Note to Webmasters everywhere: if your site is down, and your goal is to provide services to other sites, do not claim that your going offline leaves user sites unaffected, when said users can clearly see otherwise.

In other words, bite me, Enetation.

Update: Both comments and Blogspot are back to full strength -- I think. But really, this is getting annoying.

. . . and comments are down again. Isn't this fun?

Meanwhile, does anyone know of any good sites that do overviews of American politics? Specifically governors' races. I have Stateline.org, and I had a good one out of D.C. that was fairly selective about the races it handicapped, but I have since lost the URL.

Actually, if we want to get really specific, if anyone can point me to a recent poll on the Tennessee gubernatorial race, I'd appreciate it.

Comments are back up. Don't be shy.

Here's the page for this year's Asian American International Film Festival, which starts this Friday and goes on for a week. It's a little difficult to navigate, but they have screenings of Musa: The Warrior, The Last Witness, Shaolin Soccer and Princess Blade buried in there. And I'm curious about the "Gaysian X-travaganza" party listed. No Map of Sex and Love, sadly. If L and I hadn't lucked into finding copies while DVD-shopping this weekend we would've been very upset.

The schedule for this year's Korean film festival is also up. I'll probably have moved by the time most of these get screened; more's the pity. Actually, you can't access the schedule from the site yet, but my friend Kwang-woo has posted it here. I've heard good things about Bungee Jumping of Their Own, My Beautiful Girl, Mari, and Take Care of My Cat, which I've missed before. I wish they'd managed to get Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, but that should make its way across the ocean eventually.

Finally, the guys at Subway are helping promote Takashi Miike films at the Anthology in August; if they get enough response to City of Lost Souls and Happiness of the Katakuris, they might be able to bring in more, including Ichi the Killer, which L loves and which apparently has been "cut to ribbons" on the available Hong Kong DVD. Grady has all the info.

Comments are down, and I'm having trouble getting my current posts onto the main page. You get what you pay for, y'know.

Friday night I saw Me Without You with a friend. In some respects I liked it thoroughly, especially the movie's first half, which concentrated on the two women growing up in the late '70s and early '80s; it offered a relaxed view of period detail -- "mundane glam," I wanted to call it. (I think Alastair will like it.) And both the lead actresses (Anna Friel and Michelle Williams) are great. (Michelle Williams. Ah, Michelle Williams. I might start suffering through Dawson's Creek just for her.) But in the movie's second half it started to lose me with a more soap-opera-y plot than I would have liked. To keep from spewing the spoilers, if two people who get together by the end of the film had gotten together earlier, it would have been a better movie. Not bad, but not quite as glowingly smart as some of the reviews make it out to be.

The party Saturday night was awkward but not as awkward as I feared: enough of my high school friends whom I genuinely missed made appearances. One is married and just bought a house; one is about to become a teacher; one is heading down to Miami in the fall for law school. Et cetera. My high school boyfriend seemed pleased to see me; his fiancée didn't say much -- she was in an even more awkward position, as her future father-in-law stood up after lobster and made a speech about welcoming her into the family -- but seemed sweet. It surprised me how well I got along with everyone after seven years of separation; we had enough catching up to do to fill in the long silences.

And then last night I sat at my favorite local café -- lots of options, where I live -- and wrote a couple pages, the first time I'd done that in a while. Nothing big; possibly a new opening to the book, possibly just an exercise. We'll see.

Hmm. A New Republic book review in which the target is not the Writer of the Month but Dubya himself. The typical charges come out early -- he didn't win the presidency fair and square, he caves to pro-business special interests far too often and too openly, he makes fun of journalists, etc. etc. -- and you might be persuaded to drop it quickly; to be fair, by the end Wolfe has started smacking down Michael Moore, though that's been done, and better.

But what started me reading the whole thing was this:

. . . . in the half-century after [1888], Americans elected to the presidency such undistinguished men as William McKinley, William Howard Taft, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover. An era that included two wars, the assumption of an empire, a stock market crash, and the beginning of our greatest economic crisis was also marked by as mediocre a political leadership as we have had in our history.

Two features stand out in this roll call of incompetence: the presidents with the lowest reputations over the past hundred or so years were all Republicans, and they were all guided by the conviction that their job was to side with the powerful in any potential conflict with the poor.

Five presidents are missing from that list: the two Roosevelts, Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland, and Woodrow Wilson. Let's leave the Roosevelts aside. Cleveland's reputation isn't great, but it isn't poor; he's best known for vetoing a lot and having a candy bar named after his daughter. Harrison is known for even less. (Let's face it -- I can name all 43 presidents in order, and the toughest stretches are from William Henry Harrison to Lincoln and from Lincoln to Teddy Roosevelt. The presidents of the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, with the possible exception of Ulysses Grant, really haven't gotten that much attention, and Grant has for his pre- and post-presidential record more than for his scandal-ridden presidency.)

That leaves Woodrow Wilson. Now there's a revisionist controversy I want to hear. Wilson was a Southern gentleman of his time, which is to say, a racist; the effects, good and bad, on the Fourteen Points on post-WWI Europe can be debated for hours; his championing of the League of Nations paved the way for the current UN; and, apparently, in public speeches he sounded much like Mojo Jojo:

The whole incident is full of signifiances. It is also full of perplexity. With whom are the Russian representatives dealing? For whom are the representatives of the Central Empires speaking? Are they speaking for the majorities of their respective parliaments or for the minority parties, that military and imperialistic minority which has so far dominated their whole policy and controlled the affairs of Turkey and of the Balkan states which have felt obliged to become their associates in this war?

Whether Wilson the idealist, who may or may not, depending on your argument, have caused immense harm by pursuing his idealism, was a better president than the do-nothing Calvin Coolidge -- I wish I knew enough to really enter the argument. Can anyone recommend a good Wilson biography to me? (Or get President Mojo Jojo's voice out of my head?)

I hope you crash your mama's car
I hope you pass out in some bar
I hope you catch some kind of flu
Let's say I don't wish the worst for you.

Since my high school boyfriend now lives in Austin, home of the Old 97s, it would not surprise me to hear he'd been listening to that song this week. Spook me, but not surprise me. Then again, when I knew him he was more into Bela Fleck and Billy Joel.

I mention this because I'm going to his engagement party tomorrow. Everyone to whom I've mentioned this reacts as if I had casually said, "I'm going to take a bath tomorrow and drop my hairdryer in midway through." But he seemed to want me there -- he emailed me to make sure I'd gotten the invitation -- and I'm curious about his fiancée. And it'll be my first visit back to Westport, and possibly my first time seeing a bunch of high school friends, since my family moved from there back to Atlanta in the summer of '95.

The forum is ambivalent about being friends with the ex; I've managed to at least come to speaking terms with all of mine, though great doses of time and apologies were usually necessary. My high school boyfriend and I had a particularly nasty breakup -- he once emailed me with the list of times I'd fingered his Unix account (no, really) and a quotation, "Woman was God's second mistake," attributed to Nietzsche; and I was even brattier to him -- but at this point we've gotten into a routine: we acknowledge each other's birthdays, and talk then or soon after. Usually we just catch up: he's applying to business school, I'm moving back to Atlanta, he's engaged, I'm still with the guy from Dallas, et cetera. It's our way of keeping an acknowledged connection intact but not too strong.

I've found I'm not a sentimental woman in one respect: if a particular chapter of my life has closed I usually don't feel like re-opening it, even to browse and reminisce. I haven't been back to Swarthmore since one visit less than a year after graduation. I could have gone up to Westport long before this and didn't. And I can have my exes as friends without being tempted to bring it back to something further. So I'm going.

The crowning detail, though: it's a seafood barbecue. If meeting my high school boyfriend's fiancée and seeing his parents (who liked me back then, though I doubt they do now) won't be awkward enough, I'll get to do it with a lobster bib on and butter-covered fingers. Pray for me.

Sidney Dorsey has been convicted of murder, much to my surprise. For those of y'all not about to move to DeKalb County, Dorsey was the former sheriff, defeated in 2000 in an election by Derwin Brown, who immediately started firing people who had apparently helped Dorsey move a whole bunch of money around. A little more than a month later, Brown was gunned down in his driveway. Two of the co-conspirators who actually pulled the trigger did not get convicted of murder, so pretty much everyone expected Dorsey to get off. He was also convicted on 11 of 14 other charges of corruption and racketeering. Great guy, that. Couldn't have picked a more appropriate fate for him.

