this weekend leads to love

well, it leads to valentine's day, anyway. of course, really, all those cards and things should be on tuesday, the ides (15th) of february, if we want to go for pagan origins instead of the corrupted catholic (then greeting card) version. see, valentine (one of several saints with the name, actually, but the one to which the holiday refers) was, according to catholica online, a holy priest in rome, who, along with saint marius (or rather, the guy that would later be named saint marius, cause the saint title doesn't apply retroactively, does it?), assisted the martyrs in the persecution under claudius ii. there are probably some nifty details about executions and torture that could fit in there, but the saint index doesn't bother with much detail. anyway, he was apprehended, and sent by the emperor to the prefect of rome, to make him renounce his faith. he refused and was beaten with clubs and beheaded february 14, about the year 270

why he got a holiday--i don't know. i guess he just got lucky in dying the day before a pagan party, namely the feast of the lupercalia, on the aforementioned ides of march (the same ides that figure in the death of julius caesar (44 bc), so why don't we make it caesar day and we could all eat salad and perform shakespeare; now, that'd be a holiday worth celebrating)). the feast of the lupercalia was about the goddess februata juno, the goddess of "fever" or passion in love

and, here's how it went:

pagan priests, called luperci (from the roman word for a wolf), would run the party from the lupercal cave on the palantine hill in rome, where romulus and remus were supposed to have been sheltered by that wolf mother of theirs. two naked young priests, assisted by vestal virgins--cause, what party is complete without vestal virgins?--would sacrifice a dog (in place of the harder to catch wolf, surely) and a goat. blood from the animals was spread on the priests' foreheads and wiped off with some wool dipped in milk. then, the priests dressed in loincloths made from the skin of the goat and ran about the city, scourging women with strips of skin taken from the sacrificed goat. now, that's a party. see, the romans believed that this flogging would purify them and assure their future fertility and easy childbirth

so, then came the shit the catholics kept (or corrupted, for a time). see, girls would write their names on slips of paper (called billets) and they'd go in an urn, and boys would pick them out, and that girl would be their partner for a day of erotic games and they were apparently expected to remain a couple for a year after (until the next ides of march came or the two of them decided to get married, whichever came first)

the catholic church, in trying to turn all this into saint valentine's day, tried putting saint's names on those billets. instead of finding an erotic game partner, the kids would find a saint to emulate in life, cause you know that's what adolescents want, a saint to emulate. that system didn't catch on, so, in the 1500s or so, catholics went back to the girl's name thing, and then the greeting card folks showed up and said, what the hell, why only pick one girl's name? why not have several girls? why not, instead of that random picking-out-of-an-urn thing, let's buy cards and give them to all the girls that we fancy, and screw those expectations of yearlong couplehood. hell, screw being a couple at all. send valentines to your best friend, your teacher, your parents, that creepy uncle that looks at you funny, your grandma, your brother. it's all about love, and who couldn't use a little more love?

ok, to be fair, the greeting card folks showed up later. the trading of homemade valentines started soemtime before the 1600s, after trying that saint's-name-on-the-card thing again. commercially available cards weren't until maybe a century later, and hallmark wasn't founded until 1910. but, still, we can blame all the extra decorations and crap on the card companies, certainly. and, they keep the exclusivity out of it--funny frazz yesterday made a thing of cards that said "for my one and only" coming in boxes of a dozen. but, that's how it is now, with elementary school kids making valentines in class and every student better get one or that just wouldn't be fair...

