goats, anyone?

I was looking up cities, whimsically, on Wikipedia, and found this fun fact about Modesto:

Modesto's official slogan is "Water Wealth Contentment Health," which is emblazoned on a large arch uptown that has been immortalized in many photographs. A contest was run in 1911 to determine the slogan. The original winning slogan was: "Nobody's got Modesto's goat". The second place entry was the final winner.

That would about sum it up, except that the article also notes the Modesto is basically a crime-ridden commuter town. That, I think, does sum it up.

decompressing

Today is the birthday of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the German philosopher best known for a system of dialectic (in which a thesis encounters its antithesis and the two transform progressively into a new synthesis according to a universal and absolute law) that he never espoused or even discussed. This is typical of Hegel's reception among most people, many of whom never bother to read him. And those who do don't get him. Vocally.

For quite a while, I was very heavily into Hegel. Reading him is like reading an extremely complicated mystery novel, full of suspense and dramatic tension, surprise plot twists, stunning conclusions. He has the reputation of being boring, overly abstract, hopelessly arcane, blinkered in his assumption of the ascendancy of this thing called the Absolute no one can quite identify, and in all, useless. I've always thought this was because no one realized how simple the story he's telling really is - or no, not simple, down-to-earth. Then again, anything I say or write about philosophers should be regarded as suspect, because my interpretations are usually outside the mainstream (especially with Hegel, now that I think of it).

Anyway, here's to old Stinky Buckets Hegel on his 236th birrthday! Coffee all around!

In other news, whew. The new place is more or less in place, and we're doing finishing touches: Lauren has sewn curtains for the Music Room and is working on pillows for the Nook in the bedroom; two guitars are hanging next to the Picasso "Violin and Guitar" poster in the Music Room. This is the first weekend we've had to relax and do very very little since moving, and I'm finding it difficult. I'm frustrated by the lack of normal rhythm. The Music Room faces west, so by the time I've become used to playing, around 4 or 5 pm, it's too warm. It's also a strangely shaped room that doesn't ventilate well. It's just gonna take some time to work out how to use the space. I've also got the Canker Sore From Hell right where my gum meets my lip.

It's Sunday. We've got watermelon. Tonight we're making a pizza. With any luck, I'll find a bridge to the song I'm working on.

hopeful pessimism

In "The Myth of Sisyphus," Albert Camus argues that living in hope is what makes life not worth living - that is, hope leads to suicide. His reasoning goes something like this: if you hope for something, and this hope is the central meaning of your life, then you're not living to live, and the worth of life is subordinate to something unreal, something that doesn't literally exist. Only life without hope is lived for the sake of life.

I used to buy this, or at least, used to believe I bought it. But the other morning I woke up thinking Camus had a view of hope I couldn't accept, or that needed more nuance.

I am a hopeful person. This is not to say I'm an optimistic person, because I'm not. Hope, I think, isn't an expectation that everything will turn out right, nor is it the perception of the good or bright side of everything. Hope is active and transformative, leads to a commitment to change something, or to be part of a group committed to try to change something. For instance, my hopes for the future of the CSU drive me to be a faculty union activist. I don't see much reason to be optimistic about the future of the CSU, or of faculty, but I have hope that working with these people will be worth it, no matter what happens in the long run (in fact, I suspect the long run will be awful).

That same morning, I woke up from a very strange dream. I was participating in a direct action campaign (a protest, but also a meeting with the campus president) at CSU-East Bay. Mark Karplus, the CFA lecturer rep at e-Bay, and Steve Wilson, the rep from Sonoma State, were there as well. Eventually we ended up suspended on a clock tower on the campus (I don't think e-Bay even has a clock tower). As the police and CSU officials started to climb up to drag us down, Steve and I saw a kitten on the top of the tower, and we grabbed it, to turn the whole event into a weird melodramatic spectacle and photo op. Lecturers save kittens!

