Maybe things will run a bit more smoothly from here in?

Cyrille de Lasteyrie (aka Vinvin) is a genius, and I am not in the habit of using such terms loosely. His Bonjour America is the best thing I have ever seen (for free, on the web). I discovered him while trying to catch up with Bicyclemark’s recent blog postings. (It’s a truism that most of my good internet finds come from Bicyclemark.) He’s a Frenchman who has something to say to America. And he is a very funny man. What’s refreshing is that while Vinvin is critical of American culture and foreign policy, his commentary is (from what I have seen) always funny and never facile. He obviously loves us, dislikes Bush, and wants to teach us about cheese.

Go and watch “The Frencheese Project.” As Vinvin says,

You’ll be scared, and then you’ll learn a few things about cheese. Is the french cheese good for the health? This is the big question of this episode!

Or watch “What do we think about America? A big poll,” and find out what the French think about Dick Chenay. (Yes, Dick Chenay.)

Or just enjoy a nice impersonation of Charlie Sheen with a French accent.

What could be better? Well, there is a whole archive worth of vlogs from Bonjour America. So have fun answering that question yourself. And do answer it, please. If I keep posting at the heady rate of once every 5 weeks, I do expect you to try and keep up. In return, I will endeavor always to include a picture, Dear Reader, for your enjoyment.

#4 with the search “Picture of a man giving chapati to a dog”
#5 for “sagittarius chameleon”
#6 for “the strangest chameleon”
#9 for “Matt Groening volunteering”

I’m also inexplicably #2 on yahoo for “Jorge the chameleon,” and people also surfed in from Yahoo searches for “washing machine humor,” and the more disturbing “video of jeff weise walking through hallway.”

Let me also take this moment to apologize to all those students (Hello Birkbeck College, London!) whose attempts at finding entries for +chameleon and +zoology here so miserably failed them. As an education professional, let me take this moment to encourage you to begin your research in your university library’s electronic databases.

The other magic kitchen trick that I know is this: if your soup / stew is too salty, add a raw potato. It will soak up the salt. (And that’s why if you ever eat a soup or stew that is too salty, it will be the potatoes that are the saltiest part.)

That’s all I got right now.

You got any tips for me? Non-kitchen tips are probably the most interesting.
Discuss.

In other news, the BBC has been running a series of articles on the digital age: interviews with bloggers, podcasters, creative commons devotees; they’ve also been soliciting readers’ views on how the digital age has changed their lives. While some of those articles are rather superficial, I really appreciate that the BBC is taking this on as an ongoing theme. Some of the articles are more practical: this one on blogging while on vacation. Or their article on RSS feeds. Very hands-on.

And although usually in the past I’ve found that writing a nice wee blog entry gets the old gears working, and serves as a warm-up for the writing I’m supposed to be doing, somehow, the last few weeks, I haven’t written anything at all.

I have cast out a few nets for dissertation fellowships, and am waiting to see if any of them come in. The hopes are slim. As the time to finding out about them approaches, I have been mega-stressed-out to the point of intellectual paralysis (thank you, Mr. James Joyce) by the process of waiting to see if I will have a fellowship or a new job for next year. (My current job ends in August.) This is not to excuse what is, at the end of the day, procrastination. But I am trying to figure out its cause, and I think I’ve got it.

I don’t like waiting. This happens on a day-to-day basis: if I have something to do later in the day, something exciting (whether it’s teaching a new workshop, or hosting a public event), it’s really hard for me to focus on doing anything substantial in the meantime (rote, mindless work is just fine, but nothing involving the whole brain). It’s as if my adrenaline stores are already gearing up for later, and I’m caffeinated before I even walk towards the espresso machine.

I have noticed this for some time.

But I had not recognized the fact that this inability to focus in the face of an upcoming event–in this case, news of my future financial status–can occur over a period of weeks or months.

It’s darned frustrating.

As an aside, I had a wonderful dream a few weeks back (before a trip to the dentist), in which a dentist did all of my tooth x-rays, then showed me the curve of my teeth along the jaw, and pronounced me as having ADD, based on this. In the dream, I said, “Ahh, that makes total sense.” Of course, I have never been diagnosed with ADD. But I liked the idea that dentists could see something of your personality through their bite-wings. And, coward as I am, I preferred being told I had ADD to being told I needed dental-work.

