Here and There

I disagree with Barack Obama’s tactic of excluding Fox journalists over their network’s smear attempt on him. It really smacks of Rovian political strong-arming, and ultimately goes against the idea of a free press.

Let the people sort out what’s wrong, I say. The Fox story of Obama’s supposed madrassa-education never took off because there were enough citizen journalists, as well as professionals, there to debunk it.

I think Obama is making a huge mistake barring those reporters.

It was her courage (and trust me, I know what it’s like to be a liberal from Texas). It was her clarity, of voice and conviction.

I vaguely recall when the Fort Worth Star-Telegram first started running her syndicated column. Not sure how old I was, or if I had political opinions beyond “Ronald Reagan sure is an old man.” But I knew I liked her. I didn’t even read the paper religiously at that age, but there was just something about her.

Molly Ivins died today, at the much-too-young age of 62. I’m sad.

Behold, Hugo Chávez, ¡el presidente por vida!

Okay, I’ve resisted for a long time, for many different reasons, but I have a (condensed version of a) story to tell.

I was on a flight in December to Texas. The plane was diverted from DFW to Austin due to bad weather in Dallas. In Austin, our plane sat on the tarmac for 8.5 hours. With little to no food, overflowing toilets, and only two 15-person shuttles offered to us over that time, we waited, and waited, and waited, and were not allowed to taxi to the gate or off-board. There were people with medical issues, children, and elderly people, not to mention those of us who hadn’t eaten or slept.

Some passengers are in Washington, D.C. this week to urge lawmakers to pass a Passenger Bill of Rights to ensure this kind of thing never happens again. It happened to passengers of 14 Northwest Airlines flights in Detroit in 1999, so history is just repeating itself here.

And here’s where I’m really going out-of-bounds with Here and There: I’m asking you to at least check out this petition. It’s for congressman Mike Thompson of Napa Valley. He’s been our point-person in Congress (I tried getting through to my representative, but Madame Speaker is a little busy these days).

If you like the idea of having basic rights ensured when your plane is grounded or delayed, please sign the petition. If not, I understand. I’m not typically a petition-signer myself. But I do believe in holding U.S. companies to basic standards of service.

Thank you.

When I saw “eye gunk” on the NY Times home page, I thought for sure they meant eye gunk, i.e., eye boogers.

But no, they’ve co-opted the term to mean “floaters,” or, bits of dislodged membrane on the eye.

Damn them for getting that click out of me (though in my advancing years, I should probably heed such medical information).

What happens when dead deers strike back.

At the end of a year, it’s really tough for my feeble memory to keep track of the movies I saw that year. Not that I see a lot of movies. More like I just have a really bad memory.

But here’s my best stab at 2006’s list, with brief reactions:

Letters from Iwo Jima. Excellent. Suffered only for a few recognizable faces. Hardly a flaw.
Casino Royale. Great new Bond actor. Good story. Good action.
Jesus Camp. Great in that it showed me something I otherwise wouldn’t see. Scary.
Little Miss Sunshine. Easily the most overrated film of the year. Good at times, but overall cheesy.
The Science of Sleep. As close to Being John Malkovich-perfect as this year came.
Superman Returns. What a waste.
The Devil and Daniel Johnston. A close-up look at a far-out guy. Pretty damn compelling.
Babel. Brad Pitt couldn’t bring this movie down. Some flaws, but overall really good.
The Departed. As I tell people, 99 percent perfect. One percent absolute shit. Tie for best of the year, with …
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. He makes fun of those who need to be made fun of. And he does it well.
Volver. I’m an Almodóvar fan, but this was too sentimental. Too long, also.
The Good Shephard. Good, but overly ambitious. Slightly above average.
An Inconvenient Truth. Good, though I dozed a few times. Saw it late, so there’s that.
Marie Antoinette. I’m not opposed to camp. Just do it well. Coppola did not do it well. And Kirsten Dunst was god-awful.

Sorry to end on such a sour note, but I made this list in the order I remembered the movies. Hope this does something for someone out there.

Last January, I debuted* Lexicon 2005, a list of all the words I learned that year that I bothered to keep track of.

