Sorry for the low-tech rerouting, but: 

If you reached this page because of a link to a numbered item that is no longer on my main page, you can get to it by adding "#" and the number -- e.g. "#1085" -- to the end of the URL above.

Dogblogging: Corrie, ready for a walk.

12/11/05, 1:00 a.m. (Link here)

More about newspaper-reading cats: Ours wasn't the first.

12/8/05, 5:39 p.m. (Link here)

So now the United States of America is a country where a professor who dares to advocate scientific theory to the denigration of creationism is physically beaten up on a lonely road by unknown persons and shortly thereafter resigns from the chairmanship of his department, as though defending the Enlightenment were somehow wrong or embarrassing.

12/4/05, 5:39 p.m. (Link here)

Further adventures of the newspaper-reading cat: Kilroy reads the Chronicle.

12/3/05, 11:04 p.m. (Link here)

The 1961 Larousse Gastronomique, regarding the eel: "When caught in fast-running water, its flesh is very delicate..." A small reminder of the whole realms of things one doesn't know.

11/29/05, 4:18 p.m. (Link here)

Sent just now to "oreilly@foxnews.com;jsessionid=089A10C5CD2038141AFB804035BE5FE2" and re-sent to "oreilly@foxnews.com":

"Dear Mr. O'Reilly:

I have just reviewed your attempted blacklist of "worst offenders" at http://billoreilly.com/pg/jsp/general/mediadef.jsp . I would be honored if you would add my Web site, "Demisemiblog," to this list of distinguished publications. The address is http://home.pacbell.net/mabjo/martha.html . My name is Martha Bridegam. Do please be sure and spell my name right on any lists you may be drafting.

Yours truly,

/Martha Bridegam"

(See this Atrios item.)

11/29/05, 10:15 a.m. (Link here)

Split decision: chunk of Vermont marble dissents from the Roberts Supreme Court.

11/27/05, 3:01 p.m. (Link here)

Why is Jerry Falwell trying to steal Christmas from those of us who believe that religious faith is a private matter? He's trying to turn a pleasant private observance into an ugly public political act. He's acting as though this religious holiday can't be celebrated at all except as a fully intended slap in the faces of those who don't celebrate it. He is trying to change the conversation to the point where the only way to celebrate Christmas will be as a bigot. That is stealing Christmas. That is wrong.

11/27/05, 12:08 a.m. (Link here)

So this is what Edgie does behind our backs: she's trying to hack the sardine futures market. Lucky she can't spell or it'd be "all your fissshh are belong to us!" (Photo by Strange de Joel.)

11/23/05, 11:57 a.m. (Link here)

It's possible this week's Schmidt-Murtha business may be remembered as the "Have you no decency?" moment when the national mood turned.

11/19/05, 6:29 p.m. (Link here)

About this $700 million cut from Food Stamps: I realize there's no point these days noting that poor people are constituents too, but Food Stamps are also a farm subsidy. Don't farmers count as constituents either?

11/19/05, 1:38 p.m. (Link here)

So I'm nattering at the breakfast table over an SF Chron article on pellet stoves and Strange de Joel wants to know, "If the pellet stove breaks down, do you go to the Supreme Stove?"

11/13/05, 11:12 p.m. (Link here)

Habeas corpus is on the ropes. Strange, since we've got all these soldiers and Marines and such who have sworn to defend it. But true. Unfortunately, true. Just go read this. But not over breakfast.

11/9/05, 10:51 p.m. (Link here)

So I'm browsing the Google News headlines and one of them is the Bay Area Reporter version of this story, and by way of polite conversation I say, "Syphilis is up and gonorrhea is down."

Strange de Joel bursts into song:

"New York, New Yoooork!..."

11/9/05, 5:25 p.m. (Link here)

Strange that the SF Chron decided to run this photo of a happy-acting Arnold (arm out, three of four fingers carefully curled) under a headline describing his thumping loss in yesterday's election. A weird little cognitive dissonance there, as though the Chron people thought Arnie even in defeat was more entertaining than victorious union leaders. "Wrong but Wromantic" or something. I dunno.

And, yes, I was working yesterday with the union coalition that beat Arnold, taking calls about election irregularities in San Francisco. Actually, there were surprisingly few problems at polling places yesterday -- which makes me realize how preventable were the wildly irregular events I remember from Gonzalez-Newsom 2003.

