Body Parts

I Am Outside Celebrity Culture, So Explain To Me:

Lady Gaga wore meat draped over herself as clothing. To say ironically I'm not just a piece of meat??

The Kardashions. I don't get it. Why do these women receive attention?

The appeal of vampires to 14 year old girls.

Lindsay Lohan tweets she failed her drug test, not that she continues to use, as if she's some sociologist studying herself.

You get the idea. What are such celebrity antics about and why do such celebrities receive so much attention?

 

 

Full Moon

Using a moon phase calculator, I have determined that I was born under a full moon. Knowing me, who would agree?

Did Odysseus Discover California? Coulda happin'd, Man, Coulda.

Discovery of a 3000 year old tomb on a Greek island "could revive scholarly debate on the location of Odysseus' Ithaca mentioned in Homer's poems — which are believed to be loosely based on Mycenaean-era events. While the nearby island of Ithaki is generally identified as the hero's kingdom, other theories have proposed Lefkada or neighboring Kefallonia."

The Impossibility of Honesty

An honest man will have no friends.

Bill Clinton Pimps for Iranian Terrorists

Thanks to "Regime Change Iran," for pointing to the report of a speech by former President Clinton at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem last week. He cautioned Israel not to be alarmed by newly elected Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's recent promise that Israel would be "wiped off the map." Ahmadinjad was outrageous, but he wasn't elected to destroy Israel, only to improve Iran's economy. Hmmm, I guess Clinton does inhale afterall, for he is hallucinating about Iran. Let's see, a fundamentalist Muslim state that supports terrorists who killed American marines in Lebanon,  who took Americans hostage and held them for months, who supports terrorists who attack Israel from Lebanon and from the Palestinians, who have obtained long range rockets capable of hitting Israel, who are altering the warheads of those rockets to carry nuclear weapons, who are accused of secretly developing nuclear weapons, whose highest officials have on several previous state occasions promised to destroy Israel, which promise Ahmadinejad only repeats, and whose clergy spew anti-Semitism and call for the destruction of Israel on a daily basis.  These are acts of war, not threats. Is Clinton going to walk the path of moonbat ex-president Jimmy Carter? Is this humping of Muslim opinion part of Clinton's no-secret campaign to be Secretary General of the UN? Is this preparation for Hilliary's 2008 run for the presidency? God help Israel. God help us all.

Random Stress Points

The clouds and rain of two days yield to the West to the sun. Cool winds sweep the sky. A radio news announcer and guest on KPCC analyze the increase in commuting time in our Inland Empire and the fastest growing county in the nation. Empire sheriffs, called to a rural home by an interrupted 9-1-1 call at 4:30 AM, report six persons dead, their bodies distributed throughout the house with gashes in their heads. At the head of a line of cars at an intersection near my home in Sprawling Suburb, I wait for one of our city's lost people, a homeless Black woman, to cross the street. The walk signal chirps incessantly. She pushes her supermarket cart with her belongings piled high. Her small, scruffy terrier runs near her feet, trying to escape a Rottweiler attacking it. The Rottweiler is without collar or tags. The woman curses and lectures the Rottweiler to no avail. I decide to call my wife to tell her of the murders. Whom do we not know?

Re-Re-piping

Re-piping continues. It is now becoming a saga. Re-piping was done on Monday. Tuesday, it failed city inspection. The inspector required three corrections. The contractor made the corrections on Wednesday. Today the inspector returned to inspect the corrections. He accepted two corrections, rejected the third and most complicated one. The contractor will return today to correct the corrections. Soon we will need a computerized work schedule program to chart the flow of job, change orders, inspections, corrections, re-inspections, re-corrections, re-re-inspections. The inspector returns tomorrow. I had a bender of a snit on Tuesday. Today, my sense of  humor returned and I laughed. Meanwhile, plaster dust piles up.

I must remind myself of the possibility of everyone to screw up the simplest task, which is why inspections are necessary. For almost two decades we lived in  a planned unit condominum development. The contractor, in building the twenty units along one street, neglected to connect the dwelling sewer drains to the  street main sewer. The city inspector failed to notice. As a result, for a decade, twenty houses pumped their sewage into the ground beneath the street, where the rotting fecal material accumulated. Eventually, the ground beneath the street became so saturated that the street collapsed. The oversights were revealed. "Oh, that's why things smelled around here." The reason why the trees along the street grew so rapidly and lushly was also revealed.

On the other hand, bureaucracies can grind down to stop any forward motion. I recall a wonderful article in the New Yorker by the former head of the New York City subway system. He was hired as a consultant by the London subway system, which was expanding (the Jubilee line, I think). He gave up after several years of frustration. He compared the British state bureaucracies to the former East German bureaucracies. "They have all the efficiencies of the East German state housing authority, without its sense of humor." (Note. See Hitchhiker's Guide. Film. Satire.)

Revised. Re-revised.

