heddalee

This song is SO GOOD -- check it out --






Portland band "A Weather".

Hey, if you're local to me and want to help w/ Thrill the World and you're not already dancing that day, we could use your help! An hour or an hour-and-a-half that afternoon (Oct 24) would be so helpful... and remember, we're doin' it as a benefit for SMYRC, so it's a win-win for ever'body. Thanks much! 

Yesterday, an interesting thing happened. I went to the library to pick up my holds. I retrieved my books and took them to the counter, and Gina-the-librarian took my card and scanned my books, while looking at me - but not looking at my name. She then went to the DVD hold section and got a DVD that clearly had someone else's name on the tag sticking out of it, and scanned it. The system, of course, didn't know what to do since it wasn't my hold, and Gina stood there, stunned into silence for a moment (actually, she hadn't said anything to me yet). After staring at the screen for a bit, she looked down at the DVD and said, "Oh this isn't yours. You have a twin!"

I guess I look so much like this Mister Bustamente that she didn't even think I might be someone else. And! now I have the name of my "twin".... although I googed him, and nothing came up. Is that possible any more? If someone isn't googleable, does s/he exist? Do I have a made-up twin?

 (Please) tell me the name of a book you've read more than once.

From an interview with the London Times (I have no idea why the paper categorized this interview in the Women's section):

How’s Obama doing? “Dreadfully. I was hopeful. He was the most intelligent person we’ve had in that position for a long time. But he’s inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters. He’s acting as if Afghanistan is the magic talisman: solve that and you solve terrorism.”

Vidal originally became pro-Obama because he grew up in “a black city” (meaning Washington), as well as being impressed by Obama’s intelligence. “But he believes the generals. Even Bush knew the way to win a general was to give him another star. Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it’s a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred — religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word ‘conservative’ you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They’re not, they’re fascists.”

Another notable Obama mis-step has been on healthcare reform. “He f***ed it up. I don’t know how because the country wanted it. We’ll never see it happen.” As for his wider vision: “Maybe he doesn’t have one, not to imply he is a fraud. He loves quoting Lincoln and there’s a great Lincoln quote from a letter he wrote to one of his generals in the South after the Civil War. ‘I am President of the United States. I have full overall power and never forget it, because I will exercise it’. That’s what Obama needs — a bit of Lincoln’s chill.”

Vidal now believes, as he did originally, Clinton would be the better president. “Hillary knows more about the world and what to do with the generals. History has proven when the girls get involved, they’re good at it. Elizabeth I knew Raleigh would be a good man to give a ship to.”

Today religious mania has infected the political bloodstream and America has become corrosively isolationist, he says. Instead, America has “no intellectual class” and is “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is. Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the corruption of the people and that happened under Bush.”

Vidal adds menacingly: “Don’t ever make the mistake with people like me thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren’t any and if there were, they would be killed immediately. I’m never surprised by bad behaviour. I expect it.”
 

---

Subject: see what had become of the victim that did not descend, and found in



Ariously balanced. His ray-gun was in his bare left hand; his face-plate
was locked partly open. He raised his fingers to the direction rod on
the suit's breast, gazed straight at the guard on the nearest
watch-platform and snapped the direction rod out, pointing it at that
guard. * * * * * What happened then struck so fast, so unexpectedly,
that it took only thirty seconds to plunge the quiet ranch into chaos.
The Hawk came like a thunder-bolt, using to its full power his only
weapon, the space-suit. The sight of him might alone have been enough to
strike terror. From the dark arms of the tree he hurtled, his bloated
monstrous shape of metal and fabric dull in the glow of the
watch-beacon, and crashed with a clang of metal into the platform he
aimed at. Nothing there could withstand him. One second the guard on it
was calmly gazing off into the sky: the next, like a nine-pin he was
bowled over, to topple heels and head whirling to the ground sixty feet
beneath. He lived, he kept consciousness, but he was sorely injured; and
he never saw the outlandish projectile that struck him, nor saw it
streak to the second watch-platform, bowling its guard out and to the
ground likewise, and then repeating at the third and last! A crash; a
pause; a crash; a pause; then a third crash, and the thing of metal had
completed the circuit, and all three watch-platforms were scooted empty!
Then came confusion. There had been screams, but now a crazed voice
began crying out mechanically, over and over: "Space-suit! Space-suit!
Space-suit! Space-suit!" It came from the second guard, who lay twisting
on the ground. His tongue, by some trick of nervous

 

good night, sweetcat.

You loved well, and you were loved.