I think that would be a great slogan. We could make t-shirts with a two-panel cartoon. The first panel would depict CSU chancellor Charles B. Reed with a bag of kittens, right on the shore in Long Beach, about to drown the poor dears. The second would show CFA activists seizing Reed's arm and wresting the kittens from it, presumably to bring to a vet for shots, eventually to be spayed or neutered and brought into loving homes. (Perhaps a third panel, on the other side of the shirt, could show this.)

one down, one to go

We got back from Vancouver about 12:30 this morning, after a long afternoon of air travel, most of which was, as usual, spent not actually flying. This was uneventful, except of course that six or seven planes exploded when several individuals, defying not only Homeland Security but also common sense, had the temerity to brush their teeth on the plane. After clearing security on the Canadian side (which is roughly 138% easier and less melodramatic than in US airports, especially SFO, of which more, perhaps, if you're good, later), we found food from a so-called "Asian cuisine" joint, where they pitched our food into styrofoam, poured us a cup of water - which, in compliance with new safety regulations, had no lid - and then handed Lauren a potentially lethal weapon: chop sticks.

Much will be written about the inanity of the new "safety" regulations. Lauren thinks the next thing to be forbidden will be teeth, since she was able to cut a strip off a band-aid to affix a breaking bit of fingernail to the remaining part. I believe the next thing will be identification.

*-*

TSA drone #1: Sir, is that your photo ID?

Passenger: Yes.

TSA drone #1: No ID, sir.

Passenger: What? Don't we need photo ID to get past security?

TSA drone#2: (shouting so that his voice echoes unintelligibly in the tinny security area) No PASSports, no DRIver's licenses, no photo ID!

Passenger: (to TSA drone #1, who has ignored the previous) Excuse me? Sir?

TSA drone #1: Yes?

Passenger: I have to throw away my ID?

TSA drone #1: Is it a photo ID?

Passenger: Yes.

TSA drone #1: (with increasing condescension) An ID, with a photo on it?

Passenger: Yes.

TSA drone #2: No DRIver's licenses, no PASSports. No one gets on the PLANE with photo ID!

TSA drone #1: Is it a photo of you?

Passenger: Yes, it's a photo ID card, so the picture is of me.

TSA drone #1: Does that sound like it would be a kind of photo ID to you?

Passenger: Yes, but my question is, do I have to throw it away?

TSA drone#1: Is it a photo ID?

Passenger: Look, what I mean is, if I need photo ID to get through security, but I have to throw my ID away, how do I get through security? And what if I need my ID again? Like, to drive?

TSA drone #1: Can't have it at the gate or on the plane.

Passenger: Yes, you said that, but my question -

TSA drone #2: (still shouting, but right at Passenger) No PHOto ID, no PASSports, no DRIver's licenses!

Passenger: Oh, forget it. (Tosses ID into trash.)

TSA drone #3: Can I see your ID and boarding pass, please?

Passenger: They told me to get rid of my ID, I just threw it away!

TSA drone #3: I'm sorry, sir, you can't pass to the gate without ID.

*-*

The other scenario would be that no boarding passes are permitted.

*-*

TSA drone #1: Boarding pass.

Passenger: Yep, here.

TSA drone #1: You're under arrest.

*-*

By the way, SFO sucks. New security, old security, no security, SFO sucks. No one there seems to understand why planes keep landing there and people keep showing up to get on planes there.

More on the Vancouver trip and the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labour (tee-hee! Funny Canadian spelling!) later. I'm brain dead, and I have to get my teeth cleaned, and I hope trade back in this awful rented Malibu for the repaired Eddie Jetta. I'd also list my complaints and grievances about the Malibu, but they're too many to list.

o, Canada

Tomorrow at this time we'll be touching down in Vancouver.

I like Canada. The clichés about Canada and about Canadians are more or less accurate. Canada is cleaner than the US, and Canadians are friendlier. They're quite patriotic, probably more patriotic than most Americans, but not jingoistic the way so many Americans seem to be. There's something about Canadian cities that feels comfortable and just slightly not quite American, even though most things are culturally familiar. I decided this morning that it's a certain neatness to them, by which I don't mean cleanliness, but a sort of having-been-straightened quality.

I hope I like the COCAL conference. I'm pretty sure I will. We're going to be meeting Jonathan from San Jose at the airport and share a cab into town, so we've already got a sort of built-in Vancouver social life. That's so like Canada, isn't it? Setting things up for us like that?