Material Paradox

When we measure standard of living, material conditions and possessions comprise the bulk of what we mean by quality of  life. This definition has allowed us to perceive that American quality of life has increased dramatically over the past generation. Dwellings have doubled in size, more automobiles are owned, length of schooling has increased, people live longer - these are familiar statistics. At the same time, this wealth has been obtained by a long observed, much documented, major transformation of the American family and the impoverishment of social community.  Women in the workforce, increase  in out-of-wedlock births, and decline in the traditional marriage have been accompanied by the evisceration of social voluntarism conducted by women. The social slack has been taken up by increased governmental programs that bypass the family, thereby reinforcing the social phenomenon whose problems they seek to remedy. The proposal to extend California's governmental supervision to children  as young as four years of age continues the liberal program that builds government to replace private social  community and family. It is not enough for conservatives to oppose such measures. Conservatives need to re-conceptualize and redefine quality of life in such a way as to illuminate the underlying social disintegration. We must start by rethinking the concept of the standard of living. Social, as well as material, dimensions must be taken into consideration. We need to think how fewer material possessions could lead to increased quality of life, without arriving at fewer possessions by confiscatory tax policies that raise the material quality of life of some at the expense of others.

In Transition

I woke this morning dreaming of Scarlett Johannson, the movie actress. Freud would appreciate the many puns this dream carried. In Freudian theory, the manifest content of dreams is sometimes called "screening content," meaning that the content you see in the dream is intended to screen, as in hide and obscure, hidden content that you are not allowed to know about. The pun is to movie screen. The dream involved driving around Northern California in a car. In physics, the measured movement of a mass from one position  to another is called "translation". Here the movement of the car puns the title of her breakthrough movie, "Lost in Translation". In the movie, the motion of  the main character, played by Bill Murray, is his movement between youth and middle age. The Murray character is, in the movie, too old for genuine romance with the Johannson character. I am obviously the Murray character.

There is a secondary "translation" in the movie involving the Johannson character. She is in the early stages of pregnancy. Her pregnancy is apparently unexpected. Judging from her husband's behavior and interest in another woman, an actress whom he knew in school, he has not been told about  the pregnancy yet. The Johannson woman did not necessarily want the pregnancy at this time of her life, since she has not thought out who she wants to be (the implied subject of conversations with the Murray character). The baby will define her future for her. She too is lost in translation/transition. The pregnancy might be referenced in my dream. The car, in which I and the Johannson character are travelling in my dream,  is a carriage (as in, originally, a horseless carriage). The pun here is to carrrying, as in, she is carrying a child. Since I am in the car, the hidden content of this theme might be that the Johannson character refers to my mother. (Isn't Freudian analysis fun? Want more? | See end of article. | )

The hidden content of my dream must be, I am lost in my life transition between middle age and old age. I am moving from one position that I know about to another position which I don't know much about, which means I am lost. As a subsidiary hidden content, I might want my mother to tell me where I am going. Since my mother died long ago in her early old age, she would tell me, if she could, where I am headed. I also don't know what the location of my old age position will be, so the pun is that I don't know how I will end. I know these facts of my life independently of dream analysis, so, if this is the dream's hidden content, it's not well hidden. Still, I must say, Dr. Freud, dreaming of Scarlett Johannson was pleasant.

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| More. | "Horseless" carriage is a good psychoanalytic pun, in the sense that the reader needs personal knowledge of the author to decifer it. The author's wife owns a horse. She has long devoted herself to horses as an avocation. That the author in the dream rides in a horseless carriage implies he is away from his wife-with-horses. He is on an escapade with Scarlett without guilt (his wife representing his conscience), because his wife is not along and he is not connected, in the dream, with his wife. If all this strikes you, the reader, as nonsense, then you see why scientists refuse to take literary criticism (the dream is a piece of composed fiction) seriously. There are no objective tests. The analyst can make of it whatever the analyst wishes.

Salk Vaccine

The Salk vaccine removed a horrorifying fear that hung over my childhood innocence. Though I knew no one who had polio and no case of polio, as far as I knew, ever struck my little, rural New England village, I was nonetheless fired to a fever of fear by Life magazine photos of children in iron lungs and by my mother's admonitions. She should have  known better; she completed all but a few months of training to be an RN. In the brief, sunny summers, many boys, and me as well, loved to swim in the several rivers that flowed along side the village. In one swimming hole, below a covered bridge, we could swing from a rope hanging from the truss work into the water. Only the braver boys - I was not one, being terrified of heights - dove off the bridge itself. My favorite swimming hole was at a bend in the river, a ways up from the bridge, where blue clay was exposed in the river's natural banks. Whenever we swam there, we returned home dyed blue. The rivers were polluted in these years before the environmental laws required cleaning them. One river received sewage,  though, fortunately, little of it from the sparse settlement above the swimming holes. The other river took the full swill from paper plants and stank most of the time. The perils of pollution gravely concerned my mother, who had much time to worry about such matters, as a stay-at-home mom raising me and my younger sister. She lectured me on the dangers of swimming in the river; but for some reason did not forbide from swimming in it. As I biked down the village streets toward the river, my mother would stand at the front door of our home and cry out, be careful you don't catch polio!