|
|
|
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
|
Category: News and Politics
Anyone who has ever tried to play “Montgomery Bus Boycott” at homeprobably realizes how hard it is to make Martin Luther King out oflegos. First of all, it’s difficult to find black minifigures unlessyou buy the NBA 3-packs which feels, If you think about it, eitherdeeply insulting to black people or to white basketball players.Secondly, the hair. Put a black minifigure in a suit with accompanyinghair and it will look like a second string Eddie Murphy character from“Coming to America”. In fact, legos are so poorly representative ofethnic diversity right now that the posted versions of Martin LutherKing Jr. on Flickr look identical to the posted versions of Will Smithas Agent J in “Men in Black”; right down to the suit. It’s hard totell, from a distance, if he has a dream or a neuralizer.
As hard as it is to get good Martin out of little plastic blocks, it’seven more complicated to get a good Coretta Scott King. Legos arenotoriously bad at replicating women in minifigures as well. For mostof her husband’s non-plastic life, you would find her right behind him,supporting him. In reality, Mrs. King had the singular distinction ofbeing witness to every single “Lego Block” that went into building theCivil Rights Movement in the 60s. Each piece of this fight for justicewent through her hands at one point or another. If anyone were lookingfor deeper insights into what King believed and how he followed thearrow of justice, looking through her eyes is our greatest opportunity.
Mrs. King was reluctant to take up the role as leader of the civilrights movement after her husband’s death. In fact, she went toJosephine Baker, asking her to act as leader of this community. Whenshe declined, Coretta Scott King became the soul and heart of AmericanCivil liberties. She fought to ensure that even though Martin LutherKing was gone, his dream would be visible, relevant, alive. She madesure that he had a voice even when surrounded by people without herunique insights into his mind. She made it clear to the world that thebattle for civil liberties and freedom did not end at the color ofpeople’s skin. Just as Frederick Douglass found that he couldn’t befree as long as anybody remained in chains, fighting for Irish HomeRule and the women’s suffrage, Coretta Scott King explained that theCivil Rights movement was there for the poor, for women, for LGBTpeople, for everyone.
In 1968, during a Solidarity Day Speech, she called for women to "uniteand form a solid block of women power to fight the three great evils ofracism, poverty and war." She opposed Apartheid when the word wasunknown to most people. In her fight for equality for gay peopleeverywhere she spoke out to say “Homophobia is like racism andanti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry in that it seeks to dehumanizea large group of people, to deny their humanity, their dignity andpersonhood. This sets the stage for further repression and violencethat spread all too easily to victimize the next minority group."
She indelibly linked the fight for gay rights to the Civil Rightsbattle in one of her most famous speeches of all, calling out that, "Istill hear people say that I should not be talking about the rights oflesbian and gay people. ... But I hasten to remind them that MartinLuther King Jr. said, 'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justiceeverywhere.' I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther KingJr.’s dream, to make room at the table of brotherhood and sisterhoodfor lesbian and gay people." She was completely unequivocal andabsolutely clear. In 2003, she invited the National Gay and LesbianTask Force to be a part of the 40th anniversary of the March onWashington. She crossed bridges to support a group she wasn’t a partof- to honor the dream. She fought for the equality guaranteed to allof us when she fought for equal marriage, calling an amendmentpreventing marriage equality “a form of gay bashing that would donothing at all to protect traditional marriage.” She took the hardestroad she could and she handled it without falling.
On Martin Luther King Day, this year, I want to honor the woman that hehonored when he said “without whose love, sacrifices, and loyaltyneither life nor work would bring fulfillment...” There is still a longway to go, but to the woman who got every single building block right,the woman who understood every word he said better than most of us, thewoman too beautiful to be constructed out of Legos - to you I want tosay thank you.
Powered by  | | English | | Albanian | | Arabic | | Bulgarian | | Catalan | | Chinese | | Croatian | | Czech | | Danish | | Dutch | | Estonian | | Filipino | | Finnish | | French | | Galician | | German | | Greek | | Hebrew | | Hindi | | Hungarian | | Indonesian | | Italian | | Japanese | | Korean | | Latvian | | Lithuanian | | Maltese | | Norwegian | | Polish | | Portuguese | | Romanian | | Russian | | Serbian | | Slovak | | Slovenian | | Spanish | | Swedish | | Thai | | Turkish | | Ukrainian | | Vietnamese |
|
|
|
|
Friday, January 09, 2009
|
Category: Goals, Plans, Hopes
“Dude”
“Dude, wake up”
I rolled over. This is
the problem with this entire season. Say one shitty thing about
Christmas and tacky Hollywood ghosts try and drag you all over the
11-dimensional superstring spacetime universe all night until you just
give up and start thanking Jeebus for Elves again.
“Nope”
“You have to get
up”
“No, I don’t.
I really goddamn don’t. And you better get your transparent B
and E ass out of my bedroom before I call the stalker police on you,
Casper.” I tried to dig my way deeper into the bed. When I was
younger I used to be exceptionally good at ignoring things. As times
wears on and we all get older, we begin to experience more and more ITI
situations (Impossible to ignore) and our ability to subtly brush
off our environment suffers. There are zen masters out there,
however that have perfected this art and, they say, are capable of
being entirely oblivious to hundreds of things at the same time,
including one or two things poking them in the groin. This is expert
level environmental neglect, something I, on my best day, am
incapable of, as evidenced by the sharp pain shooting down my leg.
“And are you
poking me in the groin?”
“Oops, guilty.
Sorry.” The ghost got up off the bed and hovered to my left. I
could feel the warm asiago cheese smell of the bagel she had clearly
eaten less than an hour before. Asiago cheese is not social food.
It’s not what you eat right before you go intoning breathlessly
into people’s ears, which struck me as the rudest part of this
thing.
“You have to come
with me.” She intoned breathlessly into my ear.
“Actually, I’m
going to go hit ‘1’ a couple of times on the ADT box and
silent alarm your pasty ass back to the Comcast Cable Fearnet channel
if you don’t stop cheesebreathing on me.” I intoned back,
sharply, like a tangy gruyere.
“Damn, you can
smell that? Crazy good bagel, though”
“Look, you seem
like a nice enough paranormal manifestation,” I reasoned, still
staring with sleepy eyes into my race car pillowcase, “but I
swear, I’ve spent the entire night learning the meaning of
Christmas from a bunch of guys who looked like ‘Magic the
Gathering’ threw up on Hellraiser and I just want to nod off
and pretend the entire thing was a bad ambien™ trip.”
“They all had
their lessons to teach and I have mine”, she mumbled, picking
cheese out of her teeth with a spare bus pass I had sitting on my
dresser. The afterlife is fucking disgusting and I’m starting
to suspect that if any of these people had any personal discipline or
hygiene they might not be dead in the first place. Maybe this is the
great secret of the undead- they all died from a failure to bathe
properly and take even the remotest interest in the welfare of their
teeth.
“Hey,” I
looked up. “Don’t do that. They have dental implements
they sell for that.” It was at this moment that I caught a good
look at her face.
“So you noticed,
huh?” She cocked her head to one side, as if to emphasize the
fact that a good part of her lower jaw was missing, forcing her
tongue to loll about in a way that reinforced that overarching slimy
eel-like quality of tongues we tend to mentally breeze past when we
shove them wholesale into
other people’s mouths to say "hi" and "goodbye" and "let's exchange
every body fluid we have, it's okay, I was tested for STDs in March of
89 and I feel fantastic".
“No, I don’t
see anything, “ I rededicated myself to burrowing into my bed.
It’s a California King. I know some people say that there is no
real difference between a king and a California King, to which I say
“ha, you must have stumpy legs”, because the difference
is real and significant. I wiggled my toes as if to punctuate that
idea.
“You can’t
stay in bed all day,” she prodded. In reality, I could. I have
never understood why people say things like this. It’s actually
alarmingly easy to stay in bed all day, this behavior falling into the small but
elegant venn diagrammatic overlap of things that humans can do that
can also be done by a sweater.
“Lock the door when you
leave," it occurred to me that she might have been too intangible to
lock the door, "or go out through the wall, Kitty Pride." Here's the
thing. As an atheist, my approach to ghosts has been similar to my
approach to anything else that my deranged brain haplessly spits out
after one too many porcini mushroom and pepper sandwiches; irreverence
and complete lack of respect for their existence. In fact, this is how
I've been responding to a lot of people I know lately. I can't prove
you exist, you can't prove you exist, so let's take existence off the
table and correspond like the actual fictional characters we most
likely would be if anyone we knew were real enough to actually imagine
us in the first place. "You
aren't curious about the face thing?" she offered, in a whisper. I
confess I was a little curious but maybe not enough to up and start
recognizing people's existence in direct contravention of my normal
policies.
"You're
not real," I suggested, "So it's a waste of my otherwise boundless
curiosity." Not a waste so much as a collateral redirection. I was
still curious about how many minutes of the Burgess Meredith Penguin
episodes of the original Batman series Dick Cheney had to watch to
perfect his public speaking style and how Dr. House always has a 3 day
growth of beard in every single episode. Most men understand that in
order to have a 3 day growth of beard on Tuesday, you will have to, at
some point on Monday, have a 2 day growth of beard. There is a secret
to Dr. Gregory House, beyond the intrinsic secret of how he still has a
job after very nearly amputating people's heads on a regular basis at
8:23 in the evening before discovering they need a cough drop at 8:56.
I understand he's meant to be an eccentric genius. He just seems like a
bad doctor.
"I'm
going to stay here until you roll over and get up," she blubbered.