 

• facebook. I wasn't into it anymore, too many soundbites and no dialogue.
• Eating meat.  (ethical motivations predominate)
• Eating wheat. (tested positive to a wheat allergy long ago)
• Eating dairy. I'm almost certainly lactose intolerant.
• Eating anything with added sugars. Sugar makes me feel loco.

I've done each of the last four for periods of time on their own; I sorta think that having a clear line between what I ought to eat and what I oughtn't will be easier than having an ambiguous category of "things I shouldn't eat, but are permitted under my current regimen." It's been six days; this change has been going well for me; I feel better overall, for certain.

Also, someone just came by the church and gave me cucumbers and summer squash from  their CSA delivery. Yay!

 

 

It is customary to pray for sound health and good understanding. Ilya says to be more specific is unwise - it's a mistake to believe we know what we require. We are guided in directions we don't know how to imagine. God is generous in not making us appear foolish every time.  -- Lisa Olstein, "Lost alphabet" 

--

happy birthday, Itai! I've been terrible about seeing you this summer. Perhaps Saturday @ St. Stephen's? 

--

me, from a few months ago:

Another in a series one might label "ladies on hedda's list" is the redhead in Alcazar. Check out this video (I've posted it before, but it's one of the best songs ever, and a fab video. And she's gorgeous):





A couple of days ago I saw a man pushing a cart down the street with three 25-pound bags of sugar in it. I had to ask, so I did: what do you need so much sugar for? Makin' sugar cookies, he said. How many? Seven thousand. What do you need seven thousand sugar cookies for? "I'm makin' them for a twelve-year-old's birthday party," he told me. I tried to think of some way I could ask what sort of preteen party needed 7000 cookies, but he started shouting for someone in the house we were passing to come out and help him get the sugar up the steps, and I walked on.

An interesting thing: I signed up last week to volunteer for TBA, an arts festival that happens in the late late summer every year in Portland. I've volunteered for them before, so I went to the open volunteer meeting, went home and emailed the guy who I wanted to work with (for), set up a schedule, went in and did my first shift, sat around and bullshitted with him for a few hours. It wasn't until the other day (when I was looking at my new moleskin day planner) that I even noticed that any of it actually happened - I'm not sure how much sense that makes, and I can't recall ever doing something over a stretch of days, and it not registering in my conscious mind at all, making no impression on me whatsoever. I guess it was 'automatic' in a way.

Last night, acupuncture and then therapy back-to-back, something I've never done before. I came out of acupuncture feeling high and giddy, so meeting up with my therapist was interesting. We didn't cover ground we'd planned to, but it was a good talk nonetheless, even if I was kinda spaced out.

Holy crap, I actually agree with Camille Paglia. Some of what she has to say:

I just don't get it. Why the insane rush to pass a bill, any bill, in three weeks? And why such an abject failure by the Obama administration to present the issues to the public in a rational, detailed, informational way? The U.S. is gigantic; many of our states are bigger than whole European nations.

Both major parties have become a rats' nest of hypocrisy and incompetence. That, combined with our stratospheric, near-criminal indebtedness to China (which could destroy the dollar overnight), should raise signal flags. Are we like late Rome, infatuated with past glories, ruled by a complacent, greedy elite, and hopelessly powerless to respond to changing conditions?

And what do Democrats stand for, if they are so ready to defame concerned citizens as the "mob" -- a word betraying a Marie Antoinette delusion of superiority to ordinary mortals. I thought my party was populist, attentive to the needs and wishes of those outside the power structure. And as a product of the 1960s, I thought the Democratic party was passionately committed to freedom of thought and speech.

What was needed for reform was an in-depth analysis, buttressed by documentary evidence, of waste, fraud and profiteering in the healthcare, pharmaceutical and insurance industries. Instead what we've gotten is a series of facile, vulgar innuendos about how doctors conduct their practice, as if their primary motive is money. Quite frankly, the president gives little sense of direct knowledge of medical protocols; it's as if his views are a tissue of hearsay and scattershot worst-case scenarios.

I don't see anything in the way that Obamacare is being pursued that makes me feel like ordinarily folks are being considered, consulted, or spoken-to. It's a shame to say so, but unless something changes soon in the way that the Demo party addresses this incredibly complex subject, I'm going to start hoping that 'reform' fails this time around and we get another shot at making adjustments to health care systems more slowly and with much more attention to how people can be made to feel like it's being done with and for them, instead of to them.

first in a, um, occasional series of women I'd get with:


Polly Jean is omg so hot in that video. Rawrrr.