This may -- and I say this carefully -- end up as a very important moment in local political history. For the first time Atlanta can remember, this was a trial where all the major players were black -- Dorsey, his accomplices, Brown, his widow Phyllis (who had been saying "Sidney did it" from the beginning), Dorsey's ex-city-councilwoman wife Sherry, the bail bond company owner who apparently traded sex for jail contracts with Dorsey, and the sheriff who got sworn in to replace Derwin Brown -- and while the majority of the lawyers on both sides were white, this large, sensational, politically loaded trial was conducted with a near-absence of racial fingerpointing. A couple people cried early on that Dorsey had been singled out by The Man, but it wasn't nearly as loaded as, say, the rhetoric Bill Campbell was throwing around while he was mayor.

What this might mean -- again, might -- is that the black political power structure in Atlanta is starting to get a little more mature and less self-conscious. It's been around since Reconstruction, started flowering in the 1920s, made the rest of the world sit up and take notice when Maynard Jackson was elected mayor in 1971, and by now is pretty firmly entrenched -- and possibly secure enough to tackle its own excesses. Campbell made a hash of running the city, and everyone knows it, not least Sister Shirley, who may or may not clean up the mess left behind.

I like Shirley Franklin, actually. My boyfriend, who lives closer to the city than I do, doesn't: "All she's done is run her mouth and take a pay cut," is his verdict so far. I'm choosing to be optimistic right now. From what I've seen, the woman is very politically acute; you have to be, to have had your finger in as many pies as she has (she served in both Jackson's and Andy Young's administrations and was part of ACOG). She knows Campbell was playing a self-destructive game, and she can't keep playing it even if her ex-husband is milking his airport contracts for all they're worth. She might actually do some real cleaning up, and not a moment too soon.

Sherry Dorsey, I suspect, is another politically astute woman, even though she completely alienated her (no longer 100% black) council district and lost the seat (to another black woman). If you flip through these photos, you'll see her talking to two different people identified as "close friends" of the late Derwin Brown. This means that either (a) Derwin Brown's friends are very forgiving people or (b) the Dorseys will be divorced within a year. Maybe two.

I also wouldn't be surprised if Phyllis Brown got into politics. Only if she wants to, though. The woman's been through enough already.

I'd been looking for ages for a free image hosting site -- because I am Little Miss Cheap when it comes to this blog -- and I finally found one in PictureHosting.net. If you see images on the left-hand side being tinkered with in the next few hours, that's why.

Here are some of the things I've done since last we met:

• Flew to Atlanta, and back. Which was a good thing.

• Saw my boyfriend. An even better thing.

• Saw The Powerpuff Girls Movie with said boyfriend. We were the oldest people there without kids. We were also both fans of the show long before the movie, so we liked it a lot -- it's mostly backstory about how the Powerpuff Girls came to be the heroes of Townsville. There's tons of Mojo Jojo, and in a nice touch, he starts out with fairly normal speech patterns, and only after he becomes a megalomaniacal villain does he start talking, well, like Mojo Jojo ("These are the plans that I have formulated, and now I will follow the specially designed plans by me in order to take over the world, which I will do once I have accomplished all the steps in these plans that were created by me!" Etc.). Very fast-paced, nice animation, and the soundtrack is great. Plus Buttercup sulks a lot. I highly recommend it.

• Found an apartment. It's a little pricey, but a mile from my brother (yay) and centrally located (yay) and across the street from an Indian DVD store. I predict that within three days of moving in I will own the collected works of Shahrukh Khan, or at the very least Dil Se.

• Wrecked my car. Yeah. Third wreck in five years. It was my fault. The woman that I hit had been laid off that morning. Everyone is fine, with the exception of the couple months in Hell added to my future, and the cars themselves. There was progress, though: for the first time in my wrecking history, the cars both started afterwards.

• Called myself an idiot a few hundred times after wrecking the damn car.

• Realized that since I'm still on my parents' insurance, their rates will go up for a wreck which was in no way their fault. Cursed myself a few hundred more times.

• Learned that my boyfriend retreived the grill that had previously been attached to my car, and that he plans to mount it over a sign that says "Pay Attention."

• Learned, the same day, that the #7 runs express from Manhattan, but not to Manhattan, in the evenings, which can make getting back from LaGuardia somewhat frustrating.

• Was introduced to Trillian by a co-worker.

• Listened to the Prefab Sprout album Swoon. It's not nearly as Britpoppy as the songs my college roommate put on mix tapes for me, and so I found it a little off-putting at first; I have a feeling it'll need a couple more listens before I know if I can warm up to it or not. If you like clever mid-80s Britpop, though, and you can find a copy of Protest Songs, that's the album my former roommate had. I especially like "Tiffanys" and "Life of Surprises."

• Tried to write a long post in relation to this article (found on Kausfiles), and gave up; I wasn't in a blogging mood yesterday. The gist of my aborted commentary was that young French Arabs don't really see an incentive right now to become French: they don't get any economic benefits (because jobs for the young of any background are few and far between); they don't get any social benefits (basically, they don't stand to gain from joining a more relaxed French culture; and I could do a long digression on gang rape and ideas of masculinity, but it wouldn't be very intelligent); they don't get any religious benefits (since traditionally "Frenchness" has meant Catholicism, not Islam); so no wonder they retreat further into a fundamentalist Islam and/or hooliganism. It's a good article -- the first page especially -- but I wish he'd focused a little less on the social context and more on the economic one. Maybe my longtime secret boyfriend Mickey "Welfare Causes Terrorism!" Kaus will say more on the subject.

• Read the dead fish story, in which an innocent man with a guilty conscience is framed for mass murder by his conniving wife and her friend, the brains behind the operation. And cracked up laughing, even though I'm in a cubicle and I've been at work since 8 a.m. and all my co-workers started staring at me.

So I'm going to let you down on the B. R. Myers post. Apologies; Fisking is addictive.

Tonight is dinner with Beta Reader D, because he's going to London soon and I'll be gone by the time he gets back; then tomorrow I'm off to Atlanta, to meet my parents' new puppies, let my boyfriend cook sumptuous dinners for me (no, really!), and look at apartments. Lots and lots of apartments. Posting will be light, if not altogether nonexistent.

Y'all will live. Especially if you're reading John & Antonio, blogging about life in Barcelona. They're definitely worth a read.

If you've been wondering, "Who the *&#$##@ is B. R. Myers?", here is your answer.

While I'm on an Atlanta-media kick: I can't listen to Neal Boortz. I have been known to start shrieking and clawing frantically for the dial when I hear his voice on the air. People I love listen to Boortz -- my mother and my boyfriend, for two -- but I simply cannot take that much bile with my cereal, and if one of my loved ones insists on keeping the channel on Boortz I will immediately start trying to drown him out with my own voice, and if you've ever listened to Boortz you know that's not a cacophony you want to hear.

That said, I give the man credit for surprising me, and I was indeed surprised to read that he thinks that the Ninth Circuit was right in ruling the "under God" part of the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional.

I wonder why he doesn't get more public rallies going the way Steve Gill does in Nashville. I think Boortz probably could, if he got incensed enough about a state (as opposed to a city) issue.

I give. Time to Fisk John Sugg.

Full disclosure: I have never written anything for Atlanta's Creative Loafing. I did write in the past for Atlanta Press, a now-defunct rival to the Loaf, and I have worked for publications that have employed people who have written for the Loaf. Like I've said, Atlanta is a tiny media town, and everyone ends up snarking at everyone else, and most likely six months from now I am going to run into John Sugg at a party and stand there with a frozen smile on my face when a mutual acquaintance says, "Jessica's also writing a novel, and promoting it online." (I even can guess which mutual acquaintance it will be.)

But this manifesto, titled "The Declaration of Independence . . . from Dubya," is so Fiskable that any attempts on my part to resist crumble. I'm sure Mr. Sugg is a very intelligent man, and he can certainly get his point across, but I have disagreed with his work many many times, and no work more so than this one.

First, for contextual purposes:

Although the repeated mendacities of your administration are beyond comprehension -- far greater by many powers than your predecessor's peccadilloes with Whitewater, White House travel agents or even Monica's semen-stained dress -- you earn credit for telling one chilling truth.

If nothing else, Bush is apparently efficient, able to cram more mendacities into a year and a half than Clinton got in in eight. And Laura Bush (as best we know) isn't helping her husband out. But let's take that statement into the more substantive part of Sugg's argument, still addressing Dubya:

Your affinity for the word "evil" raises questions of how in touch you are with reality -- you embrace horribly repressive regimes, from China to Uzbekistan to Malaysia; you seek to ignite a new Vietnam in Colombia; yet you cheer the attempted overthrow of democracy in Venezuela. You side with Libya in opposing an international court that would bring war criminals to justice -- your Alice-in-Wonderland congressional allies have passed a law that would allow us to invade the Netherlands to "rescue" Americans on trial by the court. That invasion may happen -- in Europe, news agencies (studiously ignored by mainstream U.S. media) report with substantial documentation that our military was complicit in the torture and slaughter of hundreds, possibly as many 2,500, Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners, many of them roasted to death in sealed cargo containers.

