Am I becoming a Buddhist? -- more on copyrights and the promiscuity of our artistic work on the internet

Doing a search for a poem I wrote and published here (but misplaced), I found it. Once, on All This Is That, and once on another site. This other site had four of my poems, all reproduced perfectly, word for word. The only thing missing was my name. My poems became her poems by merely deleting those two words.

Naturally, I was outraged. And then I started thinking, "well, Jack, what about all those photographs you so cavalierly snag and reproduce, or incorporate into collages and paintings?" Do I really think they are all public domain? No. Do I believe I am using them under the Fair Use provisions of the copyright act? Yes. Do I credit the owners when I can find their names? Usually.

So, I am taking a Buddhist approach to infringement. I would have been happy to see the poems reprinted, if they'd use my name. But since they didn't, I'm just going to be glad someone liked them enough to appropriate them. I still wrote them, after all. We can both take credit for them. Forgive and forget.

I also take comfort in, and was inspired by, Woody Guthrie's approach. . .a more egalitarian, sharing folksy-oriented approach (although I do admit to being a bit more of a capitalist than Woody). I just wrote about this here.

I didn't even send her an email. I almost put a link to her blog. . .but hey, I'm not that forgiving! My outrage has subsided into amusement. So, I am not quite a Buddhist yet. . .although I now appear to be surrounded by boddhisatvas!
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Woody Guthrie on copyright laws

"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."
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Photograph: The Cousins

Click photograph to enlarge...

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Woody Guthrie's transit and eclipse: "I been in the red all my life"

Woody Guthrie was a great man, and a great writer. Yeah, I didn't say great singer, but I like his singing. Any fool can get all Frenchified and rococo. It takes a genius to get simple. This genius fled Dust Bowl Oklahoma in the 30’s and became famous a few years later for his songs Dust Bowl Ballads. For most of the rest of his life he would be a roamer and a troubadour. He is one of the great American songwriters, right up there in the pantheon with Stephen Foster, Gershwin, Bob Dylan, Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin and others. He may be at the top of the rockpile. . .in my booklet, at least.

Woody Guthrie loved America as deeply as anyone ever has. He thrived on the people and the idiom. We remember him mainly for his songs, but he was also a wonderful writer. You may have heard his songs like So Long It’s Been Good To Know You, I Ain’t Got No Home In This World Anymore, Dust Can’t Kill Me, Union Maid, Reuben James, Planewreck At Los Gatos, and over a thousand more songs.

He hit 46 of these United States, usually with just his guitar and a toothbrush. One of the songs inspired by a trip, This Land Is Your Land, should probably be the national anthem. Woody’s influence has been monolithic, although most of us have only experienced Woody absorbed and filtered through Bob Dylan, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Phil Ochs, Allen Ginsberg, Joan Baez, or Wilco, among hundreds of others. His work has been passed down through cultural osmosis.

When the notorious House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) began collecting names and driving the blacklisting, Woody was not afraid. He had nothing to hide, and the committee, like the dust, couldn’t kill him.

Some people considered The B.P.A. and the Grand Coulee Dam tributes to an "experiment in American socialism." These huge public works projects were "a revolutionary slap at the private enterprise system." Guthrie’s Columbia River songs reflect his optimism the dam would bring an increased standard of living to the people. One of Guthrie’s most famous songs, Pastures of Plenty, presents an idealist's vision of public irrigation and electrification:

I think of the dust and the days that are gone,
And the day that’s to come on a farm of our own;
One turn of the wheel and the waters will flow
‘Cross the green growing field, down the hot thirsty row.


Look down in the canyon and there you will see
The Grand Coulee shower her blessings on me;
The lights for the city for factory, and mill,
Green Pastures of Plenty from dry barren hills.

Woody was profoundly shocked by what happened to the poor Okies who left the Dust Bowl for California, by how they were killed, beaten and starved out by the State Police and farm owners. Something had gone very wrong with this great country. His song about Pretty Boy Floyd summed up his feelings:

Now as through this world I ramble
I’ve seen lots of funny men.
Some will rob you with a six-gun
And some with a fountain pen.
But as through this life you travel
And as through this life you roam,
You’ll never see an outlaw
Drive a family from its home.

Woody believed the Great Depression and dust bowl were caused by the Big Boss Man and King Coal. He wasn’t singing anymore about lost love; he was pointing fingers.

One night, on a radio show, he hit it on the head:

"A policeman will just stand there and let a banker rob a farmer or a financier rob a working man. But if a farmer robs a banker, you would have a whole army of cops out shooting at him. Robbery is a chapter of etiquette.”

Woody Guthrie was a patriot, but he was no Democrat. As he said in that same radio broadcast:

“I ain’t a communist necessarily, but I been in the red all my life.”

By 1947, Woody was working on his second marriage, to Marjorie. Between his travel and performances, he lived with her and his daughter Cathy Ann in Brooklyn. Woody nicknamed her Stackabones, and wrote his famous children’s songs for (and with) her:

Why can’t a dish break a hammer?
Why, or why, oh why?
Because a hammer’s
got a pretty hard head.
Goodbye goodbye goodbye.

Why can’t a bird
break an elephant?
Why, oh why, oh why?
Because an elephant’s got a
pretty hard skin.
Goodbye goodbye goodbye.

He published stories about Stackabones. Cathy Ann was very much like Woody, singing, rhyming, and always playing with words. One day her dress caught on fire and she was badly burned. She was singing when Woody got to the hospital, but she died that night.


Woody sat down and wrote: “And the things you fear most shall surely come upon you.” It seemed like everyone he ever loved was doomed to go up in flames. There were fires in his childhood. The brand new family house had burned down. His sister Nora died when her dress caught fire. Just she and her mother were at home. She was singing when Woody saw her in the hospital too. There were many rumors about her death. There were other fires. And there was his mother’s problem. After her daughter died, she became more and more nervous and remote until finally she spent all her days wandering through town like she was lost. No one knew what to do.

There was another fire. Woody’s mother was holding a kerosene lamp and when his father woke up, he was on fire.

When Woody came home the next day after a visit with relatives, a neighbor told him his father was in the hospital and his mother had been put in an insane asylum. In his wonderful book Bound For Glory, he compared his own restlessness and nervousness to his mother’s condition.

After the death of Stackabones, Woody lost his spark. He and Marjorie soon had other children (including Arlo), but he never took the same interest. He had become unpredictable. He still wrote hundreds of pages each week, and always had new songs in the works. But they weren’t like the old ones. He just couldn’t concentrate anymore.


