Wild Monkeys!

Hey Free Thinker

2009-06-28T07:17:30Z

The '80s should've been far more like this:

(h/t to Ducky for the song, which led me to the video on a video-discovery-rich night)

Annual less-online time

2009-06-23T08:17:59Z

I've got five briefs and one misdemeanor trial left to finish in this big work push before the Country Fair, and then I'll be onsite for 13 days. I'm not going to be online a whole lot during that period (through July 14). I look forward to catching up with everyone thereafter -- but most of all, if you can come to the Fair, do it!

Cold fury

2009-06-01T06:32:31Z

I have been more outraged by the brutal, senseless murder of Dr. George Tiller than by any number of atrocities in the world over the last several years. It cuts to the quick of what I believe in. His blood is not just on the hands of the killer and his immediate ideological allies, but also on hundreds of politicians' hands: the hands of those who have fought to marginalize and ghettoize women's reproductive health care generally and abortion services specifically. They created the climate that led to this killing. Many of them are, with whatever crocodile tears, celebrating it tonight. They are anathema to me.

Kitty status: improving

2009-05-29T15:21:22Z

Thanks for your good thoughts and wishes. Dalilah is improving.

Funniest diversion of the day

2009-05-27T21:51:43Z

The 30 worst unicorn tattoos.

Credit to Ian McCullough and Andrew Sullivan for the link.

Dalilah

2009-05-27T20:13:48Z

Our beloved Dalilah, aka Pokey-Paw, a Chartreux cat, is ill with a severe bladder infection, right on the heels of another one a few weeks back. She's fifteen and we've had many health scares over the last six years, so we're certainly sensitive to the possibility of saying goodbye to her this time. But subcutaneous fluids and antibiotics have restored her appetite, which had been scarily absent, so we'll see. This time we have the complexity of having a three-year-old who's lately been learning a lot about the natural world, including death, in the picture. On the other hand, it could be a really healthy, positive thing for her, handled correctly. Anyway, we're all just trying to keep Dalilah alive, or, failing that, comfortable.

Update: she is doing much better, thankfully.

Happy Renn Fayre

2009-05-03T15:24:13Z

Thanks for keeping it real, Reed and Reedies. I was able to attend as much of Renn Fayre as I ever do as a parent, and to enjoy my retirement from Meatsmoke leadership. Great job, next generations of smokers and Renn Fayre staff! I had a super time and I hope all of you who attended did, too.

First of May

2009-05-01T17:44:30Z

Thanks to paraleipsis for the link.

Joy

2009-05-01T14:37:41Z

Happy Renn Fayre! Happy Beltane! Happy festival season!

A favored memory

2009-04-19T05:03:36Z

Was anyone else influenced as a child by Stanley Kiesel's The War Between the Pitiful Teachers and the Splendid Kids? For some reason it came back to me today. I commend it to your attention.

Voice Post

2009-04-11T01:29:41Z

The end of time

2009-04-08T04:44:16Z

“I like to fuck,” she said,
And so I said, “Fuck me, then,"
And she said, “No.”

So there we were, best friends
Who told each other stories
About sex, about work, about the ways —
What gives, what goes,
Who takes what for comment —
That, complimenting all turns of style,
The praise-horns, picked up, hoot
And are put down.

“Codgers, ear-haired, careworn,
Sweet old men in overalls and baseball hats —
Girls in the cities dress the same:
All pigeons corner stores and statues.”

“A dog shake, a sprinkler —
Steam rising from empty roads in subdivisions:
Faces in the houses still quick to come and go,
But slowing down, as hunger gnaws, and snacking.”

“And you spend your nights wondering,” I said,
“If all of it's sick,
If all of it's not —
It all of it is,
It all of it's not.
One day it may well burst,
The black machines inside cut out,
Bleeding wires, lubricants, similacra,
Name-dropping, guano, a thousand shitting things.”

Or desert smell, or anything at all.

And so I said, “Sing me a poem,”
And she said, “Okay, but you realize,”
She said, “That all a poem demands
Is absolute honesty.”
And I said, “Okay, then,
Honesty it is.”

“And so, a poem, a thing —
I can't quite get a grip on it.
Am I telling you a poem?
A shifting thing of spirit, quick,
A daybright —
A four-gallon oyster hole,
Digging in the harbor floor,
The sea held back by temporary dams.”

“Improbably unpretentious non-art,
That's cleanliness without order —
A splintering thing, not real, not really;
An answer, anyway,
Like broad, shallow steps, carved high in the stone,
Swept free of ice and dirt.”

A breath.

“Clapped in irons for herbmongery,
A dangerous thing.
And free again by noon,
Skipping and laughing.
The busy dazy carnival in the streets.
A world coming to an end.”

And she said, “I dream of days to come,
Politics and school,
Bent over the computer again —
Not for every minute nor for always,
Or maybe always, but not every minute.
From looking outside, from in the world here to over there,
To looking from the inside out,
But, as we said, not always.”

“And so what we need is a dis-spiriting,” I said,
“Calling out the ghosts
So we can bury them.
The wires hum and seasons turn,” I said,
“And if you give me my choice,
Well, I'll turn with them.”

— Portland-Eugene-Portland, 1998-2009

Good day today

2009-03-29T06:46:33Z

From cooking and hosting a gourmet dinner party for two other couples and their total of three kids, to (earlier) watching all those kids and our own two (including elaborate kid painting project!) with one and then two of the other parents while D and the remaining two parents were at a spa getting massages and soaking and saunaing and so forth, to going running for the first time in forever, to helping a prosecutor-recently-turned-defense-lawyer acquaintance work on one of her first motions to suppress statements, to having gotten a bit of extra sleep in the morning, today was a good day.