1) Somehow Bush, who has made buddy-buddy with Vladimir Putin, gotten pissy with Jiang Zemin over spy planes, campaigned for a missile-defense shield that China openly disliked, and uttered pro-Taiwanese statements that made his advisors cringe, has "embraced" China more than his predecessor. Meanwhile, in terms of repressive regimes, Malaysia is not even in the same league as China -- or Burma, which maybe should have been on the Axis of Evil list. But Malaysia? Not a free and open country, granted, but not the PRC, either.

2) Den Beste has already made a long argument against the ICC; I'm still not sure where I stand on that issue, so I'll leave it aside. It ought to go without saying, however, that we have different reasons than Libya for opposing the ICC.

3) "Roasted to death in sealed cargo containers"? I don't even know what the source is for that one. Apparently I've been reading too much mainstream media. I know I've got at least one reader who's part of Warblogger Watch; you want to come down and source the "sealed cargo containers" rumor?

In the one area of the world where U.S. authority needs to be applied -- the Middle East -- you have totally capitulated to the awful Ariel Sharon, a man committed to only one tactic, endless war. Yes, Yassir Arafat is awful, too (he was elected by majority of his people, however, a claim you can't make). And, yes, Israel absolutely should have peace and secure borders. But your non-solution of placing the entire burden for re-engaging a peace process on a people who have suffered under 35 years of military occupation is just, well, loopy to a degree that's almost criminal.

Put another way: Have you no morals, Mr. Bush?

Because it is apparently far too much to ask of these poor oppressed people that they, oh, stop blowing up civilians. Such a demand is amoral, almost criminal. I think Sugg's definition of "moral" and mine differ a bit.

And whether Arafat's election was more legitimate than Bush's is certainly up for debate.

Your constituency is obvious to those who look -- the band of lawless corporate marauders who seek to loot the world's wealth, squander the planet's resources and gamble with American workers' salaries and savings. It is not too extreme to say that you run a quisling puppet government for the pinstriped corporate warlords.

Of course they gamble. Capitalism is about gambling. It is about being able to take risks -- hopefully, risks which you have researched and gauged carefully beforehand -- in order to increase profits and increase your workers' salaries and bonuses. Do I really need to point out that both working for a company and investing in its 401(k) are both voluntary activities?

And it ought to go without saying that if Bush really were a "quisling puppet," then Sugg wouldn't even have an opportunity to work up a froth, because Enron, Global Crossing, et al. would have been quietly bailed out without their troubles becoming public.

Yet, when last week a federal appellate court in California sensibly ruled that the phrase "under God" in the official Pledge of Allegiance was unconstitutional -- it equates patriotism with acceptance of the monotheistic deity -- you slimed our nation's founders by declaring the decision was "out of step with the traditions and history of America."

The cowed and servile Congress anxiously echoed your silliness. A true leader might, instead, have observed that our nation's founders would not have confused symbols and rituals with real patriotism, and that they would have tolerated -- indeed, encouraged -- differences in beliefs and customs.

More than one true patriot has observed that it is the scoundrel who is first to wrap himself in the flag -- just what you repeatedly do. Your vice president and your attorney general have declared that criticism borders on treason. At Ohio State University last month, those who would exercise their most American right, peaceful dissent, at a graduation ceremony where you spoke were told they would be ejected, denied their diploma and arrested.

Here's what I could find on that Ohio State protest, for what it's worth.

The nation will be 226 years old on Thursday. The words "under God" were added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, 48 years ago. That means that for a fifth of this nation's history, "under God" has been in the Pledge. And we can argue about whether it should be or not -- and we do, because we can, because contrary to what Sugg seems to believe, we do not live in a dictatorship -- but to say that to strike "under God" is to go "against the traditions and history of America" is not necessarily wrong.

Mr. Bush, you have used the Sept. 11 tragedy to expand the military budget to an unimaginable $400 billion -- knowing full well that all of our expensive toys were insufficient to stop madmen armed with $5 box cutters. You have reignited the nuclear arms race by changing policy from the elimination of weapons to the warehousing of old bombs and the creation of a new generation of hell-toys.

I'd be more sympathetic to Sugg's points here if he suggested an alternative -- any alternative. But to call the September 11th attackers merely "madmen," devoid of political context, is false. This is like refusing to kill the octopus because the tentacles, not the head, stung us.

Last month, you pronounced that you and you alone have the right to overturn the Constitution, and, relying on the most dubious interpretations of a 60-year-old Supreme Court decision, declare when a person is an enemy combatant (hell, Jose Padilla was a barely educated street gang banger).

I'm not sure why Sugg is getting on Bush's case about failure to act on reports when he himself can't take any of the terrorists seriously. Apparently, because Padilla was "barely educated," he actually wasn't a threat. Bush can't win here: fail to arrest anybody, and he's an incompetent slug in Saddam Hussein's pocket; arrest somebody, and he's a dangerous dictator picking on poor uneducated Latinos.

Trampling rights is horror enough. But the reason sold to the American public is pure sham. It wasn't for a lack of intelligence that Sept. 11 happened. You had plenty of information. Yet, you bungled, you failed to properly analyze and then act prudently. It's absurd to say that the FBI, with 27,000 employees and a $3 billion budget, is impotent before a gang of Third World madmen.

It is absurd, and sad; Sugg's screed isn't devoid of a few actual points lurking behind all the overheated Chomskyist rhetoric. But his larger point gets lost. By playing down al-Qaeda, is he trying to say that any idiot can blow up a plane, and therefore there's no point in overturning our freedoms to try and stop terrorism? Or is he saying that Bush should have been able to stop September 11th that much more quickly? But wouldn't that have required an extension of intelligence?

I don't know what Sugg is trying to accomplish, other than make noise and get noticed. (Considering how many people pick up Creative Loafing solely for the entertainment listings and the phone sex ads, that's a noble quest.) And he's not pretending to give anything other than his own opinion, though I wish he'd source some of his claims. (The one about Bush forcing women into abusive marriages, for example.) But he does himself, and his argument, no favors. I can sit here and pick his claims apart, and I'm sure other people may jump in and Fisk him even more thoroughly than I have here. But someone just glancing at the text on a hot street corner might get to the "roasted and sealed containers" line and say either, "Oh, how horrible!" or "This guy is full of shit," and walk away, either way, ill-informed. Which is not, presumably, what Sugg and Creative Loafing want.

I have to say: ten years ago, five years ago, I would have taken his words at face value -- and I wasn't a stupid girl, even then. Naïve, but not stupid. But I'm not in college anymore and I'm tired of all this squealing. It's been almost ten months since September 11th and left-wing commentators such as Sugg are still trying to sound the same points without perspective, making Bush into their enemy and crying "Dictator!" as if every morning he rubs his hands over a world map and cackles. It is possible to shade the world a bit gray. It is possible to deplore the accounting fraud of Enron, WorldCom, and Xerox without condemning the entire capitalist system. It is possible to raise a mighty eyebrow at the PATRIOT Act and Carnivore without deciding that our democracy is a sham. It is possible to worry about the plight of the Palestinians without excusing the murderers among them. It is possible to criticize this country and still love it and be grateful for the lucky accident that made you an American citizen from birth.

And until people like Sugg start realizing that, the left -- and the front half of Creative Loafing -- will continue to screech itself into irrelevance.

Can I Fisk this column? Really, it's so blatantly One Man's Opinion (in this case, Will Hutton's, the author of The World We're In) that it's only barely worth it. But a couple points:

It is no accident that WorldCom, whose accounting fraud cost $3.8 billion, was based in Mississippi and was a generous contributor to its hard-line conservative senator, Trent Lott, minority leader in the Senate, as Ed Vulliamy reports today. Nor that Enron, whose profits were vastly overstated by accounting fiddles, was based in Texas and whose relationship with George Bush was so close.

Sigh. Okay. First thing: corporations cover all their bases. When InstaMan, a while back, looked up Cynthia McKinney's fundraising records and found a number of suspiciously Arab-sounding names, I checked the records as well and noted that she was also in the pocket of Delta, Coca-Cola, and Georgia-Pacific, to name three. If WorldCom didn't give money to Lott's opponent I'd be shocked. Second, it was no accident that Enron was in Texas because Texas was where the oil is (and once upon a time Enron did deal in actual commodities), and at least part of the reason WorldCom was in Mississippi because Mississippi, as anyone who has actually been there can tell you, is cheap. Rent is cheap. Food is cheap. Costs of living for your employees? Lower. Costs of doing business? Also lower. It's not necessarily some magical cultural element; it's called "nobody wanted to live there before air-conditioning became widespread, and shooting civil rights protesters wasn't exactly the greatest PR move, and thus the cost of land has lagged behind that of much of the rest of the country."

