal being lobbied for is an obvious national disaster waiting to happen, I have to at least say a few unkind words about it, no matter who's pushing the agenda: Beltway neocons, Big Oil, apocalyptic fundies, or anyone else. Nobody deserves a free pass here.

All of that would bring us to the second half of this post, if I was asserting there was a connection between the parts, which I'm not.

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So here we have a roundup of articles and opinion pieces about the (maybe) coming war in Iran:

• RNC chair Ken Mehlman recently shilled for war with Iran in front of what he assumed was a very sympathetic audience. And he got booed! If I was offering opinions right now, I'd say this was a highly positive development, but I'm not, so never mind about that.
  
• An article asserting the CIA is getting pressured to fudge intelligence about Iran, but this time they're pushing back, at least so far. Real neocons have never trusted the CIA, seeing them as a bunch of closet-liberal Ivy Leaguers, just a step or two away from the hated State Department. If they push back too much, it may be time to do another personnel shakeup and transfer in some more political cronies.
  
• Larry Wilkerson speaks out again. Wow. Someday, when we have a normal, sane guy in the White House again, this guy deserves a medal.
  
• Juan Cole takes on Christopher Hitchens, and rips him a new one. Some people remain perplexed at Hitchens' metamorphosis into neocon attack dog. It's not all that surprising, really. Many of the original neocons started out as militant Trotskyites (which Hitchens was at one time, and may still be in his own mind, as far as I know). Once you've accepted the idea that the Absolute Truth must be imposed on the entire world, by any means necessary, the exact nature of the purported Truth can apparently wander from pole to pole without anyone seeing a contradiction or thinking anything's amiss. Hitchens has simply gone south on us, just like old Leo Strauss back in the day.
  
• An editorial from the Boise Weekly
  
• A piece at the Decatur Daily Democrat titled
  Not every crisis equals World War II.
  
• A recent column by Justin Raimondo. The paleocons don't like the war any more than anyone else does. Actually maybe he's more of a libertarian than a paleocon. I'm not 100% clear on that point, but he's certainly not your typical lefty.
  
• An article titled "Drumbeat against Iran sounds awfully familiar". It's from a Farrakhan media outlet, so set your expectations accordingly, but it's less illucid than you might expect.
  

I don't want a war in Iran. It's a terrible idea. Inherently terrible. And even if it wasn't, Rummy and friends would just bungle the war and find a way to lose anyway. Everyone knows this. Everyone also ought to realize by now that Iran's just the next item on a long list of wars the neocons are itching to get us into. We're supposed to go to the far corners of the earth and expend unlimited blood and treasure, fighting people who never did anything to us, and whom we have no quarrel with. That's just too much to ask of anyone.

---

There used to be a comment thread to this post, where a visitor was angered by some of my comments. I felt personally attacked and sort of blew a gasket in response, and he responded back, and then I responded again, and then I decided it was an unproductive debate and turned on comment moderation temporarily. I'm not proud about doing that, and I also wasn't proud of some of the things I said in the heat of the moment. Blogspot doesn't let you edit your comments, as far as I can tell, so I decided to blow the whole thread away. There were a few tidbits in the thread where I tried to clarify or expand on points from the original post, and I thought some of those were worth keeping. I've tried to stick to the relevant opinion parts and get rid of the arguing parts and off-topic stuff, and rearrange what's left to be a bit more coherent, but please bear in mind that what you see here was originally part of a heated argument, and in some spots the prose suffers for it.

Part of my interest in the Walt-Mearsheimer paper is sociological, concerned not so much about what it says, as about why it's being said now. There appears to be a growing sense among the general public that US foreign policy is out of control, and our place in the world isn't what it should be. People want to know why, and whose fault it is. On the disenchanted right, we're starting to see the meme that the Iraq war's going badly because of wimpy liberals undermining our national resolve (see my later article "M is for Meltdown"). On the left, you primarily hear the same talk about big oil and corporate interests that we've all heard since, oh, at least 1973, and probably much earlier. There's also a lot of talk about Christian fundamentalists and their Armageddon fixation. Neocons tend to look outward to assign blame, and provide a laundry list of additional countries we need to do something about, suggesting that things will improve once we've checked off everyone on the list. This paper is just the latest contribution in the ongoing, muddled search for answers. I personally don't think there's any one party that ought to be singled out and made the scapegoat, but that's not an answer that's likely to satisfy a lot of people. It should be blindingly obvious that it's not in Israel's best interest to be singled out by the public as a reason behind America's woes in the world. Some people realize this already, for example see the link about Ken Mehlman being booed recently.