and religious folks wonder why kids grow up thinking less and less of monogamy and celibacy

same shit, different day
st paul, mn - a couple have been charged with counts of unreasonable restraint of a child (a misdemeanor). apparently, they locked their 11 year old (at the time) daughter in a chain link dog kennel (12' long, 3' wide, 6' high) as punishment a couple times. and, while that's nota great idea, certainly, but, the thing that got to me in the article i read about it was a quote from the county attorney prosecuting the case: "It's so incomprehensible that a couple would think it was OK ... appropriate ... to confine a young girl in a dog kennel"

seems obvious, i suppose. it's incomprehensible. who would dare think to imprison someone in a cage for several days? who would dare think to imprison someone inside something that's just chain link. we want our bad kids locked up in juvy, in cells of concrete and iron, not chain link. we save chain link for animals, duh

in other news, seattle's got a mandatory recycling law going into affect next year. and, apparently, madison, wisconsins and the entirety of connecticut already have such laws... and, apparently, so does pittsburgh, and my wife (from pittsburgh) never mentioned it, that i recall, even when we watched the bullshit! episode about recycling

and, for those still keeping score, the associated press estimates 1453 us military killed in iraq since the war began (1100 from hostile action, 1315 since bush's "mission accomplished" bit)

iranian president mohammad khatami vowed no iranian government would ever abandon the progress they've made in developing peaceful nuclear technology

same guy also said iran would become a "scorching hell" if aggressors (ie, our soldiers, duh) come marching in. the crowd to which he was speaking started chanting "death to america." bodes well, don't ya think?

israel's peace with palestine already hit a kink when the latest meeting was cancelled following a mortar attack on a jewish settlement in gaza

los angeles police killed a 13 year old boy after a car chase (he in a stolen car). might want to mention he was black, another dead black youth at the hands of the police, like the point is that he was black, and not that stealing a car is an offense punishable by death (regardless of skin color)

it's all good times at home and around the globe. the cultural cancer festers and spreads but at least we can drug ourselves to, as they say, make ourselves "comfortable" as we die. we can watch our television and take our prozac and worry about the latest fad diet and the abovementioned recyling (a tiny gesture that is occasionally useful), and not worry about deforestation or environmental poisoning or the lives lost in iraq (note, even i didn't mention the iraqi losses in my score above). we just get ourselves a little metaphorical morphine and rest our eyes (lest we actually see our world for what it is)

no point in dwelling on the negative when we can make ourselves feel good for now, right?

this "belief in god" stuff justifies anything. cool

it's something everyone knows, but sometimes the reminders are a bit annoying: history (and the present, sometimes) is written by the winners

oh, and, might makes right, and all that

as long as we're the good guys, as long as we're going to win, then everything we do is ok. iran can't try to get nuclear weapons (cause they signed the nonproliferation treaty, don't ya know?) but we can make new ones (even though we signed that same treaty)

in colorado, where professor ward churchill (who likened the workers at the world trade center to eichmann) quit his position as chairman of the university of colorado's ethnic studies department, david horowitz, "a champion of conservative causes who has long accused American universities of overstocking their faculties with leftists," said firing churchill would violate his rights and set a bad precedent but, let's just go ahead and investigate the university's hiring procedures to see how churchill managed, in today's political climate, to attain that chair in the first place. cause, surely, we wouldn't have someone so blatantly against our present political agenda in a position where he might influence young minds. we're in charge. we can't have those hippy liberal freaks teaching our kids that supporting the imperial machinery of america is wrong. the holy american empire must live on and conquer. these disruptive voices must be quashed, those who speak them ground into the dirt of the earth they so love

sure, eichmann supported the machinery of hitler's germany even while not subscribing to the nazi ideology, but those people in the world trade center were nothing like that. they didn't set up america to crush the weaker peoples of the world. they didn't make big business into what it is today. they just played their parts, completely innocent from what might come from american products, agendas and ideals being spread across the globe. they were no more legitimate targets for the "terrorists" than if we were to, say, blow up a mosque or a hospital or... oh, who am i kidding. all of their buildings are legitimate targets, because they are their buildings. if our god didn't want them to be destroyed, he'd let us know. and, if their god was powerful enough to stop us, wouldn't he have done it by now?