But let's see where Will Hutton takes this:

The states of the Confederacy remain the heartland of the distinct brand of American conservatism that combines Christian, market and America-first fundamentalism to a unique degree, reinforced in the South by a legacy of barely submerged racism.

And the guns, Will. Don't forget the guns.

1) Christian fundamentalist and America-first and market? The three do not go together. There's a reason why Eric Rudolph -- whom I'm guessing would meet Hutton's definition of a "Christian fundamentalist" -- chose to bomb the most commercial, privately-funded Olympics in modern history. More likely you will have a deeply fundamentalist Christian who chooses to home-school her children rather than support a system she views as corrupt, or a businessman who goes to church every week and says Grace at meals but regards the Tim LaHaye/Jerry Jenkins series as fast-paced entertainment rather than omens of the future. To be a Christian -- to be a practicing Protestant Christian in the American South, even to be a practicing Protestant Christian who listens to Christian music and puts a Bible verse on the business card -- is not necessarily to be a fundamentalist, because the word "fundamentalist" implies a certain set of political views, which are not necessarily pro-market. Fundamentalists (and here I'm treading carefully, because I haven't really studied fundamentalist politics) do not necessarily accept that Adam Smith's invisible hand is also God's hand, much less preach it as a gospel.

2) How does racism "reinforce" this triad of Christian-America-market yahooism that Hutton sees? What kind of racism? I might have been able to buy this as applied to the anti-Japanese feelings of the late 1980s, but that kind of racism clearly isn't "Southern." Hutton must be talking about white-on-black racism. But then how do you explain the number of blacks serving in the Army? Have they been brainwashed en masse? And what if they're Christians?

3) And how is racism in the South "barely submerged," anyway? Does that mean we don't talk about it? We do talk about it, but not enough? Does the racism come from those pro-market Christian fundamentalists? Is Hutton absolutely unaware that Atlanta, one of the most commercial cities in the ex-Confederacy, has had five straight black mayors since 1971, has a black woman mayor right now, and that the mayor before her brought up racism many a time?

Apparently aware of the complete idiocy of this line of thinking, he tries out the complete idiocy of other lines of thinking:

The majority of mergers and takeovers in this stock market-dominated economy have proved destructive: few add any value and most lower it. Between 1993 and 2000, Wall Street had brought 3,500 small hi-tech companies to the stock market; even before the dotcom bubble had burst, more than half were trading below their initial offer price or had gone bust.

Now, we can debate the value of mergers till the cows come home. But that's a complete non-sequitur. If anything, it might suggest that some of those 3,500 dotcoms should have merged with each other to combine resources, find a workable business plan, and stay afloat.

Productivity is higher in both [France and Germany] (the old East Germany excepted) and growing at least as rapidly. The consequence is America's intractable trade deficit. Great wealth and opportunity have been the privilege of the few.

As in, France and Germany have been getting richer with America, and they're the "few"? I'm not even sure what the logic is that connects those three sentences. Any left-of-me readers are welcome to explain it.

The structures that support ordinary peoples' lives - free health care, quality education, guarantees of reasonable living standards in old age, sickness or unemployment, housing for the disadvantaged - that Europeans take for granted are conspicuous by their absence.

So is extremely high unemployment among people my age, because there aren't as many barriers to hiring them. (See: France.)

. . . many in Europe have wilted before the propaganda offensive and begun to accept that Europe's economic and social model is irredeemably weak and that it should be Americanised.

That wilting sound? That's not Europeans bowing to the inevitable American pressure. That's European pension schemes bowing to the inevitable demographic pressure. There will be more money coming out than will come in. That's not propaganda, Mr. Hutton. That's cold, hard arithmetic.

The only thing I conclude is that Mr. Hutton believes that nobody around him can think for themselves. Not pro-market boosters (because they're just being swept up in a delusional tide), not Christian fundamentalists, not businesses in Mississippi, not blacks, not other Europeans who fall like a feather at the first puff of American hot air; nobody, that is, but him, and his contempt will save us all. And we will fall at his feet, so mesmerized we don't even notice he does not have a single damn clue as to what he's talking about.

(Link via Slate. My Jacky-Cheung-loving reader M, who likes the Guardian, is going to beat me soundly round the head and shoulders now.)

Hmm. A Cato employee who runs marathons and listens to Beck, Barenaked Ladies and "Man in Motion."

You single, Radley?

Oh, but he's an IU fan. I don't think he'd put up with my Dookieness.

(Link via VodkaYenta.)

(And for what it's worth, I did get an unexpected green light on the story I pitched to one of my many bosses, hence no B. R. Myers post yet. Time for research, which I always prefer to actual interviews. Much easier to interact with a computer, y'know. Especially if Stateline.org is up and running. All you political junkies should be feeding on Stateline.org as if it were hickory-smoked 'cue.)

Jackie Collins -- not Jackie Collins the author of Hollywood Wives et al., but Jackie Collins, a nice Kiwi girl currently based in London and recovering from a bad 2001 -- has posted a bunch of entries all at once to her journal. Since said journal was one of the reasons why I got into online writing two years ago, and since she will soon be a Fellow Author of an Unpublished Novel, I'm happy to see her back again.

You know, I was going to put up a list of my girlcrushes for Stephen Green's benefit, but really, how many "I like girls too!" posts should one blog have? There is no "bloggerette on starlet" action. There is no action. Only leering, and leering gets old.

Of course there is my Ambercrush, which really only came into being once I found out that she actually notices her fans, talks about their support for her, and lets them take pictures of her butt (that last from The Kitten, the Witches and the Bad Wardrobe). I love a girl with a sense of humor.

I'm not going to Toronto Trek, though. And what would I do if I did? Stand around like a big dork? I've done the big-dork routine in front of celebrities before -- babbling in front of Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls, once listening to Don Sutton's cell phone ring in a Turner Field elevator -- and thank you, I'm not fond of it, and I don't think the celebrities in question are either. And while it might be fun to party with other Amber/Tara fans, just like it was fun to party with Amazing Race fans and participants, I'd still feel like I had Big Dork tattooed on my forehead.

All right, let's put this comment system to good use.

I'm moving (back) to Atlanta in about a month, and hoping to have my apartment choice settled before I move. (I love my parents dearly, but I've lived with them before, and I don't think any of us want to return to that. Besides, I need to have my home office up and running as quickly as possible.) I'm looking for a one-bedroom-and-office, or two-bedroom, setup in the Emory/Decatur area. The actual number of Emory students in a complex doesn't matter to me much as long as crime and noise are relatively low. DSL setup is a must, as is an office space where I can close my door. I'm hoping to stay under $1000 a month in rent.

So you have an idea of what I'm looking for, here are some of the places I want to check out: Jackson Square on DeKalb Industrial Way, Highland Lake and Highland Square, Westchester at Briarcliff, Jefferson on Peachtree, and Post Park, which I suspect I would love if it weren't stuck way the heck out in Chamblee. My little brother did OK living in a Gables-managed complex, and I've heard fair-to-good things about Summit St. Clair.

Aptratings.com is intriguing but, I suspect, not all that helpful (on the other hand, they did say nice things about Post Park. Post Park, please pick yourself up -- that includes the gazebo and the butterfly garden -- and move yourself just a bit closer to Decatur. Or even Virginia-Highland. Okay? Good). So if anyone has a complex to recommend or warn me away from, I would be very grateful.

Coming tomorrow, assuming one of my bosses doesn't take me up on my offer to write another story: why B. R. Myers rocks the plastic like a man from the Catskills.

I think I'm in love.

I won't get down to Atlanta in time to see him, but he's playing July 22nd at the Bottom Line here in the big city. Anyone interested in going with me?

Sigh. We will now try comments. Comments courtesy of Enetation, if they work. Typically I've had good luck with Brit-hosted sites -- I've used Postmaster for my non-blog email since December '00 with almost no complaints.

Thank Reader R for persuading me that comments would mean more for my readers than for me.

Apparently it has been a crappy day for everyone in my office. A big Dark Cloud o' Crap hangs over us. I'm listening to WDVX-FM to feel better. As Layne points out in a rather eloquent farewell address, you have to have awfully big problems to get an audience lately. And I've had it pretty lucky, relatively speaking. (With the exception of that little incident with the Transmeta IPO . . . )

Case in point: a bit after midnight on 1 July 2000, I walked into the smoking section of the con suite at DragonCon to meet a man in a black shirt, black shorts, and black Converse sneakers, who immediately began asking me questions strangers don't usually ask. And I started asking questions back. We went down to the entrance (so he could smoke) and kept talking. About four in the morning he said, "I'm going to kiss you now," and I said, "Okay."

Two years later, we're still talking, and kissing -- though he's quit smoking.

Sad news from London: My newly returned co-worker tried and tried to get her hands on that Battle Royale DVD I want so much, and came up empty. Bad Jessica! No DVD for you!