Crying can be a snotty exercise even when you have your entire face.
Remove some of the supporting structure and it's like trying to carry a
mucus filled slip n' slide around in your backpack.
"I'm
up, Space ghost. see?" I leaned back on a pillow and half opened my
eyes. I could do this one on my bed. "Look, you're going to show me the
true meaning of Christmas, AGAIN, and my life will be changed forever,
blah blah blah, but I'm only doing it if we can take the bed. And that
sandwich sitting there next to you on the nightstand." I don't always
go to sleep with a sandwich by the bed and I know that Avocados don't
hold up well out in the open like that but I hate being hungry in the
past.The past is full of bad food. I hate to say it, but it's sort of a
fact of time travel.
"I
don't want to..." she set to crying for real right now, which, for her,
was the facial equivalent of a constantly misfiring Israeli-made snot
gun, aimed directly at me. This sucked.
"ok,
ok, talk to me, what do you want?" In "the Sixth Sense" the ghosts went
away once the creepy little boy helped them solve their problem. I was
hoping that this might be sort of similar.
I mentally started hunting for words synonymous with slobbering so that I could,
at some point, write this all down with with minimum redundancy. "I'm done with Christmas." she slobbered again.
"No one's done with
Christmas. It just goes on and on. It's like Pancakes at Denny's. You
can keep hacking away at it, but it's impossible to make it all the way
through."
She sniffed and inhaled a 7 inch long string of slime. "You know it's like January 9th or 10th or something, right?"
I looked over at the
clock on my nightstand and, sure enough, I'd been sleeping for two
weeks and had completely missed Christmas, Kwanzaa, Hanukah, New Years
and about a week of the new year. I considered the health benefits of
such a lengthy sleep and weighed that against my resolution to feed my
cat more regularly in the coming year.
"You didn't see a cat around when you came in, did you?"
"This Christmas was the
worst. I just think it's not what I want..." Her voice trailed off as
she smelled what may have been the cat. I, apparently, hadn't eaten in
two weeks either and yet I had the self control and presence of mind to
not be rotting under the dresser in a fetal lump sucking on a sock. I
suppose I was just raised better than that.
I tried to wipe a
larger-than-humanly-possible pile of mucus from off of my comforter but
just managed to spread it out into a 6 inch diameter disk of pure goo."Well, I don't know how the ghost thing goes, but why don't you quit?"
It looked like I had fallen asleep next to my pet Jellyfish. I put that
thought out of my mind as I felt that my record with pets had recently
taken a bit of a hit. "I don't think it's evil people that are the
problem in the world as much as it is just purely unhappy ones".
"That's me. Purely
unhappy." She bent over to whisper and I saw down her robe. Where a
living woman might have had breasts, she had two cages in which the
souls of the unrepentant wickedtoiled in constant pain. I was sort of a butt man, myself.
"Look, sweety, " She
perked up when I called her sweety. I wondered if the sinners in her
boobs felt the blush as it rose to her face, "Maybe this economy is a
blessing. We can't keep pretending that we are our jobs anymore,
especially when we can lose them at any moment."
A clear green and yellow
tinted spray of liquid rained down on my as her upper palate attempted
an "s" sound without benefit of much of a face. "What do you mean, sweety? I can't just leave. I need this job."
"Yes, but is it you? Is
it the thing that makes you happy? I mean, we're so used to being
called what we do for a living. It's our automatic answer to 'what do
you do?'. Maybe it shouldn't be any more."
"That's even scarier than not having a job - Thinking about what I am or who I am without one. " She paused for a moment and I thought I could hear the tortured souls despairing deep within her. There may have been a gentle "Meow" mixed in.
"That's a good New
Year's Resolution. To try and figure out who you are, beyond what you
do." I pulled back the covers and sat up, dangling my adult sized
footie pajama clad feet almost to the floor."To not be a writer, or a banker, or an art director, or a gatherer of Christmas Souls, but instead just be."
"I guess when the
economy is crappy, jobs are only temporary. To be happy, maybe you have
to figure out who you are underneath the job." She blubbered like a
powerful institutional grade sprinkler full of half-cooled green jello as I took cover under my yellow bunny comforter.
As it let up, I moved
closer to her, hoping to catch another look under her robe. It's a
small grey striped cat with an abnormally large head. "Maybe that's the
secret to being happy in all of this right now. To be open to changing
the 'what we do' part if it makes the 'who we are' part better." Many
people had commented, in the past, on the freakish size of the head,
speculating as to whether she might have been some sort of
superintelligent mutated cat. I expect not, since the convenience store
across the street sold catfood and my wallet was in my pants draped
over the chair. How intelligent do you have to be?
"I can do that. It's
scary, but it's something I can do. Maybe you won't see me next
Christmas. I could be the ghost of Easter." She stood up with a new
resolve as the swirling eddy of souls inside of her chest pressed
visibly against the front of her robe.
"Well, that's not really
where I was going with that, but it's a good place to start." I watched
as she reached into her robe and pulled out the ephemeral soul of Mrs.
Krinkles, my cat, depositing her deftlyon the only remaining dry spot on my bed.
I thought about what it would mean to be me and not what I did for a
living. Maybe it meant spending more time doing things that were
actually important.With people and things I liked.
"I'll see you soon," she
breathed ominously. There was a new bounce to her step, which,
unfortunately, in her case, caused her to buck and sway, sending mucus
around the room like a cup full of coffee on the dashboard of a moving
car.
"Hey, um. Thanks for the
cat." As I watched her disappear I thought to myself that I had my
whole life ahead of me, a nasty drycleaning bill and a cat that never
needed to eat again. In the end, my Karma was in positive numbers and
that's all I could have asked for.
Powered by | | English | | Albanian | | Arabic | | Bulgarian | | Catalan | | Chinese | | Croatian | | Czech | | Danish | | Dutch | | Estonian | | Filipino | | Finnish | | French | | Galician | | German | | Greek | | Hebrew | | Hindi | | Hungarian | | Indonesian | | Italian | | Japanese | | Korean | | Latvian | | Lithuanian | | Maltese | | Norwegian | | Polish | | Portuguese | | Romanian | | Russian | | Serbian | | Slovak | | Slovenian | | Spanish | | Swedish | | Thai | | Turkish | | Ukrainian | | Vietnamese |
|
|
|
|
Monday, November 17, 2008
|
Category: News and Politics
Science rocks. Unless you bought 900 acres of Nagasaki farmland in 1943 and were hoping to flip that shit. But let's assume that this is not the case
Science rocks. And today on Science and You we're going to be looking at Dicrocoelium Dendriticum, a tiny microscopic organism that, much like seasoned veteran cult filmmaker George Romero, speaks English poorly, weights very little, has trouble getting a date, and creates zombies.
Dicrocoelium Dendriticum (Which we will call, for the purpose of brevity, "Dinky") lays its eggs up inside the ugly bits of a cow. The problem is that it's a fast and furious world inside a cow and there's one way out and it's pretty much the way you would expect. Not long after Dinky eggs emerge from Bessie's Fire door, a species of snails gobbles them up and hosts the tiny parasite inside it. Please remember this last part when ordering all willy-nilly off the French Menu this weekend.
Like most heterosexual male bulls and a statistically significant number of 15 year old young men from Macomb, Illinois, Dinky wants to get back into a cow. And like most female snails in the wild have discovered, when you need a helping hand, a snail is not the place to look. So Dinky forces the snail to throw it up, along with a healthy dose of ant-attracting yummy phlegm. Ants come along, eat Dinky and that's where the odd begins to happen.
Ants that eat Dinky find themselves partially zombified. The ant acts perfectly normal during the day but at night, when other ants are sleeping or making the ant with two backs, Dinky ants crawl along slowly, hypnotized, until they find a tall stalk of grass. Then, with their best "please eat me, cow" pose, they hang from the top of the stalk of grass, waiting for nature to take its course. If they aren't eaten tonight, they just wake back up and do it again tomorrow.
Dinky is interesting because, as I discovered in my "Defiling the dead" class at Miskatonic University, if you inject a human corpse with a RNA bath solution containing Dicrocoelium Dendriticum and a series of other ingredients (one being Diet Dr. Pepper, which tastes much more like regular Dr. Pepper, as a quick aside) you can reanimate the dead. It's actually a pretty easy operation, but you have to inject the solution directly into the spinal column leading to the brain and, therefore, need a honking big needle.
Here's the thing. Dead people are like the unending, infinitely sustainable resource of planet earth. There were so many deceased folk to choose from, I had trouble figuring out where to start. So I tried to think like an American and I resurrected someone about whom there is soon to be released an almost assuredly Oscar winning biopic. Upon scanning through IMDB I decided to steal the Body of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in the State of California, assassinated On November 27th, 1978, almost exactly 30 years ago. In doing this I created a historical first in that the result is the only currently animated homosexual male in America with no idea who Madonna is.
I document here, for posterity, my conversation with the acrid, corrupt, mephitic (thank you thesaurus.com), zombified corpse of famed civil rights icon Harvey Milk.
Me: Harvey. Harv. You ok?
Harvey: Wow. That is, hands down, the worst party I have ever been to. Honestly. And I know Belushi.
Me: Ok, I have some good news and some bad news.
Harvey: Hit me.
Me: Bad news. You were shot to death almost just about 30 years ago today and the guy who shot you claimed it was because he ate too many Twinkies and only served a few years in jail.
Harvey: Well, bad trip. And weird, but not the dumbest thing that's ever happened. Good News?
