Burque Babble Calls Heather Wilson "Frighteningly Irrelevant"

"Heather Calls Obama "Frighteningly Inexperienced"-- Bruce Daniels, ABQJournal.com 7/22/08

Really, soon-to-be-former Representative Wilson? Hmm...what sort of fun can we have with this word in regards to our very own Lame Duck Congressperson?


How about:

"Heather Wilson: Frighteningly Doomed to B-List Fox News Analyst Hell"?

Or...

"Heather Wilson: Frighteningly Tied to NippleGate For the Rest of Recorded Time"?

Perhaps....

"Heather Wilson: Frighteningly Reminds Burque Babble of Patricia Madrid, Which Is Just Damn Frightening"?

Fun word.

Texas, Somebody Else's Texas

City Limit Sign, Moran, Texas 7/21/08

Upon arrival at the Texas/New Mexico border east of Roswell I solemnly declared yesterday that I will NEVER go to Texas again, burying very close relatives excepted.

Extremely close. Cousins, uncles and such...not gonna happen.

It's not all the State's fault, and it's not really the fault of all the people in the State. More like a culmination of things the description/analysis of which would be neither interesting or insightful.

Texas sucks. And as a resident of the place for 26 years I feel both perfectly free to make such an assessment and a little sad about it. But there ya go.

Again, I won't get into the boring particulars like heat, humidity and a steamy tropical forest of evangelical oppressiveness. No, that would be a waste of everybody's time.

Just a couple of parting movie house photos to hang on the blog wall and glance at from time to time as a way of remembering a Lone Star State that ain't all bad.

Real movie house and downtown environs, Eastland, Texas, 7/21/08

Fake movie house used as set for "The Last Picture Show",
Archer City, Texas 7/18/08

Happy Trails, Texas. Happy Trails.

My Brush With Banking Deregulation Infamy

Hey, look at me! I'm indirectly famous by virtue of being a bonafide IndyMac Bank customer! No, I'm not making that up!

I come back from Seattle and find out that the Feds took over my mortgage, and I'm a bit pissed that Greta Van Susteren or Anderson Cooper hasn't called me up for an interview or something. No, I have nowhere near $100,000 in an IndyMac bank (or to my name, for that matter), and I wasn't in one of those long lines on TV demanding my money.

I guess when you have a mortgage at a failed bank you don't go stand in line and demand the bank take your monthly mortgage payment. Instead, you get this irrational scenario in which you NEVER have to pay your mortgage now because the bank is out of business.

Unfortunately, that irrational thought has not proven to be true, AND Anderson Cooper hasn't even tried to interview me yet. Kind of a non-event, so far, from this angle.

And yes, I am a little envious of those ultra pissed-off people shown on TV waiting in long lines outside an IndyMac branch, but it's mainly because many of them have over $100,000 at a bank, whereas I'm lucky if my average balance gets over $250. What with my mortgage payments and all.

From the look of things, it appears many others may be joining me as members of failed financial institutions. But, for now, I have a level of vague celebrity (in my mind) I will cherish for as long as possible before Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae and the whole home lending market collapses into a large, steaming pile of 1932 all over again.

But I will have been among the first, and nobody can take that away from me. I'm still ready for that TV interview, by the way, just give me a call Anderson, Greta, Keith Olberman. Hell, I'll take Matt Lauer at this point. Like a flood victim along the Mississippi, this fame thing can't last forever.

Find the Cost of Freedom, Buried in Our Ears and Groundwater

So I'm sitting here trying to listen to this fairly early (i.e., not so mad yet) Beethoven Septet on KUSC online, when the "Sound of Freedom" once again drowns out Beethoven, birds singing out my window, my wife asking where all the coffee went this morning, and everything else sonic.

And, as always happens when I hear the "Sound of Freedom", two questions spring to mind:

1. Do we really need all these military jets in a world where the U.S. invasion of a country takes about 30 minutes, but the ground force, door-to-door guerilla war takes years and years and years and years?
2. How much does flying these military jets in neat, yet deafening, formations cost?

I read that the U.S. Military is responsible for around two percent of U.S. oil usage, which may not sound like much but you need to remember this is the gas-guzzling United States we're talking about. The 132.5 million barrels of U.S. military usage estimated in 2007 dwarfs the oil consumption of entire countries like Israel and Ireland.

Yeah, I know those countries are small. But if my division is right, the U.S.Military would place just above Sweden and below good 'ol Iraq on this graph.

The "Sound of Freedom" is the Sound of Money Hemorrhaging at something like $4.25 a gallon for jet fuel.

And speaking of hemorrhaging, I also read this morning that jet fuel at Kirtland AFB is contaminating the groundwater table and has been for some time.