I have emails in my in-box from another co-worker, on my move to Atlanta, which I'm reluctant to read, because I am a big coward, especially this early in the morning. Sorry, but we've decided we really need to keep you in New York. Or: What, did you think we were going to give any money towards a move that you suggested? This is a dotcom you're talking about.

I spent most of the weekend with family; we went to a cemetery on Long Island yesterday to unveil my grandfather's headstone. He died July 3rd of last year, after a very long and difficult fight with pancreatic cancer. The tradition at Jewish funerals is to bury the person first and wait to unveil the headstone until at least six months after the funeral; my grandmother waited a year because she didn't want to come up from Florida in the winter, and she wanted the same rabbi who performed the funeral to perform the unveiling. The headstone says, "Loving Husband, Devoted Father, Adored Grandfather"; I would have preferred to have added "Stubborn Leftist Bookworm Who Once Paid Full Price for a Hyundai," but there is a protocol for these things.

I hadn't been back to his grave since the funeral; I hadn't seen the point. He's not there. I saw his body in the coffin, and all those clichés about the spirit leaving the body behind came true for me in that instant. I don't know where he is, exactly -- I've heard his voice in my head a few times since he died, but I think that's a mental trick of my own, rather than any Voice from Beyond -- but I know he's not in that ground.

And yet it was important for us to put the headstone there and mark his burial, as impersonal as the headstone is. The rabbi's speech included a note about burying our dead with dignity, and I shivered . . . my grandfather came to this country as a baby in 1920 from Hungary, and I couldn't help thinking that if not for that lucky accident, the chances that he would have been buried with dignity, after a long life, would have been significantly lower.

I miss him. But after September 11th happened I thought, "At least he died before that; at least he didn't have to see it." Because watching those towers fall would have broken his heart.

So I am not Cheery Cheerfulton yet. Sorry, all. Go have Megan school you about stock options and airline economics.

God bless Jennifer Weiner for writing this. Most of it I'd heard before, which was reassuring in its own way.

My roommate, as I've mentioned before, works for a literary agency here in New York; her boss has at least three clients whose names, when being dropped, impressed me greatly, and my roommate herself is now beginning to take on clients on her own. She has made it clear she doesn't want to look at my book (it's not really in her field anyway). Every weekend she brings home several manuscripts, which she diligently reads. Most of the ones she brings home -- i.e. the ones she's going to carefully look over and evaluate -- are not unsolicited; either they're new manuscripts from existing clients, or her boss has specifically requested it. From the little she's talked about her job, a goodly number of unsolicited manuscripts arrive at her office daily, and 95% of those don't get more than a minute or two of her time. Clearly, once upon a time the same thing happened at a different office, only that day a manuscript called Good in Bed happened to be in that slush pile, and some agent actually took the time to read past the cover letter, and now Jennifer Weiner, bless her, has a seven-figure contract.

And no, I'm not being sarcastic. Good in Bed is definitely worth a read.

That said, my understanding of the publishing industry is that the two biggest obstacles between me and a publisher are (a) all those other manuscripts in the slush pile and (b) more importantly, my inability to sum up my book in a single easy-to-follow sentence. (People who ask me, "What's it about?" normally get about half a minute's worth of "Umm . . . " followed by something like, "It's about this girl who's just out of college, and she meets her little brother's ex-best friend, and they both have things to work out, and there's sex and confusion and a gun and a minor-league hockey game . . . " Yeah, that's compelling.) I haven't even tried writing cover letters for the book yet. Which is partly shock at the idea that something I wrote might actually be marketable, and insecurity, and partly the convolutions of the plot. Weiner says she went to the bookstore and tried to find out the agents for books similar to Good in Bed. Anyone know of any books similar to a quasi-coming-of-age story featuring a Chinese-American native Southerner who resents her job and her mother's new Subei ren boyfriend and a suicidal teenager who watches far too much Revolutionary Girl Utena and mourns the half-elven chaotic neutral mage he played for three years? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? . . .

Sigh. One of my mother's college roommates is a successful novelist in her own right; she's been encouraging and sweet the few times I've met her. I may solicit her advice soon. In the meantime, it is, admittedly, easier to blog than to actually deal with that big hulking manuscript sitting in a green binder on the floor of my bedroom.

Apparently a minor-league hockey team set to come to Gwinnett County is looking for a name. One of the finalists is the Maulers. Sounds nice and intimidating and hockey-ish, right? But keep in mind the region in which people would be talking about the hometown Maulers.

As in, it'll sound more like "Mallers."

As in, people who go to Gwinnett Place Mall and the Mall of Georgia.

This has not escaped the notice of team officials. And why not? It's certainly more applicable than the Gwinnett Beavers, however much it might amuse some fans to get tickets to the Beavers vs. Whoopee game.

Gwinnett Maulers. I love it. Their mascot will be an angry SUV. Their defensive line will be known as Pleasanthill Road. Instead of hot dogs and beer, the stadium will serve Auntie Anne's pretzels and smoothies, and instead of a Zamboni, between periods senior citizens in white Keds will come out and walk the ice flat.

In other Atlanta news, happy birthday-in-advance to Hannah Beth, who turns 26 on Sunday. You can go give her birthday love in the shiny new forum.

M says that the title of the Jacky Cheung song I was listening to translates as "Hide and Seek." Which is not what I would have guessed at all.

Am about to add three new blogs to the list on the left, and then there will be work to do.

Oh, Pamie. We are so proud of you, girl.

Note to Welch and Layne: when you get this Examiner project of yours off the ground, go give Pamie a call. She's in L.A. She's a fantastic writer, and a soon-to-be-published author. She's got newspaper experience (ask her ex-co-worker at the Austin-American Statesman) and she's very, very funny, as demonstrated here, here, here, here, and my personal favorite, here. So, clearly she's also got a facile touch with words, and can knock a deadline out of the park. And you'll get a lot of subscribers describing themselves as "squishy." Which may not be the demographic you're looking to sell to advertisers, but in the newspaper business, who's picky?

Finally, finally, finally a review of Champion! From Korean film expert Darcy Paquet, no less. He gives it a thumbs-up and compares it more to Failan than to Friend -- good signs.

In other good news, my co-worker temporarily in London emailed me this morning to say she should be buying me a copy of the Tartan NTSC Battle Royale this afternoon. Pardon me while I do the Dance of DVD-Acquiring Joy. L probably has first dibs on watching it with me; Asparagirl can be second, if she's up for blood, exploding collars, and subtle commentary on Japanese militarism.

I said a couple weeks ago that I was trying not to talk smack about Atlanta's Creative Loafing. And so I won't. However, other, less genteel bloggers are perfectly welcome to.

For example, others might take a look at this week's cover image -- for a story about the building of the Northern Arc highway -- and wonder if, say, Governor Roy Barnes is shooting opponents. Or tanks are running through the streets of Atlanta. Or thousands of people are fearing for their lives after daring to publish an anti-Northern Arc opinion. The answer to all of which is no.

And those other bloggers might then come to some conclusions involving the words "crass" and "inappropriate" and "Shut UP, Creative Loafing." But in true Southern passive-aggressiveness, I merely give you the link.

Dang. Vouchers yes, random drug-testing for students also yes, by a 5-4 margin on both counts. The majority for the vouchers decisions was Rehnquist, O'Connor, Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas -- no surprises there; I would assume the same five voted for random tests.

I haven't been following the drug-testing case closely enough to know the issues involved -- feel free to send me links -- but on their face, wouldn't the two rulings involve some sort of contradiction? If you're that concerned about kids using drugs, wouldn't you want to limit their access to private schools that aren't required to test? It seems to add up to a "You're free to leave, and if you stay it's your own fault, and we can impose restrictions on you as we see fit" attitude. Which worries me somewhat. There are always going to be students who, for one reason or another, can't take advantage of the voucher program, just like there will always be students with absent-minded or too-self-centered parents; one possible negative social (not legal) consequence of the introduction of vouchers will be that students who don't use vouchers will be assumed to be choosing their (possibly inferior) public school, when it's not necessarily their choice to make, especially before high school. (A dissatisfied high school student could always drop out.)

I think (again, my very facile analysis) the vouchers decision was the right one; I have some serious doubts about the drug-testing one. I know I would've been resentful, and my parents (both lawyers) indignant, if I'd had to pee in a cup prior to joining Yearbook my senior year in high school. Granted, it could work as a disincentive -- I've heard the "I can't smoke pot tonight, I may have to take a drug test next week" statement before. But it does smack slightly of Evil Teenagers scapegoating.