all hail emperor bush, the lord god and the american empire. down with our enemies and whatnot... kill them all and let allah sort them out

screw it, i'm going republican

you ever get the idea it's too late for humanity? like, we've corrupted every society we can find around the world, poisoned every square inch of the environment and now it's all just going to spiral down to our death (hoever long we might be able to drag that out)

that kind of thing makes me want to jump on the republican, warmongering bandwagon. i mean, if we're all going to die anyway, and life will likely get more miserable sometime in the future, possibly in the next few years, possibly not for more than a century (for the richer nations, anyway), shouldn't we get behind the conquerors already? it's our onyl chance to make sure we still have access to potable water and fuel and lumber and... well, anything we want; we can take anything from anybody if we just give up on being fair and wanting something better for the planet and our species. give up the dream of revolution, give up the dream of some sort of peace, coexistence without war (if not without violence), and the sky's the limit. hell, there is no limit. conquer everybody, make the world your oyster and your slave, and fuck the environment, fuck peace. we can live in our penthouse in the sky, our mansion in the hills, live it up in the lap of luxury until we die, and all the destruction will remain out of sight, out of mind, if we pay certain people to keep it that way. we can make the media not report on the ugly things. we can pay lowly, desperate immigrants to clean up local messes and make our nieghborhoods (for when we absolutely have to go out into them) look good. we can kill anyone who tries to fuck with us and destroy anything we need to destroy to get what we want, precious metals, gems, lumber for a new addition to the house, veal or steak or otter meat on a whim. there is no limit to life for the rich when the rich own everything. there is no limit for the conquer as long as he can keep on conquering, as long as he can subjugate everybody else to his will, press down his boot on the neck of mother nature herself until she stops acting like she's sick fo christ's sake

afterall, god put us in charge, right? we are the bosses of all the animals and they shoudl be proud when we choose them for our slaughterhouses, for pens and cages so small they can barely move, for dates with bolts fired into their skulls, feet jammed into conveyor belt hooks, throats slit, and none of it meaning anything cause they are little more than parts on an assembly line. only, this assembly line makes your dinner, instead of that suv you use to burn fossil fuels and pollute the world a little more. god wanted it this way. that's why christ will show up soon. forget that nonsense above about the environment dying, or the notion that our culture will finally collapse under the weight of her own excess. god knew what he was doing. and, he put us in charge, knownig damn well that we would take it upon ourselves to replace him, to amke decisions in his stead, to rule the roost with an iron fist and a sherman tank and an atomic bomb (and, we're making new ones of those, by the way, according to government officials and experts via the new york times), and screw the sissies who would have us be nice to animals and only kill them on occasion or never at all. god set this up, and he's omnipotent and knows all. he's perfect. he wouldn't have set all this up, so seemingly imperfect, if there weren't a big solution in the making, a magical finish line that will make it all better. see, we can overcut forests all we want. we can poison water sources, damn the dead fish and wildlife. we can manufacture radioactive weapons, chemical weapons, cause none of it matters. christ is coming, and it will all be ok. in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, he will return and all will be well (except for that whole final battle with the devil and all the horror that will bring, of course), and the believers will be swpet up into god's embrace and he'll kiss us and hold us and make it all better, and forgive us for fucking things up, cause, duh, that's what was supposed to happen... and why the hell didn't we destroy more trees? did we really think we had enough temples built already?

condi rice tells france to get over their disagreement with us (cause surely, it's pointless to dispute us, since we can blow them up just as easily as we're blowing up iraq), because that's what god wants, for every nation to stand behind the bulldozer of america. a suicide bomber blows himself up outside an army recruitment center in baghdad, killing 21 and injuring 27 and it's all in the name of allah and the thing of it is... it is in the name of allah, of elohim, of jehovah, of god the father and christ his son and the holy ghost and mother culture and her self destructive ways, caue it all fits, no matter what side of the war you're on, as long as you fight, as long as you make sure lives are lost, and resources are burned (literally or figuratively); it is all in the way of god, and any mistakes along the way will not matter once christ returns. the real enemies are the treehuggers, the folks of peta and greenpeace and truth and israeli prime minister ariel sharon and palestinian leader mahmoud abbas, who declared today that their people would stop all violent attacks against each other... but, i'm sure we can get them fighting again, with our terrorist factory in iraq. they can try for peace, and isn't it so damn adorable to see them try? but, in the end, we can still kill them, can still destroy their homes, so it is we the conquerers who will decide who lives and who dies and who gets to stop fighting. and, don't bother protesting, cause we can stomp on you protesters as easily as you'd stomp on a cockroach (not that you'd do that, you bug loving hippy bastards). and, don't bother with letters to congressman, cause they are in our back pockets and are dying to join and support us. don't you get it? you lost. the Left IS dead and god would have it no other way