As for the content of the paper, many reviewers have noted that its arguments are often simplistic and it draws overly broad conclusions, which I think is an accurate assessment. Whatever the paper's imperfections, though, the public discussion it invites is long overdue. I categorically reject the notion that there ought to be taboo subjects people should be afraid to talk about. For example, I published one of those Mohammed cartoons here. Healthy public debate serves as a check on ill-considered ideas, like the current headlong rush to war with Iran.

This morning my local newspaper ran an op-ed piece by Charles Krauthammer, one of the same neocons who got us into Iraq. He's now arguing that Iran's Ahmadinejad is the new Hitler, and 2006 is 1938 all over again, implying that any solution other than war is Munich all over again. Which is the same argument that we were fed about Saddam, and which I've also seen made about Syria, Libya, even Venezuela, believe it or not. This kind of talk closes off the possibility of having a rational debate over what to do about Iran, and furthermore I'm convinced that was the whole intent of the article.

In the coming months I expect to see a lot of talk about how many American lives were saved by nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so that the identical course of action will appear to be a reasonable and moderate solution to the "Iran problem", and anyone who opposes it will be smeared as a wimpy Chamberlain-style appeaser. It worked with Iraq, and I don't see any reason to doubt it'll work again.

And due to the lack of public debate, again nobody will consider what happens next after the big "Mission Accomplished" speech. And while we're still bogged down in the aftermath of Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Iran, the war drums will inevitably start beating again.

After 9/11, it turns out that the neocons had signed this country up for an endless series of wars in the Middle East and beyond, against a long list of countries America has no quarrel with, with no public debate of any kind whatsoever. We started out with Afghanistan (which again, I supported at the time), and then Iraq (which I didn't and still don't). And now we're ramping up to nuke Iran, and so become an international pariah for the next few hundred years or so. But that won't stop us; after Iran we have to attack Sudan, and Syria, and then Saudi Arabia, Libya, maybe Indonesia or Pakistan or Nigeria after that, and on and on. As far as I can tell, we're expected to eventually wage war against every single Muslim country on the planet. And after that, who knows? Do we nuke Pluto next, just in case? I just don't see any end to it. And what's worse, neither do the strategy's advocates.

This strategy results in a lot of domestic "collateral damage". An eternity of war means an eternity of terrorist attacks against ordinary Americans, at home and abroad. Cheney & Co. are snug as bugs in their bunkers in undisclosed locations, but the rest of us aren't so lucky. And terror attacks in turn mean a hardcore national security state here at home, with a permanent loss of our most basic Constitutional rights, and a creeping, vicious, joyously ignorant Christian fundamentalist theocracy rapidly dragging us back into the Dark Ages. Yet again, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that might be, well, sub-optimal for this country.

Iran’s Ahmadinejad is clearly a wingnut, but I have no personal quarrel with the country of Iran. Every Iranian I've ever met has been a really wonderful person, and they have a rich, ancient culture with amazing art, music, and poetry, but apparently our country's job now is to kill everyone and nuke the whole place into a radioactive cinder, just in case. Going out on a limb again, let me say I think that would be sort of immoral.

Mayday

A few photos I took of today's big May Day march are here. As expected, it was almost entirely an immigration march this year. It's varied a lot over the last few years. First we had marches full of anarchists and miscellaneous affinity groups, all protesting on their own separate issues. Then several local unions banded together to organize a more "respectable" May Day march, which seemed to work out quite well. This year it was overwhelmingly about immigration, with a few anarchists and art-bike types mixed in.



Our local Indymedia operation has a small article here, and some photos here. Here's an article from The Nation about the much larger marches in Los Angeles.

I'm actually not going to make this an immigration opinion piece. It's a complex issue, and I go back and forth about some of the particulars. Maybe I'll devote a post to the issue later on, if I have anything worth saying on the topic. But today we'll just move on to the day's other business.