Okay, I'm wrong -- the 5-4 majority on the drug test decision was Thomas, Rhenquist, Scalia, Kennedy and Breyer. Interesting. Here's Dahlia Lithwick's recap of oral arguments for Slate. Scalia apparently wants to test "every kid in every high school in the U.S.," according to her. I once wrote a paper for a Constitutional Law class arguing in favor of a Scalia decision (about whether a cross burning on a black family's lawn constituted "free speech"; he said it did), but clearly we're on opposite sides of the fence here. Eugene Volokh has the links to the opinions for all cases decided today.

My initial reaction was that Joanne would be having a champagne breakfast this morning (since she's in California) to celebrate. But I'm not sure.

Beta Reader D says that, actually, Leon Wieseltier's 1995 bodyslam of Cornel West wins the Best New Republic Book Review Smackdown Ever award. I say (still) that Beta Reader D ought to get his own blog. There's a whole lot of libertarian bloggers out there, and not as many non-libertarian right-wing blogs. I happen to know that D has his own website, which I haven't linked to because it contains his real name, pictures of him and Mrs. D, etc., and I don't think he actually ever signed up for such exposure.

And Beta Reader J deserves a platform solely for his film reviews. A mere excerpt from his take on Butterfly and Sword:

Donnie Yen is charming as always, but doesn't get a lot to do. Which is kind of odd since this was made right after Iron Monkey I think, in which he established himself as a star. But since only porn actors bounce from film to film more than kung fu artists, maybe that isn't surprising. He also has the worst hair ever. But, again, the problem is that he just randomly appears and disappears. It's almost strange -- he is Deus ex Machina Sifu. "Oh no, the house is on fire!" (Donnie flies in and resuces the girl even though he wasn't even in that scene . . . ) "Oh no, the dead body is returning to fight!" (Enter Donnie who was just like 10 miles off a minute ago.) And his secret love for Michelle Yeoh is left unresolved at the end . . . what's with that?????? No one of either gender or any sexual orientation with any sex drive at all could not wish for a Michelle Yeoh/Donnie Yen sex scene . . .

He plans to watch Peking Opera Blues next. No sex scenes in that either, sadly, though there is a scene with Cherie Cheung, Brigitte Lin, and Sally Yeh hanging out in lacy white nightgowns.

Meanwhile, both Asparagirl and Justin Sodano linked to my long Buffy post. Amusingly enough, nobody emailed me about the post (except Justin himself, to tell me he linked to it -- thanks, Justin), but people showed up in the comments sections of both their websites to argue my point. Which proves my theory that people find it easier to criticize weblog posts through comments sections than they do over email -- simply the ease of use, I think, and the speed of response; also, someone who has comments available is clearly looking for feedback.

I don't have one (yet) just because I know I'll want to respond to every single comment, and I just don't have the time. But you're always free to email me. Even if you disagree. Really.

Once again, no smackdown like a smackdown in The New Republic's book review section: Dale Peck declares Rick Moody "the worst writer of his generation."

The all-time greatest TNR book review smackdown was Lee Siegel's masterful bitch-slapping of Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. I was smart enough to Xerox it in my college library at the time (1998, I think), because it's not online now. And that's a shame.

New York life, 2002:

Co-worker: Did you hear those sirens? Should we be worried? (We had all heard a very loud "boom" during lunch.)
Me: (rapidly checking CNN and NY1's sites) I don't know.
Co-worker: I won't worry. Of course not.
Me: We can always check NY1 later. (looks out window) Dude, it's raining.
Co-worker: Really?
Me: It was a thunderclap we heard.
Co-worker: (sees downpour; in a mixture of relief and frustration) Arrrrrghh.

About this '80s box set that everyone's talking about: I'm not sure why. It's a pretty scattershot compilation, for one. Off the top of my head, where's "Blue Monday"? Where's "Rock Me Amadeus"? "Closer to Fine"? They have one Duran Duran song, which is just silly, and no R.E.M., which I'm going to assume was a rights issue, because to have an '80s compilation without "It's the End of the World (As We Know It)," "Stand," or "Orange Crush" is even sillier. At least they have "Tainted Love," though I suspect that song has become better-known since its release than it was at the time.

And their one-cut-by-the-artist choices can be strange: "Lies" instead of "Hold Me Now" or "Doctor, Doctor" for the Thompson Twins; "Let's Go to Bed" instead of "Just Like Heaven" for the Cure; "Venus" and not "Cruel Summer" for Bananarama. (And some, admittedly, are right: if you are going to limit yourself to one Duran Duran song, it might as well be "Hungry Like the Wolf"; "Don't You Want Me" and not "Human" for the Human League; "Only in My Dreams" for Debbie Gibson.) And what's with the lack of Guns 'n' Roses? Every boy in fifth grade with me knew "Paradise City" by heart. Or Poison, for that matter. I remember sitting around with a bunch of friends my senior year in college, and a couple had guitars, and the sing-along included "Every Rose Has Its Thorn."

There are other '80s compilations available -- not seven discs, maybe, but I remember seeing a really neat three-disc set that concentrated more heavily on the New Wave early part of the decade and looked like great fun. Then there's the "Rock of the '80s" series, which defines "rock" pretty loosely: on my one CD I have "Come on Eileen," the Kinks' "Good Girls Don't," a novelty song about the Vietnam War, and "In a Big Country," a very underrated song.

The Slate writers do give the '80s credit for musical diversity, which it sorely needs: people tend to emphasize the trappings of the decade -- the bad fashion, mostly -- and not notice that some beautiful songs emerged. We're currently in the process of separating the wheat from the chaff of '80s music (while keeping both the wheat and the chaff of the '70s -- but that's my bias) and the same thing will eventually happen to our current post-grunge drought.

The chief complaint about current music is that the pop is too manufactured, the rap is too materialistic, and the rock is too whiny. The last point, hell yeah. "You Remind Me" should never never ever have been allowed to chart. (I blame Fred Durst.) But rap clearly has its share of interesting things going on -- Missy Elliott, OutKast, the Roots -- and current pop, I suspect, will have more staying power than we're currently giving it credit for, especially *NSYNC (back in 2000, when I had my car, I unabashedly stopped changing the channel and sang along whenever "Bye Bye Bye" or "It's Gonna Be Me" came on) and Mandy Moore.

Yes, Mandy Moore. I was appalled as anyone by "Candy" (the girl is fourteen, and she's practically blowing the camera!), but have you seen the video for "In My Pocket"? It's Orientalist brilliance. I stood with my jaw gaping in the gym the first time I saw it. It's fire and half-naked boys and wise Kali-esque figures and Mandy Moore casting herself as Turandot. If her management continues to make wise decisions (since, in retrospect, A Walk to Remember did a lot more for her than Crossroads did for Britney Spears) I predict the 23-year-olds of 2022 will own Mandy Moore CDs the same way I have Duran Duran's Greatest Hits now.

So: know your '80s. And if you're a cutesy female folk singer with a guitar, hanging out in Harvard Square, don't try to cover "Just Like Heaven." Really. Just don't.

And one last note to Slate -- next time you have a discussion of '80s pop culture, call Dwanollah. She's the smartest '80s fangirl you'll find.

Hashai is back up. It is otherwise known as the online journal (with pretty pretty pictures) of the lovely Anna Beth, the best thing to come out of Louisiana since A Confederacy of Dunces. Give her great amounts of love and cross your fingers that she will be heavy with child sometime in the near future.

My inbox was heavy with communications this morning. First, M has promised me access to his many Jacky Cheung mp3s, which is good, since the CD I've been listening to is borrowed and L (my friend here, not the one in Boston) wants it back. Second, Beta Reader D shows why he should have a blog of his own, in response to my earlier post on men in college:

The suspects I prefer:
1) Once you let a woman do something, men don't want to do it anymore. This now includes education, culture, etc.: all signs of being gay, dontcha know? Real men don't think. Real men don't have self-discipline. Real men don't study. Yadda yadda yadda.
2) Self-esteem correlates inversely with performance according to the studies I love and cherish. Women -- especially white women -- always think they're lousy; naturally, they are oodles more competent than everybody else. The natural result follows.
3) Getting back to sports at Swarthmore, as I think I said at the time, the admissions office now explicitly regards athletics as affirmative action for men.
4) I favor cultural brainwashing of boys, telling them to get off their
asses and study. If that doesn't work, long live the female majority in college!

(D, if you don't like me quoting your posts, let me know.)

Third, the blog has officially done the book some good. There's a character in the book who decides to join the Army and gets sent to Korea. Now, I know next to nothing about the military, as some of my beta readers have already found out; but look who emailed me about my soccer predictions -- Rafael, who, when not blogging, is busy being an Army sergeant in Korea. He has graciously agreed to fact-check my ass in regards to all things military-in-Korea. Hooray! Go visit him -- if his site is down, here's a backup -- and thank him for his part in keeping you and yours safe to consume massive quantities, and for making my book better.