A painting of Woody at the Columbia dam,
about which he wrote some of his greatest
songs

Marjorie forced him to move out when he attacked their son Arlo one day. Woody went into the hospital to cure himself of alcoholism, and a young doctor figured out his problem. He asked Woody questions about his parents and grandparents, and diagnosed him with Huntington’s Chorea, called chorea because of the violent dance-like movements of its victims (the root of the word choreography). Huntington’s Chorea is an inherited degenerative disease and a victim’s offspring stand a fifty-fifty chance of getting the disease. The course of the illness is long and savage.

The changes in Woody occurred so slowly that few of his friends really noticed. Almost everyone chalked it up to drink, or said “Well, that’s just Woody. That’s the way he walks and talks." Some people avoided him now. He slurred his words and staggered and was becoming less and less capable of working at all.


Bob Dylan's copy of Woody's Book
Bound For Glory
When Woody was trying to concentrate, he wrote his name everywhere. . .on walls, on people’s books, on pieces of paper. Woody Guthrie. Woody Guthrie. It was almost as if he was trying to convince himself he really DID exist.

One day he was lighting a fire and the gas can exploded. His arm could no longer hold a guitar very well.

Woody checked into the State Hospital in Queens, and with the exception of visits with friends on weekends, he lived there the rest of his life.

His son, the musician Arlo Guthrie talked about him to Rolling Stone magazine:

“I remember him coming home from the hospital and taking me out to the backyard, just him and me, and teaching me the last verses to This Land Is Your Land because he thinks if I don’t learn them no one will remember. He can barely strum a guitar now and—can you imagine?—his friends think he’s crazy or drunk and they stick him in a green room with all these crazy people…”

“All of a sudden everyone is singing his songs. Kids are singing This Land Is Your Land in school and people are talking about making it the national anthem. Bob Dylan and the others are copying him. And he can’t react to it. Here’s the guy who had all these words and now that he’s really big, he can’t say anything.”

Only Shakespeare could write something that terrible. Woodrow Wilson Guthrie died in 1967, in his fifties. Some experts believe the disease may have enhanced his rhyminess and wordplay, and acted as a creative spur like alcohol and drugs have worked on others.

As the cells died in his brain, it rewired itself, forcing new and wonderful pathways between the nerve synapses. This also led to the not-so-wonderful behavior his family and friends saw. Just like his mother. Starved from all that work, his nerves short-circuited.

Woody and the disease are so bound up together, it’s hard to know where it started and Woody began. No one really knows if the disease starts when you are 14, or in your later years. It cannot be cured. It cannot be predicted in advance. Research is ongoing now, mainly because of what happened to Woody.

Most importantly, of course, is not the disease, but his music and his books. When we sing his most famous song, we sing the first verses. The last verses he tried to teach Arlo are probably politically pink at best, and they were the ones Woody hoped would survive:

In the squares of the city by the shadow of the steeple,
Near the relief office I saw my people
And some were stumbling and some were wondering if
This land was made for you and me.

As I went rambling that dusty highway
I saw a sign that said Private Property
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing.
That side was made for you and me.

Some of the photographs and images of Woody are copyrighted and unlicensed. However, the individual who uploaded this work to Wikipedia, and first used it in an article, as well as subsequent persons who place it into articles, asserts that this use qualifies as fair use of the material under United States copyright law. All This Is That is using the photo under the Fair Use provisions of the copyright act as well, as those provisions apply to scholarly work.

---o0o---

It's a sign of the times: sex offender registry required for sheep abuser

A Michigan man who pleaded nolo contendre to a sodomy charge involving a sheep has been ordered to register as a sex offender. Jeffrey S. Haynes said the state registry is intended to keep track of people who have committed crimes against humans. . .not animals lovers like himself.

Calhoun County Circuit Court Judge, Conrad Sindt, however, told Haynes that once he is released from prison, he must register with the Michigan State Police Public Sex Offender Registry. Click the title of this post to link to the whole sordid story.

Related stories on All This Is That:

Bestiality In Southeast King County - A Horse Is A Horse Of Course Of Course
Horsin' Around: Update On The Enumclaw Beastiality/Murder Case
Another Shocking Revelation In The Enumclaw Beastiality Case
Further Ruminations On Enumclaw And Beastiality
The Final Enumclaw Horse/Beastiality Update

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Follow-up: Victim of VP's attemped assassination suffers coronary

The 78-year-old lawyer shot by Vice-President Dick Cheney in a hunting "accident" has birdshot lodged in his heart that triggered "a minor heart attack" Tuesday morning, hospital officials said.

You notice how everything about this story is minor? Vice-President Cheney "peppered" the luckless Harry Whittington. He was "peppered" sufficiently enough to be in the Intensive Care Unit a couple of days. And now we learn the birdshot has caused a "minor" heart attack. What's next? Stories in the New York Times and on MSNBC talk about about all the jokes, shockwave games, editorials, Democraric drumbeating, and the general buzz surrounding the story. Just as things were about to quiet down, Mr. Whittington suffered a heart attack. Just him making a joke about the shooting might have scotched the buzz for good. That hasn't happened. . .



The original story in All This Is That appeared Sunday night. Over five hundred people have read that original posting (not to mention stories on hundreds of other blogs and web sites) which began as satire and seems to have now become almost straight ahead reportage. In fact, the rumors about the Secret Service, and the manner in which the story was released have increased in intensity and my original satire has been dwarfed by the dark stories now circulating about the "incident."

Google searches leading here include phrases like "Cheney shooting conspiracy," "Dick Cheney Secret Service coverup," "Vice President attempted murder," "Cheney rumors" Cheney resignation," and "Cheney drunk while hunting?" This is very strange indeed. Between Scooter Libby's indictment, the allegations of domestic spying, and all the other Republican craziness, this hunting accident has coalesced to form a perfect storm swirling around the head of the Vice-President.
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Poem: Ten ways of looking at lies

1.
A lie is situational
Mine tend to reducing
Or blowing up the fact

2.
Speak with a forked tongue
But make sure each tine
Knows what the other is saying

3.
There is danger
Lying in cahoots
Collate your lie with the other lie

4.
It travels in many guises
Animal scat hype shuck and jive
Prevarication stretching spoofing

5.
Common targets of falsehood
The po-lice the confessional
Your boss your boss's boss

Your parents surveys
The priest anyone over 40
The insurance adjustor

6.
Lies are like rabbits
They keep breeding
Until the range is overrun

7.
The safest lie
Is the one
Only you know

8.
The first one caught
takes the heat.

9.
"And after all, what is a lie? ’T is but
The truth in masquerade"

10.
The truth exists
The lie must be created.
---o0o---

No. 9 is a quote from a poem by George Gordon (Lord Byron)

Rules for living

1. Never cut your hair or touch up your beard after three margaritas. Or call your boss. Fives.com says you should also not:

1) buy domain names
2) hire an attorney
3) do lots of file management from the command line
4) sort out your finances
5) telephone people you remember fondly from elementary school

2. Everyone seems normal until you get to know them. Mostly. Sometimes someone is so far gone that the tell radiates for blocks. But normally, the benefit of the doubt we give strangers carries the day. Even really wacky folks tend to hold back until "they get the job."