Other business? Let's not forget: May 1st is also the three year anniversary of Georgie's big "Mission Accomplished" speech. He, and the R's in general, are now quiet as church rats about the once-celebrated aircraft carrier episode.

Editor & Publisher has a review of old news stories and quotes from around May 1st, '03, a time people once referred to as the end of the war. You have to read this stuff to believe it. I remember it well, and I'm proud to say I thought it was garbage from the beginning. Here's another page with even more fawning quotes. Chris Matthews has a lot to answer for. Once upon a time, I held out a slim hope that aging men wouldn't have to act out like that anymore, after Viagra hit the market. Didn't work, obviously. So what's it going to take? What kind of pill do we need, so that 50-something guys stop getting misty-eyed about sending 20-something guys off to die in pointless wars?

Here's a fascinating article by John Dean (of Watergate fame) about why Bush is increasingly dangerous.

And Rolling Stone asks whether Bush is the Worst President in History.

A rather biting piece wishing a happy 3rd birthday to Mission Accomplished, over at Sploid. A columnist for the Niagara Falls Reporter refers to this blessed holiday as "Mission Accomplished Day", or MAD for short.

Tom Wieliczka considers what Bush's next inept stunt might be, now that we're ramping up for war in Iran. That's an easy one: This time around, George gets to swagger around the glowing ruins of Teheran in an ultra-macho radiation suit, while the talking heads ooh-and-aah over what a strong, virile leader he is, and what a glorious day it is for "freedom". It'll be just like the last 3 years never happened.

tags= bush may day immigration mission accomplished

Misc_Media

Today's media finds, some fun & silly, others far less so.

Image: Saturn's rings, with Janus and a second moon not identified by JPL's caption. (maybe Prometheus, or Atlas). Wow. It just looks completely unreal.

Two videos of echidnas at YouTube: One taken at the Sydney Zoo, with a small child excitedly shouting "Echidna, mommy! Echidna!". And another echidna sighted by the side of the road, snuffling in the dirt.

I have a couple of video clips of otters I took in Seattle a while back, but a quick YouTube search shows there are already lots of clips of otters. I might just do it anyway so I can say I'm videoblogging, which I understand all the popular people are doing these days. Or maybe that was last year. I get so confused sometimes.

Right in the midst of all this superficial coolness and cuddliness, here's Stephen Colbert's appearance at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, in three parts, where he completely rips into Bush -- who's sitting just a few feet away. I don't think Colbert was in top form, quite honestly. The Bill Kristol interview a couple of days ago was funnier, and Colbert seemed a tad nervous at the podium this time. But it's worth watching just to see the Bushes glaring at Colbert, and to listen to the embedded media toadies in the audience tittering nervously after each zinger. Until Colbert took the stage, everyone was having a grand old time, media and government types mingling with celebrities, politicos making mildly self-deprecating in-jokes, and everyone drinking heavily. And then Colbert dropped the proverbial turd in the punchbowl. Nobody was expecting serious satire, and they just couldn't deal. Now the media's pretending the whole thing never happened, and they're shoving the Bush+impostor video in our faces instead, to show us how silly and cuddly George can be. They just never stop trying to make him look good, no matter what happens. They still worship Bush, and I can't begin to fathom why.

Wandering back to more superficial topics, let's visit the perennial blog fave, "What I'm listening to right now". I don't cover music much because I'm a hopelessly square music dork. I don't know who the current hot artists are in any genre, mainstream or otherwise. And I personally have no musical talent whatsoever. In grade school I discovered that I'm able to play woodwinds and string instruments equally poorly, although if I ever tried either again I'd have to practice a great deal just to get back to my previous standards of poorness. I'm not even very good at whistling, truth be told. I'm too cheap to buy music regularly, and I'm no longer in the lucrative 18-34 demographic, so my opinions (such as they are) are absolutely irrelevant anyway.

So anyway, at this exact moment I'm listening to Trance Tuesday #020, the latest weekly mix from TrancePortal.org. It's weird that the same music fits equally well when I'm working out and when I'm grinding out C++ code.

The very latest thing on the iPod is the Failing Records Vol. 3 compilation, music by various local Portland musicians.