Finally, I had a bit of spam, but every other email address on the spam list was a well-known blogger -- Layne, Suman Palit, Ken Goldstein, the Volokhs, et cetera. Apparently there's at least one person out there who thinks I'm one of the big boys. Which is not really true -- this blog has a limited number of topics, and thus will probably get a more limited audience -- but very flattering nonetheless.

Gorgeous newlyweds!

Okay, I have to make this quick, since I need to do work, really I do.

On the question of whether anti-male attitudes on campus have led to falling numbers of male enrollment: I'm ambivalent about the former (because there is still quite a bit of diversity in higher education -- attitudes toward men at Swarthmore, at Central Connecticut State, and at Florida A&M may well be three different things) and unconvinced that it leads to the latter.

First of all, most of the anti-male attitude doesn't show up until you actually get to college: unless there are some strange things going on in interviews that I don't know of, colleges aren't discouraging men from applying (probably the opposite, as most of them prefer a 50-50 split). So if we found a higher percentage of men getting to campus and then dropping out, that would be more convincing evidence of the harm of the anti-male bias than simply declining enrollment. (The article that prompted all the blogging looks at graduation rates but not enrollment rates or dropout rates.) Second, if it is a question of political correctness, then one would expect the trend to be slower at campuses that are less politically correct -- Pepperdine, for example, ought to be balanced. And it's not: for fall 2000, the enrollment was 59% female, 41% male. Hillsdale, on the other hand, seems to be closer to 50-50, according to its US News & World Report information, although it should be noted that for the class entering in fall 2000 Hillsdale accepted considerably more women than men.

The other question I would ask is if male numbers are declining as a whole, and not simply the ratios. It could be that we're seeing the same number of men enrolled, and women are getting the additional spaces. The thing to look for is not the male-female ratio at any one school but the overall percentage of men in college of the number of men as a whole.

But it may be a problem that begins at the high school level or below, and thus would be more complicated -- lack of college-enrolled father figures, economic decisions, anti-male sentiment at the junior high/high school level, which could be different from anti-male sentiment at the college level -- than Instapundit implies.

The Post article closes on this disturbing the-women-won't-find-good-men note. I would like to think that female college graduates and male non-college graduates (or not-yet college graduates) can still make happy marriages -- for purely selfish reasons, as my boyfriend, who turned 31 this past April, will start at Georgia State this fall as a junior.

Work now. Work now. Really . . .

(I was supposed to see Asparagirl tonight, but there's a Work Thing that I have to at least show up at. Maybe I can escape early. Asp? . . . )

My project is done. Whew! Well, the first part is done, at any rate. Still some things to do.

But now I can get to that Buffy post I promised you. Fair warning first: it will cover up to the end of Season 6. If you haven’t gotten that far, and you don’t want spoilers, you might want to avoid this one. Also, I am an admitted Amberholic and generally highly skeptical of gun-control laws. So take this argument with the appropriate grains of salt.

Kim linked to this recap of a recent Buffy panel at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (warning: season 7 spoilers in the link!). (You may think I'm overdoing it, but some Buffy fans have to keep to a very strict spoiler-free diet.) The person at the panel mentioned some intriguing things Joss Whedon, Buffy's creator and Grand Poobah, said. Specifically:

Joss said they planned from the beginning of the season to kill Tara by shooting her with a gun. He points out they intentionally planted two lines (ep 4 and 15 I think he said) where Buffy says guns are bad (paraphrasing that). In earlier seasons, Angel and Buffy died in 'fantasy' ways. Their love was a fantasy and even though their separation and loss hurt, it hurt in a safe way, because it was a fantasy. This season, Joss wanted everything to hurt in a REAL way. So no easy safe magical death. A very real, very ugly death in a real world way. And the real ugly pain that caused (to the characters and the audience).

Now, unlike Justin Sodano, I wasn’t too happy with Season 6, especially the Willow/Tara arc. To sum it up for the non-watchers: Willow and Tara were Witches in Schmoopy Lesbian Love, Willow started using magic inappropriately and refusing to stop when others warned her, Tara left her, Willow went off the magic, they reunited, Tara was killed by a bullet through the heart, Willow went nuts and tried to destroy the world in her grief.

Now, if you want a detailed explanation of why many Buffy watchers didn't think this worked well, the good people here will be able to tell you (especially in the "Deep Bitterness Society" thread). Some critics were offended because the show stooped to a cliché in making the happy lesbian relationship end in melodramatic violence. But seeing as how almost every relationship in Buffy ends in melodramatic violence or abject misery, that wasn't my chief criticism. My usual argument was that the plotting was all off. Basically, it seemed that Tara was being killed just to give Willow an excuse to become this season's Big Bad, when such an excuse wasn't necessary: there had been plenty of allusions, both in the early part of Season 6 and in previous seasons, to a darker side of Willow. The entire setup of Tara's death -- the fact that she was accidentally killed (the villain was trying to kill Buffy and fired all over the place) by a bullet improbably coming through the window, and that she went from 60 to zero so quickly -- struck me as slipshod from a show that typically thinks through all its plot implications. I originally thought that the first half of season 6 had been designed towards a different finale, and that halfway through the writers, for whatever reason, had to change gears.

I mean, really: by the time "Seeing Red" aired, Willow had been able to communicate telepathically, restore a brain-sucked Tara to good mental health, and raise Buffy from the dead. And then Tara gets shot and Willow turns into a blubbering idiot. The idea that she wouldn't even try to summon some magical power and undo the damage done by the bullet, and only start asking for not-of-this-world help after Tara had officially shuffled off to heavenly Buffalo -- again, it felt poorly plotted and poorly executed to me, and I was disappointed.

But it wasn't a last-minute plot twist, and it wasn't a homophobic strike, apparently. It was to get the message across that people sometimes die sudden, sad and irrevocable deaths, leaving their loved ones devastated. Gee, that sounds oddly familiar to me -- because it had been done one season earlier, and much more beautifully and skillfully, in "The Body," the episode where Buffy finds her mother dead of a brain aneurysm. So I guess the twist on Tara's death was that people sometimes die sudden, sad and irrevocable deaths by guns. Because Guns Are Bad.

And thus we get to the heart of the problem. The show fell victim not to the Dead Lesbian Cliché or to a pregnant Marti Noxon or to actor machinations, but to Joss Whedon's apparent desire to make a very tired and silly political point. Demons, monsters, goddesses -- those all can be faced and defeated, but guns? Might as well roll over, children. There's no hope. Guns Are Bad.

And in order to shoehorn Guns Are Bad, No Really, Worse than Demons, Etc., into the Buffyverse (which was doing just fine with Buffy dismissing guns as useless or likely to backfire, thank you), we had to lose out on the promising Willow-as-power-tripping-magic-abuser storyline, which was turned (via "Wrecked," my candidate for Worst Episode Ever) into an after-school special; we had to lose one of the few characters who didn't make many of the viewers want to scream at the TV every episode ("Shut UP, Xander/Dawn/Spike!"); and we got, in the end, a diminished show. And the fans didn't come away with Guns Are Bad: they came away with, "Damn, Buffy used to be so good, and it sucks now." Because they're generally too smart to blame Tara's death on the gun, as opposed to the writers.

So, remember, aspiring screenwriters, wherever you might be: Guns don't kill people. Bad writing kills people. And viewers.

Speaking of fanfic: Best. Buffy. Smut. Parody. Ever. (Or would that be best Buffy parody smut?) It's called "Once More, All Naked, All Gay," and it's on this site, which has a whole bunch of very, very funny parody fics.

I'm hoping to write more later today, but it will probably only be of interest to longtime Buffy watchers. And possibly the Volokhs. And if you're going spoiler-free and not caught up through the end of Season 6, it will not be for you.

Speaking of the Volokhs, while I go back to work: has none of the horny girl-watching bloggers noticed that Volokh co-conspirator Michelle Boardman is very pretty? How can Pej resist a fellow Chicago alum? Maybe he's just practicing, honing his flirting skills among those of us on the other side of the country.

And speaking of lovely female bloggers, Emily Jones has alerted me to copies of Battle Royale up for sale on eBay. I took a look around and it seems to be mostly the original Japanese release, not the later special release or the Tartan NTSC release that I asked a co-worker in London to buy for me. (I'm normally not that picky about which DVD I get. Just about this one movie. Oh, and I want the Spectrum release of Attack the Gas Station!, not the Mei Ah version, which is serviceable but dark and bare-bones. And my birthday is August 22. So you know.)

And one final note: while I was away, original anti-soccer-screeder Layne revealed his essential secure manliness by watching World Cup soccer. Which surprises me not a bit.

Ten Little Peeves About Fanfic, almost all of which can easily be applied to fiction writing in general. Grammar is your friend. Synonyms for "said" are, on the average, not. And so on. Go read -- it's useful, and pretty damn funny.

The author has some fanfic recommendations, including a Buffy/Spike Season Noir that looks good.

