Here, courtesy of Tuesday’s Scotsman, a lovely transcript of his chat yesterday with Tony Blair, which was unknowingly and unwittingly broadcast over a G8 microphone:

The transcript

Bush: Yo, Blair. How are you doing?

Blair: I’m just…

Bush: You’re leaving?

Blair: No, no, no, not yet. On this trade thingy… (inaudible)

Bush: Yeah, I told that to the man.

Blair: Are you planning to say that here or not?

Bush: If you want me to.

Blair: Well, it’s just that if the discussion arises…

Bush: I just want some movement.

Blair: Yeah.

Bush: Yesterday we didn’t see much movement.

Blair: No, no, it may be that it’s not, it may be that it’s impossible.

Bush: I am prepared to say it.

Blair: But it’s just I think that we need to be an opposition…

Bush: Who is introducing the trade?

Blair: Angela Merkel, the German chancellor.

Bush: Tell her to call ’em.

Blair: Yes.

Bush: Tell her to put him on, them on the spot. Thanks for [inaudible] it’s awfully thoughtful of you.

Blair: It’s a pleasure.

Bush: I know you picked it out yourself.

Blair: Oh, absolutely, in fact [inaudible].

Bush: What about Kofi? [inaudible] His attitude to ceasefire and everything else … happens.

Blair: Yeah, no I think the [inaudible] is really difficult. We can’t stop this unless you get this international business agreed.

Bush: Yeah.

Blair: I don’t know what you guys have talked about, but as I say I am perfectly happy to try and see what the lie of the land is, but you need that done quickly because otherwise it will spiral.

Bush: I think Condi is going to go pretty soon.

Blair: But that’s, that’s, that’s all that matters. But if you… you see it will take some time to get that together.

Bush: Yeah, yeah.

Blair: But at least it gives people…

Bush: It’s a process, I agree. I told her your offer to…

Blair: Well…it’s only if I mean… you know. If she’s got a…, or if she needs the ground prepared as it were… Because obviously if she goes out, she’s got to succeed, if it were, whereas I can go out and just talk.

Bush: You see, the … thing is what they need to do is to get Syria, to get Hezbollah to stop doing this s*** and it’s over.

Blair: [inaudible]

Bush: [inaudible]

Blair: Syria.

Bush: Why?

Blair: Because I think this is all part of the same thing.

Bush: Yeah.

Blair: What does he think? He thinks if Lebanon turns out fine, if we get a solution in Israel and Palestine, Iraq goes in the right way…

Bush: Yeah, yeah, he is sweet.

Blair: He is honey. And that’s what the whole thing is about. It’s the same with Iraq.

Bush: I felt like telling Kofi to call, to get on the phone to Assad and make something happen.

Blair: Yeah.

Bush: [inaudible]

Blair: [inaudible]

Bush: We are not blaming the Lebanese government.

Blair: Is this…? (At this point Blair taps the microphone in front of him and the sound is cut.)

———————————————————————–

I like the fact that George complimented Tony on his choice of gift, which is in fact a sweater that Tony picked out himself. (Or maybe the inaudible part is Tony admitting to having knit it himself.)

Between you and me, I think that some folks out there are intentionally catching these sorts of things in an attempt to discredit our nation’s leader. But then again, there mustn’t be many of them. After all, he has got to be saying a lot more stupid stuff that we aren’t hearing.

Yo! Way more, dude.

Your Animal Personality

Your Power Animal: DeerAnimal You Were in a Past Life: Panda You are a fun-seeker – an adventurous, risk-taker. While you are spontaneous, you are not very rational.

The thing is, I got this from Tabitha, who remarked on the peculiarity of the description of herself, contrasted with the image of a squid.

Now I am wondering (a) why I have exactly the same results as the only other person I’ve seen who has taken the test, and (b) what’s up with that squid, and (c) do they only have one set of possible results, and (d) damnit– now that I think of it, if this isn’t a “rational” response, I don’t know what is.

There was no explanation of who put this there or why. But when I encounter such things in my neighborhood, I always attribute them to the artists.

Another example: the appearance last year of plastic professionally-printed stickers (about 3 x 4 inches) pasted over the “push button for walk signal” button on crosswalk posts. Last February, New Yorkers found out from the NYTimes that those buttons–in the vast majority of cases, I believe it was something like 75% or 80%–do not work. Here’s a link to the article, but it’s no longer free. (Hey, I am an academic, I must compulsively document my vaguely remembered sources.) Anyway, the stickers that some wise folks had posted over the directions now said, “Push Button for Luck.”

They gave me many smiles, and I consider that lucky, don’t you?

The other thing that’s great about living in this neighborhood, with its low population and high percentage of arty folk, is that fashion-wise, anything goes. I am not talking about the dirty old 70′s t-shirts that pass for arty on the less-creative hipsters who stumble off the G-train from Williamsburg, confused and disoriented, looking for that happening party at PS1.

