Monday, November 24, 2003

Thanksgiving II: The Sequel

I hopped out of the car at the Oakland Airport and breezed through security. This meant I got to spend a lot of time waiting in the airport. About 45 minutes before my flight was due to leave, I decided to move to next gate down where there was considerably less congestion. As I sat I noticed a cop and a dog pass by. A few minutes later as I went back to my gate, I noticed lots of cops and a couple of members of the flight crew from the plane that I was about to board. One of the flight attendants was handing a cop a napkin and pointing to it. In my mind, I imagined that someone had written a threatening note (a bomb?) on the napkin on the plane that had just arrived and on which I would be flying out of Oakland. I wondered how well-trained the dog and the cops were. I wanted to ask what was going on, but I decided that I'd rather not know. The flight left a few minutes late. We arrived in Dallas just about on time. Then I headed out from there and arrived in Jacksonville without any delays or significant problems. I sat next to beautiful, friendly women about my age on both legs of the flight. They each wore enormous wedding rings.

posted by Drew @ 12:37 PM | link to this post

Thursday, November 20, 2003

Thanksgiving Adventure

Last year, I had quite a little adventure getting to Florida to visit my family for Thanksgiving. I'm hoping the trek, which begins Saturday, will be uneventful. I'm looking forward to seeing family and friends and watching the sun rise out of the Atlantic and playing with dogs.

posted by Drew @ 5:53 AM | link to this post

Quote of the Moment

Liberal Media

And even at the height of the Republican outrage over liberal bias, the nation's newspapers endorsed Richard Nixon over George McGovern by a ratio of 753 to fifty-six.
--- Chris Lehmann from The Eyes of Spiro Are Upon You: The Myth of the Liberal Media

posted by Drew @ 5:48 AM | link to this post

Monday, November 17, 2003

Why Killing is Bad

I've been reading the series in the Toledo Blade about US war crimes committed in Vietnam by none other than the illustrious 101st Airborne. My attention was called to the story by an AlterNet story about the non-coverage of the story by the major news networks. I have no doubt that being killed or losing a loved on is a horrendous thing. I believe that what we create in ourselves as a society when we embrace the notion that we can solve the world's problems through killing. I'm sure that by-and-large the men who did these things were decent young men before we sent them off to kill for us. I wonder what harm is coming to the hearts and minds of our young soldiers in Iraq.

Quotes of the Moment

"The killing haunts me every minute of my life. To survive, you had to say, `The killing don't mean nothing.' That's how you got through it, man. But eventually, it all catches up with you."
--- Douglas Teeters

"The things you did. You think back and say, `I can't believe I did that.' At the time, it seemed right. But now, you know what you did was wrong. The killing gets to you. The nightmares get to you. You just can't escape it. You can't escape the past."
--- Ernest Moreland

posted by Drew @ 5:20 PM | link to this post

Tuesday, November 11, 2003

2 Cats, A Little Sunshine and a Ruby or Two

I'm grinning this morning.

posted by Drew @ 6:17 AM | link to this post

Odd Coincidences

As I waited in line at Cody's to pay for my new Baffler acquisition I noticed a large coffee table book celebrating 50 years, or something like that, of airbrushed naked or nearly naked women. I laughed, in a very Beavis and Butthead kind of way, as I thought they had missed by not giving their coffee table book the name my acquisition boasted in BIG, GAUDY LETTERS on the cover. As I write this, I'm listening to Shakira and noticing that she's singing about a part of her anatomy being "small and humble, so you don't confuse them with mountains" and seeing my previous Blogger post in the lower window of the split screen interface.

posted by Drew @ 6:10 AM | link to this post

Friday, November 07, 2003

A Woman's Right to Choose?

posted by Drew @ 8:59 PM | link to this post

Wednesday, November 05, 2003

Meetin' Drew

I went to a community meeting this evening at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Long's Drugs is opening a new store in downtown Berkeley and this meeting was to have a conversation with folks in the community who are concerned about Long's desire to sell beer and wine and various other concerns about their impact on the downtown community. It was an interesting meeting. I appreciated the role of the Berkeley Neighborhood Services representative and the Berkeley Dispute Resolution Services and the representative from the Downtown Berkeley Association. I was concerned about the potential impact of having another store providing alcohol to folks downtown and about the potential adverse impact on locally-owned businesses of another big chain store moving into the area. The folks from Long's were nice and thoughtful, if not always well-prepared for the breadth of questions that arose.

posted by Drew @ 10:56 PM | link to this post

Quote of the Moment

Much awareness and understanding has been raised over the last 40 years, however the gap between the twenty richest and poorest percentiles has doubled. The amount of raw nature needed to provide the one billion wealthiest people with an average of $25,500 worth of income could not be found within those countries' borders; in fact, it requires the entire Earth's annual yield. For the high-consumption twenty percent to take 254 times what the lowest-consumption billion gets no nation, no culture, no species is off limits. The World Trade Organization (WTO) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) - elite, undemocratic groups - have designed "legal" mechanisms to break down borders to ease raw material flows toward the industrialized world. The track record speaks for itself - a further concentration of wealth at the top.

In 1998, half of the 1.2 billion people who lived on less than $100 per year have stunted growth or mental retardation from insufficient caloric intake. The poorest 3.6 billion - 60 percent of humanity - live on less than $520 per year. A third of the world's children suffer from malnutrition. A Salvadoran peasant was quoted as saying, "You will never understand violence and nonviolence until you understand the violence to the spirit that happens from watching your children die of malnutrition."

--- Jim Merkel from Radical Simplicity

posted by Drew @ 6:04 AM | link to this post

Monday, November 03, 2003

Iranian Dreams?

This morning I dreamt that I was told to go back to Gainesville and check the mail at my old house. I went. When I got there I found mail in the mailbox addressed to me mixed in with the mail for the current occupants of the house. They weren't home, so I sorted through it and removed a couple of pieces of mail. One was in an air mail envelope from Iran and had been opened. I looked in and saw two pieces of paper. I pulled out the first one. It was handwritten and had been written by someone introducing himself to me as an "immigrant" lawyer. As I read I was interrupted by a former member of the Berkeley Housing Advisory Commission. He was challenging me for going through the mail. (I'm not sure what he was doing in Gainesville.) Things deteriorated from there and I never got back to reading the note from the attorney or the other piece of paper in the envelope, which I presumed to be from my friend Mohammad and his family. I haven't heard anything from him since 1994. The last I knew he was teaching English in Tehran. He went back to Iran shortly after the US Embassy takeover. Several of his brothers were killed during the war with Iraq. I thought of his brothers when I heard about the gassing of the Kurds in Northern Iran. I still remember the images of bodies strewn on the ground, in ditches. Mohammad and his family were on my mind much of the day today.

posted by Drew @ 4:28 PM | link to this post