Anyway, we'll be back soon. Don't worry; Christina is looking in on Lancelot. If you're very very good, we might bring you something as a souvenir.

a recommended way to spend a day in Modesto

As previously noted, we took Eddie Jetta up to the GEICO approved body shop in High Upper Freaking Northern Impassable Modesto, which is okay because it's the only shop in the area with GEICO's guarantee. They also work with the Enterprise rental joint around the corner, where we'd be renting a car to get us through the week without our ride. GEICO made us a reservation, Enterprise picked us up promptly, we got to their shop, and I knew when we walked in the door that we were in trouble.

How many rental car places have you been where there's a row of 20 chairs along the window? In how many of them were the chairs half-full or more? At 10:30 am?

You see, we had a reservation, but Enterprise didn't have any cars. There were about 8 people ahead of us, who had been waiting long enough that they had stopped complaining, and had begun to settle down and grow moss. They were getting cars from their downtown Modesto shop, and from Manteca, which is 30 miles away. They were shuttling people out to these places. After about 45 minutes' wait, we were approached by a poker-faced rental agent and office sub-manager named Rich, who offered us a cargo van for the time being, you know the type - the unmarked white windowless vans favored by child abductors.

So here's what you should do to while away a day in Modesto: set up an easy car rental reservation, and instead wind up with a pedophiliomobile to drive around on your errands, making jokes about who in the store would be a good option ("Hey, that mom isn't paying the slightest attention to her mewling brat, let's grab it!"). Then, having done all the errand-running Modesto can really accommodate (this is roughly three hours' worth, if you stretch it), run the sucker down the Crankster Freeway to Turlock, trade it in for a proper car down there, abandoning the van. Only 6 hours later, we're home from picking up a rental car. Voila! Day gone!

perhaps not the best approach to these matters

I ordered a poster of Picasso's Guitar and Violin to hang in the Music Room (yeah, we've got a Music Room - though it's also the sewing room). It was shipped via some strange arrangement called DHL Smart Mail, whereby DHL ships the package, delivers it to the post office, and the post office delivers it to your address. I was concerned, first, because this seems like a cockameme arrangement, secondly, because not only does DHL suck (of which more below), but our local post office has proven to be pretty bad as well. (Some of that depends on carriers; we used to joke about the carrier at Speedbumpville, who took about four hours to fill the boxes for the complex, that it took him so long not because he was slow, but because of the increasingly long martini breaks. But it seems like Turlock just isn't put together right, postally that is.)

But the main reason I was concerned is that although the company I bought the poster from had the right address, complete with apartment number, the DHL shipping address listed on their pop-up search window didn't have an apartment number. Plus, as regular readers of this feature will recall, DHL was who botched my order of grassfed meat in June, delivering it to the wrong apartment, claiming someone signed for it, when in fact the apartment was vacant, and after one weird evasion after another, eventually claiming they could retrieve the meat a week later and return it to the sender. So I sent a note to the poster people. I tried to be subtle, which is dicey because some folks won't take the bait.



I'm concerned about my order getting to me. DHL (who
are terrible, absolutely the worst shippers in the
world) does not list my apartment number in the
address. Can you verify that the address label on the
shipment of my poster included the apartment address?
(I know that sometimes people have scanned and saved
copies of shipping labels that they keep as records,
since shippers like DHL are always losing packages.
Did I mention that DHL sucks? DHL sucks.) When I check
order status on your page, it does show the apartment
number, but DHL's pop-up window doesn't include it.
I've had a lot of trouble with shipments not arriving
from DHL, because, as I believe I've mentioned, they
suck.

They responded this morning. They didn't take the bait.

Anyway, this morning we're off to take Eddie Jetta to have $1400 of damage repaired from someone keying him. The shop will have the car for a week, and we'll be in a rental, or else in Vancouver.

pizza with crazy gorgonzola sauce

We rarely order pizza. When we do, it's almost always the veggie pizza with white sauce from Round Table (this is not a paid endorsement). That got me thinking, once, that I could make a white sauce. I make a mean béchamel as it is, and, I thought, I could augment said béchamel with cheese. Gorgonzola came to mind, I don't remember why. But the result is just about perfect. I've made this concoction tonight, because Raechel is coming up from Arizona to gather her things from storage, and is staying with us. So we're making her a pizza with this high-test sauce.