I’m talking women on bicycles with spiked hair, orange workmen’s boiler suits, and combat boots (dirty, not couture) speckled with paint. You can wear anything in this neighborhood and not look strange. And if you’re a woman with no makeup, they assume you’ve got something else going on. (That’s kind of true of true in NYC in general, except that on the big island of Manhattan, the tourists are always there to gawp and point at the more creative locals, like my tripped out transvestite comrade riding the D train, looking like a Chrismahanakwanzakah Tree in full technicolor-patterned skirt and very-much-contrasting blouse, faux fur, and tinsel. He was beautiful.) But here in artist-central, anything goes. It’s heavenly. Perhaps a bit on the mundane side of daring, but it suits me.

By the way, you’ll notice that the new verbal chameleon does not apologize for not posting in a month. The new verbal chameleon is an older, wiser, more economical, less apologetic, shinier, fluffier verbal chameleon. In short, the new verbal chameleon has been busy, but will do her best to keep you informed.

She wishes you all the best for the season. Um, if you’re still there?

This article really, really pissed me off. Because I know people like this. People who want to make their dogs violent, uncontrollable killers.

I used to live in a fairly pleasant working-class neighborhood in the North Bronx where every male from 12 onwards either seemed to have, or want to have, a pit bull. I saw many a teenaged boy get his first pit pup, and in polite park or street conversations, they’d brag about his lineage, his red nose (“they’re the craziest”). I had relatively similar one-sided conversations with men of all ages around there, many of whom had been raising pits for years.

At the local Vet’s office, nearly every dog person who came in had a tough dog and a little dog. A shih-tzu and a pit; a chihuahua and a rottie. One for the lap, and one to protect the lap, presumably. Of course, most people loved the tough dog and cuddled it just as much. Most people just liked dogs.

When I first got Sasha, he played happily with lots of these pits. I met many a sweet-natured pit bull. I knew some of them grew to be unmanageable, even as they were adorable pups. But others didn’t.

Over time, we’d encounter more and more nasty humans with nasty dogs, almost always pits. Their people would do things like threaten and bully other people out of the dog park, so their dog could be alone there. Or they’d instead encourage unwitting folks to let their dogs play with what turned out to be violent dogs. A breach of dog park rules, let alone human decency.

One woman seemed to have a nice pair of pits, and my dog played happily with them, until one of them nipped the other a bit too enthusiastically, and he bled. The scent of blood on her brother seemed to make her crazy. She lunged and angrily barked at him, as I hastily got my dog out. I was horrified. The owner did not seem to see a problem with her actions. But me and my lot hightailed out of there, as she tried to control her dogs on their leashes, one dripping with blood.

I learned to avoid the tough owners and their tough dogs, and my dog learned to fear and hate pits.

Still, the dog park was mostly decent, and 95% of people and their dogs were the salt of the earth.

Then one day I was with a spanish-speaking South American friend I’d met there and her mutt, who understood commands only in German: “Sitz, Mackie!”

They had lived in Austria previously, with her German-speaking partner, which explained the dog’s linguistic orientation. To this day, my own dog responds to Sitz!, the word of German he learned by watching Mackie.

My dog is bilingual in one word.

I am sure she must have given him a treat when she told him to sitz. Heck, if I brought enough treats, he’d probably take classes at the Goethe Institute.

And you have to love a mutt named after “Mackie Messer,” Mack the Knife from the Threepenny Opera. But I digress.

Anyway, the worst incident was when this friend and I arrived to find an eerily-realistic human form hanging from a tree in the dog run. A bundle of rags for a head, a shirt, pair of pants, pair of shoes, all stuffed, hanging 4-5 feet off the ground from a rope noose. As we approached, we only gradually came to see that someone had not actually hung themselves in the dog park. A nice guy we knew and had often walked and talked with came along soon after and we reported it to the cops patrolling the park. It was taken down.

The hanging dummy meant that they’d been training pits to attack human bodies, right there in the dog park. I did not go there much after that.

Incidentally, this was before 9/11. I never saw the nice guy again, and did not know his last name. (If there’s one thing having a dog does for you, it’s that you meet and talk to an awful lot more people in your neighborhood, people you usually never really get to know.) I knew he worked somewhere in lower Manhattan, perhaps even the WTC, and because of this, I will always, always worry about him. I hope he just moved away.

That’s one of the legacies of 9/11 for me: wondering about people you didn’t run into after that. Wondering if anyone you knew, but did not know well enough to check on, was lost.

Verbal Chameleon: How can they eat raw cow testicles and not get sick?

The Sicilian: Man, I don’t know.

VC: I once knew a guy that was living among a tribe in Africa. He was given a piece of an animal’s heart or liver or some other organ in this ceremony; it was ritually important for everyone to eat it. So he did. Now he has Hepatitis or something. Some kind of Hepatitis you can’t get rid of.

TS: Hepatitis? Wow. I wonder if Zombies get that.

VC: Zombies?

TS: Yeah , you know. Zombies.

VC: But–what are Zombies, exactly? Dead people?

TS: Yeah, you know, the walking dead.

VC: Okay.

TS: So, you know, they eat all those livers, kidneys, all kinds of things. I wonder if they get Hepatitis.

VC: But they’re dead! They’re already dead. So what the heck does it matter if they catch a virus??? Anyway, don’t they eat everything? Or are they simply partial to the inner organs?

