entirely safe and fun

Following up on my earlier post… I saw today, on Plastic, a quicklink to coverage of venal US Representative Tom DeLay’s speech to the membership of a group called “Vision America”. He claims there’s a war against Christianity in the United States.

I thought that was very funny.

Even funnier, from organizer Rick Scarborough: “This is a man, I believe, God has appointed … to represent righteousness in government.”

Hee!

And the man himself, DeLay: “Our faith has always been in direct conflict with the values of the world.” Nowhere on his Congressional homepage is his talent as a medium discussed, but he seemed to be possessed by Nietzsche for just a second there. If he had only meant it that way, maybe there would have been hope… Scarborough’s congregants saw fit to suffer a witch to live, though, and he got better, delivering the sort of platitudes and tautologies they presumably paid him to hear (”…Jesus Christ himself made us just so that we could live in this nation at this time.”).

At least DeLay’s former colleague James Traficant had an entertaining hairpiece. For a while there, DeLay somehow was managing to be crooked without being interesting, but his recent foray into ensemble comedy is somewhat promising.

Right now, over at Achewood, one of the finest story arcs in web comics appears to be wrapping up. Coverage of the Great Outdoor Fight (”Three Days! Three Acres! THREE THOUSAND MEN!”) began on 25 Jan 2006 (link to first strip) and is ongoing. Read it now and you’ll be able to say that you saw it while it was still on the front page. You’re already too late to have been reading it before it was cool. Achewood is the most consistently readable webcomic. Sometimes I’m embarassed to find myself reading a Penny Arcade strip (not often); occasionally The Order of the Stick is clunky. Achewood is not just funny, it’s playful and even revelatory.

Yet another study reveals that Americans distrust atheists more than traditionally discriminated-against groups such as gays and Muslims (discussion of a previous study with somewhat different focus on plastic.com). Said study shows that “…acceptance or rejection of atheists is related not only to personal religiosity, but also to one’s exposure to diversity, education and political orientation—with more educated, East and West Coast Americans more accepting of atheists than their Midwestern counterparts.” The full study will be published in the April number of the American Sociological Review. Among its revelations:

• Midwesterners would prefer, if they were gay, not that they are, to become involved with Christian rather than atheist homosexuals, if there were any around, and would like to know if the investigators know anyone who’s looking, not that they’d want to be introduced or anything.
• Respondents with less than six years of formal education would prefer shiny Muslims to unpolished atheists, and some of them already have collected several bright, reflective Muslims and Jews to adorn their nests.
• 62% of Muslim respondents who preferred a Christian to an atheist politician of otherwise equivalent background consider Christianity a “wicked and primitive superstition.”
• Although atheists were generally rated as “untrustworthy,” those with larger trucks were rated less unfavorably than those with smaller trucks. On an item asking about suitability for careers in teaching, atheists owning vehicles with more than two feet of clearance scored almost as high as believers who drive Escorts.
• On most favorability scales, atheists were rated slightly above atheist lawyers.

That’s quite a whine you’re serving. It definitely exhibits a classic Santa Cruz Mountains style - dare I say terroir? Perhaps the whine tradition in Silicon Valley is young, compared to say in the antique French whining regions, but it is concentrated, especially in these last twenty years. I can almost smell the eucalyptus trees outside the window near your cube as I contemplate your whine here. But the astringency, even bitterness, seems to call for a little more time in the cellar. Let’s put that whine down for just a year or two, and when we come back to it, I think it will have improved quite a bit.

Following up on my last post - Sadly, I couldn’t find my picture of the “Saint of the Month Club” reliquary, but among my pictures from a trip to Italy in 2002, I did find a sort of modern equivalent. This stunningly tasteful glass Moses - this stunningly tasteful near-life-sized glass Moses, in fact, about five feet tall - was photographed in Venice (rather than Florence, but sometimes you gotta cast a wider net) at a random glass shoppe near St Mark’s Square. I imagine that if the later Medici could have purchased it, they would have, putting it as a devotional image right in one of Uncle Lorenzo’s stuffy old chapels. It fits right in with some of the religious tchotchkes in the Silver Museum.

On a wholly different, but still Venetian note, the water-bus equivalent of “Mind the gap.” Or maybe…

• “Exercise caution while grooving.”
• “Yield to passengers in clown shoes.”
• “Carry giant triangles on shoulders only while boarding.”