The most-played music on the iPod is everything from Dahlia. They are/were the most excellent electronica duo I've ever seen. I missed their New Years show, and I'm not up on what their future plans are (if any). I'm so out of things that I missed a recent appearance by Jen Folker, the duo's vocalist. I never was one of the cool kids, and I guess it's way too late to start now.

Updated: Get your way-too-cute baby squirrel photos here. Awwwww....

tags: saturn cassini echidna echidnas otter otters bush stephen colbert portland electronica trance dahlia

Silky Anteater

I was watching a dumb nature show about anteaters today, and it happened to have a brief segment about a little creature I'd never heard of before, the Silky Anteater (Cyclopes didactylus). It's tiny, lives in trees, has a prehensile tail, eats ants, and is adorable in a weird Jim Henson sort of way. Or in a Kiwa hirsuta sort of way, come to think of it. Since they're arboreal, nocturnal, small, and shy, it appears that they haven't been studied all that much, even though the scientific name comes from Linnaeus himself, way back in 1758. I did come across a page where researchers describe capturing one and attaching a radio transmitter to it. A very, very large transmitter, with a long whiplike antenna. You can't help but feel sorry for the little beastie.

More pics and links at TheWebsiteOfEverything and the USDA's Integrated Taxonomic Information System. And here's a study suggesting that Cyclopes diverged from the other anteaters as long as 40 million years ago, and is quite genetically distinct from the others. Which should be obvious; these little guys are super-cute, while all other anteaters are just plain weird.

But wait, there's more: Here are a couple of absolutely adorable video clips of silkies in action. If you're going to follow just one link on this page, go see the video clips. Awwwwww.....

Seems that silkies are indigenous to the Carribbean island of Trinidad as well as South America, and on Trinidad their common name is the "poor-me-one". From an 1894 article in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, On the Birds of the Island of Trinidad, by Frank M. Chapman.

There is an animal in the Trinidad forests whose call is so inexpressibly
sad that it affects even the negroes, and they have given to its author the name of "Poor-me-one," meaning, "poor me, all alone." These words express in a measure the hopeless sorrow of a voice which is so sweet and human in quality that it might easily be considered a woman's rich contralto. This impressive call is heard only at night. At the rest-house I heard it only on moonlight nights, and then at infrequent intervals. It is generally supposed to be uttered by the little Ant-eater (Cyclothurus didactylus), which, for this reason, is commonly known as Poor-me-one. I am told, however, by Mr. Albert B. Carr of Trinidad, a gentleman who is very familiar with the animals of the forests, that the Poor-me-one is in reality a Goatsucker, and that he has shot the bird in the act of calling. Unfortunately the bird was not preserved, so for the present its specific identity must remain in doubt. I have placed these remarks under NVyctibius for the reason that Waterton's description of the " largest Goatsucker in Demerara " with little doubt refers to what in Trinidad is known as Poor-me-one. Gosse, however (Birds of Jainaica), does not describe this call, and as it does not seem possible that so close an observer could have overlooked it, it is probable Waterton may have erred in his identification.

So it seems that the name "poor-me-one" is shared with a native bird, Nyctibius jamaicensis, or Northern Potoo, which is the creature that in fact makes the sound associated with the name. The name "poor-me-one" has also entered the local lexicon, for instance this example:

Burly Surujdeen Dass was lying on his bed like a poor-me-one, watching Greece battle the Czech Republic for a treasured place in the Euro 2004 Final against Portugal, naked except for brief white shorts, one leg encrusted in an off-white cast, and the other, the right, showing signs of having recently being under the surgeon’s scalpel...

I've noticed I have a real affinity for small insectivores (echidnas, hedgehogs, anteaters, etc.). I'm not really sure why. In part, I'm sure, it's because I'm not really a big fan of ants, so it's sort of like we're all on the same team or something. It looks like there are at least a few other fans out there. Here's the MySpace page of someone who goes by "Cyclopes didactylus". And here's an appeal by someone who wants one as a pet but can't find one. I tend to be extremely dubious about exotic pets in general, and in this case, I can't imagine where you'd get enough ants to keep it fed and healthy. You'd probably need your own ant colony, and you'd need to keep them fed and healthy too. That sounds like a lot of work. But if the local zoo wanted to start a petting zoo full of these little guys, I'd be first in line to donate and volunteer.

tags: silky anteater Cyclopes didactylus