seeing our shadow

ward egg ranch, san diego, california, february 2003: 15,000 hens, "spent" laying hens, their bodies so depleted of calcium they are useless for egg laying, are thrown, alive, into a wood chipper to die

chickens genetically altered to grow twice as large and twice as fast as they would naturally, according to a poultry industry journal says "grow so rapidly that the heart and lungs are not developed well enough to support the remainder of the body, resulting in congestive heart failure and tremendous death losses."

turkeys and chickens, stacked in crates atop one another, or sometimes kept four to a crate, often must be debeaked--the burning off of a portion of the beak, to make it less sharp--so as not to damage each other in their cramped quarters

birds that fall off the slaughterhouse conveyor belts are left to die, as taking the time to pick them up would delay production

dairy cows are impregnated so as to give birth every year and, through genetic manipulation and intensive production technologies, it's common for them to produce 100 lbs of milk a day (10 times more than they would naturally produce). like with the abovementioned hens, these cows often suffer from calcium depletion (more being taken out than their diet can put back in). and, their high energy diets (so as to get more milk produced) can cause serious metabolic disorders

newborn calfs are separated from their mothers, the females to be raised to be dairy cows like their mothers, the males to be raise for beef or crated to be raised for veal

the cia uses the following tactics (many used in abu ghraib):

• forced nudity and sexual situations (intended to violate muslim moral codes)
• use of unmuzzled dogs to threaten prisoners
• exposure to extremes of hot and cold
• sleep deprivation
• use of stress positions (binding in contorted or painful stances for long periods, or forced standing in one place)
• water boarding (tying the prisoner to a board and either dunking him in water or suffocating him with a soaking wet cloth, repeatedly to the point of near-drowning)

four young men died in california youth authority prisons last year. publicized reports had guards isolating young people in 6' by 9' cement cells for months at a time, abusing kids with chemical weapons and failing to provide basic levels of educational, medical and mental health care. a videotape of guards beating two youths made national news

yet, still we make war, we torture, and we shove generation after generation of animals into the factory process of the meat industry, generation after generation of humans into prisons or into armies. the catholic church pays millions to settle child abuse cases, our new attorney general promotes torture as a reasonable course of action

and, at gobbler's nob this morning, punxsutawney phil saw his shadow--or was pulled out of his fake stump, held up for the crowd to ooh and ahh and his pronouncement was made regardless of his involvement--so 6 more weeks of winter... but how many more weeks, months or years of abuse, imprisonment and violence do we get?

of course, who cares? we've got valentine's day coming up, then the oscars, st patrick's day, easter, and the occasions keep coming... and, no one bothers to fix anything or acknowledge anything bad for any moment long enough to distract them from picking out new cell phones or drooling over the new suv behemoth or fretting over what's going on over in the oc or on csi or law & order or desperate housewives

and, today we get the state of the union, bush's attempt to justify all the shit he's going to put us through rather than an honest appraisal of the union or her state

the good news

militiamen killed 16 people and kidnapped at least 34 girls last week in the congo

a un report has concluded that no ?genocide? was committed in sudan?s darfur region, where tens of thousands of civilians have died in the past two years, and an estimated 1.8 million have been displaced, not to mention more than 70,000 dead from hunger and disease. but, there?s no ?genocide? so it?s ok

meanwhile, in rioting in khartoum, sudan, there were, depending on the information source, 25 killed, 196 injured, 23 killed, 100 injured or 14 killed, 16 injured (those low numbers coming from the governor, as one might expect)

a 10 year old palestinian girl was shot and killed monday inside a united nations school in a southern gaza strip refugee camp, hit in the head by israeli tank fire, apparently

