Before all this crazy stormy stuff hit, San Franciscans may recall there was some ordinary rain a few days ago. We had a plan to go running in the park, and the rain seemed like a good excuse not to do it, so we did it. It’s a little over 2 miles, at a really easy pace, but I never was able to do 2 miles at any speed before so I love it.

Anyway, I had my shorts on and then when we saw the weather, I went back in and put on some sweats. But the rain wasn’t all that cold and after a little running, I was sweating. Something felt weird. I looked down and figured it out: I hadn’t taken off my shorts, my sweatpants were on over them. Cool! So: 0.75 miles, remove sweats. And that rain felt pretty good, so: 1.25 miles, remove shirt. I’ll save the rest for a warmer day, or maybe Bay to Breakers.

Andrew Olmsted was killed in Iraq the other day. He was a career soldier who posted a lot of good writing on various blogs - I mostly read him on Obsidian Wings - and I remember when he wrote about deciding to go back to active duty knowing that he'd end up being sent over there. The idea of trying to be practical and apolitical about things like that is... hard for me to understand, but he seemed like a smart and good guy. It's probably thanks to people like him that anything constructive ever gets done under the current management. Anyway, I guess this isn't really sadder than all the other sadness so far, but it sucks badly.

Long, stressful journey through buildings & streets in the middle of an invasion from outer space, or maybe from the future. Robots and flying saucers are shooting people, etc. It looks pretty hopeless.

Cut to: some time later; things have more or less settled down under our new alien overlords. I’m walking through town in the evening with B., guided by some streetwise guy—an ex-cab driver or something—who tells us what’s what.

“I hate those goddamn elephants they have now.” He points up at the sky. There are flocks of miniature elephants flapping around with their giant ears—basically Dumbo, a little stockier and tougher-looking, but still pretty freaking cute. But our guide warns us that they’re pretty rough characters involved in all kinds of underground business. He brings us into a run-down apartment building to take care of some business, and there are little surly elephants, mostly drunk, lounging in the hall and pushing past us on the stairs.

Back outside, I’m nervously kidding around: “Well at least there aren’t any, like, vampire ponies.”

He stares at me like Are you serious? “Not in your neighborhood, but watch out around here—the goddamn vampire ponies are all over this park.” We’re crossing a little ill-kept park at night. Sure enough, these little foot-long ponies are scurrying around everywhere, and they can leap up to eye level, moving way too fast for comfort. They’re mostly distracted by chasing and eating some other small animals, but one of them bites my hand just before we get away.

I have a lot to learn.

I was dreading this day for months: I started back into a class at the Circus Center—super-beginner-intro to Chinese acrobatics. I was expecting to be reduced to a shivering pulp by upper-body exercises, and they didn’t disappoint.

What I didn’t expect was that when it came to doing a few half-assed cartwheels, I wasn’t just bad at them (not surprising since I wasn’t very frisky as a kid; I’m pretty sure I never did a cartwheel in my life) but instead, I got totally confused and I literally couldn’t tell what I was supposed to do or what I was doing. I watched a dozen people do the damn cartwheel a dozen times. I watched the teacher do it in slow motion. It wasn’t even the mirror problem—he faced the same way as me. But it was like trying to navigate in a five-dimensional world. My right hand? My left foot? What is this thing called “left”? How come when he turned around, he ended up facing the other way? Wait, first I just move my head down and... what the hell, now my head is down, how did the floor get there? There’s a character on Heroes whose superpower is that after watching someone do any action one time, she can do it exactly the same. I have the opposite superpower.

This can only improve.

So Mike Bloomberg really is running for president... or maybe not... or at least the “Unity08” people want him to. Those are the bozos who wanted to start a third party with no positions at all except “Democrats and Republicans are both OK”; now they’re putting all the money they raised into a Draft Bloomberg campaign.

I haven’t spent much time in New York since Bloomberg got elected, and I don’t know what people there think of him these days. People everywhere else seem to have a vague idea that he’s a moderate Democrat, or a moderate Republican, or just a guy with a lot of money who’s not crazy. If he ran, he might suck away a decent chunk of the Democratic vote. That would suck.

Bloomberg is a fan of the PATRIOT Act, the Iraq war (which he’s said was necessary because we were attacked first on 9/11), and the drug war. He killed the recycling program in New York because it didn’t make money (he restarted it later, after his financial analysis turned out to be total bullshit). He wants everyone in America to be fingerprinted or have their DNA on file (I’m linking to that one because no one will believe it; you can look up the rest). During the 2004 Republican Convention, he had the cops sweep the streets for anyone vaguely resembling protesters and lock them up in warehouses. Yes, he’s is in favor of gun control and abortion rights, and he’s gay-friendly; that doesn’t make him a liberal, it makes him a New Yorker.

