boggles the mind

the washington post this week published the results of its 2-year investigation into the post 9-11 security apparatus that has grown up in the last 9 years. it's a fucking tome, but the paper will be running it as a series. all the info had to be gleaned from public records and sifted out of the dizzying complexity of overlay, redundancy and confidentiality. there is NO WAY to accurately ballpark what this is costing. even the guys in the thick of it, who wear pounds of medals and ribbons everyday on their uniforms, are disgusted by the inefficiency and buried by the sheer amount of data. there are head honchos with 6 or more computers in their offices because there is no compatibility standard of hardware/software between supposedly communicating divisions. never mind the guys who won't play in the sandbox.


this is just a snip:

*some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

*an estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in washington, dc., hold top-secret security clearances.

* in washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since september 2001. together they occupy the equivalent of almost three pentagons or 22 us capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.

* many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. for example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

let's just for a second remind that the last remotely close call, the underpants bomber at christmas? was foiled by a seat-mate who saw smoking trousers. the nigerian and yemeni chatter being monitored by all the best and brightest had no proper filter and there were literally thousands of communications just souped in with everything else, everyday.

lore of $300 hammers and $1000 toilet seats have inured us to expecting government efficiency, but this is one of the most aggressive cancers i have ever seen and nobody is talking about it.

george bush was right. be afraid.

all hope is not lost

abstinence icon and mommy accessory, bristol palin, and her dumb hunky baby-daddy splashed themselves and their bastard son on the cover of some rag as a wedding announcement. hooray. another magazine has paid levi to NOT show his junk.

conspiracy theorists proffer that the timing is to deflect any glam from chelsea clinton's upcoming nuptials, but we couldn't have a more roadkill-to-pineapples comparison here, could we? the clinton camp is so mum on chelsea's deets nobody is even sure where it's being held and it's 2 weeks away. while the two star-crossed tundra teens are now shopping a reality show about their sure-to-be klassy wedding and lives as newlyweds. (she really wants levi to wear hunting camo as part of his wedding suit.)

but network honchos are kinda-not-so-fast. "don't think we should do it. neither of them have personalities," said one cable honcho. possibly one of the most refreshing quotes i've ever seen from a tv suit, lmao.

one other thing? how the hell did those two brown-eyed brunettes get a tow-head as a kid?

my head hurts

this is from a rally in arizona, and the suit-clad chubster is named j.t. ready. an ex-marine (actually twice court-martialed and drummed out of the corps), he is active in local republican party antics, pals around with elected officials and self-identifies as both an aryan and a "national socialist". he declines to call himself a nazi, but um, hey, i'm thinking he might not have done so well in school. he posted this to a forum called new saxon:

The truth is that negroids screw monkeys and rape babies in afreaka [sic]. Then stupid white man who licks kosher jew rear lets negroids in. … Stop Negroid immigration and integration now!!! Nature will take care of the rest."


charming, huh?

hot on the heels of arizona's racial profiling law, he and a group of other loons have assembled mountains of ammo and declared border war against "narco-trafficers". they have spent nights out in the desert with their semi-automatic rifles prowling for brown people hopefully loaded down with ponchos of blow. he brought some reporters out there and when asked what he'd do if they actually ran into a running little juan, bleated, "we'll him him! we'll kill him!" unless the u.s. builds a minefield across the entire mexican border, it's not doing its duty and so these guys are just going down there to help. awesome.

drugs are flowing over the border. lots of americans have monkeys they feed and it's all about supply and demand. the cartels are powerful, violent and have utterly corrupted the mexican military and police. people get shot. a lot. in mexico. violent crime rates in arizona have been flat for a decade. there is no crisis of brown guys killing white guys. or anybody. according to tucson border patrol, from october to july, 170,000 people have been apprehended trying to sneak in. only 1100 of those have included prosecution for drugs.