one of the suicide bombers on iraqi election day was a child with down?s syndrome, reportedly

the nepalese king has disbanded his government and tropps have surrounded the home of the prime minister, but it's not a "coup" surely

rebels fired homemade rockets on a military post in colombia tuesday, killing at least 14 soldiers and wounding about 25

and, michael jackson's molestation trial makes headlines, or you could skip past that and read about eva longoria's love life or, oh my god, orlando bloom and kate bosworth splitting... if you cared that they were together in the first place, that is

and, in other news, did you know that, according to mariam fam of the ap, sunday's election in iraq "occurred without catastrophic rebel attacks"? i guess 44 dead doesn't count as catastrophic, unless of course you happen to be a family member of one of those 44, but some of them will probably become disgruntled and hold us, or the authority in iraq, responsible for the violence, and they will soon be counted with the insurgents and then they won't matter at all, until they are dead and we chalk them up on our scoreboard--we're still winning, by the way, regardless of our lack of success; you go by strict numbers and there's been 1400+ dead us soldiers, a few thousand, i believe at last count, injured, and what's the latest count on iraqi dead? oh wait, there isn't one, at least no good one, cause the highest estimates put the dead at tens of thousands and we wouldn't dare admit to any accuracy there, so we throw out much lower estimates... and i don't even care to go find what our current estimates are cause we all have got to know they won't be accurate and will likely not even be trying to be

as much as i want to be inside the culture we have, to fix it from inside, or at least do my small part in fixing it--and who knows if i've even made a dent yet?--the idea of running away to some rural place far far from all of this shit is increasingly appealing from day to day. if only there were some appropriate place outside the system that wasn't antarctica...

i'll end today's rant with this note from iraq: monday, at the camp bucca prison facility, during a search for contraband, detainees (read: iraqis we've caged because we are gods and it's our right) got violent, throwing rocks and using weapons fashioned out of objects from their cells. as would be expected and damn well required from the good soldiers of the united states, we opened fire. i mean, how dare the caged animals try to get out. how dare they think they have some inalienable right to freedom.

only four were killed. but, is that good news? or is it more likely that most americans think that isn't enough?

monday: a return to life
so, sunnis are to iraq election as us disgruntled gen x nonvoters are to the us election...

or something. monday again and i don't know quite what point i want to make today

iraq had its election, some 8 million people voted, apparently, and the big noshows were "insurgent" sunnis, doing just we wanted. as one iraqi (48 year old history teacher qais youssif) was quoted by the ap, "the so called elections were held in the way that america and the occupation forces wanted. they want to marginalize the role of the sunnis. they and the media talk about the sunnis as a minority. I do not think they are a minority." minority or not, though, they didn't bother to participate in the new system which they didn't approve anyway. and, so, they'll keep fighting, and we'll keep fighting back and this election won't mean much cause there will still be a war going on, and no seems to actually want to stop that except by killing every member of the opposition. the american way of war, the american way of life: kill them all and you don't have to solve the problem

to get some perespective on election day, you should know there were nine suicide attacks, most near polling sites, 44 killed. and two us servicemen were also killed... fighting the sunni... which brings up an interesting question: how does a country have a democratically fair election while one segment of its population is busy being killed? wouldn't it have made more sense for our soldiers to honor the day with a ceasefire?

well, the answer is yes, it would have made more sense, except it would be entirely unamerican. where our authority can influence the election, it would do so, just like in our own election, with the eligibility challengers and whatnot. we can't have the "enemy" taking part in his country's election, now, can we?

in other news, a local detention facility has set aside a wing for military veterans. that bears some sort of repeating. a local detention facility (ie, part of our prison system) has already several prisoners who are (or expects to have a lot who are) military veterans, enough that they want to house them together, albeit because they believe the camaraderie will help them turn their lives around. nice goal aside, does no one care that our military veterans tend so much toward crime that we would have to do this sort of thing? and, anyway, don't we have military barracks in which to train these folks between times we set them loose on the enemy?