11/6/05, 7:12 p.m. (Link here)

A West Point man's memories in today's SF Chron are a reminder that we tortured people in Vietnam too. So is the proper reaction pride that this time people are objecting faster and more volubly, or shame that it has been true both in that war and in this one, or should we have to choose?

11/3/05, 4:34 p.m. (Link here)

Have Internet, will travel...

Interesting: Utah state government is offering rural towns with low costs of living as homes for computer workers who may as well live anywhere.

11/2/05, 7:08 p.m. (Link here)

We are now a country that tortures people in basements in Eastern Europe. How can we have adopted so many of the evils we have always stood against?

[LATER: Unlike me, archy hasn't been stunned into brevity on the subject. Go read him.]

10/27/05, 2:41 p.m. (Link here)

Sixteen people may not sound like a lot, but when 16 people in Klamath Falls, Oregon are tired of a war and willing to say so in public, something has turned.

10/3/05, 3:01 p.m. (Link here)

Idle thought: if Dubya just went ahead and appointed his horse to the Supreme Court, would the Senate confirm the appointment?

9/23/05, 9:28 p.m. (Link here)

Texas evacuation stories from Ben at Horizon tonight.

9/22/05, 5:14 p.m. (Link here)

In the context of this thoughtful disquisition on those huge-scale trailer parks being set up to house Katrina evacuees, please consider that Levittown was not the biggest "instant town" in U.S. history. I think that the biggest family housing complex ever created wholesale in the U.S., at least on an emergency basis, was probably this (scroll to foot of page). If anyone thinks I'm wrong, please write and tell me why.

9/18/05, 12:31 a.m. (Link here)

I heard on Friday that there are a few hundred displaced Gulf Coast people staying in St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco after all -- and the guy who told me said that members of the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness haven't been "allowed" to go in and talk to them. Weird. Makes ya wonder what are the rules of ingress and egress for the place.

9/17/05, 12:15 a.m. (Link here)

Four years ago Auden's Sept. 1, 1939 was everywhere on the Net. Is anyone turning back to it now?

9/16/05, 10:46 p.m. (Link here)

"Evacuees get settled in the Coliseum." Doesn't anyone find that a little bit creepy?

9/16/05, 10:09 p.m. (Link here)

Dylan ends up in my head over and over. Once you think of it, he's got some kind of fascination with high water. Hard rain... deep and muddy water... Crash on the Levee/Down in the Flood, which a lot of online writers have been noting... admit that the waters around you have grown (J. remembered that one)... buckets of rain... shelter from the storm. More that I'm forgetting, probably.

There are going to be great songs out of this tragedy too. We've got parody songs already -- I've tried a little parody myself -- but parody doesn't cut it. Whole works of art have to come out of such a weight on the human conscience. They'll come. We'll write those songs. If the twentieth century taught us anything hopeful, it's that art is still possible after anything.

9/13/05, 12:43 p.m. (Link here)

From Tyson Foods: a story of an entirely literal "Whites-only" bathroom. In the twenty-first century, in America. I seriously wonder if racism would have been expressed so openly 10 or 15 years ago. Are we regressing?

..[LATER: This was immoderate. I should have said it was a disputed allegation, and denied by the company. You can't know the details of a case like this from a distance. Not that I'm any less ashamed of the ambient racism in this country.]

9/13/05, 8:27 a.m. (Link here)

A sign o' the times (funny) from the Klamath Falls Herald and News...

9/11/05, 11:12 p.m. (Link here)

Via the William Gibson blog: the American Federation of Musicians, New Orleans Local, Hurricane Relief Fund.

9/11/05, 9:45 p.m. (Link here)

Worth following: the blog by ACORN organizer Wade Rathke, who was himself washed out of New Orleans.

9/11/05, 8:17 p.m. (Link here)

Remember the bit in Catch-22 where the airmen discover their plane has Milo Minderbinder's stock certificates in place of parachutes?

9/11/05, 11:58 a.m. (Link here)

R.I.P. Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, at 81, not long after having to leave his home outside New Orleans. One of the grand old men. Joel heard him sing live once in Louisville. His Web site still says he made it safely to Orange, Texas, but that he lost everything, even his instruments.