Wikipedia’s featured article on 15 March 2006 was on the Palazzo Pitti, home of the Silver Museum (Museo degli Argenti) where are displayed the least tasteful of the Medici treasures - more rococo travelling altars, gilded reliquaries, and jewel-and-curlicue boxes than anyone could have suspected the existence of. I’m going to have to see if I can find a picture from my visit there of what I’ve called the “Saint of the Month Club,” perhaps the grossest relic I’ve ever seen. This is a gold-encrusted baroque box with a glass front into which are set twelve (?) magnifying lenses, under each of which is a chip of bone and a little slip of paper inscribed with the name of the luckless martyr who is claimed to have been its one-time owner. I guess the Medici already owned everything worth owning by then, and production of plastic lawn flamigoes and mirrored garden globes wouldn’t begin for another four hundred odd years. “Gee, Ferdinando, your second cousin three times removed sure had a lot of pretty paintings… ooh, shiny! Let’s accumulate some baroque crappe!”

Apparently the Medici had some problems in their universal-objects-of-flattery years as well as in their post-magnificent tchotchke-amassing phase. The clan’s wikipedia entry reveals patriarchs who revel in such epithets as Piero I “Il Gottoso” or “The Gouty” (that being a factor in his death) and Piero II “The Unfortunate” (”drowned in the Garigliano River, while attempting to flee the aftermath of a battle which the French (with whom he was allied) had lost”). Lorenzo “The Magnificent” was the son of the former and the father of the latter, which one hopes was some comfort to them as they respectively put up their feet for the last time and fled downhill.

*This is, I hope, the correct plural of epitheton necessarium - it sure is euphonious!

Try using this little web utility to make blog-safe links to New York Times articles, or to dig articles out of the archives. This will help to ensure that your links are still usable down the line, and thus that web pages citing NYT articles don’t age into unhelpfulness within a week as their link targets become premium content. The net result is to turn this (basically an error message) into this (accessible content). I’m going to stick a link into my roll - more people ought to know about this.

At Keystone (Summit County, CO), I discovered a deep truth about my very nature. I received a sign. Apparently, I am a “Jackwacker.” Who knew?

Answers: Yes, I was ninja skiing. Yes, the Rockies are amazing. They’re even more beautiful when the sun is shining, as it was on the morning this photo was taken. No, I did not apply to the Keystone U PhD program, although I was heavily recruited. The Dutchman was too busy Flying to pose for this shot, which is a shame because his appearance is in many respects quite comical. Yes, he really is Dutch, and will be offended if you identify him as a Flying Fleming. He will be doubly offended if you call him a “Phlegm.” But he and I are united in our appreciation for the fine beers produced by the Flemings, and our respect for their unique linguistic and cultural heritage in general.

The German word for “lung” is “Lunge.” It’s feminine, and pluralizes to “die Lungen.” I learned this not in the “Visiting the Doctor” chapter of my German textbook, but in the “Food and Drink” chapter. Unaccountably, I was a little disturbed by this, despite the fact I was living in Lancaster, PA, the scrapple capital of the United States. At least when you’re being served Lungen you know what part of the animal you’re getting, right? Better the devil you know. EDIT: Ian reminded me of the “Scrapple” ad from the funny but quickly-forgotten Xbox game Whacked! I found a YTMND using the ad jingle and graphics from the game. “Grind up a pig, put it in a can, scrapple!”

Food devils… A few years later, while living in Pittsburgh, I received a can of Potted Meat Food Product as a birthday present. There was some discussion about the ingredients as I read them out loud. First, I misread “mechanically separated chicken,” printed right above the nigh-Epimenidean “partially defatted cooked beef fatty tissue,” as “catastrophically separated chicken” (some beer may have been drunk in the hours leading up to this). We speculated about the techniques used to catastrophically separate chicken - clearly it would have to involve explosives - and then about the mechanism used even to mechanically separate chicken. We were thinking Garden Weasel, which is significantly more appetizing than the actual answer (”a paste-like poultry product produced by forcing crushed bone and tissue through a sieve or similar device to separate bone from tissue”). Once discussion of chicken separation and the nature of PDCBFT had subsided, I continued to read the off the list. “…Water, partially defatted cooked pork fatty tissue, salt. Less than 2 percent: mustard, natural flavorings, demons, dried garlic, dextrose, sodium erythorbate, sodium nitrite.” About ten seconds later, one of my friends grabbed the can. “No way are there demons in that. Let me see!”

I donated the can to a food bank when I moved to California about five years later. It was a lose-lose situation; I’d feel guilty throwing it away, and I’d feel guilty about feeding it to someone. But one great thing about America is that I have an assurance from the market that someone eats the stuff - its very existence on supermarket shelves certifies it. Hopefully, it made someone else happy over the course of its unnaturally prolonged life, and did so in its intended role as food, or at least as a food product.

My woolgatherings, plus the possibility I entertained today of a taco with lengua at Taqueria La Bamba here in Mountain View - I went with pupusas instead - led me to browse through food articles on Wikipedia, which reminded me, finally, of this classic jeu d’esprit/vandalization:

Baby food

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Revision as of 22:45, 10 November 2005; view current revision ← Older revision | Newer revision →

For babies as food, see cannibalism.