Me: That massive brushed gold plated needle hanging out of your nearly severed head matches your bracelet almost perfectly.
Harvey: Sweet. I can work this.
Me: So, I didn't mean to just dig you up but I figured you'd be someone I could talk to.
Harvey: I'm in, brother, you know it. But I haven't eaten in 30 years. (Harvey began opening and closing the drawers in the beat up Day's Inn mid-priced suite I had reanimated him in. )
Me: all right, this might be seen by some as bad news as well, depending on your sense of humor, but the recommended diet for a newly created zombie such as yourself is human brains.
Harvey: Yeah, that's not going to do it for me. Why don't we just order up a couple of Kahlua and Creams and let things happen the way they happen.
Me: Excellent. (I dial down to room service, keeping Harvey in sight out of the corner of my eye in the mirror. Hanging out with Zombies gives you this feeling that your brain is absolutely huge and completely accessible)
Harvey: Ooh. And some ladyfingers. I love those. So, fill me in, doc. What's happening in California these days? How's Belushi?
Me: Um. Ok, well, for a while we had completely equal marriage in California. Over 18,000 couples were legally and happily married. Many of them started adoption proceedings. It was nice.
Harvey: Groovy.
Me: But then 700,000 signatures were entered into a petition that created a ballot initiative called Proposition 8 that amended the California constitution to prevent Gay people from being treated as equals as far as marriage was concerned. The amendment passed.
Harvey: ok. Ungroovy. But expected.
Me: They spent over 35 million dollars passing that amendment.
Harvey: ok, now who do you mean by "They"?
Me: I don't know, Harvey. It's the same they as it always is, isn't it? I remember how young I was when you were killed. Some of my older friends told me "They got Harvey" and I remember wondering what they meant. It didn't sink in until later that you were dead.
Harvey: And in a state of the art, silk lined casket, by the way. Comfy. (Harvey eyed the room as though under blacklight. He made a move to fold the sheet over a stain that I hoped was only semen)
Me: Sorry. They say that marriage is a religious thing and that allowing gay people to marry violates their religion. That marriage is a religious institution.
Harvey: Well, that's untrue. People have been getting married since long before Christianity happened. Characters from the oldest pieces of literature we have were married, and it had nothing to do with religion. Beowulf's parents were married. American Marriage certificates say marriage but have no mention of God.
Me: And they say that letting gay people marry is redefining marriage.
Harvey: Marriage is being redefined all the time. In this country alone, marriage has gone from possession to personhood to partnership. Consanguineous marriages are the norm all over the world, with polygamy, polyandry, group marriage, secular marriage, all forms of marriage in all sorts of cultures.
Me: They say that homosexual relationships are unnatural.
Harvey: Unnatural? All the animal species we observe engage in heterosexual and homosexual behavior. Some of them are monogamous, but not many. Hell, look at spiders, nasty fucking things. Natural and unnatural is a crappy argument. Eating your partner's head after sex is natural. (Harvey leaned over to look in the mirror)
Me: Well. Hm. They say that it will cause marriage to collapse.
Harvey: Jesus. Look at my head. (Harvey was staring in the mirror at his pus filled head, large flaps of skin falling down over one eye from decay) Do I put anything on this?
Me: I don't think it's going to do much good.
Harvey: Just because I'm dead doesn't mean I have to look like an asshole.
Me: I hear you
Harvey: Besides (back on point) We know what the top ten or so things are that cause marriages to collapse in this country. Time, Money, Children and Childcare, Sex, Jealousy, Work, Household maintenance, Arguing methodology, Extended family, and emotional distance. If we really cared about marriage we'd put the money into newlywed programs that helped create time management skills and fiscal competence, we'd fund childcare facilities, create adult partner sex education and connectivity classes, organize group therapeutic programs to address jealousy and anger issues, offer work-life programs in small communities, teach home economics, household maintenance and mediation skills, help young couples to tell their parents to go fuck themselves and slap everyone until they learned how to cry. How do gay people factor into this unless we get to do the slapping?
Me: Why don't they understand all this?
Harvey: this is you with the "they" again?
Me: Well, it's pissing me off.
Harvey: Naw. Don't fall into that trap. It's not an us versus they issue. Or even an us versus them issue. This is just fighting bad ideas. Don't turn it into fighting people.
Me: I think that's big of you, but what do you say to people who think you shouldn't be allowed to have the same rights just because you're gay.
Harvey: I don't say anything to them, brotherman. I say we fight the bad ideas with good ones. A hundred years ago, being openly gay would get you hung from a tree. Gay people didn't come this far by fighting with people all day long. Not with insults and name calling. We got here a different way.
Me: Fabulously?
Harvey: Actually, yes. Gay people got everything we have in the most fabulous way possible. By standing next to people and not taking ourselves too seriously. By listening better. By being better friends than anyone ever thought possible. What does it mean now in movies to be someone's gay best friend? It means the person who doesn't judge. The person who loves you. The person you call at 3 am because you need to talk to someone and there's one person who will wake up and talk to you and only half mean it when they yell at you.
Me: Is this going to be in your movie?
Harvey: A movie? About me?
Me: Yeah, with Sean Penn.
Harvey: ooh, the kid on Little House on the Prairie?
Me: Yes (I said declaratively, upon looking through his wikipedia page. Sean Penn was in freaking Little House on the Prairie. How does he not just get constant, never ending shit for that? Why the cover up?)
Harvey: I liked him. Look, gay people got where we are through love. We fought hard for it. We're not going to give it up now just for the right to hate the people who don't want us to succeed. We're going to fight this the way we always have.
Me: fabulously.
Harvey: Ugh. You really need to step it up when you say that word. When you say it, it just lays there. Do you think calamine would help this any? (Harvey now held out part of his arm, below the elbow, which had apparently fallen off during the conversation)
Me: It's really not a skin condition. More of a... Like a thing that happens when you try to defrost a chicken in the sink and you leave it out for 30 years or so too long. With the water running.
Harvey: This is sucking a little bit now. (as he tried to reattach the appendage)
Me: (perking up after the knock at the door) Oh. Here are those Kahlua and Creams. That'll make you feel better.
Harvey: Oh yeah. That'll take the edge off of falling apart in a Day's Inn Bathroom.
Me: How do you do it? How do you stay so centered?
Harvey: I see the whole road, you know. It goes far back that way (he waved his unattached forearm in the direction of the bathroom) and for ahead this way (As he pointed with the appendage towards the armoire that held the small, old fashioned television.) We have to stay on the road we built. We can't walk it any other way. (At this, Harvey took a big swig of his Kahlua and Cream, causing a spigot of Creamy Liquid to come spraying from an apparent hole in his gut. He looked at the mess on the floor.) I should probably clean that up, then.
Me: Meh. You can barely tell
Harvey: (He paused for a moment, as if to finish the thought with a flair.) I really probably could use some brains now.
That day spent with Harvey was the first day, in a way, of the rest of my life. In the way that most days that come before at least one other day before you die are. I closed the door behind me, thinking about everything that Harvey had said. The cute young bellhop rushed past me with a plate of ladyfingers.
Bellhop: I forgot. Sorry.
Me: No worries. He's in there. And hey. ( I thought about the road and what it looked like today. I suddenly felt a little better. I handed the Bellhop all the cash I had in my pocket, about 120 dollars). I bet he could use, you know...A little head...
I winked at him and walked away.
Powered by | | English | | Albanian | | Arabic | | Bulgarian | | Catalan | | Chinese | | Croatian | | Czech | | Danish | | Dutch | | Estonian | | Filipino | | Finnish | | French | | Galician | | German | | Greek | | Hebrew | | Hindi | | Hungarian | | Indonesian | | Italian | | Japanese | | Korean | | Latvian | | Lithuanian | | Maltese | | Norwegian | | Polish | | Portuguese | | Romanian | | Russian | | Serbian | | Slovak | | Slovenian | | Spanish | | Swedish | | Thai | | Turkish | | Ukrainian | | Vietnamese |
|
|
|
|
Monday, November 10, 2008
|
Category: News and Politics
This is a long way to go for a little bit, but if you have some free time, meh, why not.
Everybody loves the Batman. I had a Batman pez dispenser in the 7th grade. Everyone wanted the Batman pez dispenser. I was terrified that one of my fellow mucilage-fingered classmates would steal this Batman pez dispenser so I asked my friend Matt what to do.
Matt: Dude. Tell everyone you shoved batman up your ass. Poof- no one wants Batman anymore.
Me: Really? Does batman go up the ass? And why poof? What's poof?
Matt: Poof is magic talk. It's like "alacazam- batman's up my ass"
Me: Do I want everyone to think I shove candy dispensers up my ass?
Matt: Man, look at this sweet fucking thing. Can you afford NOT to have people think you shoved this fucking bitch up your ass? Fuck. Fuck.
We had pioneered this process whereby if you felt that you hadn't sworn enough in the commission of a sentence you could lob a few f-bombs in after it. Like air cover. Fuck.
Me: (upon careful and deliberate consideration) Well. I guess Batman goes up the ass.
It turns out that "Does Batman go up the ass?" would become a popular question later as we all, awash with new found sexual identity issues, tried to figure out what the hell Batman had planned for the 12 year old kid in shortpants and elf shoes. It should have been instantly and viscerally obvious, but, again, who knew Batman went up the ass?
So, Matt told people but it didn't matter. Even in those times, before antibacterial soaps, people loved the batman. And I, pezless, learned an immutable human truth. NO ONE CARES THAT BATMAN GOES UP THE ASS.