Not that I should read it at work, of course. Ahem.

Champion is apparently being released Friday in Korea. This comes from CineClick Asia, and I see no reason to doubt them.

Y'all, it doesn't even matter to me how good the movie is, or isn't. This is the movie that offers the promise of scene after scene of a buff, shirtless Yu O-sung. This could potentially be the greatest contribution to the world supply of eye candy since Angelina Jolie was cast in Gia or Michael Rosenbaum and Tom Welling in Smallville.

Check out the CineClick Asia page for the film. The Flash intro is incredibly, irritatingly slow, but it features a buff, shirtless Yu O-sung with Guns 'n' Roses as musical backdrop.

I don't know about you, but my day just got a whole lot better.

Saturday night I told Alastair, who is one of my beta readers (and the only one using a Mac, for what it's worth), that the book had too much straight sex and not enough of any other kind. He reassured me that straight sex is a good thing, too, but I didn't feel much better, because I hadn't done a good job of explaining my dissatisfaction.

Then he, L, and I watched Velvet Goldmine. It was a slightly symbolic gesture, since there had been a Velvet Goldmine screening among our small social group at the tail end of senior year, and the personal wars going down between various people in the audience were more important at the time than the movie itself; this time we could just drink our White Russians and relax.

Afterwards I said to them (L was a beta reader for my first book): that was what is missing from the current draft of The Adventures of Chloë and Pete. I had a hard time conveying what that was, but I'll try and sum it up: desire -- not necessarily exclusively homosexual or homoerotic desire, but desire that is overwhelming in its color and need: painful, yet comforting in its intensity. It sharpens your senses, creates a small pit of lava in your gut, and slows down time whenever the object of your desire is in your view. It's adolescent in its origins, yet it's worst when you're no longer an adolescent, aware of how ridiculous you look -- and how sweet such intensity is, because you know what it's like to be in love without such desire. It's essentially immature, probably short-lived, and entirely necessary.

And it's not in the damn book.

I had a couple more chapter requests from beta readers in my inbox this morning, and for a moment I wanted to tell them no, because they're getting a shell of a book. The color and sweetness and devastation of that particular kind of desire is lurking in the background when it ought to be out front and center in full glorious force. And there's no way they could read my mind and say oh -- that's what's missing.

This is what I write about. Not the Middle East crisis, because I don't see what I can contribute to that debate right now. Not my personal life, because that's actually going remarkably smoothly. Not about politics or business, because that's what I'm supposed to tackle at my day job. And not crap between various bloggers, because frankly, if I wade into that cesspool I'll drown post-haste. I'm self-centered. I wrote a book. It's more like Book 95, with plug-and-pray technology, and the readers are waiting patiently for the next release, and I need to tell them what the bugs are. You can go ahead and write me and tell me that I'm self-centered and wasting good bandwidth, and I will award you Obvious Points.

I did mention that whole "bad mood" thing, right?

I switched the music to "Butterfly", or at least the Dance Dance Revolution version that was current about a year ago. (2nd Mix, I think.) Because animé and J-pop and cute sweaty boys wishing they were girls, and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and Ewan McGregor kissing as the camera circles them slowly, and desire, and the book -- they're all tied up together.

Bad night last night, not a good day at work today, et cetera et cetera. The readers of my old journal can tell you how moody I can get. Leave it be.

But one request: can anyone link me to a site that translates Jacky Cheung lyrics into English? Specifically I'm looking for the lyrics to the ninth track on this album:

(Image taken without permission from Jacky Cheung Data Station, which is mostly in Japanese. Apologies to the webmaster.)

It's upbeat and weirdly quasi-Middle Eastern, and it briefly samples Enigma's "Return to Innocence" after the first chorus. And I'm very curious as to what, exactly, Jacky is saying as he cheers me up.

First of all: Joanne Jacobs rocks the house. Tell her I sent you.

I'm not officially "back" yet. I'm in Boston, at Chez Alastair, having just eaten a yummy eggplant dish prepared by L. She has settled in Boston and found a wonderful job, and it is very good to see her again. Three years was way too long to go between nights of hanging out with her guitar and Alastair's Stephin Merritt collection and Hedwig and the Angry Inch. I'm happy and relaxed, which is a lovely thing.

Tomorrow will be more Bostonia and Monday will be lots of work and other things (such as cleaning my room from top to bottom so that my roommate can start showing it to people who answer her ad). Probably not back 'til Tuesday at the earliest.

But y'all will be okay. Go give some love to Pejman, as the man is a love sponge, and I hear he's gotten some knocks lately.

  posted by Jessica @ 20:24 |

I'm going to be out of town -- and probably not blogging -- for the rest of the week. I will be shagging my boyfriend at great length, and when I return I will tell you, in immense and precise detail, the positions assumed, the toys used, the knots tied, the passages from The Story of O read out loud, the number of times the neighbors yelled at us to keep it down!, the damage done to the bed, the fruit squished, the names of the two others involved, the youth organization to which they belong . . .

Kidding, wankers. Who do you think I am, anyway? I'm going to a conference and then to Boston to visit friends. If you're in Boston, and you're my friend, either email me or call my cell phone so we can hook up this weekend. Hopefully I will get to see L, a friend whom I have not seen since graduation; Alastair, generous soul that he is, promised to help a girl out.

I will be seeing my boyfriend at the beginning of July, but don't hold your breath. That kind of writing I charge for.

I wonder if Den Beste, the Python fan, is familiar with the Kids in the Hall, since their sketches, like Python's, frequently played with gay stereotypes. (Someone asked him in his forum and he hasn't responded yet.) And I can say that those particular sketches are still in demand: when I saw the Kids in the Hall live earlier this year, they performed "Running Faggot", and Scott Thompson had a new Buddy Cole monologue in which Buddy imagined a three-way with Saddam Hussein and his son. No. Seriously. And it was still funny. This is my favorite Buddy Cole monologue, for what it's worth, tied with "I'm not saying I'm gay. I'm just saying, boys, you wouldn't want to run into me in a dark alley." (The transcripts don't do the performances justice. You really have to see them.)

Anyway, my point is, clearly not politically correct humor, but even I at thirteen -- and I was not a worldly child, let me assure you -- knew an in-joke when I saw one. They even had a second-season sketch that dealt explicitly with Scott being out.

As for Python: I suspect at least some of the "Practice flouncing about" humor is lost on Americans who didn't experience the English school system; our college students used to dress up in drag all the time -- go find some pictures of F. Scott Fitzgerald from his Princeton days -- but the US doesn't have generations of hormonal boys who spent their adolescences cooped up with each other. But other than that, no, I don't know how Python gets away with it, other than "That's British humor for you." Same, for that matter, with John Inman in Are You Being Served?

For what it's worth, my father introduced me to Python, and I can still get him to crack up by saying "Not guilcup" every so often.

There's a new place for all the cool kids to hang out.

Oh, y'all. Crazy crazy weekend. It involved Elizabeth Taylor shouting "Monkey off the terrace!" and me watching the Senegal-Sweden game live with five other Swat alums -- one from Hong Kong (hi, M), one from Nepal, one from Kenya, one from Uganda, and one from the Ukraine. And the Blogapalooza, of course. Here's the proof: I'm the girl in the shiny glasses above Dr. Weevil's cranium. Sitting across from me, next to Erin Hayes, is Ken of the Illuminated Donkey, and let me tell you, if ever you're waiting for an IRT train at some ungodly hour of the morning, he's a good guy to have around. Here's a better picture of me sitting to the left of Jim of Objectionable Content, who is in turn to the left of Leonard of Unruled. And here are the rest of the good Doctor's pics.

I wish I could've spent more time with some of the bloggers, especially Nick, Ravenwolf, and Sasha Castel (who was modeling InstaWear). But the group that partied till the wee hours was myself, Ken, Jim, Max of Common Sense and Wonder, Paul Frankenstein, and Megan McArdle. It was lovely, stimulating conversation about MBAs and Tom Wolfe and the University of Pennsylvania and all sorts of topics. By 2 am we were so thoroughly talked out that no one wanted to stick around and watch Paraguay-Germany, which turned out to be no great loss.

(Speaking of which: Senegal! Senegal! How bad-ass was that winning backheel pass? Go Senegal! Go USA! So far my knockout round predictions are 4-2 -- yes to USA, England, Senegal, and Germany, no to Ireland and Belgium -- and I'm picking Japan and South Korea for tonight, so I'll probably finish 5-3.)

And Paul and I didn't even get to talking about China. For the next Blogapalooza, clearly.

As far as I know, there are very few Atlanta bloggers, though I know of at least two swell writers who live down there; I suspect I'll have to come back to NYC often to get my Blogapalooza fix. As well as my Asian movies fix. And my Prospect Park fix. Why am I moving, again?