3. When you make a mistake, make amends immediately. It's easier to eat crow while it's still warm. Ask Richard Nixon.

4. Pick your battles wisely. Will this matter one year from now? One month? Tomorrow? Naw...

5. Never pass up an opportunity to pee. I learned this hard fact over the years, sitting in bumper to bumper traffic on the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge or going north on I-405.

6. If you woke up breathing, that is cause enough to celebrate.

7. Know your way home. Even if, and especially if, you're in a foreign country or a strange city. I don't really believe this rule. But I don't panic if I'm lost, either. I don't really believe in the concept of being lost. At any given time, some of us just have a better idea of where we actually are. And to some of us, it doesn't matter. . .we'll get there eventually.

8. You'll feel better if you throw up. That was certainly true in high school drinking days. It's still true. You never feel worse afterwards.

9. Everyone considers themself an above average driver, pretty good in bed, and "smarter than the average bear."

10. A tongue stud, green hair, a tattoo, or extreme facial metalwork is no excuse not to learn to do it right.

11 If someone tells you, "You're dreaming, pal!" kick them in the testicles. They said it's a dream.

12. If someone else enters a public bathroom, cough to let them know you are there. If not, you may have to listen to something neither of you intended.

13. The Sacred Buffer Corollary: When in a public bathroom, never take the urinal/stall directly adjacent to another user/jockey. When you are the first settler, never take the middle facility.
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Cover-up: Cheney shooting "was no accident"

The Vice-President chats with aides

following Saturday's shooting mishap

Senior aides to Vice-President Cheney have disclosed to All This Is That startling new details of this weekend's shooting of Harry Whittington by the Vice-President. Aides say the incident was not an accident, as the press has been led to believe. An initial statement given to the press pool said "Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot and wounded a companion on a weekend quail hunting trip in Texas, spraying the attorney Harry Whittington with birdshot. "

Harry Whittington, a millionaire attorney from Austin, was reported "alert and doing fine" in a Corpus Christi hospital Sunday. The Vice-President's office did not disclose the accident until nearly 24 hours after it occurred. Mr. Whittington is in stable condition in the hospital's intensive care unit.

According to aides, the story of the accident was patently false. Whittington did not, as the Vice President's office said "come up from behind the vice president and the other hunter without signaling or announcing himself." The initial statement even seemed to make light of the accident: "by god, Harry was in the line of fire and got peppered pretty good."

Aides to Mr. Cheney said The Vice-President was mad that Whittington had spooked a second covey of quail away and angrily pointed his shotgun at him. At least two aides say Vice-President Cheney intentionally shot at Whittington, believing he was far enough away to escape any shot from the blast. A third aide believes Mr. Cheney pulled the trigger accidentally as a result of one of his now frequent "nerve tremors."

The Democratic leadership announced Sunday they would demand a commission look into the charges of cover-up by Vice President's staff, as well as the Secret Service.

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Seven years ago today, Bill Clinton was acquited in his impeachment trial

It was seven years ago today--February 12, 1999--that Bill Clinton's five week impeachment trial came to an end, with the Senate acquitting the President of perjury and obstruction of justice.

President Clinton began an affair with Monica Lewinsky, a 21-year-old intern, in 1995. Over a year and a half, The President and Lewinsky had a dozen furtive encounters in the White House. When she was transferred to the Pentagon in 1996, she confided in Pentagon co-worker Linda Tripp about her trysts with the Commander In Chief.

Tripp began secretly to record conversations with Lewinsky, pumping for the sordid and tawdry details (and there were plenty). Paula Jones, who was suing the president on sexual harassment charges, for another alleged adventure of The President's, subpoenaed Lewinsky. In January 1998, at the urging of The President (allegedly), Monica filed an affidavit denying having had a sexual relationship with him. Later that week, Tripp contacted the office of Kenneth Starr, the Whitewater independent counsel, to rat out Lewinsky and play him the tapes she made of her talks with her "friend."

Tripp was secretly wired by the FBI and met Lewinsky again. Shortly after that, FBI agents and U.S. attorneys questioned Monica and offered her immunity if she cooperated. When the story first broke, President Clinton said "I did not have sexual relations with that woman."

In late July, lawyers for Lewinsky and Starr worked out a full-immunity agreement covering both Lewinsky and her parents. Starr had threatened them all with prosecution.
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Head of the G.O.P. pledges to portray Democrats as pansies and use blogs to slap them around

On Friday, the Republican national chair, Ken Mehlman, outlined a political strategy for the midterm elections to portray Democrats as pansies, liberal apologists, and closet commies. He plans to portray the Dems as too weak to protect the country...and to bypass the liberal media and get the message out via the blog world. [ed. note: We just can't bear to use the words cyberspace or blogosphere].

Dear Ken:

We volunteer to donate all the space you need on the main blog of All This Is That.

A focus of this blog is on presidential and congressional politics. We would gladly furnish space to your worthy cause free of charge. As you may or may not know, The President has expressed his support and written to this blog more than once.

Feelin' the love,

John Newton Brummet III
Editor-in-chief and contributing writer,
All This Is That
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Visiting President Richard Nixon in New York City

By Jack Brummet, Editor-in-Chief
with research by Pablo Fanque, National Affairs Editor

Click collage to enlarge

One of my favorite things when I lived in NYC was to visit President Richard Nixon.

The President had a sweet townhouse at 142 East 65th Street on the Upper East Side. We probably stopped by five times while I lived there. I would drag friends there in a taxi, or car, if someone had one. The President never actually came out to greet us, although I often hoped he'd come out and say hi to the kids, and hang with us like the time he visited the students at the Lincoln Memorial. Maybe we'd have another one of those uncomfortable Nixon moments where he is bound and determined to seem like a regular guy. . .an almost laughable goal.

A few years after he resigned, he returned east from his California exile. This is the President who wanted to send me to Vietnam, so I had mixed feelings, indeed, about this man. He kept the Great Society funded, even as he lied and weaseled his way to disgrace. What could you think of the ex red-baiter who went to China and opened diplomatic relations? He was a two-edged sword, which made him endlessly fascinating. And I went there to pay homage to both Good King Richard and Evil Dick.

These visits often occurred around closing time. I seem to recall often having a bottle or go cup in hand, as we stood outside the townhouse for ten or fifteen minutes and pondered the dark and magnificent phenomenon of President Nixon.

In all of those visits, the Secret Service never came near us. We saw them a few times, but no matter how loud and raucous we got, they never approached. I guess that makes sense. There were 20 million people living within an easy car drive. We were probably not the only knuckleheads in the region to stop by.