This was shocking to me, as a kid. I sort of thought that it was a given that the value of any object was directly and inversely proportional to the amount of time it had spent up someone's ass. This graph may be more suggestive of that concept.
What you see here on this graph is that there is a dramatic plunge in the value of any object almost immediately upon being placed in the ass. Some say that an object, here, at the onset, can lose up to 50% of its intrinsic value immediately upon being crammed up an ass. Sad, but understandable. From there, it is a steady downward progression with increments of general value lost upon each successive moment spent up an ass. Contrast this against the batman pez dispenser, which seems to have a progression better illustrated in this chart:
Again, we see the drop almost immediately as Batman goes up the ass, but it's mitigated. The steady drop in value is nowhere near as steep, as well, even seeming to level off at around 70%. One more time, the incisive human truth is revealed that no one cares that Batman goes up the ass.
Or, we care, but not that much.
Immanuel Kant was an 18th Century German philosopher who was, in his spare time, also the cowled superhero known as Batgirl. During the day he discussed deontology, helping to create the moral framework that permeates law and makes philosophy coeds so anxious to jump into bed with their professors (it's true), while, at night, he patrolled the streets of Königsberg, taught black leather clinging suggestively to his full and supple teenaged breasts while his long red hair wafted through the Prussian night, alerting criminals that their time had come to pay for their transgressions.
Batgirl put forward a philosophical system that denied that there was a reason to ever lie. In his ideology, the fact of the lie was wrong-its act. It didn't matter what the consequence was. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a philosopher who was a member of the anti-nazi resistance in the 1940s, suggested a situation that would showcase where he felt Batgirl was wrong. (Bonhoeffer was, also, at night, the hero known to many as the Black Canary, righting wrongs on the bawdy streets of Berlin in a pair of bikini covered black fishnets that hugged his round and muscular ass, wrapping around the thin and hard lines of his sun kissed thighs, and diving ever so deftly into a pair of seamless leather boots, cupping delicate and smooth white feet.) Do you have a right to lie to a murderer who comes to your door looking for your neighbor?
The Black Canary never denies that Batgirl is right to suggest that lying is wrong. At the heart of it, the wrong is less wrong than the wrong situation advanced by the murderer. And if the wrong that a person will endure is too dramatic- too much - people are justified in lying.
This is the ideology that sits at the core of Jury Nullification. It's well known that if a Jury thinks the punishment is disproportionately severe for the crime or that the prosecution is corrupt and unfair or if the law itself is wrong, they will frequently return a not guilty plea when they know that the defendant is guilty. This is known as Jury nullification. It's a way that Juries, as human beings, can, like Black Canary suggested, lie to be more moral. If, for example, the sentence for possession of an ounce of marijuana were to be, on this case, life in prison, you could expect that the Jury would nullify, and possibly, afterwards, kick the prosecutor's tubby white butt a little. That's called, I think, a Jury getting real on your ass.
Ok, so here is a thought experiment we can use to explore. We'll call this case:
The Batman goes up the Joker's Ass.
First of all, eww.
Secondly, imagine this. The Joker has set a bomb to go off in a school. Because he's pretty much fucking crazy, he inserts the time-controlled detonator into his rectum, deeply enough that you pretty much have to reach up there to get to it and defuse it. The Batman was first on the scene, and he, as Batman is wont to do, went up that ass and defused the bomb. We understand that Batman wears a pretty thickly lined glove but this is still pretty invasive. He is arrested and brought to trial and you're on the jury. What do you decide? Is he guilty of going up the Joker's ass?
In this first scenario, a lot of people might say "nope. Not guilty. He did what he had to do. All those children's lives were at stake." He saved lives by navigating that clown ass. Fair enough. This jury may nullify.
Now, let's say that, in scenario b, Batgirl and the Black canary had, in their off hours at the philosophy sweatshop they work at during the day, already evacuated the school and gotten all those kids out of there. And Batman knew it. No lives are saved by going up the Joker's ass. Does this change anything?
Most people would say yes. It does change things. Batman is no longer justified, or at least no longer as justified, in slamming that batglove up the clown. This jury would likely not nullify.
It seems as though that a principal deciding factor as to how culpable Batman will be has to do with the external circumstance of whether or not lives were saved. The jury finds it easy to see that the offense of letting hundreds of kids die trumps the offense of ramming batpaw up Jokerbottom. The school full of kids and their welfare forgives a lot.
Now, and I warned you that this was a long trip for very little, we are watching the Federal government go, essentially, up the ass of the American taxpayer to collect bailout money, first for the banking industry and now for the auto industry. Those of us who haven't had to make 850 billion dollar decisions at any point in the past (me!) now have to decide if we can forgive them for this offense, not having the option to stop it.
And it's with a little bit of surprise we realize, many of us, that we CAN forgive them. And it's clear why. In this situation, if this bomb goes off, the potential is for tens of thousands of people to potentially fall all the way through the cracks. Homeless, without insurance, joining the 13 million children who go to bed hungry in this country regularly- the 35.5 million people considered to be food insecure in this country today. We have no choice but to forgive this hand up the ass because we haven't found a way to evacuate the school. We haven't built a real safety net in this country that can provide people with the basics of what is needed, as is a human right, to survive.
Because of that, we find ourselves pouring billions of dollars into bad businesses; businesses that have failed because they deserved to fail. But we can't let them. And we see, one more time, an issue that becomes apparent again and again. Without a socialized undercurrent that can prevent people from dying- falling all the way down- there is no real moral authority to pure capitalism.
Batman's going to do what he wants. And we have no choice but to sit there and support it - no choice but to cheer as he goes up the ass again. But we may see the truth here. If we had done our job originally, that 850 billion dollars would look like exactly what it really is. One big hand up the ass.
And do you know how many pez dispensers that buys?
Powered by | | English | | Albanian | | Arabic | | Bulgarian | | Catalan | | Chinese | | Croatian | | Czech | | Danish | | Dutch | | Estonian | | Filipino | | Finnish | | French | | Galician | | German | | Greek | | Hebrew | | Hindi | | Hungarian | | Indonesian | | Italian | | Japanese | | Korean | | Latvian | | Lithuanian | | Maltese | | Norwegian | | Polish | | Portuguese | | Romanian | | Russian | | Serbian | | Slovak | | Slovenian | | Spanish | | Swedish | | Thai | | Turkish | | Ukrainian | | Vietnamese |
|
|
|
|
Monday, November 03, 2008
|
Category: News and Politics
Looking for a new cellphone, I thought about buying one of those newfangled google phones instead of an Iphone. Newfangled. Admittedly, this was for two reasons:
1. I have T-mobile service and can't get an iphone without rebrainwashing the machine in some sort of illegal or at least unexpectedly warranty-defying fashion
2. I have a T-mobile contract that extends 6 months past my eventual death and it will cost me upwards of a gilligan dollars to terminate it.
3. My manly sausage fingers are contraindicated for the Iphone.
That third reason was a bonus in case people out there wanted to debunk the first two perfectly good reasons why I can't have an iphone. I'm not proud of my sausage fingers.
So I called a T-mobile store that our old drummer (he's 32) used to work at and asked for him. He wasn't there so they provided a substitute salesperson of equal or greater value with whom i had this conversation, pretty much verbatim:
"hi, I just wanted to see if you had any of those G1 googleriffic phones in stock"
"Googleriffic?"
"The Google Phone?"
"Oh, the G1."
"Yes, but we call each other by nicknames all the time"
"Let me check, hold on. Are you an existing customer or a new customer?"
"My name is Jim, and I'm a T-mobile customer"
"ok. it looks like we have 2 in stock but we are holding them for new customers"
"So, new customers are coming in today?"
"What? We're just being told to use these only for new customers"
"ok, dude, do me a favor"
"Yes?"
"Don't ever say that to anyone ever again. Really. Honestly. You just violated like 7 rules of marketing here. You're telling me I'm less valuable to you because I'm a customer."
"Did you want to talk to a manager?"
"I don't even want to talk to you."
"Is there something else i can assist you with?"
"I've lost my will to be assisted. This just makes me sad at the state of salesmanship in this country. I just want to cry. You made a customer cry. This is just a really bummer ending to a phone call. One I am making through T-mobile's service."
"----silence----"
And i know that Eddie (I decided later that night that his name was Eddie) was not being paid enough to respond responsibly to the near hassidic levels of proto-guilt I piled on him, but, really, are T-mobile salesperson manuals written in crayon on a Fuddrucker's menu? Does this not seem like a crappy way to manage a lifetime customer relationship? And after a few upgrades that's exactly what I am. I am committed to T-mobile until every single fucking organ in my body fails, since every new upgrade required I extend my contract at least another year. The sun will turn blood red and all life consumed in a flurry of radioactive sandstorms sweeping across the dead countryside like the gnarled fist of a rotting elder god and i will still be paying 150 dollars a month for the full data package plus unlimited texts to the wandering, inhuman descendants of modern day T-mobile representatives.The T-mobile plan requires that i know my mindset 2 or 3 years into the future. Historically, this has not been the case. Hell, I don't know what gender I'm going to be in 3 years. Add to this the fact that I can't have a googlephone.
So, I found another T-mobile store located conveniently between two Starbucks and, despite the personal handicap of me being an existing source of revenue for their corporation, they sold me a few ounces of exponentially marked up plastic with a touch screen and instant access to Google Street View. i do want to point out that, although not freakishly so, it seemed like the salesgirl's arms were too short for the rest of her body. Maybe this was an illusion resulting from a poorly considered peasant-top and capri pants but i kept imagining her as a T-mobile sponsored T-Rex charging through the prehistoric forest of handheld phones for the whole family. Tyrannosaurus Salesgirlicus leaned back onto her haunches and let out a roar, sending us on our way out of the store of wonders with a precious Googlephone. i waved back to her, as if to say, in passing, "look, normal sized arms."