[LATER] Got his "Long Way Home" on the stereo. An instrumental called "Deep, Deep Water," and a lovely cover of "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" with Clapton on backup guitar.

9/10/05, 10:31 a.m. (Link here)

Further awkward events while the front page is occupied by the traumatized living and the floating dead and the fascinating new 1850-meets-1984 vibe of the Gulf Coast ...

We are force-feeding the hunger strikers who we have been holding without trial for three years.

This is not the country in which I was born, or at least it's not the century in which I thought I was living. I want to go home to the America that for a while was beginning to live down its past and had become almost able to claim it had done so. Can I go home now?

[LATER:...Hellishness in Iraq, likely won't be on the front page either...

9/9/05, 2:35 p.m. (Link here)

I had other verses in mind to go with the previous item but the word "Dixie" wouldn't stop implying the Old South, and sad to say the very worst racism of the Old South seems, as in any septic tank, to have floated.

Instead I'm watching the awkward announcements and events quietly taking place this week while everyone's worried about the disaster:

- Habeas corpus takes a body blow in the Padilla case

- Karen Hughes sworn in as "Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Ambassador for the same." (See WPost on same.)

- What else? [LATER: I knew I had another one in mind. The DeLay associates in Texas being indicted.]

9/5/05, 3:22 p.m. (Link here)

The Night They Let Old Dixie Drown

New Orleans was a town
with a grand and a glorious name
'Til Dubya left it to drown
in the waters of Pontchartrain
Labor Day two thousand and five
Thousands hungry, just barely alive
Heard there was calvary coming
So they waited for help that didn't arrive...
The night they let old Dixie drown
and all the bells were ringing --
The night they let old Dixie drown,
the folks at FEMA were singing,
"La
la la la la la
la la la --
I can't hear you..."

(With apologies to The Band)

9/5/05, 1:15 p.m. (Link here)

Just go read it: the WWOZ List Of Found Musicians.

9/5/05, 11:44 a.m. (Link here)

Cruise ships named "Ecstasy" and "Sensation" to sub for the Streetcar Named Desire...

9/4/05, 7:11 p.m. (Link here)

At the risk of stating the obvious, I think it's terribly important that people get into ordinary, individualized housing situations quickly in order to preserve as much as possible of normal social relations. It would be really bad to have the temporary shelters harden into long-term refugee camps because the people enclosed in them would assuredly be treated as second-class citizens. I'm doing research on the Japanese American Internment at present and I'm hence very conscious of how human relationships change when people are treated as numbered bodies in camps. The term "evacuee" was used then too, so it chills me to read it this week, although I know the meaning is literal and not euphemistic at present.

9/2/05, 9:37 a.m. (Link here)

Talk about locking the barn after etcetera... The Federal Register today carries an Environmental Impact Statement dated Aug. 16 for a proposed "Hurricane Protection Project" on the Gulf Coast.

9/1/05, 4:32 p.m. (Link here)

Coffeeblogging:

9/1/05, 1:50 p.m. (Link here)

OK, Demisemiblog is off hiatus. The news is just too all-fired miserable not to talk about.

Twenty-five years of profit-driven corner-cutting has hollowed out federal preparedness to where, per Grover Norquist's frequently expressed wishes, it really can be drowned in the bathtub. And we can halfway suspect that the current administration will regard the deaths of thousands of poor black American voters as a supportable loss.

And the Superdome has quite predictably turned into a goddamned slave ship. From the first announcement sending people there who had nowhere else to go, anyone with sense should have known it would become a scene of horror.

And of course, as ever, the SF Chronicle's Anna Badkhen is on the scene, noticing things that snottier, glitzier reporters don't. When is somebody going to give that woman a Pulitzer?

Demisemiblog is on hiatus.

Nothing permanent, nor personal. Just been considering William Gibson's comment on blogging: "The image that comes most readily to mind is that of a kettle failing to boil because the lid’s been left off."

This space may be revived and redesigned when my mood changes. I'm still posting daily on multifamily housing issues at housingfinance and I'll be contributing to the group blog at Horizon.

"What?" you say, "No catblogging? However shall we face our Fridays without a sight of the amazing and winsome Edgie?"

So, OK, ok, catblogging may occur without notice.

Thanks for your patience, everyone.

--MB

Edgie, Aug. 20, 2005:

Return to main page