The sauce is easy. Melt two tablespoons of butter (has to be butter) in a saucepan. Add two tablespoons of flour, and whisk this together over low heat, whisking now and again to avoid it burning to the bottom of the pan. This is a roux. Cook the roux until it smells a little nutty rather than like raw flour. Then add a cup or so of milk, preferably warmed, but I tend to use it straight out of the fridge. Whisk this until smooth, and simmer as the sauce thickens. Add white pepper, a little salt, a little garlic powder, and the key ingredient to the whole thing, nutmeg. I grate about one-eighth of a whole nutmeg into the sauce. You may like less, or you may like more. Then crumble about a quarter-pound of gorgonzola into the sauce, and let the sucker thicken. You need it plenty thick for pizza, as you'd probably guess. Then add whatever you'd add to pizza. Ours is usually sliced tomatoes, black olives, green onions, mushrooms, and artichoke hearts. You might want broccoli and red onion. Or you might want ground beef and pickles. Or you might want diced duck liver, sprigs of fresh thistle, and strychnine, although I'd think you were a little weird if you did.

Off to pizzaland. And I promise, I'll post more songs to our soundclick page soon. We've been busy moving. Give us a damn break! Geez, you people! Can't you entertain yourselves for one lousy minute?!

4 flicks

Raechel sent Lauren some kind of survey, one of the questions of which asked you to list four movies you would watch over and over again. I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean, if anything. The wording seems key to this, because one may have a favorite flick, which nevertheless one would not watch over and over (for me, Dog Day Afternoon would be such a movie).

Perhaps this is a trial for a new MMPI item. Certain conclusions could be drawn from such lists. If the four films are The Bad Lieutenant, Pee Wee's Big Adventure, Mary Poppins, and The Exorcist, this is at least highly suggestive.

Anyway, for whatever it's worth, four movies I would watch over and over: Dr. Strangelove, Ocean's 11 (the contemporary version - sorry Frank), The Kids Are Alright, and The Maltese Falcon.

moved

Mostly, the move is over. All the stuff is out of the Apartment of Earthly Delights, and in the new, as-yet-unnamed place. As of this writing, the only contender for the name of the new place is The House About Town, which is of course an allusion to Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein. As a handle, that's not bad, but it's also not in keeping with the Harry Potter theme of the other place names already installed: the study is the Room of Requirement, the half-bath where Lancelot's catbox will be is called the Chamber of Secrets, and there's even a cupboard under the stairs, which is the Harry Potter Memorial Cupboard. Then there's the unnamed Music Room, and so forth. I took the usual pictures of the usual wreckage and general tumult of moving, but I don't see any reason to post them, because it you want pictures of the usual wreckage and general tumult of moving, you can find them elsewhere, I'm sure. All such pictures look more or less the same.

I've moved, let's see... (not counting dorms) 11 times. I kept recalling past moves while carrying boxes of books around, and also remembering the good times we all had in grad school helping each other move. This was the shortest and just about the easiest move, despite the facts that we hauled almost all our stuff in a Jetta, and the first two days it was well over 100 degrees by midafternoon.

That's not to say we're not exhausted. Cuz we are.

Today we surrender the keys to the old joint. A week from Thursday we're off to Canada.

this is no time to blog

We're moving tomorrow!

I woke at 3 am, because the phone rang, and couldn't get back to bed. I recently unearthed a receipt from June of 2004, from a trip to Target to buy basic stuff for this apartment. It's made me think a great deal about how I ended up moving here, and I had to write it all down, especially all that I didn't say at the time. I haven't decided to post it, obviously, or you'd be reading it instead of my unedifying account of what I wrote.

But as long as we're here:

We went to the mall yesterday, then to the Pirates of the Caribbean flick, basically in order to escape the oppressive heat. (It's only going to be 107 today, so that's not too bad comparatively.) The flick was okay; I didn't think it was nearly as fun as the first one, but not as dreadful as critics seem to think. It was what it was. However, I came away with the powerful reminder that movies suck. They're just terrible, all of them. Everything that Big Movies touches turns to dreck; it's all advertising for what sort of spectacular crapola the movies can generate. The mall was a mild success. I bought much-desired cotton handkerchiefs, at Penney's, which seems to be the only place in the region that sells handkerchiefs other than seasonally.

We're leaving in about two minutes to go sign the lease on the new digs. Huzzah!

book order

I just ordered a textbook for my fall Contemporary Moral Issues course. I feel a little guilty about it.

