Yesterday, as is the tradition in my country, I:

• publicly splashed around in the surf at Baker Beach with a bevy of butt-naked beauties;
• played catch with a big dumb yellow dog;
• sang the national anthems, "San Francisco" and "If I Should Fall from Grace with God";
• consumed cookies, chocolate cake with American flag frosting, and margaritas seasoned with beer and lime popsicles.

Thank you Becka, John, Sarah, Gina, and Zac. Sorry I didn't get to the other events. Life is good. Tired now.

I spent the last month or so knocking together a new website for The Independent Eye, the theater company my parents have been running for 33 years. Take a look.

I hope it's smoother to use and more in tune with their aesthetic than the previous site, but more importantly we've added a few tons of stuff from their archives: photos, reviews, and (so far) two dozen full scripts. I can't believe how much there is even though I was there for most of it, and there's still more to put in. You could wander around in there for a long time, but for some good reading & pictures you might start out with these:

Long Shadow
Descent of the Goddess Inanna
Le Cabaret de Camille
Hitchhiking off the Map
Hammers
Frankenstein
Amazed

Thanks to Sam Young for last-minute animation-making (the home page slideshow).

Whew.

Thanks to Becka's morbid curiosity, I have now seen that horrible video of interviews at a College Republican event. Max Blumenthal isn't the most interesting reporter ever - unfortunately he sounds like kind of a teenage Michael Moore with a bad hangover - but the people he talks to still parody themselves pretty well, and they are a pretty stupid and scary crew.

B's reaction was "oh man, we are so fucked"... but I don't know if there are really more of these guys than there used to be, or just enough to replace the ones who are currently in power & getting old - or, I hope, not quite enough. Digby calls this "a kind of finishing school for dorky political sociopaths" and there will probably always be plenty of those (as long as "political" just means willing to kiss ass for power, and not any real interest in governance), but I hope there won't always be such an effective racket for making use of them.

To the last item, a friend writes:

I don't know. Have you ever been on a college campus and started asking liberal students their opinions and justifications thereof? Many of them sound like total idiots/sheep/whatever too. Some of my best friends have been college republicans (hah...no really!). For a while my two roommates were the NJ CR state chairman and the president of the Rutgers CR chapter. I assure you some interesting debates took place in that apartment. One of them was an idiot much like you see in this video. The other one was intelligent and reasonable. I surely didn't agree with him on many things, but we could actually discuss issues. I learned a lot from him and hope he would say the same of me.

I guess my point is, if I videotaped conversations with both them and wanted to edit it in such a way as to malign a whole ideology, guess which one I would show.

I know, there are plenty of dumb or dumb-sounding people everywhere, and I'm glad no one filmed me in college either.

But this wasn't a bunch of random conservative college students - it was the College Republican National Convention. It really is a direct feed into the party that's ruling the country. I've never seen a Democratic (or liberal, whatever that means these days) equivalent, in college or anywhere... not surprising because the Democratic Party is more or less an average centrist political party, not a radical movement (except in a College Republican's imagination); it's not really interested in courting leftist activists, dumb or smart. Joe Liberal College Schmoe isn't likely to be doing anything in particular about his vague opinions. (This is not to malign liberals, but J.L.C.S. is the vast majority of college students, and the vast majority of people in general don't do much about things.) His cousin Radical Schmoe may get into something useful, and usually local... or if he's a crusading joiner, he may go to the Spartacists or some such group that has about five bucks and a pamphlet.

The national Republicans these days are a powerful radical movement. They're doing a different kind of sheep-farming - these college groups are incredibly well funded and directly connected to the party, and the stuff they're teaching these kids is being put into practice right now with awful results. And I hope that your reasonable roommate will go on to do good things, but I'm afraid he's really not the kind of person they're looking for.

See very creepy New Republic article about CR elections (needs login - check bugmenot.com) - also Washington Post - also Salon.

Update: Yami McMoots tells me something interesting:

I volunteered with the Young Democrats in 2004, though I never officially joined b/c I didn't want to sign on to the Democratic Party. I'm not sure how the relationship between the Democrats and the various youth arms really works, there are probably some differences from the GOP's way of doing things, but I definitely got the sense that there was a grooming mechanism in place for anyone who was seriously interested in party politics.

Some of those people were quite intelligent and passionate about their incremental improvements to the status quo... but man, some of them were total fucking tools.

OK, I have finished Harry Potter and the Last Noun Phrase.

(Did not yet go to see the movie of Harry Potter and the Antepenultimate Noun Phrase, but kind of looking forward to it, especially since that's the one I can never remember anything about so I might even be surprised by something.)

Inarticulate review: I liked this book a lot. I know Rowling isn't the greatest prose-maker, and she always pushes the limits of making up the rules as you go along, but I just really like the stuff she makes up. And I love what she chose to do with the main characters, even if a lot of the second-tier ones got short shrift. It works, and it even kind of makes you think.

However!

I didn't expect to run into so many rather obscene double-entendres. I'm not talking about take-that-wand-and-stick-it jokes, or even the whose-wand-is-bigger jokes, or "not my type" jokes; those are just PG teenage rudeness. I mean... other stuff... that certain people would consider very bad, and that would make slash writers very, very happy. I don't know enough about Rowling to know whether these are inadvertent, but I can't figure how an editor let them pass. But then I'm not sure whether I'm the only one (other than slash writers) who reads them this way; I may just be 12 years old to an unusual degree. Which is why I'm not gonna say what they are, until someone else admits to seeing them too.

I'll just say... one of them involves an ambiguous use of an em dash at the end of a sentence (just a suspenseful pause? or word(s) left off?) at the end of one of the final chapters. And another involves something someone said about what Grindelwald may or may not have done.

Goddamn, now I'm giggling again. I am so 12 years old. Someone else please own up.

G.W. Bush, candidate, October 2000:
Asked about health insurance: "'Insurance'... that's a Washington word. I want to talk about health care."
[Can't find a transcript of this on line. I wrote it down at the time because it was the dumbest thing I'd heard so far.]

G.W. Bush, president, now:
"The immediate goal is to make sure there are more people on private insurance plans. I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room."

This refers to an aspect of the "TOP GUN George W. Bush Action Figure" that... well, just go read about it.

(Also, manufacturer's page here; note, "all the accessories of an original")

The summer edition of
SPARKY'S GALLERY OF SHAME
features lots of carbohydrates and some non-food materials.