And, I'm not making this up, my online music (now a Segovia guitar piece) just got drowned out again by the Sound of Military Days Gone By. Vroom-vroom taxpayer dollars. Vroom-vroom.

New Yorker Cover Proves Lazy Extraterrestrials Live Amongst Us

This just in: I'm a lazy bastard.

After a week's vacation up Northwest, I have returned to some thigh-high weeds (pictured above), a novel thigh-high in its own weed-like thorniness, and about ninety-eleven chores that need to be done before I head out of town again to the long-avoided South (it's a Summer of revisiting past lives, perhaps more about that later).

Yet, despite all this that needs to be done, especially those weeds, all I can do is fixate on the response to this New Yorker cover:



By this time, having, in my extreme laziness, slept in well past 8:00, we're probably up to at least one million blogposts and 73 million comments about the above cover. Yet, I can't help wasting my lazy bastard time perusing the never-ending "Outrage!" from Daily Kos folks about this thing. And, worse yet, insipidly adding to those 1 million plus blogposts myself.

I can't tell what's funnier, the cover or the "Outrage!".

I tend to spend far too many important lazy bastard hours reading Daily Kos, often in the same way irritating drivers slow down to see if there are any bloody bodies thrown from vehicles crashed along the Interstate. I can't remember a thread getting 2400 comments in quite some time, "Breaking: Impeachment!" and "Developing: Bush/Cheney Sucks!" included.

I find some threads on Daily Kos informative, others comforting in that "oh, these strange people actually agree with my me on something" sort of way. Then there are threads such as "Outrage!" that reaffirm the fact that I am an alien from another planet who cannot really join the human race because, after all, I'm an alien (but not in that Scientology crazy Thetan level digested alien sort of way) and am missing important chromosomes or a certain arrangement of genes necessary to be classified as homo sapiens.

And that just makes the "Outrage!" even funnier.


Here's that cover again:


Don't worry, I won't ruin it through dissection. It's just damn funny. Life-affirming (for an alien) funny. Perhaps there are other (non-Scientology) aliens among us who, like me, love the Hell out of Barack Obama (FISA vote notwithstanding) and cannot look at this cover without getting a big-ass smile on their pointy, triangularly-shaped alien face.

Klattu barata nikto baby!

Now if I just had me some space-age, extraterrestrial weed-killer that wasn't bad for Planet Earth. Must not have packed that when I left my home on Planet Satire. Oh well, maybe I should finish this 15th cup of coffee and look at a few hundred more posts of "Outrage!" instead.

Back Within Seattle's Overloving, Sinister Arms

Lake Union, the ubiquitous crane, and
a quickly reducing number of seafood-related
warehouses from the 11th floor of the Pan Pacific Hotel

--9th and Terry Ave., Seattle, Washington

I had pretty much decided not to post anything from here, but ran across the 756,423rd Duke City Fix thread about "Flying Star", and couldn't help myself. Yeah, okay, I definitely could have helped myself.

Having lived here for a few years from the start of the boom in 1988 to the consumer packaging of "grunge" in 1993, I have been hesitant to return to Seattle and environs. And yes, part of the reluctance stems from the fact that the city holds some bad memories, including the fact that I was making like $16k a year in a city when, even back then, $16k a year was barely, barely subsistence level.

But another, bigger and perhaps more generally pertinent reason is that this town embraces much of what Albuquerque is not, especially in areas I am passionate about. Mass transit, self-sustaining identifiable neighborhoods, greenery, water. Coming here is philosophically like scratching really hard on an old scab, hard enough to get past the simple pleasure of the scratch and entering that pain/pleasure threshold as the wound starts to get bloody again.

In short, this city has too much of what I want, and that is scary. It is full of large-scale Microsoft/Starbucks mogul-funded projects (the new downtown Public Library, Benaroya Hall, etc.), a massive professional sports stadium(s) complex right next to downtown, and a pub on almost corner with eight quality micros on tap. It is areligious, not afraid of high taxes, and, at least in Summer, the perfect temperature.

So what's the problem? Why aren't I living here now? Why did I ever leave?

The problem, for me, is that Seattle and environs beckons like some sort of heaven to which permanent residence involves a hazy deal struck with an ultra-green, crunchy-liberal LOHAS (Lifestyle of Health and Sustainability) deity you can't tell is God, Shiva, Satan or Bill Gates.

To further the weak analogies, this town is a Pandora's Box of social planning leftyism, the Las Vegas for people who hate everything about Las Vegas, the cool, temperature-perfect place the Sirens were trying to lead Ulysses toward (in his mind, if I were Ulysses, and who doesn't think they are Ulysses).