i'm sorry, mr. ready, but those guys you're hunting are coming here to clean pools and mow lawns -- not get your daughters all hopped up on meth and pregnant with baby pedros to infect your master blood-line. but why let pesky facts get in the way of a good old-fashioned witch hunt? even the insane governor of the state is claiming headless torsos have been uncovered in the desert sands. which is an absolute lie. a lie. a lie that she has repeated to the media to keep the fear in a hot froth.

mr. ready's ownership of an arsenal is protected by the constitution. there is no law stopping him and a bunch of other wing-nuts from being in the desert with their shotguns, night-vision goggles and smoke bombs. his hate speech is protected by the first amendment.

this is a snip from his party's mission statement:

Just like African Americans have the NACCP – an African-American rights
advocate – the National Socialist Movement is a Euroepan-Ameican rights
advocate that promotes the interests of White people and works to make sure
European-Americans continue to have a voice in government affairs.

first off, why can't ANY of these idjits spell, and second, has he seen a picture of congress lately? it's a goddamn ocean of white guys, so i am always flummoxed by the lament that it somehow needs to be taken back. from whom?

so i'll just spend the day humming the little ditty from "springtime for hitler":

"Don't be stupid, be a smarty, come and join the Nazi party!"

be afraid

this guy was in a dispute with his landlord and tried running him over with his windstar minivan. i always knew minivans were evil, but ya know, guns don't kill people, etc.

the adam's apple as devil nose, the snaps on his forehead (was he towing boats with his cranium?) and the bolts on top of his skull all made me nearly lose my lunch. and laugh in a nervous kind of way.

unless his landlord also looks like this, i can't imagine a tulsa property owner welcoming this guy to an apartment.

he's out on bond, btw, and ladies, i'm guessin' he's single.

i are officially an old

at yesterday's pre-shift meeting, we did our usual run-down of what to expect from the day and night. blah-blah-blah, but part of the info was the concert nearby that would start at 7:00. the bigger shows there trend toward a certain demographic which shoe-horns nicely with that of our regular dining base: over 35, with money to burn. shows there this summer include the doobie brothers, donna summer, a styx/journey double bill. get the drift?

last night's show was squeeze and cheap trick. in a meeting with 8 people, several of whom are over 30, not one had heard of squeeze. not one. a few knew the name of cheap trick, but couldn't drag a song from their memory bank.

"live at budokan" went triple platinum. that's 3 million albums and you could not turn on the radio and NOT hear "surrender" or "i want you to want to me". they were partying anthems and the band sold out arenas all over the world.

squeeze? for god's sake, some of the most infectious pop tunes that rode over on the 80's new wave. early albums were produced by john cale and then elvis costello -- neither of whom can be considered an industry slacker. songs like "black coffee in bed" and "pulling mussels from the shell" are ear worms of the best sort. that catchy hook gets in your head and won't let go. i saw them a bunch of times live, including in jamaica, and they were kick-ass fun. the jamaicans LOVED them too.

"argybargy" was released in england in 1980. we had some very progressive radio stations where i grew up and i could not get my hands on it fast enough. i had the lp and the tape, so i could play the latter in my car. the summer between high school and college, i wore out the tape. my friends had no end of fun that "tempted" was my theme song, since i spent most of those firefly months dashing from party to party and juggling 3 boyfriends, lol.

music i loved as a young woman, that played part of the soundtrack of my life, brought a roomful of blank stares.

i am an old.

what men want

today's ny times mag had a short q & a with hugh hefner. he of the silk pyjamas and still, at 84, banging the blondie bunnies in his big bed in his big house. proof that living your life the way you want is best, but that's not where i'm a-going here.

he was interviewed by deborah solomon and this is just a snip:


In the meantime, Playboy’s ideal of feminine beauty has become passé. Contemporary models don’t go for that old voluptuous hourglass shape.

Obviously women are taller, healthier, more athletic today than they were before. That certainly is a slimming down, but I don’t think there’s been a great deal of change in terms of perception of beauty.

The look now is more androgynous, flatter.

I question that seriously. When has the notion of flat-chested come in since the 1920s?

You’re referring to flappers?