anyway, in personal news, had a good weekend. already got taxes done. and my birthday was on saturday. aside from the requisite cake, there was the viewing of all three lord of the rings films (my gift from my wife) in their extended versions inside a day, some nice gifts, the cake bible (already tried a cooked sugar cage thing from this), a couple lego sets, an architecture book, and with some birthday cash some wine glasses, wine and some kitchen supplies, and a good night of television last night with american dreams, carnivale and the finale of huff. and, today i get started on reediting the novel and screenplay versions of beginning

and, only a few days to the state of the union. everyone jump for joy

death isn't always brad pitt
yesterday in highland falls, ny, a father was charged with the murder of his 7 year old daughter, found stabbed to death in the restroom of her school

wednesday morning, just a few miles from where i live, a suicidal man left his car on train tracks, causing two trains to crash, 11 to be killed, 200 injured, then slashed at his wrists with scissors as he watched the aftermath. he was arrested after being rushed to the hospital and, because of "special circumstances" might face the death penalty

a sudanese bombing of a village in darfur wednesday killed or wounded 100

even as expatriot voting began, at least 10 iraqis and 2 us soldiers were killed (in relation to the war, that is) friday in iraq. since wednesday, at least 54 iraqis and 9 americans have been killed in "insurgent" attacks, and a helicopter crash killed 30 us marines

early this morning in new york city, a 28 year old actress/playwright was shot and killed confronting an armed robber

yesterday in peoria, il, a man confessed to killing eight women

in china, dozens of people were detained or beaten (one man beaten so badly his left eye looked to be coming out of its socket) for trying to mark the death of former communist leader zhao ziyang

this week a white farmer and two of his black employees went on trial in south africa for beating, tying up and throwing to lions (which ate him) another black employee

and, yesterday was the 60th anniversary of the liberation of auschwitz where 1.5 million were killed during the second world war

this is our world in a nutshell...

well, no, i neglected to mention environmental issues (like, for example, the bush administration approving drilling on desert grasslands on the otero mesa in new mexico, despite pleas to protect the area from energy exploration), ongoing genocide (like in the abovementioned darfur), and the statistics on just how many people are raped, beaten or murdered all around the world each day (more than 50,000 violent deaths a year in america alone)... aren't any numbers at all too many?

we live in a world in which abuse and death is commonplace. our troops humiliate and torture prisoners, and we barely care... hell, we're more likely to complain to the fcc that the photos made it on the air than to complain to the government or the military that the acts occurred in the first place. we're afraid to watch real violence or related imagery, lest we have to face it, really face it and acknowledge it. we like our violence to be pretty and well choreographed, for our movie star heros to be the clearcut good guys and the villains to get what's coming to them, with explosions and balletic kicks and punches a nifty bonus

somewhere along the line, in america anyway, we mistook the right to bear arms for the need to bear arms. like we mistook the right to cut down trees to make paper or lumber for building, or the right to kill animals and eat them to survive for the notion that we need to cut down all the trees and set up assembly lines to slaughter all the animals. we're okay with violence and death and environmental ruin as long as it's nicely packaged and we don't have to see any of it in gruesome detail

of course, rice was sworn in as secretary of state and gonzales will be attorney general soon. who doesn't want to kill someone?

too many christians waiting on the hollywood ending
last june, jeffrey lucey, a us soldier recently returned from iraq, killed himself, hung himself in the cellar of his parents' house with a hose. "the dog tags of two iraqi prisoners that he said he was forced to shoot unarmed, lay on his bed." those dog tags, he'd brought home with him, had worn them after being ordered to shoot them. his therapist told his father "he never wore those as trophies. he wore them as a symbol of honor to those men."

now, does this get big news coverage? no. gotta go to democracy now to read the interview with his parents. ran a search, and apparently a chicago tribune article made brief mention of his suicide, but without much background

"at the close of 2003, u.s. commanders put the number of insurgents [in iraq] at 5,000. earlier this month, gen. mohammed abdullah shahwani, the director of the iraqi intelligence service, said there are 200,000 insurgents, including at least 40,000 hard-core fighters. the rest, he said, are part-time fighters and supporters who provide food, shelter, funds and intelligence."