But this vague idea people have about him, that he’s just a sensible nebbish, fits perfectly with how he got elected. Back then, compared to Rudy and the national Republicans, he looked like the sanest and mildest guy in the world. The Democrats in the race were long-time NY politicians with baggage; all most people knew about Bloomberg was that he had money and ran a news service. His switch to the Republican party was universally seen as a move of convenience: if he wanted to run, he had to hold his nose and let Rudy shake his hand. He seemed like the furthest thing from an ideologue. And I kind of think he isn’t one, really. Unlike Rudy, I don’t think he thinks of himself as a crusader or a king or an asshole; he just thinks he’s a no-nonsense guy, a practical businessman like everyone really wants to be, with no time for all the silly politics. His opinions on things like Iraq are received opinions—he figures an ordinary guy would just want to kick Saddam’s ass, or Osama’s, or whoever. An ordinary guy wouldn’t waste time arguing with a bunch of hippie protesters; just let the cops figure it out, that’s their job. An ordinary guy wouldn’t be too upset by banning smoking in bars because, well, maybe he would but smoking is icky.

He’s not the New York Post mayor like Rudy; he’s the New York Times mayor—smug, totally blind to his privilege, and not half as smart as he thinks he is. Please don’t vote for him, unless you just like money or think he’s cute or something.

I got a flight to Acadia, the secret country inside Canada. Long ago, the people of a few French-Indian towns managed to evade the British; they moved into a deep valley in the woods that’s hard to see from anywhere else, and they’ve been living there ever since. There are millions of them. The Canadian and American governments are aware now, but they’re embarrassed and don’t know what to do, so it’s kind of an open secret. You can get these flights if you know where to look—travel agents put up ads in bus stops, mostly in black neighborhoods; I found one when I got lost in Bed-Stuy.

When I get there, I’m met by an acquaintance who had heard about the trip. It turns out he hangs out in Acadia all the time, and he reassures the locals about me: “It’s OK, he knows about us.” Right away I’m given an official but casual welcome, and we walk into a cozy little restaurant—kind of frontier cafeteria decor—where a very cute young woman, with a long face of no familiar ethnicity and unusual patterns of freckles, has saved me a table; she’s my official greeter.

I have no idea if anything I’ve heard about Acadia is accurate. Their system is sometimes described as “non-capital-oriented capitalism” and they have this contrarian pioneer culture, but there’s a lot of communist-nationalist rhetoric—more touchy-feely than aggressive—and, like they say about Cuba, I can’t tell if I’m just being shown a small piece of the picture. Their TV shows are odd: more like little conversations and people presenting stuff that they’re interested in, sort of like public-access cable if it were really good. They seem to know a ridiculous amount about American history. They’re a little sheepish about the lack of amenities, like how the tables in the restaurant are all hacked-up pieces of wood, but it all looks pretty charming and I suspect it’s false modesty. The city I’m in seems about the size of San Francisco. Supposedly the whole valley system is self-sufficient.

What are they up to?

I'm trying to learn a little more about the strange green creatures who rule the world, so now and then I'll post something here about a plant that got my attention.

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Wood sorrel or Oxalis (family Oxalidaceae) is a diverse bunch of plants, but easy to recognize: straight succulent stems ending in clusters of three leaves that look like big clovers, but a little pointier, and the leaves fold up at night. They put out little pale flowers once in a while.

When you crush the leaves they have a pleasant tangy smell, and you can eat 'em, but don't overdo it; oxalic acid is yummy but can be bad for you.

This plant is almost impossible to kill. That's why I kept one in my house for years: it would shrivel up when I neglected it, but it bounced back with 20 new stems once it got a little water. Plus, the one I had was really pretty, the kind with deep purple leaves. The one that started growing in our front porch planter last year was plainer, green with little freckles, and not as sturdy; after a dry spell it looked 100% dead, leaves gone, stems all tiny and crinkly and brown.

The planter had been looking pretty sad for a long time anyway, so I threw away the dead plants, got rid of most of the crappy soil, bought some new dirt and put in a couple different things. Three or four days later, next to the violets, there were a half-dozen oxalis buds poking their necks out of the dirt (they come up like an upside-down U, with the leaves all curled up underneath)... and when I pulled them up, the roots went down at least six inches. This was in the new soil--if these guys were hiding out in the planter before, they must've come up from the very bottom. The next day: two more. The next day: two more. I've been taking one or two of them out of that planter every day for the last month. After being merciless for a while, I started to respect their determination, so I resettled some of them in a different planter; they're doing OK there but not spreading--they like the front porch a lot better.

So now I know why they call wood sorrel a weed. What I don't get is how it keeps growing new heads like that. Can someone help me out with the biology here? Don't plants need to photosynthesize to build stuff? How can a little critter that's never been above ground grow a half-inch clump of leaves and a seven-inch tail? Do they have a big secret bulb full of fuel down there somewhere? Are they eating the violets? Is it a perpetual motion machine?

I was thinking about the role of the chameleonic razz in art. Parody is usually considered one step above the fart joke as literary value goes, but when it’s really really good I get a lot out of it, and maybe it’s not just because I have low standards.