For one thing, using a textbook feels like a cop-out. The text is an anthology, with one section devoted to moral theories, and another dealing with different issues. It does include a decent number of different issues, but, like practically every introductory ethics textbook I've come across, it mainly repackages the same handful of standbys. For instance, the environmental ethics stuff always includes Garrett Hardin and the animal ethics stuff always includes Peter Singer - both authors whose positions are, as I understand the current debates, at least a little behind the times. I'll feel less than genuine using some of it, because I'll know when something is outdated or half-thoughtful.

Standarization of textbooks also implies that there is a determined set of things that should be thought about the issues at hand. To a very limited, in fact superficial degree, I suppose I accept the notion that a class covering contemporary moral issues does suggest a certain range of topics, and that within those topics there are certain ideas that one should probably consider. I mean, if we're going to talk about environmental ethical issues, one idea that seems like something you'd want to think about is whether we're using up the planet's resources. But when every anthology covers largely the same topics with largely the same articles, it conveys a false impression that these are the only ideas to consider on these topics. I was expressing this aloud the other day, after spending hours hunting for a book for another class, and Lauren said it suggests teaching philosophy is like teaching math.

Even that doesn't go far enough, because there can be different ways of teaching mathematical concepts. Standardization presents a false view of learning, and maybe a dangerous one. Learning isn't the absorption of pre-digested bits of information. Textbooks have broken things down too much. Textbooks are full of spit.

For another thing, although this is one of the cheaper textbooks I could find, it's still 75 bucks. That's disgusting to me. I don't relish putting my students' money into the publishing companies' bank accounts, because as I believe (and as I think almost everyone in academia tacitly recognizes), textbook publishers are greedheads. They churn out edition after edition, making minor or even merely cosmetic changes, increasing their prices, and in effect bilking students. I used a very good anthology from a Canadian company in previousl Contemp Moral Issues courses, one I liked, one that had some different stuff in it, but this year they've taken it off the market. The book was $60, and when I used it I apologized to the class for the price, only to be told it was, for most of them, the cheapest book they bought for the term. But now the company has divided that one book into three, which contain the same content, with one or two more essays in each volume, each volume costing about $30.

I guess the challenge will be to find ways to give my students more to digest, or somehow induce indigestion in them, something like that.

interesting indymedia news item

I started to read alternative news media like Indymedia because I'm an alternative-media, don't-be-caught-in-the-mainstream kinda guy. But I've developed a crush. The way this joint works is, just plain ordinary people write their own items and post them, complete with photos with captions. It looks like a regular news feed, but it's utterly grassroots, with all the good and ill that implies. Even when it's terrible, it's a hoot to read. People doing their own thing, journalistically speaking.

Anyway, this evening the RSS feed popped up news of Jewish protests of Israeli military actions.

hide the salami

I'm reading The Omnivore's Dilemma, a book about how we eat, by Michael Pollan. The first chunk of it details what I mainly already knew about American industrial production of corn and beef, which is a harrowing and disgusting tale. Basically, in order to deal with the overproduction of second-grade corn, a practice of agriculture virtually demanded by government policy and industry profiteering, every single commercially produced piece of beef you buy anywhere in the United States is the result of cows being trained to eat a diet that would, without massive ingestion of drugs, kill them. (I remember vividly, not to say viscerally, reading The Jungle. This isn't quite that sort of thing, but it's awful in an entirely more realistic way. It's journalism, after all.)

Some people would, I suppose, simply dismiss what Pollan says about the industry, but he's not making this up. In fact, his information comes from the industry. For instance, the FDA tells the beef industry that they can't use antibiotics on animals that aren't sick (just to increase growth, for instance). Beef in feedlots, however, are practically by definition sick, because eating corn will make their rumens acidic, and this will lead to infection. The reasons they're fed corn are that we grow an enormous surplus of corn every year in the United States, which makes corn the cheapest commmodity to feed steers, and we can control corn feeding on a factory model to increase "efficiency" of the production of meat - i.e., in order to increase growth. One of the most astounding ironies of it all is that the meat produced is less healthy and less nutritious.