What the raven said

2009-03-25T05:55:33Z

This is gonna be the most-linked xkcd in a while

2009-03-20T17:04:14Z

Charovnitsa

2009-01-19T00:28:59Z

My beloved big black bicycle, Charovnitsa (Russian for Enchantress/Sorceress/Witch), was stolen from my back yard, evidently last night. Because the windstorm (the December one, not the most recent one) had blown our side gate down, she was visible, and I had glaringly omitted to lock her up. She was my bike since my previous bike was stolen from my Reed house in the Summer of 1993. We had many adventures together. I am sad to see her go out like that.

I, for one, welcome our new saurian overlords

2008-11-21T04:25:44Z

(explanation)

Most influential books

2008-11-09T23:44:00Z

OK, here's a new book meme by me. List the 20-odd books you have personally read that have been most influential in your life. By personally read, I mean that we aren't talking about indirect effects of famous books you haven't read. By influential, I mean intellectually, spiritually, politically, aesthetically, or any other way you might be influenced (e.g., books that have shaped habits or hobbies of yours). I'm not referring to your favorite stories qua stories -- plenty of mine are omitted from the list below. The question here is lasting effect.

* * *

bonobo23's most influential books (alphabetically by author's name)

David Arora, Mushrooms Demystified
T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Tortilla Curtain
Susie Bright, Susie Bright's Sexual Reality, SexWise, and The Sexual State of the Union
Edward Espe Brown, The Tassajara Cookbook
Pat Califia, Public Sex
Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia and Ecotopia Emerging
Edward De Grazia, Girls Lean Back Everywhere
Nancy Friday, My Secret Garden, Forbidden Flowers, Men in Love, and Women on Top
Joel Garreau, The Nine Nations of North America
Stephen Gaskin, Amazing Dope Tales
Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
Robert Heinlein, Friday
Ursula LeGuin, Always Coming Home (probably my favorite single book)
Markos Moulitsas Zúniga and Jerome Armstrong, Crashing the Gates
George Orwell, 1984
Alexei Panshin, Rite of Passage
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma
Ram Dass, Be Here Now
Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars, Blue Mars, and Green Mars (definitely my favorite series)
Kim Stanley Robinson, Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below Zero, and Sixty Days and Counting
Spider Robinson, Mindkiller and Time Pressure
Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Romauer Becker, and Ethan Becker, et al., The Joy of Cooking
Sasha Shulgin and Ann Shulgin, PIHKAL and TIHKAL
Gary Snyder, No Nature
Starhawk, The Spiral Dance
Marco Vassi, The Stoned Apocalypse
Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger
Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, Illuminatus!
Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States

Yes we did

2008-11-05T17:39:32Z

Now to undo Prop 8.

My calls

2008-10-31T19:41:53Z

We still have to work for it, but for the record, I am going to make the following predictions for the election. If you, too, help work for it, these things (and more!) will come to pass:

PRESIDENT

Barack Obama states, in rough order of the time he will be projected to have won them: VT, DC, DE, ME, NH, CT, MD, MA, NJ, IL, RI, MN, WI, MI, NY, VA, PA, IA, NM, CO, IN, GA, NC, FL, HI, OR, WA, CA, ND, MO, OH, NV, MT for a total of 396 electoral votes

John McCain states, in a similar order: KY, SC, MS, OK, AL, TN, AR, WY, SD, NE, KS, LA, TX, WV, UT, AZ (barely), ID, AK for a total of 142 electoral votes

Time Barack Obama will be projected to have won the election: roughly 8:10 pm PST.

SENATE

Democratic gains in Republican-held seats: VA, NM, CO, NH, NC, MN, AK, OR, GA (D+9)

Republican gains in Democratic-held seats: none

HOUSE

Democrats gain 33 seats and lose 3 for a net gain of 30

GUBERNATORIAL

Democrats pick up the Missouri governorship and retain all theirs, including Chris Gregoire, for a net gain of 1

STATE LEGISLATIVE

Democrats gain control of several state legislative chambers and lose none

INITIATIVES

Prop 8 narrowly fails in California

The Washington assisted suicide initiative passes

In Oregon, Measures 57 and 61 both pass but 57 gets more votes

The other Sizemore and Mannix measures all fail

Measure 65 passes, as do the housekeeping measures

OTHER OREGON/PORTLAND

Democrats win all 4 statewide races

Democrats hold steady in the Oregon Senate and gain at least 3 seats in the House

Amanda Fritz beats Charles Lewis

For victory

2008-10-31T03:33:20Z

What are you going to do over the next 120-odd hours to work for a victory for Barack Obama and other Democratic candidates?

I have been using my mad legal skillz (more like phone skillz, really) helping voters with ballot problems here in Oregon (¡occasionally in hilariously accented Spanish!). On Election Day, I will be monitoring the vote count in Washington County for the Oregon Democratic Lawyers' Committee from 9:30 to 5, then making get-out-the-vote calls until the polls close (after the Night Lawyers come on duty).

And you?

As I have said in all media to which I can gain access, if you need help plugging in with any progressive campaign, anywhere in the country, feel free to contact me. They need your time way more than your money at this point.

The Obama movie

2008-10-30T05:20:47Z

We are going to win this election! Not getting overconfident here. Just trusting my brothers and sisters to WORK for it.

Updated version

2008-10-22T04:30:19Z

h/t to my old housemate Adam

Best candidate website ever

2008-10-20T22:11:20Z

You have got to go check this out. And then donate!

Thoughts on thinking

2008-10-20T20:14:42Z

A link by kos to Xark turned up this other very cool post.