This got me thinking. I started wondering if T-mobile, as a company, didn't have fatal managment flaws. But then I thought, would a company with fatal management flaws have a stock market year to date trading chart that looks like this?
Yes. Yes, it would. For anyone who can't see the link, it looks like the far side of an Evil Kneivel motorcyle landing ramp with a few extra bumps. T-mobile trades as Deutsche Telekom (DT) and, yes, I know that a lot of stocks are down right now. Why do I think this stock dropping is particularly of interest? Because I'm a customer and I'm watching it happen from the inside. it's a fascinating view. I get to watch this company I pay money to make mistakes a C student wouldn't.
But let's say i only had one data point. What if all I knew about T-mobile was what Eddie had said? There's still a decision to be made, here, based on that poorly worded and considered statement. Eddie still makes a difference.
At the end of this week, either John McCain or Barack Obama will likely be the next president of this country (those following Marvel Comics' epic crossover event "Secret invasion" know that there is another, more darkly insidious possibility as well but we can gloss over that for now). Most everyone here has been watching this election closely and has his or her own opinions on which of the two major candidates is better able to lead. It seems like the only real conversation to be had is with those few undecided voters who remain. To those people, I wonder if it's possible now to look at one simple but important data point.
Which of these candidates has proven, in the context of his campaign, that he is a leader. A campaign is a complex thing, populated by thousands of very different people across hundreds of offices in multiple time zones in every one of the 50 states. And what we've learned about these two men from the way they've handled their campaigns may well be one of the most important data points of the election. Barack Obama's campaign has been run with what the Financial times has called a "steady competence" compared to the "shambles" of Senator McCain's campaign.
On the economic crisis, Obama rallied thinkers and economists, seeking out the best advice calmly and methodically. McCain's spokesmen fell over themselves disagreeing on when he would release an economic plan, allowing him to brag about the strength of the economy, suspend his campaign to pass a bill that failed on the first try, threaten to skip the first debate and then emerge finally with a completely incoherent plan that none of his advisors can seem to explain well.
On the choice of vice president, Obama's choice, Senator Biden, was publically released in a responsible and orderly way, while McCain's camp struggled to determine whether Sara Palin had been vetted by the FBI or not, with McCain himself claiming this to be the case while his advisors and those responsible said otherwise. In the choice of a running mate who now seems to be running as much against him as they both are against their party successor, George Bush, McCain again proved himself to be intemperate and rash. in comparison, Obama's campaign has seemed thoughtful, deliberate, and statesmanlike.
On foreign policy, Senator McCain's quick damnation of Russia in the Georgian crisis was harsh and poorly considered, exactly the kind of "from the hip" tone-deaf diplomacy we've come to expect from the bush administration. This, coupled with his potentially warmaking gaffe in Jordan where he had to be told that Iran and al-Qaeda have no connection whatsoever so he could publicly recant his statements certainly leave a lot of room to be worried. As does his public wishing for the death of Fidel Castro and his initial "hundred year war" flub. He comes across as a man who SHOULD be a skilled statesman but has not bothered to learn the issues. A possibly smart man who doesn't think that information about the issues is important.
Time and time again, when McCain's deputies and spokesmen open their mouths it has reflected poorly on the candidate. They speak outside their area of expertise, as Joe the plumber has in regards to Israel. They speak too soon and take opposing or incoherent positions, as Sara Palin has in regards to a federal anti-marriage amendment. They act like good people, smart people at times, with no consilient leadership. In the end, it is McCain himself who is responsible for a campaign that has prioritized games, rhetoric and tactics over policy and strategy.
As we watch a person in a position of leadership already, over a large campaign, we can easily see the emotional, impulsive, personal and even angry way that john McCain has chosen to lead. We can decide for ourselves if that is how we think this country SHOULD be led, how it works best. I have my own decisions to make on t-mobile, and i know that is a tiny, absurdist decision to make compared to the one everyone here is making on Tuesday. All i ask people to do, if they are undecided or otherwise bored in the middle of the night, is to take a look at the campaigns led by these two men and grade them on this data point. Which of these campaigns seems driven by a strong leadership. Which campaign is doing its homework right now, while you are reading this. Which one gets an "A" and which one gets a "C".
And then let's take a look at our situation and ask ourselves if a "C" is good enough.
Powered by | | English | | Albanian | | Arabic | | Bulgarian | | Catalan | | Chinese | | Croatian | | Czech | | Danish | | Dutch | | Estonian | | Filipino | | Finnish | | French | | Galician | | German | | Greek | | Hebrew | | Hindi | | Hungarian | | Indonesian | | Italian | | Japanese | | Korean | | Latvian | | Lithuanian | | Maltese | | Norwegian | | Polish | | Portuguese | | Romanian | | Russian | | Serbian | | Slovak | | Slovenian | | Spanish | | Swedish | | Thai | | Turkish | | Ukrainian | | Vietnamese |
|
|
|
|
Saturday, August 23, 2008
|
Category: Music
While we wait on Jim (for another blog)....Some News 
Sept 16, 2008 Die Warzau's highly anticipated "greatest hits" album "Vinyl 88" will be in stores and online September 16th. It contains 10 previously released tracks, (remixed and re-mastered) as well as six new, never before released tracks! Track Listing: 01 : Insect - 4:47
02 : Land of the Free - 5:26
03 : Born Again - 4:29
04 : All Good Girls - 6:01
05 : Glare - 4:32
06 : Funkopolis - 5:44
07 : Crusaders - 4:45
08 : Welcome to America - 5:02
09 : Kleen - 5:04
10 : Coming Down - 3:38
11 : Last Generation - 3:31
12 : All Cut Up - 3:37
13 : Nitelite - 4:09
14 : Smacktime - 4:44
15 : Permission - 4:22
16 : Hitler's Brain - 5:23
Powered by | | English | | Albanian | | Arabic | | Bulgarian | | Catalan | | Chinese | | Croatian | | Czech | | Danish | | Dutch | | Estonian | | Filipino | | Finnish | | French | | Galician | | German | | Greek | | Hebrew | | Hindi | | Hungarian | | Indonesian | | Italian | | Japanese | | Korean | | Latvian | | Lithuanian | | Maltese | | Norwegian | | Polish | | Portuguese | | Romanian | | Russian | | Serbian | | Slovak | | Slovenian | | Spanish | | Swedish | | Thai | | Turkish | | Ukrainian | | Vietnamese |
|
|
|
|
Thursday, May 24, 2007
|
Category: News and Politics
 Martin Luther King Jr. once said that given a long enough timeline, the arrow of human history points towards justice. I would think that was true even if he didn't say it in that booming august alliterative voice he had. He could probably have ordered Chinese food in that voice and it would have sounded epic. Give me the Potstick-er-er-ers. And the Frie-e-e-ed Ric- ah. And no Em Esssss Geeeeeeeeeee. I want to ask people who are reading (people who aren't? I am asking you nothing, in fact, I'm making fun of your blog indifference even as I type.) to try something for me. Today, and only today, the thing I am asking you to do is not sexual in nature and won't require that you apologize to your parents for embarrassing them in public. Although, would it hurt you to apologize to your parents for embarrassing them in public? Probably not. Imagine that this arrow is an actual giant big object. Let's say it's made out of wood- a nice polished teak or something. Now, what happens if we get up on top of it? It balances pretty well. It's pointing that way. Let's try this. Let's take 5 steps forward.
I remember a lot of people I knew saying, on September 11th, that we, the US should commit ourselves to a non-violent response. That we should take 5 steps this way. That we should shore up our security inside the US, work to build toward a non-external energy-reliant economy and commit ourselves to the ideal that no Muslim-reared child would die because of what happened at the twin towers. I was one of those people. We said that we should use the power of the goodwill coming our way to forgive and challenge the rest of the world to do it, too. We could lead by example. If people never learned how to say "I'm sorry", we should learn to forgive anyway. We could have made the names of those 3k+ people who died that day stand for something real. I still believe this. As strongly as I think anything, I think that we need to be better as a country- we needed to learn how not to act in anger, but to pursue peace with our best tools. At the very least we should have noticed that we were not attacked by a nation, but, in fact, by a small group of people who were likely trying to create the exact result we gave them.
In hindsight it may seem obvious that what happened on September 11th was a large scale case of "suicide by cop". You've all probably seen suicide by cop before. It's what happens when you get up in a clock tower somewhere and start pumping hollow shells into people until the police bring in the sharpshooter to remove you. You know it's suicide but you don't care. It's what you're there to do. When a tiny group of people attacks a giant sovereign nation, they have at least some suspicion that the nation will start blowing people up in retaliation. You know it's going to mean thousands more of your supporters die, but you don't care. It's what you're there to do. And we played along. If Osama Bin Laden had tried to find a way to get the US to destroy any of its remaining credibility in the Muslim world, pitch wildly to the right, remove the civil liberties of its own population and waste billions of dollars he couldn't have succeeded more. The country has become more religious, more paranoid, more violent, poorer, less concerned with civil liberties, more xenophobic, in essence, we have become more like them. And the fact that thousands of their own supporters have died to get there is inconsequential to them. It worked. We did it. The group of people who believe that internally directed action was the right course of action has grown. The arrow of human history points forward. You are rarely wrong about this sort of thing if you stand on the arrow and take 5 steps forward. When the US attacked Iraq, some people stood up and said it was wrong, unequivocally wrong. The number of people who now admit that seems to be growing every day. Equal rights for women. Breaking down segregation. Defending human liberty. The guarantee that Martin Luther King made, beneath the surface, was this. Get up on the arrow and take 5 steps forward. You will be hated today but vindicated tomorrow.