Frank Curran, Claudia Curran, Nick Gattuccio, and Jack outside Richard Nixon's House, 1980 - click to enlarge

In the mid-eighties, Richard Nixon and I both moved from Manhattan. He moved to Saddle River, New Jersey and wrote a lot of books, and advised every President in some capacity.  RMN died in 1994, in NYC.

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new index to poems on all this is that

I'm here
Ten ways of looking at lies
The Broken Chord
With our heads in the sand on the transit and eclipse
the sun plays its red song
Litany
Poem: The Developers
A raindrop's life
The mystery of the first amendment to the Ten Commandments
The Bay Of Delusion
Mad Song
Reasons To Keep On
Conspiracy Theory
The Moon Race
Mr. Flue's Grave In Hillcrest Cemetary, Kent, Wash.
The World Seems Especially Calming And Verisimilitudinous Today
Kent, Washington
Rollover
[It's the Lee Harvey Oswald smile]
Zombie Breakdown
Heaven
The Variations
You Rehearse Dying
Sonnet For Hari
Defensive Daydreaming
The Dream
Dogpaddling
The Prostethic Head & The Absence Of Blood
Tetuan - "No Paranoia, My Friend"
The Grey Visitors & Painting: The Grey Ambassador
The Bad Movie
The Bucket
The Man In The Mirror
Liftoff
Optimism
Perspective
A Flight Of Swallows
Audioblog - The Prevaricator
Weather Report
Your Wooden Leg
The Revelations
Sermon At The First Church Of The Mojo Apocalypse
Dosvidaniya, Ivan Ivanovitch
The Late Excavation (Text And Audio)
Jack Kerouac, Meet John Barleycorn
The Gideon Bible In My Nightstand
At The Acropolis
When Aliens Land, Or, The Return Of The King
The sous-chef is a sociopath]
James Wright Falling
[Life Is Not A Hardy Novel]
Seven
Coyote Comes Home Like A Salmon
Shorts For Jerry Melin ca. about 1988
Bird
Monism
The Golden Rule
The Countdown
When Aliens Land, Or, The Return Of The King
AT HILLCREST CEMETARY IN KENT, WASHINGTON, I WALK BY THE GRAVE OF SAM THE GRASSEATER
Notes On Flying Daybreak
Explosions
Not Past Tense Yet
the glass is not half-full
It's Getting Crowded Here
Li Po In Disgrace
The Clock
A Love Song
Bad Timing
The Killer
The Absence of Footprints Growing Up
Gone Fishing
The M.D.s A Poem -
Acrylic
The Marriage
Driving Home To Seattle, We Watch Deer Drinking from the Skookumchuck River

Photograph of urinals in Queenstown, New Zealand

Click photograph to enlarge...

In the lobby men's room, the Sofitel Queenstown hotel has installed life sized images of models behind the urinals to peer down at each customers, uh,

The girls, local Queenstown models, hold cameras, tape measures, and binoculars; some of them are laughing, one is shocked.
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The mule - a parable of management, teaching, and child-rearing

A farmer had a mule for sale. He claimed the mule would obey any command it was given.

One prospective customer was leery of this claim and decided to put the farmer and his mule to the test. So he said to the mule, "Sit down." But the mule just stood there. "Sit!" the customer yelled. Nothing happened. He turned to the farmer and said, "You claim this mule will do anything it is told, but I can't even get him to sit down."

The farmer reached down and picked up a two-by-four, walked over and hit the mule in the head. "Sit," he said. And the mule sat right down. Turning to the shocked customer, he said, "first you have to get his attention."
---o0o---

Alien Lore No. 63 - President Dwight D. Eisenhower meets up with alien ambassadors in the desert?

On Feb. 20, 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower interrupted his vacation in Palm Springs, California to make a secret trip to nearby Edwards Air Force Base to meet with two extraterrestrial aliens.


Or, maybe, as they explained later that night (and again and again over the intervening years), Ike went to the dentist.

There is an often repeated story that President Eisenhower visited Edwards Air Force Base to either view the wreckage of a flying saucer and the bodies of dead aliens. . .or that he met with live aliens on an urgent diplomatic mission to earth.

There are many version of the story, all roughly telling how Ike mysteriously disappeared from Palm Springs one night, and that he was taken to Edwards A.F.B. He is supposed to have returned around dawn not long after, and ordered absolute blackout about anything having to do with UFOs and the aliens.

Like all the great urban legends and rumors, this story remains in circulation because many of its facts are true. We know the President indeed traveled to Palm Springs between February 17th and 24th, 1954. We also know that on the evening of Saturday, February 20th, he did disappear. Members of the press learned that the President was not where he should be, which triggered speculation that was either gravely ill or had expired.

White House Press Secretary James Haggerty called an urgent late evening press conference to announce "solemnly" that the president had, while eating fried chicken earlier that evening, broken a crown on one of his teeth. He disappeared to a local dentist.

The President arrived as scheduled the next morning for a church service, and the matter was largely forgotten. But the trip does appear to have ended suddenly. Another curious fact was that Ike had returned from a quail shooting vacation in Georgia less than a week before leaving for the Palm Springs "vacation."

Interestingly, the dentist's widow, in a June, 1979 interview, could recall nothing about her husband's treatment of the President (which presumably was a memorable event). And yet, she did remember many of the details the next night, at a steak fry (whatever that is!) where her husband was introduced as "the dentist who had treated the president."

On February 20th, the Associated Press reported that "Pres. Eisenhower died tonight of a heart attack in Palm Springs." Two minutes later, the AP retracted that bulletin and reported that Ike was alive.

Michael Salla, a former American University professor is a main proponent of the Presidential-Grey encounter. "There was telepathic communication," said Salla. The aliens offered to share their superior technology and their spiritual wisdom with Ike if he would agree to eliminate America's nuclear stockpile.

"They were afraid we might blow up some of our nuclear technology," Salla says, "and apparently that does something to time and space and it impacts on extraterrestrial races on other planets."

Ike declined the alien offer, Salla says, because he did not want to give up the arsenal.

Sometime later in 1954, the story goes, Ike reached a deal with another race of extraterrestrials, known as the "Greys" (as opposed to the earlier group of "Nordics") . The president allowed them to capture earthling cattle and humans for medical experiments, provided that they returned the humans safely home. Since then, Salla says, the "Greys" have kidnapped "millions" of humans (you've heard that story, and its variants here numerous times).
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White House announces nation-wide gun buyback and surrender program

Attorney General Gonzales at this evening's press briefing at
the Justice Department

In an unannounced, sparsely attended early evening press conference at the Department of Justice, Attorney Alberto Gonzales announced a stunning new White House initiative in the war on terror.