By engaging in this charming practice, we also expose ourselves to the risk of E. coli infection (since the feedlot cattle literally live on enormous piles of feces, and are generally contaminated at slaughter), and the development of new strains of antibiotic-resistance bacteria. This is a simple evolutionary process: by constant use of antibiotics, we act in ways that select for resistant strains, since they're more likely to reproduce. And voila! Cheap beef makes us sicker, and will continue to make us sicker. But damn, it's profitable.

I especially dig a remark Pollan makes at the end of the section: "Eating industrial meat takes an almost heroic act of not knowing or, now, forgetting." This isn't literally true, of course: most of us have no idea how meat is produced, since meat, for almost all of us, simply comes from the grocery store or the butcher. You can't, you are simply prevented, from choosing the source of meat you buy commercially from these kinds of outlets. That choice is made by an industrial capitalist machine seeking to maximize profit, regardless of health, environmental, or other costs to third parties.

For myself, personally (and this is the limit of my argument: I'm not about to proselytize), this amounts to an overwhelmingly convincing argument that I would be much wiser to avoid industrial meat. In any case, this is a book people who eat should read.

one reason I don't write fiction

I'm a fairly imaginative and creative person, especially in classrooms, kitchens, and with a guitar in my hand. But I don't write fiction. For, no matter how imaginative and creative I may be, sometimes reality impresses upon me sillier things than I could concoct.

13 more days... and a couple news items

We're moving in under two weeks. It's a little stressful, but on the whole, a very good feeling. It became an especially good feeling yesterday.

After a walk a couple days ago, heading back to the Apartment of Earthly Delights, I noted that it's been good to live here. In general, it's well run, and we've enjoyed the heck out of our place. But the change will be good too. Then, yesterday, my sentimentality was struck down completely when we found the Jetta vandalized. It wasn't just ours, either: our neighbors, who park next to us, and who also have a Jetta (though older), also had their car vandalized - keyed, basically. (And "had their car vandalized" sure sounds weird, like they hired it done. But that's how we articulate that in English. "Hey, Earl, what the hell happened to yer face?" "Ahhh, I had my nose broken." "Really? Do you think it's a better look for you?")

This morning, we had an appointment to get an estimate on the damage: 1400 bucks. I'll pay the $100 deductible.

So the excitement over moving has escalated, since in the new place we'll have a garage for Eddie Jetta, which will make it harder for random passersby to damage it. Over lunch we were looking at the astoundingly inaccurate floorplan in the brochure, trying to remember what the townhouse really looks like, and figuring where to stick our stuff. We've already named the new study "The Room of Requirement," and the downstairs half-bath, where Lance's catbox will be, "The Chamber of Secrets." We do these things, you see, because we're silly people.

Meanwhile, our county is on fire. I noticed a strange haze on Tuesday morning, checked the weather on the Modesto Bee site, and found that the forecast was for "smoke." That seems more like a prediction of armageddon than a weather forecast - you know, "partly brimstone Thursday, with a 50% chance of hellfire by afternoon" - but it turned out to be accurate. On Wednesday the smoke was so thick that the sunlight was, at best, a dim melon-orange glow. Today it's clearer, but that's really only because the wind isn't blowing the smoke our way.

more music

We're trying to get together some good versions of our recent songs (some old songs with new lyrics, some new songs), and in the midst of this, I found Soundclick, where I posted a few of our things. It's a nifty site; people are posting their stuff, for good or ill, and so am I.

I want to be able to put together about 45 minutes of stuff before we move, in two weeks. I don't know why. It just seems like a good idea. In any event, there are things of ours on the site now. Lauren came up with a band name for us: Paper Cats. I like it.

And we've uploaded 6 songs so far. The latest include Uncle John's Blues, which isn't done yet, and Gilroy Was Here, which is fun as heck to play. Of course, we have some of Lauren singing, including our current chart topper, Late Afternoon Lullaby.

It's good fun. We haven't had feedback on our stuff yet, but the site is a blast to look through. So many people out there are playing their own music, itching to be heard, if that's the expression. Check it out.

So I suppose we're now Paper Cats!

it just doesn't sit well, somehow

I don't know much about art. But there's something, indeed several somethings, disturbing about this article about building a Guggenheim museum in Abu Dhabi (lifted from a New York Times article that you need to register to see here).

For one thing, the article emhasizes the economic and tourism boost a musuem will provide - not the art. (In the SF Chronic version, the art isn't mentioned; in the NYT piece, it gets 2 paragraphs.) The purpose seems to be to extend a sort of Guggenheim empire into the Middle East. Are they sure that if they build it, anyone will come?

