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Fishing Boats for Sale

Driving through the backroads of Michigan this summer, I’ve seen “For Sale” signs everywhere. Not just on houses and property, but also on cars, trailers, lawn mowers, snow blowers, fishing boats and pontoons. It’s very sad. It’s gotten to the point where I expect everything sitting in someone’s front yard MUST be out there to be sold. I had to apologize repeatedly to that old woman sitting in the Amiga in Fruitport, and she STILL gave me the finger when I drove off.

Just kidding. I was never in Fruitport. And I have no use for an Amiga.

Such a fire sale can be hard on the nerves of the casually interested. If I had a few million sitting in the bank ready for action, I’d probably start succumbing to temptation and assemble a flotilla of pontoon boats, bass boats and jet skis. What I’d do with a flotilla, I don’t know. Float it as best I could, probably. The temptation is also there to scoop up some of the homes and property that are sitting on lake front property, but they cost considerably more than a 20-year-old pontoon. And I have no interest in becoming a real estate baron. Plaid pants make me look fat.

These are tough times for my favorite state. It always seems to be tough times here. I moved to Chicago in 1982 because of tough times, and every time I come back, it’s déjà vu all over again. Now the workers who are losing their jobs or feeling the pinch of the general downturn are trying to sell their fishing boats, which are basically standard equipment here. The “Cash for Clunkers” program might help the factories get rolling again, but the GM bailout will be forcing wages down. So even those folks who still have jobs might not be able to afford a house and a boat.

Oh boo hoo, you might be thinking. I don’t have a boat, or a trailer or even the time to use one if I did.

But it was part of the social contract here in Michigan for generations. You put your time in at the factory, and you’d be able to send your kids to school, have some health coverage, and be able to relax a little on the water on the weekends. Now that’s falling apart quickly. The state is out of money, the city of Detroit is bound to collapse soon, the small factories that fed Detroit are cutting back and/or shutting up shop, and the people who are just trying to wait for the rebound to start are going to food banks and selling the fishing boat. Maybe when things turn around, they’ll be able to buy a new one, maybe not. Sad to watch. Feels like the whole state is hunkered down, waiting to get punched one more time.

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Happily Ever After…Not So Much

Since many people assume that I am completely obsessed and an utter expert on fairy tales and the postmodern exploration of their themes, metathemes and metametas, I thought I would pass along this gallery of photographs by Dina Goldstein. As her daughters have begun to be interested in Disney princesses, she began to explore the idea of what “happily ever after” was like. Her portrayals of Snow White and the rest of them are beautifully done, and sometimes disturbing. My favorite is Cinderella drinking in a honky-tonk. Enjoy.

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Swine Flu: Deadly, and Politically Incorrect

We already know that the swine flu–RUN FOR THE HILLS!–has the potential to be a pandemic (just like Avian flu, Hong Kong flu, and Cindy Lu Flu before it). If that wasn’t bad enough, now we find out that it’s religiously offensive as well. From the AP:

Israeli official: Swine flu name offensive

JERUSALEM (AP) — The outbreak of swine flu should be renamed “Mexican” influenza in deference to Muslim and Jewish sensitivities over pork, said an Israeli health official Monday.

Deputy Health Minister Yakov Litzman said the reference to pigs is offensive to both religions and “we should call this Mexican flu and not swine flu,” he told a news conference at a hospital in central Israel.

Both Judaism and Islam consider pigs unclean and forbid the eating of pork products.

Scientists are unsure where the new swine flu virus originally emerged, though it was identifed first in the United States. They say there is nothing about the virus that makes it “Mexican” and worry such a label would be stigmatizing.

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“Whatsis, a Dagger I See Before Me Here or Whaaat?”

Today was William Shakespeare’s birthday, and there were festivities throughout the cultural landscape. You might have had some thespians traipsing through your downtown spouting iambic pentameter while wearing baggy shirts and tight hose, all nonny and such. But here in Chicago, Da Mare (give Chuckie his due) went everyone one better: He made today in Chicago Talk Like Shakespeare Day. While many of you may have thought Chicagoans possess mellifluous speaking voices anyway–full, resonant, with nary an “A” held too long or nasally–the proclamation should put to rest any lingering doubts that The City That Works is also The City That Iambs, and the average cop on the street sounds like Sir Ralph Richardson.