In my semi-regular laptop-scrubbing and backing-up session yesterday, I realized I started the same endeavor for 2006. I must’ve dropped it somewhere along the way, May or June, I’d guess. It’s a terribly incomplete list, but it’ll have to do.

Here it is (definitions taken mostly from New Oxford American Dictionary):
amanuensis - a literary or artistic assistant, in particular one who takes dictation or copies manuscripts.
claque - a group of people hired to applaud (or heckle) a performer or public speaker.
contrapuntal - of or in counterpoint.
eschatology - the part of theology concerned with death, judgment, and the final destiny of the soul and of humankind.
haptic- of or relating to the sense of touch, in particular relating to the perception and manipulation of objects using the senses of touch and proprioception.
imbroglio - an extremely confused, complicated, or embarrassing situation.
matrilineal - of or based on kinship with the mother or the female line.
obduracy - stubbornly refusing to change one’s opinion or course of action.
obstreperous - noisy and difficult to control.
oenophile - a connoisseur of wines.
parsimony - extreme unwillingness to spend money or use resources.
peripatetic - traveling from place to place, esp. working or based in various places for relatively short periods.
philatelist - the collection and study of postage stamps.
prosody - the patterns of rhythm and sound used in poetry.
salutary - (esp. with reference to something unwelcome or unpleasant) producing good effects; beneficial.
supine - failing to act or protest as a result of moral weakness or indolence.
susurration - whispering, murmuring, or rustling
sybaritic - fond of sensuous luxury or pleasure; self-indulgent.
tendentious - expressing or intending to promote a particular cause or point of view, esp. a controversial one.

* Words like “debut” and “crochet.” when made into past participles, have always struck me as awkward, but I don’t have a handy fix in mind, so like the Democrats** in Congress, I will just criticize without offering alternatives.

** This is clearly (I hope) a joke. It’s one of Bush’s favorite lines of last week, and it’s right up there with “Mission Accomplished” in its inaccuracy.

The Gap store at the corner of Haight and Ashbury in San Francisco has officially closed. I don’t tend to make that corner of the city a regular hang-out, so I just found out this morning by walking by randomly. Ah, to see all those naked mannequins …

Sorry, but I happen to think this is newsworthy, yet neither the Chronicle nor The Examiner ran the story.

Of course this store’s closing has to be tied to the bigger picture, Gap’s faulty bottom line. The Examiner at least grabbed that story off the wire.

I can’t imagine anyone shedding tears over the company’s recent bad fortune. Businesses come and go, and The Gap just couldn’t keep up with competition both smarter (American Apparel) and more raunchy (Abercrombie & Fitch, et. al.).

That wasn’t so painful, was it?

Using WordPress 2.1 now. It’s quite nice.

Not that anyone is reading, but Here and There will down for a short time while I upgrade my blog software.

Just when I think I’ve heard it all, along comes the story of this “proud” Washington state parent of seven (read: irresponsible breeder).

He’s outraged that one of his thousands of children will be shown An Inconvenient Truth at public school. First, what is an evangelical Christian doing sending his kids to public school? And second, what’s the big deal?

Well, the big deal, according to Frosty Hardison, is that global warming isn’t caused by humans, and that humans shouldn’t be trying to abate the so-called crisis (I, for one, hereby declare it a crisis). No, to Hardison’s mind (faith?), warmer weather is merely a sign that the messiah is coming back to save us.

Translation: Let the world go to hell. Jesus will sort it all out, for believers and non-believers alike.

PS Third question: Is his name really Frosty?

I want need this book.

If Hillary Clinton is elected president, what will we call Bill Clinton?

First man? (pedestrian)
First gentleman? (matches “lady” best, but sounds awkward)
First spouse? (yuck)
First husband? (inconsistant with first lady)

Wikipedia’s entry on U.S. first ladies weighs in with the fact that husbands of female governors are typically referred to as first gentlemen.

I wonder whether any of us should even be spending mental energy on this.

Perhaps the joke is just too, too obvious, but the controversy over Southern Methodist University’s being awarded the George W. Bush presidential library seems to be missing this central fact: How many books and papers would a Bush library really contain? Or would it just be a folder with a stack of Stick-IT notes, maybe some football game programs, and a doodle or two?

I mean, really?