So, eventually, you'll be right, but not this minute. This minute, people will call you an idealistic idiot. They'll call you self-congratulatory for noticing that there is an arrow and writing about it. They'll call you simplistic and stupid and claim that you don't understand people. They'll make fun of your hair. (ok, this is me projecting, but kids can be really cruel) But Martin Luther King gave us something amazing when he gave us that arrow. He gave us the right- the challenge - to speak into the future. To live in the future. He gave us a tool that lets us take that 5 steps.
I want to tell you what I see if I step up on that arrow and look at Iraq. I hope you'll take a look and talk about what you see, too.
Ok. Looking.
Let's face it. Iraq is fucked and so are we. While I'm happy that people are finally starting to notice this, I'm disappointed that they don't follow the thinking to its conclusion.
It's time for the United States to apologize for Iraq.
This should not be revolutionary thinking. When you do something wrong, you apologize. Ending this war is a priority and doing it correctly is an even bigger priority. We've past the point in history where good intentions are enough. It's time to end this war in a way that ensures something like it won't happen again. Really good apologies usually come in three steps:1. Express your apology for what you did
You've got to say "Hey, I notice this was wrong. My bad". The "My bad" part is important. You tell Jill that you understand that getting drunk and touching all of her cats in an inappropriate way is wrong. Every one of them. Let's say you didn't miss one.
2. Commit yourself to fixing your mistake, to whatever degree it is possible
You've got to try to undo whatever damage you can from your mistake. You get the damn cats all the therapy they need.
3. Put machinery in place to make sure you don't do it again.
This is how people know you really meant it. You make sure it doesn't happen again. You go to AA. You throw out all your kitty porn. You start dating a human. You do what it takes. And maybe, just maybe, Jill will believe it. Maybe it will start to make it right. This will make sure that your relationship with Jill isn't completely destroyed. Cats, however, never forgive. You're on your own there.
And maybe you saved Jill from a life of cat-entrenched serial despondency, quiet undercover solo masturbation and a final will and testament bequeathing everything to "Mr. Mistypaws.", but it wasn't your choice to make. You fucked up. It doesn't matter what you meant to do, what you did was wrong.
What we did in Iraq was wrong. We took a sovereign nation surrounded completely by unfriendly borders and forced them to tell us if they had substantial weapons. If they said "no", this left them open to attack by every bordering nation. If they said "yes" this left them open to attack by us. We gave them no credible way to prove anything, failed to exhaust diplomatic options and, unprovoked, invaded and destroyed their infrastructure. We killed children, destroyed homes and separated families. We detained people in violation of all known international laws, we tortured people and, regardless of how you view these actions you will likely agree, we engaged in policies that we would decry if any other nation on the planet followed them. We placed them on the brink of genocide and civil war and now have no reasonable plan to do anything about it. To jump in this conversation, I want to suggest how to end it. But I want to suggest a way that is specifically concentrated on justice. How do we get more justice and move the arrow of human history by ending this ridiculous and untenable war. My suggestion:1. Apologize. Make it clear that the United States, along with its allies in this war, were wrong to initiate this conflict. Develop a long term restitution plan that can help fund infrastructure development, personal property replacement and medical care. Explain exactly what we did wrong and commit ourselves to not doing it again. Make it clear that the US does NOT support preemptive warfare and will not any longer engage in it. Completely and unequivocally state that we were wrong. Make it clear exactly at every step. What we did wrong and begin the conversation of how to avoid it. Make all documents regarding this conflict available to the UN. Be more forthcoming than we think we have to be. This is a transparent and clear apology.
2. Place all troops in the area under the authority of the UN. Shift as many US troops as possible to other UN controlled locations and swap them out for Arab-speaking ones wherever possible. When possible, put Arab speakers in positions of authority on the troop line and create comprehensive Oversight through a commitment to the most stringent application of the Geneva conference protocols. Commit ourselves to funding a 10 year plan through the UN that will use learnings generated in Rwanda and Burundi by Amnesty international to respond to human rights abuses quickly, internally, and stave off the coming civil war. Hire a "Peace Czar" whose job it is to research and determine ways to develop and support the peace in the area. Fund this. Begin humane education and engagement training with all remaining troops, including weekly education in ethics and first response humanitarian aid. Support Non governmental aid organizations in ensuring that people in the area are fed and invite them to provide addition input on oversight.
3. Vote in and attach the following to our constitution as the 28th amendment. This is in response to the gulf of Tonkin incident as well as to the current war. We have to make it clear that the US will not engage in this sort of warfare in the future:
Section 1. The right of the people to live peaceably is necessary to their ongoing liberty and happiness, and shall not be abridged unjustly or without cause. Given that the United States is a nation that actively seeks out peace and rejects the idea that any nation should wage war frivolously, no war or policing action may be initiated or engaged against any sovereign agency unless the agency attacks first or two independent unaffiliated organizations find that human rights abuses warrant our engagement. No war or policing action shall last longer than is necessary to ensure our safety or mitigate those abuses.
Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
4. work with the world community to create a consensus on what happened for inclusion into history books. For this to be an ongoing lesson, it has to be remembered. We need to stand as an example of what an effective apology really is. The old adage "Everything happens for a reason" is one of the most evil, stupid ones to make the meme circuit. Little girls aren't raped for a reason, hurricanes don't kill children for a reason, Jill's cats are not sexually abused for a reason (They are cute.) The reality is a little more subtle and complex. If we are very smart, work very hard and are exceedingly lucky, we can MAKE a reason out of what happens. It's time to make a reason for this war. It's time to put a headstone on the thousands of people murdered. That reason may well be the pursuit of the perfect apology and a new era in world politics. The era of personal national accountability.
Powered by | | English | | Albanian | | Arabic | | Bulgarian | | Catalan | | Chinese | | Croatian | | Czech | | Danish | | Dutch | | Estonian | | Filipino | | Finnish | | French | | Galician | | German | | Greek | | Hebrew | | Hindi | | Hungarian | | Indonesian | | Italian | | Japanese | | Korean | | Latvian | | Lithuanian | | Maltese | | Norwegian | | Polish | | Portuguese | | Romanian | | Russian | | Serbian | | Slovak | | Slovenian | | Spanish | | Swedish | | Thai | | Turkish | | Ukrainian | | Vietnamese |
|
|
|
|
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
|
Category: Religion and Philosophy
 I think it's important to understand the difference between ideas and people. It shouldn't be hard, right? Ideas are colorless, formless, floaty, mental things and people have pulses and bodies. People shit and eat and think and love and breathe and smell bad when you leave them in the sun too long. People feel good when you pull up next to them and cuddle with them and, on occasion, put your tongues in their mouths. Ideas do not. In fact, ideas have no mouths for you to put your tongue in. If you like things you can put your tongue in, essentially, odds are you are a big fan of people.
Ideas can be so much scarier than that. They can be huge and monstrous and unforgettable, like the idea that people in group x are somehow less of a person than people in group y. They can be silly but scary below the surface, like the idea that proof doesn't matter, and they can be seductively destructive, like the idea that what happens here is less important than what happens after we die.
Ideas and people are clearly different. In fact, this is so clear that it should be obvious that we need to treat them differently. What makes a person survive and thrive- what makes a person better is different than what makes an idea survive and thrive- better. What's interesting is that there are two branches of science that discuss the health of these two things- people and ideas. The two branches are medicine and scientific logic. Medicine is the science of creating a healthy person and scientific logic is the science of creating a healthy idea. Medicine is clear about how to create a healthy person. You feed a person, treat a person with respect, make sure he has a place to live, food to eat, medicine when sick, access to amenities, human rights, civil liberties that would enable him to remain healthy, safe, strong, and well-fed. It's clear we need to respect people. In fact, if all of the above means anything at all, it means love. It's clear we have to love people. We don't get to do otherwise and still call ourselves scientists. We don't get to ignore the path medical science provides us and still say we believe in science.
Scientific logic is also clear about how to create a healthy idea. We have to make it accountable at all times, attack it, force it to be better, argue it, respond to it, never ignore it, never let it get away with anything, beat on it when it's stupid, support it when it's not, spread it when it makes sense, publicly insult it when it doesn't, research it, question it, never deify it and always be willing to let it go if it's proven wrong. The life of an idea is hard, cold and brutal and that's exactly the way it should be.
I certainly don't want to oversimplify this. Lots of overlap happens between people and ideas. Some people are so attached to their ideas and so determined not to let them change or evolve that they essentially bond themselves to the idea. This makes it hard to discuss things with them, since attacking the idea looks like attacking them.
Today is not a day when I want any misunderstanding about the distinction, so I want to mourn the death of a person who tried to do the best he could and cared about people without reminding you constantly that I disagreed with nearly every idea he ever publicly had. If some people make themselves bigger than life by wanting to do better, he did. Even if we have no significant overlap in our own personal philosophies and even if we had no shared vision, he was still a person who reached out every way possible to do something he believed in. He was a man who, in his heart, I think, believed passionately in love and strongly in the idea that things could be better than they are. We don't always have to have the same horizon line to recognize eyes that seek out horizons, that look out into hillsides and see the world better than it is revealed to them. We don't have to have the same eyes to appreciate what a sun looks like.