That was the last time that small breasts were popular.

we've all seen pix from old playboys, including the iconic marilyn monroe "red velvet" shot, that was hef's first centerfold and his jackpot. the women were slim, certainly, but there was s a softness, a plushness, as the owner might say, that was very feminine. women like jane russell and sophia loren put the danger in the curves.

over the decades, both miss america and miss july have gotten thinner. waist measurements of title winners of the former went from just under 26 inches (1920) to around 24 inches (1980s). from 1979 to 1988, 69% of playboy models and 60% of miss america contestants weighed 15% or more below the expected weight for their age and height category.

i don't know that i've seen an actual playboy mag since i was a teen, but the pop-up porn site pix that pester net-browsing all seem to feature the same cartoon girl: big blonde hair, miles of eye-liner, puffed-up trout-pouts and lean bodies with bolted on-basketballs for breasts. pageant girls look less whorishly-exaggerated, yes, but still with the fake tans, fake boobs and extra white veneers.

contrast these images with the female reporter's conjecture of the feminine ideal. are men fapping to the bags of bones that faint or die during fashion week? methinks not so much. those girls succumb to the tyranny of mostly gay male designers who favor androgynous types as strutting clothes hangers to showcase the drape and hang of the outfit.

yet in solomon's head, it's the jutting hips and i'll-cut-you clavicles of the daughters of heroin chic-sters like kate moss (seen her lately? from cover-girl to crone. jeebus.) that haunt men's dreams. solomon, btw, looks just as you imagine a middle-aged manhattan writer would/should. you can just as easily hear her beating the horse of women as oppressed victims of an unrealistic ideal. an argument not without merit, but i see it as the opposite side of her coin. (not to mention the reality of over 60% of women being overweight. how many are truly starving themselves to waif-land and not wallowing in dorito-ville?)

hef made a life and fortune reading and feeding men's fantasies. if somebody knows what men want, i should think it's him. not her.

hot, hot, hot

it's been pizza-oven hot the last few days. excruciating in an urban environment, with concrete everywhere mocking you and tossing hotter heat in your face. hair and clothes just melted from the shortest walk from point a to point b during daylight hours.

we always get hot muggy snaps in summer and i always bitch. we also now are subject to the tired "it's global warming." "no, it isn't," debate. call it "climate change", like sex-pervert/nobel laureate al gore, or "anthropogenic climate change" for an even bigger mouthful for a simple concept: it's gettin' hot in here.

the last few days in my wine class discussing champagne vines in england and potentially delicious reds from the rheingau within my lifetime, (latitudes too northerly to be considered even 10 years ago for such plantings) i was reminded of conversations with winemakers and vineyard owners. some of whom have been farming their land for over 400 years and some for several decades. whether it's many volumes from an alsatian, or a few books from a guy on spring mountain, they all say the same thing. it's gettin' hot in here. an unmistakable, inexorable, upward climb. but just like the "intelligent design" proponents ignoring science and the glorious serendipity of evolution, we have just as many, if not more, loons running around sayin' it just ain't so. jeebus.

if only those wine-guys would get together and publish their data. they have no agenda, just truth. and the personal worry that future generations may not share their culture of the grape because it's just too damn hot in ribeauville to grow riesling anymore.

child-like pride

when was the last time you got a badge and a certificate for an achievement? i did yesterday, lol. it was a minor accomplishment in the scheme of life and the goal for which it is just the first baby step, but still.

my name was called by a "master" -- one of only 170 in the entire world. he handed both tokens to me and a room full of people were applauding. it felt like winning a spelling bee. my last certification from wset took 6 weeks to arrive via post and just was a form letter congratulating me on passing and asking when i would send my check for the next phase. cold, uh?

there was a squirmy moment at the end, when all the names of those passing had been called and my two co-workers, who also took the exam, were still hanging back, having failed. ouch. however, i am off today, so can avoid the awkwardness and already did some delving about what i will need to know for the next level. it feels good to finally be moving forward, and doing something so few do. good and... dorky, because so few really want to do this. ;)