Beginning on February 21, the Attorney General said the federal government would "commence a firearm buyback program to be administered by the National Guard. For fifteen days, the National Guard, in conjunction with the National Security Agency, will buy back any and all firearms at their fair market value. The program will expire March 6, 2006, and in the second phase, a coalition of the NSA, National Guard, and FBI will begin a compulsory buyback program, utilizing gun registration and sales data collected by the NSA and FBI since 9/11/2001. "

Mr. Gonzales refused questions from the press, reading from a prepared statement later distributed to reporters.

"The Department of Justice and National Security Agency will hold a briefing tomorrow morning, followed by a question and answer session. We intend to outline this national security program in great detail. We believe the buyback program is fully within the scope of recently passed legislation, as well as applicable provisions of H. R. 3162, or, the Patriot Act. "

The Attorney General continued, "This program was formulated by The President, Justice Department, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. As you all well know, The President is a strong supporter of the 2nd Amendment, and the right of all Americans to own firearms. However, for the time being, we believe it is important for everyone to do their part in the war against terror. Privately held weapons have the potential to fall into the hands of terrorists and be used against our own citizens and government. We fully believe the inconvenience of surrendering firearms until we have won the war on terror is a small price to pay to ensure our continued freedom and liberty. Without this program, there are approximately 200 million guns in circulation that could be used against us to further the terrorist's nefarious goals. We vowed after 9/11 that our airplanes would never be turned against this country again. We have succeeded in that. By taking this counter-terrorist measure now, we ensure the same thing will not happen with our weapons."

Attorney General Gonzales left the briefing room, declining to answer questions about the new counter-terrorism measure. "You'll have a chance to ask all the questions you want in the morning. I'll see you then."
--------o0o--------

Couric Olympic ceremony coverage collects ca-ca cascade

It looks like Katie Couric has her hands full!
---o0o---

Poem: With our heads in the sand during the transit and eclipse

"burning down the house to roast the pig." - Lawrence Ferlinghetti


The first wheel rolled around
The first adze was forged
Every tool and short-cut

Edged us to the brink
In our short dance
With Turtle Island

The machines started turning in 1900
And we started down a path
Toward the dark at the end of the tunnel

No one stands up for earth
But a handful of tree-huggers
Least of all the poets

Poet on poet on poet
Incesting like royals
With their heads in the sand

Becoming funded chinless wonders
For an audience of poets
Clapping for each other

We are in it and watching it
Pretending we're not in it
But carefully observing

For the sake of others
Writing it all down
For a doubtful tomorrow

The machines started groaning
When McKinley laid down his bones
Unloading their by-products

Onto unsuspecting skies
As we demanded encores refills and mas
And cursed the bottle turned up empty

Abboh's boys and girl's have run amok
The wheels and tools have run amok
There's no modulation

We can't slow back down
And run twice as fast
To keep up

The electric plantations hum
With fantastic machinery
Run around the clock

In Bayonne Richmond Kent Tacoma
Manteca South San Francisco The Bronx
Flint Long Beach and Cleveland

We leave vias rues expressways
Strasses avenidas and boulevards
A continent of skull orchard

Caught in flagrante
Pants down
Hands wedged in the cookie jar

No one points the guiltfinger
No one dares to finger or be fingered
And sweet mother earth struggles

To free herself
From the shackles
She turns off the rain

And takes back her Dodos and Whales
Snail Darters and Spotted Owls
Pygmy Hippotami and Flightless Cormorant

Vancouver Island Marmot and Gavial
Great Auk and Wild Ass
Tapir Kagu and Manatee

Carolina Parakeet and Dire Wolf
Coelacanth and Blackfooted Ferret
Snow Leopard and Przewalski's Horse

Glaciers virgin forests and monkey flower
Bigleaf Scurfpea and Spiny Rice
Interrupted Brome and Greensword

The infidels with battle fatigue
Sing the song
We know so well

I don't believe in earth
I just believe
In me.
----------o0o----------

Don't muzzle the ox!

Thou shalt not muzzle the ox
when he treadeth out the corn.

- Deuteronomy XXV:iv

---o0o---

Roseanne Barr: I F***ed George Clooney

http://dailynews.muzi.com/news/ll/english/10002578.shtml

Roseanne Barr recently told Attitude magazine, according to http://dailynews.muzi.com, that she developed a crush on George Clooney when he worked as an actor on her TV show, Roseanne. Roseanne said: "I f****ed him. More than once. I'm trying to be discreet."
---o0o---

Rolling Stones dodge Depends [tm] barrage at Superbowl

My friend Kevin Curran wrote the following about the Stones performance last night at the Superbowl [tm].

"Did you watch the Stones during the Stupor Bowl's halftime? What kind of bloomers was Mick clearing from the stage? I could swear that they were fully loaded Dependz lobbed up top by some frenzied geezer fans."

---o0o---

Rioting breaks out around the world over cartoons

The BBC reported this morning that "At least five people have been killed in Afghanistan as demonstrations against cartoons satirising the Prophet Muhammad swept across the country. "

In addition, riots and protests have erupted in India, Thailand, Syria, Lebanon, Indonesia, Somalia, Iran and Gaza. The Beeb also gave a timeline of the current unrest:

"30 Sept 2005: Danish paper publishes cartoons
20 Oct: Muslim ambassadors complain to Danish PM
10 Jan 2006: Norwegian publication reprints cartoons
26 Jan: Saudi Arabia recalls its ambassador
30 Jan: Gunmen raid EU's Gaza office demanding apology
31 Jan: Danish paper apologises
1 Feb: Papers in France, Germany, Italy and Spain reprint cartoons
4 Feb: Syrians attack Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus
5 Feb: Protesters sack Danish embassy in Beirut"



I don't know. . .the Mohammed cartoons never seemed like a really good idea. I did a series of paintings last year, "Heroes amd villains," where one of the heroes was Mohammed. I figured it would be best to leave the Mohammed side to the imagination. . .working along the same lines of logic where I won't put a "repeal the second amendment" bumper sticker on my car. Could these cartoons have been intended to do anything except roil the waters and piss a large group of people off?


---o0o---

Interview with a Manhattan bartender: varnishing coffins and 86ing the rubes

Rummaging through an old box of manuscripts, I found a book I wrote in 1981 (The Spirit Below). I completely forgot writing the book (along with 200 pages of a second novel, only slightly more memorable than the first). I'll pull a few nuggets from that box over the next week...this is one. This is not an interview with a glitzy "Cocktail" style bartender. It focuses on the darker side of being the person on the other side of the bar...not that the bartender is necessarily dark, but the nature of the job brings you into contact with some unsavory folks and situations.

JACK: You should try to answer these questions as a bartender, not as a drinker. Or at least, as a drinker second.

SCOOTER: Okay.