On the occasion of his death, I want to wish the family and friends of Jerry Falwell peace and hope today. He was a man who believed in love, who believed in working to make things better tomorrow. Those things have their own rewards and draw people together from every side of the political and cultural divide. A hero in the name of love and hope, a community organizer and a man of conviction, I want to celebrate him as a person, real in every sense of the word, flawed but trying. I hope that the footprint he leaves behind is that of a man who wanted the best for the people he loved, and when he didn't see goodness, tried to make it. I hope that the lesson he leaves behind for everyone is that we all make the world in our own image every day and that our ideas cross time and space. I hope that the people who loved him can remember the person who loved them back in joy. I hope that he, as a person, got fulfillment out of a life that he worked so very hard to imbue with purpose.
And I hope that we can talk tomorrow about his ideas.
Powered by | | English | | Albanian | | Arabic | | Bulgarian | | Catalan | | Chinese | | Croatian | | Czech | | Danish | | Dutch | | Estonian | | Filipino | | Finnish | | French | | Galician | | German | | Greek | | Hebrew | | Hindi | | Hungarian | | Indonesian | | Italian | | Japanese | | Korean | | Latvian | | Lithuanian | | Maltese | | Norwegian | | Polish | | Portuguese | | Romanian | | Russian | | Serbian | | Slovak | | Slovenian | | Spanish | | Swedish | | Thai | | Turkish | | Ukrainian | | Vietnamese |
|
|
|
|
Friday, May 11, 2007
|
Category: News and Politics
 I am the first one with my hand up explaining why I, Jim Marcus, would make a terrible president of the United States of America. Let's face it, there's an army duffel bag full of good solid reasons why you should not vote for me in 2008. First of all, I have difficulty balancing my own checkbook, so I would have to really "hire up" as they say to find an effective money guy. I've identified the problem as rampant overtipping, which I can defend thusly:
1. I err on the side of believing everything a waitserver says when serving me food. This is because I have a faulty trust/feed me mechanism, much like those chicks you see on the Discovery Channel who willingly open their little beaks so mom can vomit worm mucus into them. After a week of this, you'd think the little fuckers would be on the phone to Domino's but, no. Tonight they will open wide again. This translates from bird language into "I am not dead of starvation yet, so I trust you". Humans need to set the bar higher.
2. I believe Fight Club, the movie, and suspect that any wrong move on my part will cause the general corruption of my lunch with some sort of human bodily sediment. I tip to fend off Hepatitis B.
3. I have a crush on the waitress.
Further reasons have to do with my inability to remain organized at all times, and my total lack of ability with names. You'll never hear me call George Bush an idiot for forgetting the name of the prime minister of the Transitional Federal Assembly of Somalia (and it's totally Ali Mohamed GEDI ) because I can't remember my mailwoman's name and I've had lunch with her. Have I had lunch with Ali Mohamed GEDI? No. And neither has George Bush. The point is:
Names are hard.
Yes, that's the point. But, there are at least 10 truly sucky reasons why I won't be your next president (people here who live in America) and each one annoys me a little. They annoy me because I think that each one represents a failure on the part of the people of America to set standards that would allow themselves to be governed sensibly. If we want to call for a better class of leadership, it may be time to call for a better class of followership.
Reason 1. I have not yet declared my intention to run. It's still fairly early in 2007. To run a successful bid for the presidency, you have to abandon all hope of performing your day job to any degree of efficacy and start campaigning for people to vote for you 15 months from now. I don't even know what gender I'll be 15 months from now. Who needs 15 months to decide how to vote? More importantly, how do these people pull a paycheck for the 15 months they are doing nothing but kissing babies and lying to people strategically? This leads us to Reason number 2. Reason 2. I did not inherit 100 million dollars. How do you ride the campaign trail for so long without doing your job? Don't some of you work in the senate and stuff? I know none of you are in IT. How about you, president guy? Are we paying for the 1.5 years out of your presidency that you will spend convincing us that you deserve the job again? Have you filed your TPS reports? Is the "My Pet Goat" book report finished yet? You can't do this unless you were born with a silver spoon running almost all the way to your colon. Or, of course, unless you engage Reason number 3. Reason 3. I do not have wealthy white Protestant landowning corporate friends who need favors. My friends come to me with favors like "Can you get the kink out of my butt" or "I need to talk about my boyfriend" or "Can you help me design my record cover". It's rare that any of them come to me and say, "Jim. I need to obliterate an endangered species to build an entry level production machinery plant. Can I get a hand here?" This is bigger than a buttrub and it may be a sign that I'm not truly presidential that I don't have these kinds of friends. I do like giving buttrubs, though. No money in it. Reason 4. I am one of those AtheistsIn a Newsweek Poll, a whole bunch of Americans willing to actually answer the phone and talk when Newsweek called said they believed in God by a ratio of 92 to 6 with only 2 percent answering "I don't know". All well and good. Unfortunately, only 37 percent said they'd be willing to vote for an atheist for president. This is significantly down from 49 percent in a 1999 Gallup poll—which also found that more Americans would vote for a homosexual than an atheist. September 11th did something remarkable. It convinced people that, because a bunch of monotheists flew a plane into a building, it made more sense to vote for one. I know that's probably a pretty incendiary thing to say. See reason 10. Reason 5. Additionally, I am one of those BisexualsI suspect that we will have an openly gay president, a black president, and a president whose last name rhymes suggestively with an intimate body part before we have a bisexual one. And when president Flagina comes out as Bisexual, they will find a reason to impeach him. I think this is because of the confusion around bisexuality. As many people think it's a lie as think it's a sin as think it's a transition to being gay. Of course it has nothing to do with my politics and I ask you, the voters, to ignore it. It's immediately relevant only when looking for a date. Which I am, by the way. Saturday. Reason 6. I had a life. Part 1. Sex I have had sex in public, on video tape, in front of people, with multiple people and in other situations that, while fantastic and a lot of fun, would suggest to the electorate that I am unelectable for some reason. I would have to deny and defend myself and, since some of it's on tape, it would be an unconvincing and problematic denial process. Having a life is a huge drawback on the campaign trail. Even though there are tons of neat places to have sex on the campaign trail and I would personally consider it a sign of character if a president took the opportunity to get biblical with an S.O. on the Camp David coffee table. Reason 7. I had a life. Part 2. Writing/MusicI have written a lot of lyrics in my life. Some were awful. Some were actually not bad. About 98% of them would come back and haunt me. Asking people to defend things they said out of context decades ago is the ongoing pastime of journalists who can't seem to focus on the issues. It's our fault. We buy the magazines. This is another reason not to focus on silly misstatements made by a president unwittingly while very real civil liberties are being abused by him wittingly. Microsoft Word claims that "wittingly" is a word, even though I have never personally used it before. Reason 8. I had a life. Part 3. I tried X onceI don't really do drugs. But I did try ecstasy once. It made me want to have sex with random people. I confess that this wasn't a new feeling for me. Yes, I was worried about my spinal fluid, but that wasn't the reason I never did it again. (the spinal fluid thing is a myth.) The real reason is that bottled water is expensive. The idea that unrepentant drug use will preclude you from taking the presidency is interesting. You have to repent. Be sorry. And then fail to inhale. Reason 9. I am part JewishMy father was Jewish. I know that this doesn't make me actually Jewish, but as you get older, you get closer to some traditions and the Jewish tradition is a powerful one. I was sitting Shiva once (this is what you do when you are Jewish and someone in your immediate family dies. Everyone gets together and stays in one house for a week. It's like a very somber reality TV show in Yiddish.) and my cousin Irwin came up to me while I was eating, making sure I didn't put meat and cheese on the same plate. I was a vegetarian and so I was a little confused. I assured him I wouldn't, but what I wanted to say was "Dude. I am just exactly Jewish enough to know that. I know who Elie Weisel is, where a yarmulke goes and not to put a piece of cheese on the same plate as a roast beef sandwich. And that's it. That exhausts my Jewishicity and I go goy past that point, but, up 'til there, I am totally engaged." I didn't say that. I think I just nodded knowingly. Le esprit d' escalier. The point here is that we are likely a few years away from a Jewish- or even partly Jewish- president. The anti-Semitism in our country may have gone underground for the most part, but let Lieberman win a presidential primary and we'll see what happens. Reason 10. I sometimes swear like Sarah Silverman's older sailor brother. And, I have to say, I have no clue what she sees in Jimmy Kimmel. But that is so besides the point. We, as Americans, can't stand it when presidential candidates get impassioned. We seem to be looking for stoic sociopaths. Howard Dean screams a little and all of a sudden he's Ted Bundy. Why can't we jump up and down a little in this process? People's lives and happiness are at stake. I say it's time for a few new swear words. And if we can't invent them while watching this torturous meandering process that our electoral system has turned itself into, then we're not truly the degenerates I sort of hope we are.