200,000 insurgents

keep in mind, us troops in iraq this month, according to the brookings institution's iraq index is only 150,000. sure, iraqi security forces are being trained, but aren't they just the group caught in the middle? the key here is we're outnumbered and unwanted... and, still we torture and shoot unarmed iraqis, traumatizing some of our own in the process

we create vicious animals or tramua victims of our own men. what happens when the war actually ends, when the iraq vets start trying to slip back into american society? people kept saying last summer that we needed to stop bringing up vietnam, it's been thirty years, let's leave that subject alone. but, clearly, no one learned anything from any of it, so maybe we should bring it up more, not less. maybe if john kerry had stopped playing the part of the high class massachusetts liberal he is now and embraced the antiwar, atrocity-admitting liberal he was a few decades ago, he could have had some impact, even if he still lost the damn election

we all know war is hell. at least, we pretend we know that. we say we don't need to see the dead bodies, don't need to watch the destruction on a personal level to know that war is hell. but, if we don't watch all the horror of it, if we don't particpate more directly (that is, tracking the details, the deaths, the injuries, the violence, rather than just checking brief news reports on whether we've won yet) then how will we be prepared to deal with the demons that come home with our troops?

of course, how many of us believe we're living in the "end times" and these troops won't necessarily ever be coming home, and even if they do, christ will show up and make it all better, a kiss on each wound and all the pain is gone?

too many, i'd say

too many christians waiting on the hollywood ending

"what is this--miami beach?"
bush wants iraqi voters to defy terrorists and risk their lives to go vote for the guy we already picked to win the election

condi rice will be confirmed as secretary of state, no matter who cares

two boys (9 and 10) in florida were taken from school in handcuffs after drawing pictures of themselves killing one of their classmates. police said it constituted a "written threat to kill or harm another person."

republican senator wayne allard out of colorado expects the gop leaders to call for a vote on a gay marriage ban (that is, the big amendment to the constitution) in the next year or two

but, of course the big, horrifying news, is that lexington, north carolina intends to use a damn potbellied pig for groundhog day. what kind of piece of shit policy is that? and, who do these lexington folks think they are, anyway, trying to steal the thunder from punxsutawney phil, especially because of a "heritage of barbecue"?

that's right. i picked the groundhog controversy over all the rest as the big item of the day. forget about senators trying to tell people that love each other they can't marry--not like we can separate the religious (read: god-ordered) custom from the legal corporation of two people, lest we have to allow three people to get married if they like down the line, cause how dare consenting adults try to live together--or that one of bush's biggest cheerleaders is getting an even more prominent cabinet position, nevermind how badly she pulled off the last one. forget about boys being arrested for drawing (of course, there are still comic book artists on trial or in jail for creating pornography or ultra violent comics, not to mention that one ordered never to draw again). forget about the national deficit rising even as bush demands another $80 billion for war costs (as the death toll rises and the fixed election looms). and, don't even bother thinking about whether or not we might be starting a war in iran by summer or fall at the latest (by bombing the government so the citizens will take it upon themselves to revolt and welcome us with hugs and garlands of flowers, just like their iraqi neighbors did). and, don't bother thinking about deforestation or overly large suvs devouring our gas, soldiers murdering in our names, abortion clinics being bombed, drug addicts being thrown in jail while corporations that rape the natural world get nothing but rewards (monetary anyway... it makes one want to believe in karma). let's all worry about whether or not paris hilton needs to be writing a book and how will the new season of the simple life be, whether street smarts will win out over book smarts on the apprentice, will claire have given birth while she was missing on lost, will jack bauer get to save the world again on 24, will joey ever be as good as friends once was, and will that pig 'lil bit' predict the same weather punxsutawney phil will?

maybe bill murray can repeat next wednesday over and over and over again (again) until the wars end and the forests grow back and the real world matters more than the real world.

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fun endnote: the spellcheck thought punxsutawney was me misspelling punctuating. that would be some seriously bad spelling, methinks