No, it’s not that damn comic strip. Penny Arcade is an ageless New York personality who does something you could loosely describe as stand-up—often hilarious, often educational, and just big-hearted as hell. She also started the great Lower East Side Biography Project. And she’s one of those people who’s apparently delighted when you give them an unsolicited drawing.

Anyway, she’s performing in San Francisco next weekend at The Marsh! The Sunday show also has Marga Gomez as a “special guest”, which is tempting, but I’ll probably be going to the Friday show (along with a Brooklyn pal who’s been living in Berkeley for ages now and I keep failing to meet up with). Come on and join me! There’ll be swear words, you’ll like it.

The infamous Texas ban on sex toys was just annulled by an appeals court. Basically they just followed on from the decision that struck down the sodomy laws, where the principle was pretty simple: government has no business in your bedroom.

The ruling makes good reading, at least for me—it’s refreshing these days whenever any kind of bullshit is officially rejected. It’s hard to beat a judge when it comes to ultra-dry putdowns: “we can divine no rational connection between the statute and the protection of children .... The alleged governmental interest in protecting ‘unwilling adults’ from exposure to sexual devices is even less convincing.”

The court also talks about the definition of that law in more detail than the press did, and it’s pretty amazing. It wasn’t actually illegal to own an unmentionable item, you just couldn’t sell them, and if you had more than five of them at home you’d be considered a dealer. It was a felony—although contrary to the famous ballad of Texas Annie, there wasn’t really a prison term of 27 years, and apparently prosecution was pretty rare. But the greatest part of the law was this: “It is an affirmative defense ... that the person who possesses or promotes material or a device proscribed by this section does so for a bona fide medical, psychiatric, judicial, legislative, or law enforcement purpose.” I’ve heard the Texas legislature is an interesting place, but watch out for the cops...

Anyway, I just found out about a documentary on this from 2003 that has a 10-minute excerpt on YouTube (not particularly safe for work), and now I have to find the whole thing—it’s hilarious. It has the late Saint Molly Ivins to tell you all about the giant minds behind that law, and a couple of salespeople who do an impressive job of explaining with a straight face how the unmentionable items certainly aren’t meant for that. Thanks to Hilzoy for the link.

(The other thing I wondered about, looking at the court ruling: how does a state attorney defend that law, as he’s required to do, if he’s not an idiot? The D.A. named in the lawsuit was Ronnie Earle, whom you may remember as the guy who indicted Tom DeLay, and he’s not any kind of bluenose as far as I know. But he also prosecuted and convicted himself once for something pretty trivial, so I guess there’s a certain amount of Inspector Javert that goes with that job.)

Digby was talking about how it’s a shame that our Congressbeings have 1000 times more crusading fire for baseball steroid hearings than for little things like poverty and war and crimes of state. She also noticed that apparently defending Roger Clemens is now a Republican cause, and wondered how that squared with the whole zero-tolerance thing:

Since when are Republicans the big softies toward people accused of drug use?

And then I realized that it’s because steroids aren’t a drug used for pleasure, which we know is a big no-no. They are drugs used solely to give users an edge that others don’t have. Of course they are protective of a big, white Texas boy using steroids to win by any means necessary. It’s a fundamental conservative value!

I don’t know anything about Clemens’s case, but that last part is dead right. We’re Big and Strong and we have a massive appetite—that’s how you can tell we’re the good guys. Just don’t mention our tiny balls.

Forty years ago Fritz Leiber wrote a great science fiction satire, A Specter Is Haunting Texas, where a neoconservative/neo-Confederate regime in Texas has conquered the rest of North and Central America. It’s kind of a plantation system ruled by the usual aristocrats, but of course they have to think of themselves as good ol’ boys so there’s a lot of cowboy posing. And to literalize their self-image they use growth hormones, so the Anglo ruling class is made up of musclebound giants; that makes them all chronically sick too, but that’s a small price to pay for the sake of their Way of Life. (To make sure their Mexican slaves are correspondingly dwarfish, they just use the low-tech method of having all the servant doors be four feet high.)

I can’t remember if Leiber predicted the Hummer too, but I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s a hard book to find now, but check it out if you can—it’s closer to the current mess than Brave New World, and funnier too.

When it comes to the crappification of all useful government functions in the last seven years, the Department of Labor doesn't get as much press as FEMA or the EPA, but not for lack of trying; Bush's Labor Secretary Elaine Chao has been doing her best to make the whole Reagan crew look like Eliot Ness. The National Labor Relations Board is doing its bit too(*)

(* I had the honor of getting screwed by one of the Bush NLRB's first rulings, when I was working for the Darth Vader of West Coast medicine, Sutter Health; Sutter managed to block an organizing drive because of a technicality about which clerical workers to include in the bargaining unit, but not before they spent a bazillion dollars hiring a union-busting outfit whose tactics were sleazy enough to actually lose them a lawsuit a few years later.)

but Chao is a real piece of work. I don't think most people have any idea how directly the anti-union climate these days is being driven by the White House. Last month American Rights at Work started the website Shame on Elaine, which has some pretty good links to add to the mountain of crap that someone will have to start trying to fix next year. But all you really need to know is in this item from an article about mine safety in 2006:

When Bush chose her, Chao was making more than $200,000 a year as a "fellow" at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative, corporate-funded think tank in Washington. While she was there, Heritage scholar D. Mark Wilson issued a report titled How to Close Down the Department of Labor, in which he blasted Labor's "excessive burdens on businesses." Chao hired Wilson as deputy assistant secretary in charge of workplace standards.

Courtesy of Ed Howard’s interesting movie blog: here’s a student film from 1991 that was faithfully adapted from Richard McGuire’s legendary short comic “Here”.

The acting is pretty minimal, but I really love the way they represented the story’s panels-within-panels.

• The local bad boy of illustration and strategically deployed facial hair, Mark Haven Britt, has a new website which I did the technical side of.
  
• Yet another person I don’t know why I didn’t know about: Miranda July has a scrumptious website; see also her project Learning to Love You More. (This makes me wonder what Kerthy Fix is doing these days.)
  
• Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York is a funny, sad, pissed-off journal of dumb things happening to a great place, as they often do—mixed with beautiful writing about well-loved things that are still there. (Good grief, I didn’t know they’re actually calling the meatpacking district “MePa” now.)
  
• Franklin Einspruch paints The Moon Fell On Me, sort of comics haiku.
  
• Were the basic characteristics of Newtonian physics determined by the way that Indo-European languages treat space and time? Sadly for us fantasy-minded romantics, they weren’t at all, but the evidence is nifty.
  
• I kinda like the Grateful Dead, but creatively insulting the Grateful Dead is good too.
  
• Provocative digressions for the morbid are at The Chaos of Death.
  
• If you find yourself running for higher office, here’s how to renounce Farrakhan.