Which brings up the second disturbing thing. Like I said, I don't know much about art. I had assumed, for instance, that art museums were primarily cultural institutions dedicated to preserving masterworks and presenting them in a context for aesthetic enjoyment, study, understanding, juxtaposition, and so forth. But what the Guggenheim folks seem intent upon is having "an outpost" in the Middle East. What is this, a foreign embassy for modern art?

But the most deeply disturbing thing took me a while to recognize, and in fact it wouldn't have become entirely clear without Lauren's help. The other non-New York Guggenheim museum is in Bilbao (where it has been a boon to the local economy, the article explains). Guggenheim-Bilbao will now be joined by Guggenheim-Abu Dhabi. "Guggenheim" isn't silly-sounding enough for these people? "Guggenheim-Bilbao" didn't satiate? They had to start building "Guggenheim-Abu Dhabi"? Why not "Guggenheim-Winnemucca"? "Guggenheim-Cucamonga"? "Guggenheim-Wagga Wagga"? (Cuz we can't leave out our Antipodean friends.)

anniversary

Wednesday was the two-year anniversary of Lauren moving in.

I had had a meeting on campus in the morning, but came home with flowers before we set out for a romantic excursion to Pet Extreme for stinky cat food, and to the Target of Death to find a pair of walking shorts for Lauren and a phone with caller ID (since, at our new digs, we're getting caller ID service). Maybe that's not your idea of romance, but I think even a trip to Target can be romantic, and pet stores, don't get me started!

We came home and, while Lauren baked mint-chocolate froggies (a cookie spiked with creme de menthe and green food coloring, cut out with a frog cookie cutter), I read aloud to her. We've been reading together for almost the whole two years, mainly light fun things - at present, it's Harry Potter, so that's what I read to her. Maybe that's not your idea of romance either, but whatever one reads, reading aloud together is a very cozy way to spend time.

Later, she read to me while I cooked a romantic anniversary dinner, which consisted of broiled marinated portabella mushrooms, salad, and fresh corn on the cob. Maybe that's not your idea of romance either.

I don't know what most people's ideas of romance are, or if they even have ideas of romance. We're not living in a romantic age, it seems, and like everything else, romance has been transmogrified into a commodity. Romantic love and passion are ways of being, rather than particular acts or sentiments. It has everything to do with imagination and enjoying one another.

when the going gets hot, the hot go swimming

And indeed, it's been hot. Over the past week, the high temperature has been at least 97 every day. Now, in the grand scheme of things, this is not, in itself, something to complain about, I realize. For one thing, as they say, it's a dry heat. Once the temperature gets above 95 in the Central Valley, the humidity tends to have dropped to below 20%, which is a little less hot and a little less humid than your average charcoal barbecue grill. It's nothing like 90 degrees in North Carolina in the pit of summer (I know whereof I speak, therefore I take the liberty to call it "the pit of summer"), when the humidity reaches at least 1,638%. It's nothing like 115 degrees in Phoenix and the Valley of the Sun, where the inversion layer and general crud in the air make every step outside an air-conditioned interior a glimpse of eternal damnation.

Still, by all reasonable measures, it's freaking hot. So we've taken advantage of the pool in Speedbumpville (the complex which houses the Apartment of Earthly Delights) several times this past week. I haven't been swimming in four years, and haven't been swimming this much since I was a kid in Ohio, and my parents practically had to drag me out of the pool at 10 at night.

I mention this chiefly because we're moving in a month, to a townhouse complex where there is no pool. I feel like such a doofus for not taking full advantage of the pool here heretofore, but I'm making up for lost time. We're also working on destroying as much skin as we can. We're red as beets, especially Lauren.

What else has been happening? Well, I've been reading the Culture of Food anthology that I'm co-editing with one of my Finnish pals, and working up notes on the intro to the book. I've begun preparations for my Theory of Knowledge class for the fall. I'm still working out a couple songs (tonight I think I may have finally cracked Dylan's "Just Like a Woman," and made some demos of tunes of my own, which may eventually be posted). Lauren and I are reading a heck of a lot together. But mainly, it's been hot.

What're ya gonna do, quit burning carbon? Sheesh!