But those cadences don’t satisfy me. I had the idea last week, after watching “The Ten Commandments”, that we need to talk more like Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner did in that movie. You know, full of metaphors, ominous portents, and ageless prophecies.

For example, when a waitress asks you if you’d like coffee, you’d respond, “It would take a river of coffee to rouse me from contemplation of your beauty.”

If a cop pulls you over and asks you if you knew how fast you were going, you’d answer, “Fast or slow, someday we must face our maker with the deeds of our existence.”

If your friends ask you out for a beer, you’d say, “I respect jollity and comradeship. The night is long that contains no laughter.”

Try it yourself, but I think it would be good to wait until next Passover/Easter season, or else no one’s going to get the joke. Unless you already shave your head but leave that goofy ponytail on the side, “like a true prince of Egypt.”

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Free of the Torture of Christopher Buckley

I’ve always tried to be generous with Christopher Buckley. Though I don’t know him, he apparently was insightful enough 15 years ago to assert that I was obviously a conservative if I wrote Politically Correct Bedtime Stories. I cut him some slack, probably out of professional courtesy/envy. I can’t think of anyone else who gets paid to write satirical novels on a regular basis (though I’ve only managed to finish one of them), so slagging him might collapse the whole genre. And many of his articles are funny, though not as funny as he seems to think.

But something he wrote for The Daily Beast yesterday takes him off the protected list. On the subject of the released torture memos, he upbraids many commentators for getting “sanctimonious” about the fact that the US tortured its prisoners at Gitmo and Abu Gharaib. For those of us who are appalled that our government engages in torture, he takes pains to remind us that:

It is, yes, good that the U.S.A. is not doing this anymore, but let’s not get too sanctimonious about how awful it was that we indulged in these techniques after watching nearly 3000 innocent Americans endure god-awful deaths at the hands of religious fanatics who would happily have detonated a nuclear bomb if they had gotten their mitts on one. And let us move on. There is pressing business. (Are you listening, ACLU? Hel-lo?)

The operative question becomes: What do we do now with captive bad guys who possess information that could prevent another 9/11? We may have moved on. They, assuredly, have not.

If he thinks the “captive bad guys” are fleshy repositories about Islamic doomsday plans (especially after being in custody for 6 years), then Buckley’s not as smart as he thinks. (The question of what to do with the men themselves is certainly thorny, now that they will either be tortured more in their home countries or set loose on the streets, living testimony that America is some kind of devil.) If he thinks it’s “sanctimonious” to want to hold people accountable for giving the order to torture, then he’s a suck-up to power.

And since elsewhere in the article he makes joking comparisons between the now-open torture techniques and his rough handling from the senior boys at boarding school, then he’s a turd, pure and simple.

In the days and weeks after 9/11, I remember telling people that we should take every one of those filthy desert barbarians and remove them to places where they could be tortured until they gave up every name in their rolodexes. And if they died in the meantime, small loss. And I bet a lot of other Americans were screaming the same thing. But I’m not a leader. This country would be in ridiculous shape if I were even given an honorary mayorship for the day. But there are smarter, saner heads than mine in Washington. Some were in leadership positions 7-8 years ago. We need to find out who overruled them and made torture our policy against our enemies.

I’m not being naive. I’m aware this country has engaged in secretive torture (and worse) during my lifetime. And at the risk of sounding cynical or paranoid, nothing will ever be done about that. But during this decade, torture has been used as an official tool in the “war on terror,” and I want it investigated, repudiated, degraded, eliminated. Not to have a witch hunt for lower-level ops, but to get to the highest levels, the ones who told the agents in the field, impressed with their machismo in the face of moral uncertainty, to “take the gloves off.” Because when the higher-ups sanctioned torture, they did it in my name as a citizen.

I was ecstatic on the day that Illinois set a moratorium on the death penalty because I didn’t want the state killing people in my name. Regardless of whether it was an effective deterrent for criminals (it isn’t), or whether victims’ families need “closure”, I don’t want Illinois as a policy killing people in my name. It’s too bad it wasn’t done legislatively, but I’ll take it anyway I can.