My few regular readers have probably thought I’ve lost my marbles: first software reviews, and now self-analysis. What next?

I note that I won’t be apologizing, dear readers, for the slackiness of my posting, and then–when I do post–the non-blogginess of it all (I resisted posting two more NYT articles today.) I know I am letting you down, but I am nonetheless eschewing the self-inflicted guilt-trip. Though I did begin an apology, before deleting it.

Apparently you have to take what you can get. Call it a potluck of a blog. (Oh, we Quakers, we love our potlucks.) Bear with me! And if any of you has any part-time jobs on offer starting in about September, let me know. I only get writer’s block with my own work…

The question of whether iPods choose songs in a truly random fashion, or not, has been much discussed of late. Though Apple engineers have claimed there is nothing but pure randomness at work, many iPod owners, like myself, are quite skeptical.

Even within a playlist, it seems to select certain songs over others. When I set the thing to shuffle my “five-star songs,” it comes back time and time again to “For the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” by the Beatles, “Bizarre Love Triangle,” by New Order, and Louis Armstrong’s “Mack the Knife.” On the other hand, it never, ever plays Lotte Lenya’s “Moritat von Mackie Messer,” from the same list. What’s with that? It loves “Sex and Candy” by Marcy Playground. (I never did hear another song by that band, so help me. But no girl with a Fender bass in her closet could resist that bass line.) All of these choices are ones I approve of–except I like the German “Mack the Knife” better. But it does make me wonder what this thing is up to.

I was thinking about posting this as I walked from the bus this morning, and I was going to say, “Damn, why won’t the thing play Linton Kwesi Johnson?!?” And then, like magic, LKJ came on, singing “Lorrain.”

I am not a techno-snob, or a materialistic person (just a Mac-junkie), so I did not mean to direct a posting at iPod owners. But if you do have one, or if you use iTunes to listen from your computer, I’m curious to hear what songs it wants you to listen to, when it’s doing the driving.

In it, he puts his finger right on the button, to mix an old Cold War metaphor, of what’s wrong with American policy today: the Rapture Index. Basically, the idea is this: an enormous number of Americans (some say 1/3) are living like there’s no tomorrow–because they believe there won’t be. The idea of the Rapture, when they believe Jesus will come and take the devout away with him, is a rationale for not giving a rat’s arse about the environment. Moyers describes the difficulty of working to solve our environmental problems in such a climate:

As difficult as it is, however, for journalists to fashion a readable narrative for complex issues without depressing our readers and viewers, there is an even harder challenge – to pierce the ideology that governs official policy today. One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the oval office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington. Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a world view despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.

Its outline is rather simple, if bizarre (the British writer George Monbiot recently did a brilliant dissection of it and I am indebted to him for adding to my own understanding): once Israel has occupied the rest of its ‘biblical lands,’ legions of the anti-Christ will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who have not been converted are burned, the messiah will return for the rapture. True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to heaven, where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts, and frogs during the several years of tribulation that follow.

And from the George Monbiat article published in the Guardian on 20 April 2004:

By clicking on www.raptureready.com, you can discover how close you might be to flying out of your pyjamas. The infidels among us should take note that the Rapture Index currently stands at 144, just one point below the critical threshold, beyond which the sky will be filled with floating nudists. Beast Government, Wild Weather and Israel are all trading at the maximum five points (the EU is debating its constitution, there was a freak hurricane in the South Atlantic, Hamas has sworn to avenge the killing of its leaders), but the second coming is currently being delayed by an unfortunate decline in drug abuse among teenagers and a weak showing by the Antichrist (both of which score only two).

Actually, that was almost a year ago. The Rapture Index today is 154. Anything over 145 is described in the key as “fasten your seat belts.” (Odd, that, since the bumper sticker I refer to in my title implies that the Raptured will float upwards from their cars.)

Sometimes it is easy for us progressive folks to talk about how stupid fundamentalists can be. (Of course, it’s only really PC to diss Christian fundamentalists.) Harder than dismissing them, though, is trying to figure out how they got to their beliefs. And in the same world in which I got to mine, as a lefty Quaker, and you got to yours, as a liberal athiest, and how he got to his, as a progressive Muslim, and so on.

It’s easy to say, “what idiots.” Harder to figure out how to convince them to care about our agenda. Do we say, “Yes, I know you believe the Rapture will come and we (me and my ilk) will all be left behind, and who cares what happens to sinners. But do you mind taking out the garbage so those of us left on the planet to rot after you’re gone can survive a little longer?”