See, the place is already ruining me, throwing tons of lame literary references before me which I seem to have control over regurgitating. Seattle is a vile, gourmet coffee temptress, and I must leave its environmentally-friendly clutches pronto. I must run away from its scary combination of desirability, good civic taste and evergreen trees. Must....escape...evil.....mind-velvet......clutches.....

But not before going to today's Mariners game, having dim sum in the International District, drinking a post-game beer in Pioneer Square and taking public transit back uptown to look at the sailboats filling up Lake Union.

And maybe, just maybe, I'll find a restaurant tonight as good as "Flying Star". Man, this place makes me even more incorrigible than my usual high, unseemly standard of incorrigible. Utterly insufferable.

Will the Last Newspaper Dying Please Turn Off the Lights (of truth/beauty/etc.)?

Some people show data and statistics to advocate for something, which we, as readers, immediately distrust because we know all about lies, damn lies, statistics, etc.

Some folks think that because one has a "blog", a "blogger" (I still prefer using "jenga!", personally) is against print newspapers and has joined some sort of jihad against print journalism.

Combining the two points above, some might get the impression upon seeing the stock market figures below that I, a so-called "jengaist!", am happy that newspapers are circling the drain at a high, increasingly smaller circle rate.

I'm not happy about it. It's just there (prices from Bloomberg at blog post time 7/3):

McClatchy
Price: 5.46
Daily Change: -.039
% Daily Change: -6.667%
52-week high: 28.73
52-week low: 5.45
1-year return: -76.826%

Gannett
Price: 19.59
Daily Change: -.240
% Daily Change: -1.21%
52-week high: 55.27
52-week low: 19.32
1-year return: -62.477%

E.W. Scripps
Price: 2.91
Daily Change: -.050
% Daily Change: -1.69%
52-week high: 3.78
52-week low: 2.70
1-year return: -15.856%

Note that Scripps' 16% drop in price over the last 52 weeks is smaller simply because they have been tanking for a longer time.

Brutal. And no, I'm not happy about it. But have a Happy Fourth, anyway...even if you're not a fireworks fan (or really a fan of tribalistic "the country in which I happen to live is better than your country by virtue of my having residence in this country" crap).

Has Senator Bingaman Gotten His Civil Liberties Groove Back?

If you're like me, your response to the words "Senator Jeff Bingaman" are usually: "meh". Although I'll admit I've never actually said the word "meh", that's just seems to be the latest agreed upon version of what was until recently "whatever".

Bingaman, "meh".

I know from the "liberal" perspective Bingaman has been better than chopped liver (i.e., Domenici), but rarely exciting and sometimes simply frustrating. True to this, it appeared Sen. Bingaman was going to go along with the FISA "compromise" murkily making its way through Congress last week.

Now comes news (well, it's actually been around for a few days, but I'm just now starting to really understand it) that Senator Bingaman has an amendment to the FISA legislation that would address one (of many) problem(s) with it, namely the idea of "retroactive telecom immunity" for all the blatantly unconstitutional things the Bush Administration asked of and was slavishly granted in years past regarding phone records.

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) puts it:

EFF has signed an open letter in support of the Bingaman Amendment [PDF] along with the ACLU and eleven other civil liberties organizations, and urges all members of the Senate who care about civil liberties and the rule of law to champion it. The amendment wouldn't cure all of the problems with the bill, and is no replacement for a strong no vote on final passage, but at this moment it looks to be the last best shot at saving the litigation against the telcos from an early death.

To which I say, "right on" (early 1970s "Sesame Street" usage variation). Good on Senator Bingaman even if:

1. The co-sponsors of this amendment include Sen. Arlen Specter. Shudder...shudder. Man, the things you gotta do to get things done in the U.S. Senate. Creepy.
2. The FISA legislation is SO complicated that I'm still not sure this is the way to go here, and I'm not so terribly sure if the "cool" Senators (Feingold, especially) know how to best handle the situation either.
   
3. We're all really, when it gets down to it, waiting for the electoral process to put a gigantic microfiber pillow down on the Bush Administration's aged, Constitution-bashing head and asphyxiate the pernicious bastard. 201 days to go!!!!
4. The Bingaman amendment and much of the post-Bush constitutional cleanup will involve audits by entities like "Inspector General", which will really suck if this is the Department of Justice "Inspector General" because BushCo has so poisoned agencies like DOJ that getting traction on silly things like "The Constitution" ain't gonna be happening for at least a decade.
   

Still, "right on" Senator Bingaman, and I take back some of the bad things and "meh" (see point above) that I've said/thought about you over the years. Now about that offshore drilling....