TS: I don’t know. I also wonder if they ever get enough, or if they just eat and eat and eat.

Though it does sound like a sensationalist fundamentalist Christian novel about the aftermath of a medical supply Rapture, “When surgical tools are left behind” was the compelling title of a show on TLC tonight. The Sicilian and I were having dinner and looking for a little electromagnetically charged entertainment. However, as is so often the case, there were 200 channels or more, and not a single thing on worth watching. No Russian films on the CUNY channel, no CBC news, not even those wonderful commercials for South Asian psychics on Zee TV, nothing. And as compelling as the idea of finding out what happens when surgical tools get left behind was, I could not watch it.

But I did have a convulsive fit of laughter. At the title, at the idea of a show about this. What’s disturbing is that there are (a) enough cases of this to do a show about it, and (b) footage (I assume).

And here’s a photo I took of one of the vast number of painted cows exhibited last June in Prague. It’s modelling a representation of the Astronomical Clock in Staromestske namesti.

This is not a very exciting moment for you, to be sure, but since I have used up virtually all my blogging time on that today, this is it.

Would it make things better if I include a picture and a fun scientific article?

Here’s a mole that just can’t eat fast enough. Yes, that’s his nose.
I think I may once have dated this guy…

It was one of those creative variations on the panhandle–singing from people who are not musicians being the most popular one I’ve seen. And this was original; I’d never seen it before. I wondered if this was just the service contemporary urban dwellers needed.

Case in point: on Thursday night I was at the slum veterinarian’s office. That’s my pet name for the vet I’ve been going to for years. He is in a rough area in an outer borough. In that ‘hood, everyone who has a dog has both a tough dog and a frou-frou dog: a pit and a shih-tzu, a rottie and a poodle, that sort of thing. One for the lap, and one to scare the people you want to scare. (Most of the pits and rotties are sweet little mushes anyway, but their appearance does the trick.)

The slum veterinarian is kind and damn good at his job. He also charges half of what any other vet charges. As a student, I find this to be the winning combination: good and cheap. So even though I’ve long since moved out of that area, and it is way out of my way, I make the trek there when my pets need anything. They’re well-cared for there.

But the slum veterinarian’s low prices come at a cost: they’re always overcrowded. They take walk-ins after people with appointments, but even with an appointment, you’ll wait an hour. And pick-ups can be 45 minutes. Plus the waiting room is small, usually kind of dirty, and overcrowded. It’s like the public hospital ER, except more of the patients will try and lick your hand.

So the other night, there I was, waiting to pick up my little shaggy monster after he got his dental cleaning. (This may sound silly to those not in the know, but small dogs often need their teeth cleaned–and it requires general anaesthetic!) And I am waiting for a bit. And while I am waiting, a twenty-something couple with a pair of pugs in tiny human t-shirts are getting more and more agitated.

It becomes apparent that the receptionist is having trouble finding their file. And she has asked them a few times to spell their last name. And though his woman is trying to get him to calm down, saying, “let’s not have an argument here,” the man completely loses it, after spelling his name and the dogs’ a few more times, he jumps up and starts yelling. What-kind-of-a-place-are-you-people-running, etc., etc.

And he throws (yes throws) his little pug down on the floor, rather too roughly for my taste. And as the woman gathers the pugs and watches, the man waves his arms and tells off first the receptionist and then the good doctor, who has heard what’s going on and come out. More words are exchanged, and the exasperated-but-still-cool doctor asks the young man to leave and go to another animal hospital.

This makes the man even angrier, as he grabs what looks to be a laptop case, “What do I look like to you? Some trash off the street?” And as the woman is taking the dogs towards the door, the man comes in for a final approach, pointing at the doc’s sign-in sheet and saying, “You’re lucky. If my name wasn’t on this piece of paper, I’d bash your face in!”

Then the vet tells his good receptionist to call 911, and the man expresses more horror at this latest insult directed towards him. As the vet repeats the request, the man exits, and for several minutes can be heard raving in anger as he goes down the street.

The thing is, I think I know what he feels like. The place can be a pain–all that waiting after a long day. And didn’t I have my own frustration earlier this week when I thought the customer service in the physician’s office was exceptionally bad? Though I personnally did not go medieval on anyone’s ass, the leap from frustration to anger and threats seems to snowball these days: in the post office, the grocery store, at stoplights in cars, people are losing their cool left and right.

When the man was well gone and my dear mutt was being presented to me with his newly odor-free grin, I said to the vet, “You know, I always worry when someone goes off like that, what if he has a gun or a knife?”

The good vet took my left hand and held it to his hip. “That’s why I carry this.”

It isn’t often I touch a man’s loaded gun.

I wondered later if what the angry-pug-man needed was not a visit to our friend in Times Square. Tell him off for $2.00. Hell, it would be my treat.

Note to my readers: something funny was going on with my site this week. I could not log on for three days, though the site stayed up. I think it’s passed now. And to those who did not see comments appear for a while–comments are moderated. And usually up within a day. But this week, I could not moderate them while the site was down. They are up and running again. Comments do work, and I love them, so please keep ‘em coming!