See, it’s hard. I could not think of what to say that wasn’t snotty.

You know, I want to ask how they believe their God would want them to ignore the destruction of earth. And what if the Rapture comes later rather than earlier? Do you want your kids to get asthma and skin cancer and live under global warming and never see a whale?

And then, I also get creeped out how the whole “legions of the anti-Christ will attack Israel…” prediction plays right into both Israel getting the rest of its Biblical lands back, as well as a middle eastern war that destroys the new Israelites. And then the Rapture. So anything we can do to hasten mayhem in the middle east is going to bring the Rapture all that much faster. (And, Hello, Israel, are you listening? Fund-y Republicans only want to help your land increase as they wait for your impending wars, after which you will have to become Jews for Jesus right quick, or be destroyed. Does that really fit in with your prophecies? Doesn’t that piss you off? Aren’t you starting to feel a little used?)

And you know, the more people that are looking forward to Armageddon, the more likely it is to happen. Nothing to do with God; it’s called a self-fulfilling prophecy. But then, I am dealing in cause and effect here. And you know where I learned about cause and effect? In science classes. And you know those ain’t popular with religious fundamentalists.

But there I go again. Fundamentalists are not evil, they’re just like you and me. They’re my cousins, in fact, and some of them are the salt of the friggin’ earth. But in this area, misguided. They’re reading something literally that we’re not. I am not surprised there aren’t more fundamentalist English professors, ’cause you have to be able to see language as figurative, not only literal, in my world.

Those guys in the Old Testament may well have lived, but they didn’t live to be literally hundreds and hundreds of years old. We may have descended from a bloke in a fig leaf, but he may in turn have descended from tadpoles. It doesn’t all have to be mentioned in the text. “And then there was light,” “and on the sixth day he…:” all of it can be figurative. There can be a God, but it probably ain’t an old man with a long beard. And his son did not look like Errol Flynn. You have to have some imagination. (I learned that from PBS, that hotbed of evil, as a kid.)

What’s figurative can be true. And words can be true without being literally true.

I can deal with this; did reading poetry and stories teach me that?

CWA Applauds Education Secretary Spellings for Busting ‘Buster’; Group Urges Constituents to Voice Support for Her Action Against PBS

“For years, PBS has been slipping pro-homosexual messages into its programming,” said Robert Knight, director of CWA’s Culture & Family Institute. “And the federal bureaucracy and their client, the education establishment, have done their share to destroy children’s innocence using the cover of ‘diversity.’ Along comes Secretary Spellings, who takes action as a servant of the people instead of a timid, go-along bureaucrat. Good for her.”

Yes, clearly we should go back to the good old days when Bert and Ernie lived together quietly and humbly, under a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

The yet-to-be-aired episode of Postcards from Buster, titled “Sugartime,” features an animated rabbit taking a tour of Vermont during the early spring. Along with farm life and maple sugaring, the episode explores Vermont’s same-sex “civil unions” by featuring two lesbian couples.

Sugartime, indeed.

“Congress’ and the Department’s purpose in funding this programming certainly was not to introduce this kind of subject matter to children, particularly through the powerful and intimate medium of television,” Spellings added, requesting that a funding grant be returned and that the Department of Education be removed as a backer of the segment.

“Parents don’t want their children homosexualized in the name of ‘education,’” Knight said. “Mrs. Spellings has given notice that left-wing lobbies will have to find other ways to peddle their pansexual propaganda. Let’s hope that other leaders in federal and state agencies find a backbone thanks to her courageous example.”

Children are being homosexualized, now? What exactly does that mean? It sounds like being pasteurized; our children are being subjected to a process by which they’re made to be homosexual? And how come I never get to see any of this Pansexual Propaganda? That sounds interesting.

How interesting, Concerned Women, since the vast majority of homosexuals in the world grew up with straight parents, watching straight television. They did not have PBS to encourage them. No one in the American media before 1990 suggested being gay might be fun, or even, for that matter, alright. And we still have all these gay people running around trying to get married. What’s that all about? Could it be that people who are gay do not catch it from cartoon characters?

I apologize to my non-homophobic readers, for I appear to be engaging in one of my favorite rants. But until these people get some sense, I am afraid I will have to keep at it from time to time. Bear with me.