Sure, people will make political hay out of the torture memos, but such is life. You can get as realpolitik as you want here, but you’re still faced with the question: What’s the right thing to do? If you cast the whole struggle as a battle of civilization vs. barbarism, where did we land? Do you want to look your kid in the eye–or your mother, or John Wayne, or Abe Lincoln–and say, “Yes, some fanatic medievalists hate America, and blew up innocent citizens, so in response we gathered up a bunch of people on the battlefield in that part of the world and tortured them repeatedly over years until they told us some stuff that may or may not be accurate, just to stop the pain, though it wasn’t really torture, more like hazing, really–and it was the right thing to do. We’re all safer now. And they had it coming to them anyway. So let’s move on.”

If that’s how Buckley thinks, then I should be grateful he was honest. Now I don’t have to feel obliged to read any more of his dry satires of Washington. He always seemed too comfortable with the bullshit he was ostensibly making fun of, now we know why. (I’ve always been suspicious ever since I saw a blurb from him on someone’s novel–possibly one by Stephen Fry– praising it as “Trenchantly, tootingly funny.” For that, he deserves a punch in the kiwis and a week chained to Carlos Mencia.)

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Final Spelling Bee Vocab Words

zymurgy – a branch of applied chemistry that deals with fermentation processes (as in wine-making or brewing)

embosk – shroud or conceal, esp. with plants or greenery

dirhinic – affecting both nostrils alike

peroration – a flowery, highly rhetorical speech

pendeloque – a usually pear-shaped glass pendant used for ornamenting a lamp or chandelier

vitraillist – a maker or designer of work in stained glass

anastrophe – inversion of the usual syntactical order of words for rhetorical effect

callidity – craftiness, cunning shrewdness

kakistocracy – a government by the worst individuals

meliority – the quality or state of being better

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More Spelling Bee Vocab Words

Work these into your conversations this weekend. IT PAYS TO INCREASE YOUR WORD POWER!!

turgescent – becoming swollen, distended or inflated

sesquipedalian – characterized by the use of long words

percipience – capacity to sense or come to know or recognize mentally, esp. something that is hidden or obscure

insurrecto – a person who rises in revolt against civil authority or an established government

pecksniffian – hypocritically devout; displaying high-mindedness with intent to impress

nugacious – trifling, trivial

sanguivorous – feeding on blood

exaugural – occuring at the close of a term of office

deglutition – the act or process of swallowing

ramage – the boughs or branches of a tree

(And out of all those words, the only one that was accepted by the WordPress spell checker was percipience. Go figure. If you have percipience, you probably already have.)

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Dept. of Cheap Irony

Was just listening to WXRT this morning when an ad came on for AmeriStar. It had something to do with money, and how knowing your “Mystery Points” will multiply your winnings for the day. Know your Mystery Points, and you’ll find out how to exponentially increase your money.

The name “Ameristar” sounded familiar, and will all the talk about points and money, I thought it was a bank. Sounds like a generic bank name, right?

It ain’t.

It’s really a chain of casinos.

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Saturday Morning “Watchmen”

For weeks, I’ve been promising to take Liam and some of his buddies to the opening weekend of “The Watchmen” for his 14th birthday. Had some reservations about it, especially as the reviews started coming in, mentioning the violence and nudity.

But then I saw this and feel much better about it all. Absolute genius.

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Of Lice and Men

At my daughter’s new school, people aren’t putting their heads together to learn, because of a stubborn outbreak of head lice. It started before Christmas, and since the beginning of the year, the kids have had periodic spot-checks by moms armed with combs and popsicle sticks.

Hats and coats have been occasionally packed in garbage bags for the day, to stop the louses from jumping from coat to coat. And while everyone keeps insisting that this outbreak is not a question of anyone’s hygiene, conversations still don’t proceed very far without a disgusted shake of the shoulders and a vocalized “Ewwww!”

Why do I mention this, besides getting a little shudder out of you? It’s to point out one method of eradicating lice that I hadn’t thought of: Call a professional. Hair Fairies is a nationwide string of kid-friendly hair salons that specializes in inspecting kids’ scalps and getting rid of lice and nits. The first couple times I heard about the service, I had to laugh, but parents have been hiring them because sometimes the lice are hard to recognize. Also, after the first three or four times, the glamour of inspecting a kid’s scalp begins to wear off. We’ve all got better things to do than groom each other like baboons.

All I’m sayin’s, That is a specialty that I never would’ve thought of.