This example will make no sense to you if you don’t know the hyper-elaborate comics of Chris Ware, or the computer-drawn rude cats of Chris Onstad’s Achewood, but read this anyway (and the two strips after) because it’s funny. Now Ware is kind of an easy target for that kind of thing because he’s pretty successful and very idiosyncratic; plus, Onstad could draw a comic about drywall and have it be funny. But it’s weird how appropriate the style is in this case: it’s about 50% Ware and 50% Achewood, but it’s hard to separate them out, because compression and diagrammatic layouts work really well as a delivery system for Onstad’s deadpan goofiness. I bet he would do this kind of thing more often except people would think he’s just doing Ware again.

On the other hand, not to beat a dead horse but holy shit is this old Ted Rall strip ever bad. I was trying to figure out why I hate it so much. I don’t think it’s because he can’t draw or letter at all; that could’ve made it funnier (like in the 3rd of those Achewood strips, where there’s a big colorful title but it’s in the most godawful computer font possible). I think it’s just the bitterness. Even if you didn’t know that Rall hates Ware, that strip just reads as "That guy is unnecessarily weird and mannered and makes no sense, unlike me and other sensible people; if I just point that out, he’ll be brought low.“ It’s the equivalent of the schoolyard bit, ”Hey, this is you! Check it out everyone, this is Franklin! ’Duh... I’m so smart. Fiddle-de-dee, I’m the king of nerds.’“ There’s a limit on how funny that can be, because the schoolyard is treacherous: if you add any flourishes of your own that aren’t just literal mockery, and especially if you give any sign that acting like the other guy is genuinely fun in itself, then you might get made fun of too. To be funny, you have to risk being weirder than the other guy.

Maybe this is a good rule of thumb for parody in general? Bring something to the mix, something that not just anyone would’ve thought of, that strikes sparks from your target instead of just thumping it. Veronica Geng was the master of this in prose—my favorite parody of anything ever is her piece “Record Review”, where Robert Christgau reviews the Watergate tapes using every awful rock-critic gesture in the book, and reaches heights of baroque ambiguity that the real Christgau would’ve envied while being unaware that what he’s reviewing isn’t music. And if you hang out at small-press comics shows, you may have seen Jesse Reklaw’s dead-on faux-Maus stories; not only are they great mimicry, but you learn something about the Berkeley dope trade—and he manages to imply that Art Spiegelman is the kind of guy who would take the exact same approach to even a trivial and not-so-admirable story, but that’s not necessarily such a bad thing because it’d be funny if he did. And Shaun of the Dead is a good horror movie because it’s a really specific character comedy. And so on.

I predict that Airplane will live on when Airport is dust in the wind; even in some unimaginable future utopia where no one’s ever seen a bad disaster thriller, they’ll be spitting soda out their nose at Airplane, even if they don’t get it. But if you took the same surreal gags on their own, without the bathetic suspense narrative, you’d just have a banana peel without a clown. It looks easier than it is.

I put two not-so-new comics online that would otherwise be hard to find: "Understanding the Ancients" (corporations as mythic deities*) and "Powerhouse" (a poignant gym-related personals ad). Enjoy, if you must.

* Note for non-Californians: PG&E is Pacific Gas & Electric.

I know very little about real estate, but in trying to understand the mortgage crisis news and what it means for mere mortals, I’ve been reading Irvine Housing Blog. It’s kind of like the Arcata Eye Police Log: unusually sharp writing about unusually dumb behavior. At least I hope it’s unusually dumb. If people all over the place have been behaving like they did in Orange County, not just borrowing unwisely to buy houses but borrowing insanely against the houses they had—while the stock market was running partly on the juice from bets on those unrepayable loans—I can see how a whole lot of money is about to suddenly stop existing, and that can’t be good for anyone. It’s tempting to just laugh at some schmuck in Irvine who abused easy credit, but if you make a living selling bagels to the people who work for the people who supply gadgets to the people who sell the things that the schmuck from Irvine was buying... well...

I felt better when this stuff didn’t make any sense to me.

There’s a good article in this month’s Harper’s about this too (at least I think it’s good; it could be bogus and I wouldn’t know). The author thinks there’s hope for softening the crash, but that it’ll require a whole lot of rapid investment and borrowing, and the good news is that he thinks that might happen as businesses start to invest in renewable energy, so at least we’ll be making something we need. The bad news is that he thinks that’ll just be another bubble in the end—that the economy has become so dependent on these binges, there’s really no way to stabilize it.

(Of course every time money bites us in the ass, there are Republicans to tell us how the real problem is too much government intervention; the market would work it all out if we just let it be, etc. That always sounds to me like "Sure, Lenin and Stalin and Mao didn’t work out so well, but real communism has never been tried." Very possibly true—but it still sounds fishy when you hear it from Lenin’s golfing buddy.)