So, the new governor of California is some sort of human-shaped piñata with an ass-grabbing attachment, and a recorded voice that says "I care about all that stuff."
I'm sad, but not surprised. The surprise and horror all hit me over the course of the week before the election, when I realized there was not going to be one word about Enron. I kept reading and listening, thinking that even with the large number of lechery stories to be covered, surely someone would take a moment to mention Arnold's Ken Lay connection. Nope. At that point I knew we were fucked. People can easily rationalize voting for a total asshole, as long as he's not dating their sister.
On election day I talked to a nice young lady at my job who said she was supporting Arnold because she liked "his ideas." I asked what his ideas were. "Well, to sit down and take a good look at where the money is going." (The person he's hired to do this used to work for Jeb Bush and George Pataki. HA HA HA.) She avoided talking about his character; she figured she was being practical and voting for the lesser of evils. And she had sort of a selective view of things, in which (a) California is the only state with a bad economy and taxes, and (b) the boom would've gone on forever if not for evil Davis. But she didn't mind being completely uninformed, because she hadn't heard anyone else saying much of anything. If she's at all typical, then what do you expect?
The press is corrupt and insipid (when Arnold entered the race, the freaking Chronicle ran a two-page photo spread—eight of the photos were from the same TV appearance—"big slurpy lovefest" is an understatement), but blame has to fall on the Democrats for not absolutely hammering the bejesus out of the press—nothing short of fire-breathing was acceptable under these circumstances.
As for what the effect will be... well, from the little I know of California politics, the legislature will be just as deadlocked as it was with Davis (either side can hold up the budget indefinitely), so he won't be able to do a hell of a lot unless he goes through with his bizarre threat to put all his proposals on the ballot as voter referenda. I'm not sure even the referendum-crazed Californians really want to go that far—though if they do, at least they'll have absolutely no one to blame for the result. Of course a lot of people are afraid that he'll boost the Bush campaign in 2004. That's all hypothetical, but one thing Arnold can definitely do is ensure that California never collects nine billion dollars from his friends in the electricity mafia.
All I know is, regardless of the consequences, it's just wrong that such an empty, dishonest campaign worked so well. Every damn day the guy says something that makes him either an idiot, or delusionally arrogant and careless. Example: he thinks Gray Davis should stop signing bills now, even though they would've automatically become law if he hadn't signed them by October 12. Details, details. "The public doesn't care about figures." If you're going to screw us, at least we deserve to be seduced with better lines than that.
P.S. I don't mean to minimize the ass-grabbing. If even half those stories are true, he's either got permanent steroid psychosis or, more likely, he just knows his pals will do pretty much anything to help him get away with pretty much anything.
If you're in the East Bay and feel like seeing some possibly dubious art and artists, and non-dubious food and drink, meet me at the Berkeley Comics Salo[o]n this Friday. There will be some kind of exhibits, mini-comics for sale, some improv drawing, and some drunkenness. Among the people who will probably be there are her, him, her, him, her(!), him... etc. Gawkers are welcome.
![Berkeley Comics Salo[o]n](http://www.slowwave.com/random/comixsalon08.gif){kind=link}
Susan (who apparently has better things to do at work today than posting this stuff) recently received the following advice about meditation from her health insurance provider, and passed it on to me under the subject heading above.
Highlights: [unnecessary emphasis is mine]
Meditation is one of several types of mind-body techniques. Other therapies use creative outlets such as art, music or dance.
Breathing is a natural function that you won't have to consciously learn. You simply pay attention to your breathing—how it feels when air enters or leaves your nostrils. Don't follow it down to your lungs.
Repeat a sacred name or phrase. A mantra is the name of a sacred deity or a sacred phrase that you repeat silently or aloud. You can create your own mantra, if you'd like.
Engage in prayer. The best known and most widely practiced example of meditation is prayer. Spoken and written prayers are found in most faith traditions. You can pray using your own words or read prayers written by others.
Sufi walking or dancing. A form of moving meditation that developed in medieval Islam, you'll walk or dance in a rhythmic fashion while chanting. From the Islamic perspective, the intent of the chant is to focus your mind on a specific quality of God, or Allah. If you're Muslim and want to focus on strength and courage, you could walk or dance with forceful steps, arms swinging, and chant "Allah akbar," meaning "God is great." You can merge this meditation technique with any faith tradition and focus on any sacred object or deity. If you don't consider yourself spiritual or religious, you could focus on an aspect of a phenomenon, such as birth or nature, and chant words or phrases symbolic of the phenomenon.
To be fair, the rest of the article is sort of informative (if you never heard of meditation before), but could they have made it any more condescending? My favorite part is where they tell Muslims about Allah.