JACK: Do people come to your bar for a specific reason? Is it loneliness, habit, to forget, celebrate, looking for “love,” or do they just want a drink or two, maybe even because they are happy?

SCOOTER: A lot of people. . .this bar I work at is different. . .there’s a nice Italian man, inherited his father’s milk company. Some days he comes in to forget a problem. Obviously. Other days he comes in because he’s in a good mood. But I have heard stories. At work he’s a sonofabitch. But at the bar he is very friendly or at least polite. Sometimes he’s a little funny too. But this guy who works with him says he is always an s.o.b. Only in social situations is he a nice man. Never at work.

JACK: Only at the bar? He becomes human then?

SCOOTER: Yes. Another man comes in. . .the guy’s always upbeat. Says the world has been great to him. But. . .last night he came in, started telling a lot of jokes and was very funny when he got there. And he started drinking. He was drinking V.O. straight up, with a shot of Gran Marnier floated on top.

JACK: A stiff drink, in short.

SCOOTER: It sure was. Well, he has three in about twenty minutes. There are two women in the bar. He became very rude and started in with “I’ve got nine pounds between my legs…” You know. “Do you want to f***?”

Yeah, he was not rude. He was sick. He said it over and over again, like a very desperate man.

JACK: The real self emerged.

SCOOTER: Yeah.

JACK: Can you tell is a drinker will be like that when they walk in? Even before they hoist the first glass? Before they talk. . .

SCOOTER: I can’t. Other bartenders say they can. I guess I haven’t been at it long enough.

JACK: Another question—how much do you let people get away with before you 86 them?

SCOOTER: I’d have to say I’m pretty lenient.

Sidebar: The term "86" comes, quite possibly, from Chumley's bar and restaurant at 86 Bedford Street in the West Village in NYC. We used to go to this bar because it was one of Dylan Thomas's old haunts, like The White Horse.

JACK: Extremely?

SCOOTER: Yeah. But I’ve never really had a situation like that in New York.

JACK: But I’ve seen you, years ago, drop four glasses in a row and come back for another.

SCOOTER: I know. . .

JACK: . . .drop four because you forgot you were holding them and you were staring off into space. Would you let someone do that four times?

SCOOTER: No. But. . .well. . .a tavern is much different. This place [Dorian’s Red Hand. . .an establishment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, at about 80th Street I think. Jb] is a restaurant with a bar. People drink martinis, cognac and wine, not beer.

So. . .a Scottish guy came in here. I wasn’t working at the time. He was crazy. Bull goose loonie. The first time he came in he was a f***ing maniac. He was staggering around the place, leaning into the bar, stepping up into stools and swaying back and forth. Not really out of drunkenness but from that sort of drunken bravado, of feeling like a powerful human being when you are really just drunk. Those drunken sorts of motions, hyperbolic and exaggerated motions of the drunk. Did I just say hyperbolic AND exaggerated?

JACK: Well [laughs] I can’t remember. Let’s run back the tape. [Plays back tape] Yes. You did.

SCOOTER: Uh. . .I saw him get really crazy. Sort of like when we used to drink with Bob Huff [a professor of ours, a gifted poet, and a professional drunk]. He had that sort of approach: ‘I’m man’s man. . .we understand each other. . .I’m a Scotsman, and you’re an Irishman. And I love the Irish. . .even though. . .You’re a good man. . .descended from Kings. . .” and all that stuff.

Well, he came in once when I was working and he was really gassed. And he ordered drink after drink after drink. I kept pouring them, beer after beer. He was s***-faced when he walked in the place and he must have had eight beers in half an hour. He just poured them down his throat.

There was a funny thing about the guy, ‘though. He would only drink them down so far and leave the last bit in the glass. I tell you they weren’t getting warm. He would order another as soon as the glass reached some mysterious level. And finally he got rude and the manager came over and asked if I kept serving him and I said “Yes, I did.”

JACK: Isn’t it like technically illegal to do that?

SCOOTER: Yeah. But I think it’s more to protect the bar you would kick someone out for being drunk.

JACK: Save the mirrors and such.

SCOOTER: Yeah.

JACK: And no one ever really seems to get kicked out for being a happy drunk!

SCOOTER: True.

JACK: How about a trick you told me about once? Pouring vodka in a guy’s beer to speed the process, so to speak, and get him out the door?

SCOOTER: The guy’s crazy. Fifty-five, sixty. Tells me the same story time after time. And yeah, the vodka works. It gets them out of there. He has a couple of beers and he’s so crazy he can’t even taste the vodka. Another bartender here—Sean—said he would fill his glass nearly halfway up with vodka. Even if he were not drunk, a couple of those would send him down the road. One usually.

JACK: Do you ever feel like you are helping people varnish their coffins?

SCOOTER: No.

JACK: A guy comes in with D.T.s, or terminal alcohol bloat. Does it bother you to pour them drinks? A corpse on the other side of the bar. . .

SCOOTER: No.

JACK: You don’t care? If you see a guy almost literally dying?

SCOOTER: It’s his job to stay alive. Mine is to sell drinks. For instance, this one guy quit drinking because he had liver trouble, or epilepsy or something. A while ago, he started coming in and drinking light beer. The first couple of weeks he was drinking coffee or club soda. And then he quit drinking a few and would have twelve, fifteen beers. Sean said he drank 24 one time. Sean cracked a case as it happens on his first beer. And he emptied the case in an afternoon, five or six hours.

So the guy says to me once “Kevin, this beer is just not settling right. Give me a grapefruit and vodka.”

Now, he’s sliding fast. He’ll be back to Scotch soon. He acts like vodka, beer, anything but Scotch is all right. He came in here today and looked like hell. He’d been drinking two, two and a half days. I kept pouring them. And yesterday, he was in here on day two maybe and had twelve drinks in three hours.

So I saw what was happening and started pouring them with just a floater of vodka on top after his first two. Just a little vodka he could smell and taste at first. After that first blast, when you are that twisted, you forget about worrying whether or not you have sufficient alcohol in your drink.

He wanted to be somewhere. And I wasn’t really cheating the guy. He was lonely and a compulsive drinker. He’s almost dead.

JACK: So, in some sense, you’re actually extending his stay on the planet.

SCOOTER: Although he apparently doesn’t actually want to stay here. . .

[A long digression in the interview occurs here, where we discuss the relative merits of various potables, and go into cash register theft in bars, all of which is deleted because of possibly incriminating statements made about other individuals in the business, notably our friend The Dogfish. As it turns out, this interview will only first be published here, twenty-five years later, long after the statute of limitations has expired. However, All This Is That will be delving into this area in the near future.]

JACK: What is the best philosophy for a bartender to have?

SCOOTER: Pour.

JACK: Poor? Pour?.

