Code Brown

As I was packing for my trip this morning, I briefly considered bringing my new DSLR camera, but my bags were stuffed pretty full, and I was worried it'd get banged up. (I haven't gotten a proper camera bag yet.) I did grab the Holga, but now that I'm here I'm wishing I had the digital. First of all, I have a pretty sweet hotel room looking over the river. Plus, it's really foggy here today, and I think there would be some interesting shots. I don't have any film for the Holga (it takes 120, which you can't usually get at Walgreens), but I hope to get some during the trip.

Off soon to see friends from college. Haven't eaten since breakfast, but I promise to eat and drink very thoroughly tonight. Meetings don't start until tomorrow afternoon, so I can spend part/all of the morning either (1) sleeping it off or (2) sweating it out in the hotel gym.

I'm glad not to be home hearing about the mayoral/council elections. I'm curious, but I have a bad case of Citizen Fatigue.

A guy from work had a heart attack recently. We were told that it was a major one, but how much so I don't know. There was a "get well" card at reception that we all signed -- and by "we all signed," I mean that a lot of people signed it, and I assume it's understood that I assented to its message, regardless of whether I actually put pen to paper.

A couple days went by, and someone sent out an update that the guy was going home. Terrific! This was followed, however, by a message saying that his birthday was also coming up this week, and that there would be a birthday card at reception that we could sign.

My immediate reaction was something like "Oh, come on -- does hoping that he doesn't die (and that he loses 60 lbs STAT) mean that I have to care about his birthday, too?"

In case you'd forgotten it, "Precious," by the Pretenders, is a very, very good song.


I keep opening up Blogger lately, thinking that I should write more for this site that noone reads or even knows about (that's more or less by design, for now). I then keep not posting anything new. Lacking a gimmick or a particular purpose in maintaining the thing at all makes it hard to where between nothing and everything to draw the Blogworthiness Line. Perhaps just north of Mendoza, and 3 clicks south of Mason-Dixon.

I work near the top of a 30-story building. It's one of the tallest buildings in my part of town, and the view out my window, to the west, is completely unobstructed. There is a fairly large park directly across the street, and a lot of greenspace in the vicinity. The view to the north, of the city's downtown, is pretty cool, but mine is a hell of a view in its own right.

One thing I see fairly often is a hawk gliding past, maybe circling the park. Saw another one this morning, except this one had a little rodent in its talons! It flew off toward the west end of the park, then circled back my direction and veered off to the south. I'm guessing it was looking for a secluded rooftop to have its breakfast.

Or maybe it's providing for its young. Probably not. Do hawk parents feed their babies scraps of rodent? Seems wrong, somehow, but I'm sure it's not.

UPDATE:

Well, I did 2.7 minutes of Internet research and learned that the Cooper's hawk (which was not the type of hawk I observed this morning) produces offspring in the spring months, and that it feeds its fledglings lizards, snakes, and mammals. No worms or bugs for baby Cooper's hawks, it seems.

I tried to send this to James Wolcott in response to this post, http://jameswolcott.com/archives/2006/08/sammy_glick_mee.php, but it bounced back to me. I felt cheated by that, so I post it here, for the enjoyment and/or edification of no one in particular.

________________________

Mr. W,
I agree with your take on Entourage, although I find it a likable enough diversion. I suppose it's too much to hope that Ari's canning means that the show will now focus on Ari (and Beverly D'Angelo!) to the exclusion of Vince and Eric, who are completely uninteresting.

But "bad acting" on "Deadwood"? Whoa. I'll admit that, with some of the players, the flowery language occasionally seems to get lost somewhere between sternum and larynx, and there is an awful lot of triangulated speechifying through gritted and blackened teeth. And the Bullock character is so one-dimensional as to be practically a black hole.

But I love the show, and not principally for the story, which is, how do you say, a bit slow. I'll admit to being sort of a softie for mud and gratuitous violence, but I also think the characters and acting are terrific. Ian McShane is just electrifying. I can't remember ever watching a television show and thinking, "More monologues for him, please!" Farnum, Trixie, Calamity Jane, Steve the Drunk, and Merrick are all written and acted superbly. Gerald Raney and Powers Booth are surprisingly effective nasties, and I even like Brad Dourif coming off 35 years of B-grade horror movies to play Bones McCoy to Swearingen's Captain Kirk. Moreover, he does justice to the Bonesian tradition of TV doctors beginning every sentence with "Dammit, So-and-so, these whores is infested with the Prairie Scum, and they . . . require . . . immediate . . . MEDICAL . . ATTENTION!" Then there was Keith Carradine as Wild Bill and that guy who played both Hickok's killer and Hearst's pervy advance man. Great, all of them. Lastly, I don't have the slightest idea what that theater troupe is doing there, but if that's what it takes to get and keep Brian Cox on the show, then so be it.

All that said, I'd trade 10 Deadwoods for one of "The Wire," which begins soon.

"I Remember When There Was No Such Thing as Salsa"

The buzz in some circles is that this secret, warrantless, domestic surveillance might be the thing that finally does in the Worst President Ever. I wonder why it would. Why this, as opposed to the innumerable other insults that he and his handlers have lavished on us and the rest of the world for the last five years. Is it just that a critical mass of voters in this country might finally perceive it as something that affects them directly, and negatively?

Waging elective war, by contrast, happens somewhere else, to people we don't know. Tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians dead, torture sanctioned and protected, civil war fomented, and now we're about to hand the country over to the democratically elected Islamic fundamentalists -- none of that counts as a hanging offense. But now we think that intercepting e-mails and phone calls to/from American soil is going to bring him down? Something's out of balance.

I'd like to think that it's just the last straw in the steady accretion of everyday atrocities, and that the cognitive dissonance has finally become too much. But if this is the thing that truly mars the Bush Lite presidency in the eyes of a majority of Americans, I suspect it's because we finally feel that we're the target of President Dumbfuck's quirky brand of insanity.