You just know that some committee decided they should include some "spiritual" stuff in their literature somehow, and some lower management person very enthusiastically volunteered him/herself to write it. I'm picturing a very cheerful multi-cat owner who forwards a lot of chain letters.
After working at this desk job across town for—??—six months?—I finally started riding my bike here. This is the third straight day, and there's a good chance that I'll keep it up for two reasons: 1) the weather is about to turn crappy so I have to do it while I can, and 2) otherwise I have to take an office shuttle bus which plays the lite jazz.
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Till now I'd mostly been biking lazily around my (flat) neighborhood for groceries and such. This new route (through the Castro, Haight, the Panhandle and part of Golden Gate Park, about 40 minutes) is full of hills and trees and weird little intersections and bikers and an interesting variety of traffic. It's just strenuous enough to wake me up in the morning (though as soon as I get here all I can think of is how nice it would be to curl up for a post-workout nap) and it's pretty much all downhill on the way home.
It occurred to me that it would be cool to hang a camera around my neck and take a ton of pictures along the way while in motion. Was going to do it today but I was too lazy to stop for film. So of course today I was wishing for a camera the whole time—just noticing things more than usual, some things that will still be there tomorrow (hills, sky) and other things that might not be (a big dog digging a hole in the park, a perfect level of almost-fog, and some unusually lovely joggers).
Tim Kreider: Earth vs. America (scroll down to read his "artist's statement," if only for the line about "a rhesus monkey at the controls of a crashing starship")
Emily Flake: schools of hard knocks and personal fly (and too many others to list)
Dylan Graham: relationships.
Nice fog this morning.
Nice bike ride.
Nice feeling of possibilities.
Nice everything except the having to drag my ass out of bed part.
Out west: take a look at where Susan went last weekend. I almost envy her. Almost.
Back east: Noise Footprint is a friend from my Greenpoint days, and she has all kinds of interesting things to say. For instance, this is funny and this isn't.
Studs Terkel, oral historian and rightful King of the United States (doesn't King Louis I have a good sound?), got interviewed by The Onion. Besides the usual right-on observations about politics and the people he meets, he reveals one of his secrets: after interviewing people for 37 years ...
... I'm very inept mechanically. I've got the tape recorder in my right hand, and I goof up and push the wrong button sometimes. And the person says, "Look, you pushed the wrong button. It's not on." At that moment, the person feels needed by me psychologically. .... I lost Martha Graham that way, pressed the wrong button. I lost Michael Redgrave, the actor. I almost lost Bertrand Russell, the philosopher. If I did, I'd have put my head in the oven. And by goofing up, suddenly they feel, "Hey, he's just a guy," which helps a great deal.
UCSF, the super-prestigious rich university hospital here(*),
I used to do medical transcription in New York, where it's done (or used to be done) by big agencies who have phone lines for calling in dictation, and then zap the text back over the Net. When I moved here, I was looking for work and was kind of surprised to hear that it's all a bunch of sub-subcontractors working from home now. I wondered how you could keep a handle on the tapes then. Well now I know—you just don't bother.
Speaking of outsourcing, this isn't really new news but in case you hadn't heard, don't fly JetBlue. Some time this year they decided to branch out of the airline business into the domestic surveillance business, and kind of sort of gave everyone's flight records and Social Security numbers to the Pentagon, kind of without asking.
During the Bush/Gore campaign, it seemed like a Bush victory might mean an immediate focused attack on abortion rights, with judicial appointments and legislation to undo Roe v. Wade as soon as possible and go back to the days of back alleys and coathangers. I had my doubts as to whether the Republicans could really pull such a thing off while most people are still pro-choice (and I wasn't sure Democrats would do well by talking only about the future of the Supreme Court, considering the kind of judges Gore and Lieberman liked)... but I figured the Republicans as a whole would like to ban abortion if they could.
A different and very well-argued take on this was written by Barry Deutsch, as the Senate voted on a so-called "partial-birth abortion" ban. Short version: he thinks the Republican leadership is pandering to a faction they don't really respect—the same way they give lip service to farmers and small businessmen—and that in order to keep doing so, they need to avoid advancing their agenda in any effective way. In other words, they need abortion to stay broadly legal, because a state of constant low-intensity political war is what turns out the pro-life vote. He also does a good job dissecting the wording and clinical implications of the "partial-birth" ban, to show how even for fanatics it's in bad faith.
Of course, as with the "war on terror," just because these guys don't really intend to "win" doesn't mean they won't hurt a lot of people along the way—and/or provide a stepping stone to a less calculating crowd of purer fanatics.