SCOOTER: Yeah. That’s what Sean told me on Saint Patrick’s Day. ‘Yeah, keep pouring them and when they get drunk, rob them. Anything on the counter is yours Kevin. That’s business.’

JACK: Do you think the atmosphere of a bar is conducive to business? Does a bar provide the right setting for clear thinking? Because business guys we all know at least have to think clearly enough to fleece their marks. . .to separate the rubes from their money? I mean what is it about bars? The martial regularity? The neat order of the glasses and the bottles?

SCOOTER: No. It’s not the order or anything. It’s the liquor itself. There is a certain. . .as you know. . .lucidity that can be achieved drinking [1]. It’s great stuff. I’m not saying there isn’t a fragile point. There is a point where you have another and it’s gone.

Sidebar: Cf. Horace’s epistles I, v, 19: Brimming bowls—whom
have they not made eloquent?

JACK: One more question. Would you resort to violence to quell a brouhaha or disturbance? A guy comes in, say, extremely high, and gets wild. . .

SCOOTER: Even if he didn’t get wild, I’d kick his ass.

JACK: Right. Anyone who came off loco? What if he was a big, scary, dumb looking guy?

SCOOTER: If he was really drunk? If he was a big guy? I’d say leave! And if he didn’t. . .I’d whap him. Big or small. I’d grab a club and whip his ass.

JACK: But you can’t whip everyone. Do you guys keep heat behind the bar?

SCOOTER: No heat. But there is a baseball bat.

JACK: Wow. What about the bouncer? He almost didn’t let me in here today, you know, the clothes, the hair. He was a big sumbitch!

SCOOTER: Only today. . .on Saint Paddy’s Day is there a bouncer here.

Once in a bar in Washington [state]. I had to sort of kick this guy’s ass. You were already in New York by then.

A weirdo comes in. He was real nice, quiet, normal. But somewhere in there, he turns crazy. Jerry Melin was there when it happened. I was a crappy bartender. Always will be. Even back then . I didn’t like it.

JACK: You seem like a good one, just too reticent.

SCOOTER: So this guy comes in and wants to arm-wrestle me! There were two girls there. Now I can’t arm-wrestle. Any pain and I quit.

JACK: That’s funny because I’ve seen you in several retarded fights. . .get pummeled, and come back for more. . .

SCOOTER: Well, I suck at arm wrestling. This guy says ‘Let’s do it to see who’s stronger.’ I said ‘F*** that. Bet twenty bucks.’ He said ‘Let’s do it to see who the man is.” I came back and said I wasn’t going to do it for free. He said ‘You’re chicken,” and threw something at me. A drink. . .I don’t know. I got mad and walked around the bar and grabbed him by the seat of the pants. . .in front of the girls he—and I suppose I—were trying to impress. I walked him toward the front door, cussing him out, and punctuating each phrase with a knee in his ass. I threw him against a wall outside and tossed him his wallet, which had fallen out. He tried to come back in and get his umbrella and I said ‘You sonofabitch, get out! Get the umbrella tomorrow.’

JACK: What does that story mean? Would you fight for your job, to defend the honor of your bar’s sacred turf?

SCOOTER: No! Only an insult to me. F*** the bar.

May, 1981, New York City.
--------o0o--------

The lies the President told in his State of the Union & his real chance for greatness

“We are winning” in Iraq. Delusion.
Reporters who’ve covered the war say it is a “blackhole.” Ok, POTUS would say they're amongst the doom and gloom naysayers. But a Pentagon report says we can’t stay long enough in Iraq to quell the insurgency; we don't have the troops or the resources (especially given what seems to me to be a runup to a new war in Iran). Bob Shrum on http://MSNBC.COM claims this war will cost $2 trillion and "we could have had free healthcare for all Americans."

9/11, the act that defines the Bush Presidency. Iraq=al Qaeda. Delusion.
No. There are places we probably should invade. Iraq shouldn't have been on the list. Are we safer than we were on 9/10/2001? A little. The obvious basket-case/nutjob/fruitcake/bull-goose loonie/mental defective will now stand a better chance of being caught up in the NSA security sweeps at the airports. And now we have added domestic spying, to some presently unknown extent, to the mix.

Gay marriage=bad. Delusion.

Stem cell research=human cloning. Delusion.

Criticizing the war=providing comfort and encouragement to the enemy. Delusion.

Most interesting of all is The President addressing our "addiction to oil." This in itself is a fantastic statement coming from a Texas oilman. One of the most spirited discussions of this occurred on Chris Matthew's Hardball. We have to break our “addiction” to foreign oil, The President said. And Matthews and the pundits compared this to the Nixon trip to China, possibly the most famous political example of casting against type.

The speculation on The President's speech focused on oil and alternative energy sources and drew comparisons to President Nixon's trip to China. Is big oil George Bush's trip to China? Is George, as a longtime oil supporter and partisan, in a singular position to crack down on and wean us from big oil? Just as the old red baiter President Richard Nixon was the only President who could have gone to China and cut a deal with the Communists?

It's pretty to think.
---o0o---

Blogspot Snafu -- Blogspot has been down & may still be wheezing!

I have been unable to reach blogger/blogspot all day, and it looks like like Saturday's posts were all lost. It looks like a handful of people were able to reach the blog, but not me!.

This is the first time in 15 months I haven't posted to this blog. This just barely counts....now, I am a little gunshy about putting anything up that might disappear.

From Blogspot Saturday: "Blogspot is again experiencing problems - we are investigating."

"Update, 8PM: We have restored all of Blog*Spot, save one of our filers. This means that some blogs will still be unpublishable and inaccessible. Our engineers are continuing to work on this
problem."

"Update, 11PM: Blog*Spot servers are restarting now and connecting with the filer. All blogs should be publishable and accessible within the next 20–30 minutes."

It looks like there are still problems with the system (I can recover what was lost, more or less). But it looks like the blog templates are not working right...and other things seem awry. The blog template will not work right...the formatting is wrong, etc. I can fix that eventually, but for now, I am waiting to see what happens next. I keep losing things because I think all is well.

I have more than once written stories and poems in the blogger editor. And been burned at least once....it's playing with fire, it's almost as bad as trusting your hard disk.

I can take solace (not much) that hundreds of thousands of blogspot bloggers are all in the same boat. And all the readers--lost without the blogs. . .they might have to read a book or take a walk or go out to hear some music or something!

All that profundity lost! Somehow, the world will survive.
---o0o---

The Spirit Below: meditations on the perils and pleasures of drink

I've always loved this one; I'm a sucker for the sweet, short lyric poem.


There's a Spirit above
and a spirit below;
a spirit of love
and a spirit of woe.
The Spirit above
is the spirit divine,
but the spirit below
is the spirit of wine.