Meanwhile:

General Motors said Tuesday that its Chevrolet Volt extended-range electric vehicle, scheduled for release in 2011, will achieve a fuel rating of 230 miles a gallon in city driving.

The rating is based on methodology drafted by the Environmental Protection Agency, and most other automakers have not revealed the mileage for the electric cars. Nissan, however, announced last week that its all-electric vehicle, the Leaf, which comes out in late 2010, would get 367 m.p.g., using the same E.P.A. standards.

Wll they be called Leafs or Leaves? Anyway, let's hope these Volts and Leafs aren't super-electric-silent, so that pedestrians and bicyclists can hear them.



 

Speaking of race in America, I swear to the gods that I love Frank Rich. Is there anyone who pays as close attention to what people are saying as he does, and as capable of drawing it together to tell a story about what's really being said?

And Phyllis Hyman's best song:




She killed herself in 1995, after struggling with depression for a long time.

And, finally, the Onion's take on Gates' arrest:

WASHINGTON—Upon arriving late to his meeting with President Barack Obama and famed African-American intellectual Henry Louis Gates, Cambridge police officer James Crowley once again detained the distinguished Harvard scholar after failing to recognize the man he had arrested just two weeks earlier, White House sources reported Thursday. "When I entered the Oval Office, I observed an unidentified black male sitting near Mr. Obama, and in the interest of the president's safety, I attempted to ascertain the individual's business at the White House," Crowley said in a sworn statement following the arrest. “The suspect then became uncooperative and verbally abusive. I had no choice but to apprehend him at the scene for disorderly conduct.” Witnesses said that Sgt. Crowley, failing to recognize Gates on their flight to Logan Airport, arrested the tenured professor in midair, once again at the baggage claim, and twice during their shared cab ride back to Cambridge.

One of my favorite days of the year is the day I get to break out a new day planner, all shiny and new. After twelve years of Quo Vadis day planners, I switched to a Moleskin, which began yesterday (well, it began July 1st, but my Quo Vadis didn't run out until July 31). I used to be in love with Quo Vadis, but they switched to soft covers and they've gotten worse and worse over the years. Regretfully, I had to make a change.  I noticed that day planners in general are smaller this year: I suppose this has something to do with electronic scheduling devices and the like. People need less space to write things down by hand, and visually, a smaller, palmsized planner is "competitive" with an electronic device. I guess. Personally, I'm not attracted to iphones and the like, particularly, so I use a combination of emails to myself and a day planner to keep track of my life. Such as it is.


Also, I applied flea medicine to kitty's neck a bit ago, and he is furious with me.

a poem, Niagara Falls by David R. Slavitt:

Niagara Falls
delights, astonishes, appalls,
and then is boring. Still, people come, as if
there were something to be learned from watching vast quantities of water pour
over a cliff.



a video, Harry Belafonte & Nat King Cole:




an article on Michelle Obama, Condi Rice, and the " media establishment":  The Two Faces of Condi and Michelle.

What do you think of the author's take? It seems to me that Mrs. Obama not
part of the government' - her relationship to politics is matrimonial and thereby personal, and probably more or less off-limits to editorialists.

I spent the day at the cinema today! I saw Humpday, which had its moments, but was boring? disappointing? too much like real life? the main character was too selfish and kept interrupting any interesting conversations by being not being able to find his cluephone, no matter how loudly it rang. The guy he was going to have sex with, mr. pseudosmarm, was pretty interesting to watch. He might even be heroic, in his own way, for recognizing himself in the course of the film.

Then I saw Moon! This movie was exactly... like a movie. You'd like it, if you like movies. The reviews I read refused to describe the film because "you wouldn't understand anyway, so go see it," but I'm not going to tell you about the plot because I just wasn't into it. The film hinted at really wild things, but didn't ever go there, and it had a dull, dull, dull, dull, dull ending. Sam Rockwell has a great ass, though, and it was featured throughout, so that was kinda worth it. Also, the movie made no sense in its peripherals, which distracted me, and it look'd like it was done on the cheap.

All the while I was eating a sausage/egg/hash brown casserole from Elephant's, and it was really good. Also, cranberries.

Then I watched The Hurt Locker, an Iraq movie. Really, really excellent. I could've done without the ending, and one character is blown to bits and it is completely predictable (except to him, I guess), but otherwise it was smart, fairly nonpolitical, tense, and the actors were pretty. Watching these guys fuck would've been much more fun than watching the Humpday dudes get it on, but I guess that's totally shallow to say.

There was a trailer for 2012, and I love disaster movies, so sign me up.

Then I walked home! and ate some sugar wafers on the way.