Powered by | | English | | Albanian | | Arabic | | Bulgarian | | Catalan | | Chinese | | Croatian | | Czech | | Danish | | Dutch | | Estonian | | Filipino | | Finnish | | French | | Galician | | German | | Greek | | Hebrew | | Hindi | | Hungarian | | Indonesian | | Italian | | Japanese | | Korean | | Latvian | | Lithuanian | | Maltese | | Norwegian | | Polish | | Portuguese | | Romanian | | Russian | | Serbian | | Slovak | | Slovenian | | Spanish | | Swedish | | Thai | | Turkish | | Ukrainian | | Vietnamese |
|
|
|
|
Saturday, April 07, 2007
|
Category: News and Politics
 Just about everybody had that friend in High school who got busted smoking. Maybe his dad walked in on him and some friends smoking in the basement. Or maybe his mom found a pack in his coat. (This was the scariest Brady Bunch episode, ever, btw. We all knew that the ciggies weren't Greg's, though.) Maybe, he burned down the block with a cigarette, killing hundreds including the entire population of the geriatric home down on the corner, whose inhabitants died scraping their grey grizzled fingers raw on the bars outside their windows, screaming to be shot in the head by passing policemen so as to avoid the charring, searing agony of having the very flesh melted from their aged brittle bones. (This, as an aside, WOULD have been the scariest Brady bunch episode ever if it hadn't been for those damn censors.)
Actually, I didn't have one of those friends. But I did have a story from a friend about what happened to his cousin when his dad caught him smoking. Some parents live on the edge a little and I guess my friend's cousin's parents lived there, too. His dad made him smoke 2 entire packs of cigarettes at one sitting, while he watched. The idea was "Hey, many smokers smoke 2 packs a day once they're addicted. Let's show you what that feels like." Supposedly, it worked, as my friend said his cousin got so sick he never smoked again. Happy ending, right? Beautiful. Everyone went out for ice cream and all was right with the world. We called this the immersion method.
I think I had my doubts about the methodology, but I couldn't think of a better alternative. I'd never found a way to talk anyone out of smoking and I'd never seen anyone who had. No one believes they will actually get sick or get hurt in any way. Maybe this immersion works. I lived, later, with a friend named Doug who kept falling asleep in his chair holding a cigarette and lighting various clothing on fire. I soaked his chair in non flammable plastic at his request. We spent hours out at various clubs talking about how to forestall the inevitable fiery death he faced one day when he fell into a slightly deeper sleep. I was ready to start missing charred little Doug. Sometimes it's important to get emotionally prepared. We had a little eulogy and funeral at the Metro in Chicago. Great guy. Not much left. Smelled bad on the way out.
So he suggested a radical version of this immersion method. Maybe a group of people should show up at your house and kidnap you, drag you off to a dungeon somewhere where you'll spend weeks tied to a wall, covered in ashes with ashtray filth and tar-filled water filling the room up to your neck. It would be a very expensive but effective program. A big moneymaker if we could get funding. We called it "A season in Hell" after a book of poems by Rimbaud. This was not to be the final marketing name, although it did have a catchy logotype.
By the way, this was our second big moneymaking self-help program idea. The first was the Coma Diet Plan. Our ultimate easy weight loss plan. People of heft (politically correct term for the chubby) would sign up for 50,000 dollars a piece and be put into an artificially induced coma for 3 months. During that time orderlies would exercise them by moving their limbs to prevent atrophy and build muscle mass. They would be fed intravenously a minimum number of calories and the weight would just drop off. They would wake up 3 months later, having gone through no extensive trouble, lean, fit and ready to dive right into their new skinny lives. Sweet. And after 3 months away, their families could be expected to be so happy to see them. We even had cards made, for fun. The coma diet plan. My old friend, the photographer Steve Diet Goedde was in a pretty interesting punk band named Coma Diet as well. It's where the "Diet" in his name came from (There was a time when people in Chicago used to call people by their first names and band names. Eric Spicer was Eric Raygun. I heard myself called Jim Warzau. The first person who ever introduced me to Paul Barker called him "Paul Blackouts" which, disturbingly, made him sound both plural and like a drunk. Chicago.)
So we never did it. The millions of dollars we might have made from our revolutionary self help plans never materialized. My big idea dreams are smaller now. (entering the Pillsbury bakeoff. It's a million dollars if you win, people). But maybe the ideas are sound. Does immersion work? Give people exactly what they want and they realize that it sort of sucks? Can you cure an addiction by letting the person wallow in the results of their addiction?
Whether this works or not has become more relevant to me lately. We have a unique addiction happening in this country. It's an addiction to magic. This isn't magic like on Bewitched where we, as a nation, were expected to believe that Nichole Kidman would want anything to do with Will Farrel. Not like Harry Potter Magic or Buffy the Vampire kind. (too bad, really, because I could totally get with a little more Buffy). The kind of magic we're addicted to is magical thinking.
We've seen a growing support for Pharmacists refusing to service women because it went against their religion. We've seen Popes and trains of their followers fight against reasoned, scientifically proven sexual education and contraception because it went against their religion. We've seen Churches do battle with laws that would protect children from sexual predators because they would potentially force their religion to behave in a reasoned way. We've seen attacks on science from all angles because the traditions of various religions are impacted, Muslim speakers advocating beating their wives, Christian speakers fanning the flames of antigay violence, Seventh Day Adventist speakers feeding into sectarian genocide, Jewish speakers treating a whole group of genetically near-identical people as de facto inferiors because their religion, again, pits magic against science, revelation against reason, superstition against introspection.
And the addiction to magical thinking seems to be growing. Well Over half of Americans now believe that, despite scientific evidence to the contrary, God created modern man as he exists now through the process of creationism. Over 2/3 of Americans want Creationism to be taught in schools - Hundreds of millions of people.
A comparison of peoples' views in 34 countries finds that the United States ranks near the bottom when it comes to public acceptance of evolution. Only Turkey ranked lower. The widespread popularity of American fundamentalists, aided by politicians who want to curry favor with that influential voting block, has created an environment more averse to science than we find in other countries, even those far less developed than we are. The primary advocates of Creationism are not accredited scientists. They are pundits and laymen, politicians and theologians. Our addiction to magical thinking in this country has created a set of conditions that put non-scientists in charge of the scientific education of the population.
At the same time, a movement has begun to replace the findings of doctors and professional people of compassion with more magical thinking. Recently, in Danbury Connecticut, the school observed a day of silence. This was meant to honor and remember people, gay, straight, black, white, etc. who were victims of violence just because of who they are. Local religious institutions fought for, and won, the right to stage their rebuttal to this idea with a "day of truth" where they advocated for homosexuality to be considered sinful, unnatural and wrong. By positioning their event as a rebuttal, they made it clear how they felt about the Initial event, whose sole focus was to remind people that violence in the service of intolerance is wrong. Valerie Pinnex, the pastor who instigated the "Day of Truth" refuted the intent of the Day of Silence by asserting, in opposition to the findings of medical professionals, psychiatrists, etc. that homosexuality was a clinical condition and unnatural. An ex police officer and security guard, Valerie has exactly 0 years of medical experience or training. And yet, hers was the medical advice heard by the population of the school. A message of distrust, division and alienation, specifically intended to counter a message of nonviolence. And paid for by tax money.
We have in front of us a strange addiction. But I'm starting to wonder if there isn't a cure. It's brutal and painful, like the rabies cure, a long string of painful shots. It's expensive, like the most elaborate cold remedies that involve ground up animals, endangered and rare. And it's ugly. Sort of like a proctology exam.
Let's just let them win.
I suppose we need to let the hatemongers into schools to counter the conversations on tolerance- For every Martin Luther King Day or Harvey Milk Discussion, let in the The Ku Klux Klan and a Valerie Pinnex. For every scientifically verified and exhaustively researched finding on the origins of human life, let in the magicians, preachers, pundits, and grade school graduates with dissenting opinions. For every responsibly compiled history text, let in a work of collaborative fiction detailing what might have happened, how we didn't walk on the moon, the holocaust didn't happen, etc.
And when a generation of American politicians have been raised to hate and fear what's different, the religious right can bask in its triumph. When a generation of American doctors have been raised to elevate wishful thinking above science, the American Religious Right can visit those doctors with joy, prescriptions in hand for antibiotics, taken without respect to the evolution of the various diseases countered. And when a generation of American Historians have been raised to think that whatever revisions they want to introduce into history are as valid as what is documented, The Religious right can enjoy the results of their work. As we descend into sickness, intolerance and ignorance, we can light candles along the way, mutter newly learned magic words and forget what tools we sent thousands of years developing, all to make political communication a little more vital- a little more understandable.
What would a country like that look like, just one generation from now? I couldn't say with any degree of certainty. But maybe it's time to stop fighting and let the addiction win. Many of the pro-theocratic members of the religious right in this country have never lived under a theocracy- never lived in a place where religion and magic determined the entirety of public policy. If they don't have the vision to understand what the most vocal and outspoken theological voices in our community would do with even more power than they enjoy right now, maybe we should supplement that vision with empirical experience. Maybe, if we're lucky, we'll only sacrifice one generation before the nation wakes up and rises to the countrywide challenge to pass through dark ages swiftly and without regret. Maybe only one group of men and women will have to be sacrificed to absurdity before we wake up as a nation and resume our movement towards the future.
It's probably time to give the fundamentalist what they've been wanting. A true American season of hate and ignorance. A return to superstition and the intellectual jungle. A Season in Hell. Let's see how they like it.
Powered by | | English | | Albanian | | Arabic | | Bulgarian | | Catalan | | Chinese | | Croatian | | Czech | | Danish | | Dutch | | Estonian | | Filipino | | Finnish | | French | | Galician | | German | | Greek | | Hebrew | | Hindi | | Hungarian | | Indonesian | | Italian | | Japanese | | Korean | | Latvian | | Lithuanian | | Maltese | | Norwegian | | Polish | | Portuguese | | Romanian | | Russian | | Serbian | | Slovak | | Slovenian | | Spanish | | Swedish | | Thai | | Turkish | | Ukrainian | | Vietnamese |
|
|
|
|