Reverend John Pierpont, a poet, philosopher, and preacher of the 19th century
---o0o---

The only enemy was Delusion, and her daughters whiskey gin brandy and rum.

Poet Dr. John Berryman, from his novel Recovery
---o0o---

If I had a thousand sons, the first humane principle I would teach them should be, to forwsear thin potations and to addict themselves to sack.

Sir John Falstaff, from Henry IV, Pt. II, Act. IV, sc. iv, allegedly authored by Willy Shakespeare
---o0o---

The state must fight against the abuse of alcohol but encourage its use.

Herve Beledin, President, French Wine & Spirits Confederation
from "But will France take the cure?" New York Times December 21, 1980
---o0o---

Boehner elected House Majority Leader (includes link to a pronunciation guide)

The House of Representatives Republican caucus elected Representative John A. Boehner as majority leader on Thursday, sending Tom DeLay's henchman Roy Blunt to defeat (he will remain as minority whip in the leadership), as well as beating conservative John Shadegg.

A New York Times article provides guidance to pronouncing Boehner's name. Unfortunately, it is not pronounced the way many of us had hoped.
---o0o---

Poem: the sun plays its red song

The sun plays its red song
On mountains blueing in the dusk
And climbs into someone's yellow horizon

A pale flare in the east
Setting off roosters and alarms
And coaxing the dew from grassblades

The comic palm trees sway
Like Oldenberg matchsticks
Flaming with sodium light

Day for night
Tricked by the electric eyes
of Berkeley

Senor Deadline
Has never seemed
So far away.
---o0o---

Poem: Litany

This is a poem I started in 1982. I finished it once (badly), but never published it anywhere, except in a music program. The composer Dell Wade, set it to music once and performed it with (I think) a soprano and a chamber orchestra (I have a cassette somewhere). My friend Frances Hayden translated it into spanish (Litania).

When I started this, I was fascinated (as I still am) by Christopher Smart's fantastic call and response litany Jubilate Agno. Now that I am finishing a book of poems, I have resurrected a few of those old nuggets. After decades maturing, most of them went straight to the trashcan, but about fifteen or so were successfully (and success in this instance, is of, course, debatable, and you, the poor, hapless reader must decide on your own) resurrected, seriously rewritten, and offered up, as Rod Serling would say, for your inspection.


Litany

Let us cut the poets loose
For the earth is trenched with their wanderings
For they trample the blood-waged borders
For their steps bisect old steps

Let them find their way
For they wage tense inner century wars
For they need permission
For they could scribe heartlines

Let them do what they will
For they remember to remember
For they share the common air
For their peopled hearts waltz

Let them praise the little lamb
For the wolf has already been sung
For God said I Am That I Am
For we have arrived at the year two grand

Let them dream of a song to leave
For they brood about the blank beside their birthyear in books
For the trees don't last forever
For the oysters refuse to sing.
---o0o---
1982-2006

Democratic frontrunner Senator Clinton mugs for the camera at State of the Union?

Yahoo! News Photo

The most popular photo from last night's State of the Union? As it turns out, Senator Clinton makes Yahoo's "Most Emailed Photos" list with this one.
---o0o---

Cindy Sheehan arrested at President's speech

Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom, formerly known as Operation Shock and Awe, but better known as The War In Iraq, was arrested and removed from the House gallery shortly before President Bush's State of the Union address Tuesday, according to The Capitol Police.

Sheehan, invited to the speech by Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D- Calif., was charged with demonstrating in the Capitol building, said Capitol Police Sgt. Kimberly Schneider. Schneider said Sheehan had worn a T-shirt with an anti-war slogan to the speech and covered it up until she took her seat.

Sheehan was hauled away in cuffs from the Capitol to police headquarters a few blocks away. Sheehan would be released on her own recognizance, according to the heat.

The photo of Cindy Sheehan on this page is not from her protest last night, but is an All This Is That file photo from 2005.
----------o0o----------

Poem: The Developers

Dusk has always been
My favorite time of day

When the earth relaxes
And says OK

You f***ers can quit beating
On me for a while

But sequestered away
In boardrooms offices and labs

They work overtime on classified plots
To pave the ocean and blow up heaven.
-----o0o-----
Index to Jack Brummet poems appearing in all this is that:
http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com/2005/12/index-to-jack-brummet-poems-on-all.html

Poem: A raindrop's life

A raindrop is born
In a cloud
And returns like a salmon

How it got there is another story
A droplet latches onto a nuclei
Of smoke salt or dust

And bumps into other droplets
Over and over and over
Coalescing a million times

Gravity pulls the raindrop down
To strike water or earth
And one day it evaporates

A raindrop is born
In a cloud
And returns like a salmon.
---o0o---

Word Verification Sucks

I keep running hot and cold with word verification. I turned it on in the fall, when blogs were just beginning to be hammered by the splogs, or spamming blogs. As soon as I posted an article, the spammers arrived. Then things start to quiet down. I turn verification off. And the spammers sneak in, and not just to new posts, but reaching back into comments a year old, they add their new ones.

Shoes. Increased semen production. Cars cheap! Boner enhancers. "you have a great blog. You're really making things happen. Check out my blog at...." People selling acreage on the moon. Jewelry. Books. Oxycontin and Vicoden over the internet! (hmmm!). Teddy bears. Steaks Fed-exed! Sex pictures of M.I.L.F.s in action! Real estate! Nekkid girls! Nekkid boys! Horse sex!

I turn it off and get complacent again. Until the post I just created about something (reasonably) serious is spammed with another Exciting Offer! And I turn it on again. It's a war of attrition. I want people to comment, and they, like me, find word verification irritating. . .especially if you're a marginal typist and it takes at least two (or more!) tries to pass the word verification challenge. . .
---o0o---

State of the Union Satire worth a look

Check out this excellent impression of President Bush and his upcoming State of the Union speech performed by James Adomian. It goes over the top, but there are a lot of gems in there.
---o0o---

President Bush: "Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton"

[click images to enlarge]


According to Reuters, President George W. Bush says Bill Clinton has become so close to his father he's almost one of the family. Between their disaster relief work, fund raising, attending funerals, and the like, the two former POTUSes are thick as thieves. In fact President George W. Bush joked that Bill Clinton was "my new brother."

"Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton," President George W. Bush joked, referring to how Bill Clinton had followed his father, and Hillary Clinton could follow him.

"That's a good relationship. It's a fun relationship to watch," Bush said in an interview with CBS News broadcast yesterday. "It was fun to see the interplay between dad and Clinton. One of these days, I'll be a member of the ex-president's club. ... I'll be looking for something to do."



The President said he checked in with Clinton occasionally. "And you know, he says things that makes it obvious -- that makes it obvious to me that we're kind of, you know, on the same wavelength about the job of the presidency. "
---o0o---