I thought I was a bigot, but it turned out I just had a sense of humor

Granting up front that I'm a callous asshole, I can't quite see why this is supposed to be "anti-gay literature."

Update: Let's expand, shall we?

I generally put the "anti-gay" crowd into three categories. The first is those who dislike (or hate) gays, full stop. The second don't care much about gays, but get their back up at open "gay culture." Sure, fuck other men quietly in your house, but please don't parade through the Castro in leather chaps and waiving a rainbow flag; it's just so tacky! The final group isn't terribly troubled by man on man sex that they don't have to watch, nor by a small group making a foolish spectacle of themselves, but just can't abide the damned excessive whining and grievance mongering that arises among those fighting the first two groups.

I'm firmly in the third group. (Note that I am admittedly an enthusiastic complainer, which I distinguish from "whining" by a lack of any expectation or demand that other people actually change to accommodate my aggravation.) As such, a cartoon with this message titled "Big Bucks Mountain" is guaranteed to make me laugh. The point isn't that gay sex is morally equivalent to bestiality. It is instead the last line: "'cause I'm still working on the script." It's the excessive hype and triumphalism around the movie, not its actual content, that I think is being mocked. That's a message I thoroughly approve of.

Now maybe Danziger didn't mean my interpretation and was engaging in gay = bestiality bashing. That is a problem, but it's mostly one for gays. The legal slippery slope arguments aimed at a Constitutional right to gay marriage leading to legalizing sex with animals aren't absurd. Morally, it's pretty clear that honest libertarians don't see any reason both shouldn't be fully legal but for tactical reasons would never actually say so and risk further pissing off their opponents.

I also suspect that gays find the comparison repulsive because it takes them away from the moral and intellectual arguments in their favor and faces them with the gut level repugnance that motivates those in my first anti-gay category. If you find the idea of a man fucking a sheep deeply weird enough that you don't object to it being outlawed, it must be disconcerting to realize that's the same feeling the bubbas get about you and Gary, Ace.

There are, of course, rational intellectual reasons to reject the comparison: lack of sentience and potential for love on one side of the, ah, relationship; the apparent incredible rarity of bestiality; presumed lack of an actual preference for animals based on biology (but what if that's wrong?); etc. As a matter of strategy, debating this isn't going to help advance gays no matter how strong the arguments, so instead we see knee jerk frothing whenever the comparison is made.

Which I don't think really was in this instance. But even if was, the most it will drag out of me is a curl of the lip. For both sides.

Update II: Following the links from the original linked post, I found this, bemoaning supposed gay hating from assorted liberals over Brokeback Mountain. I find these terrible bits of gay bashing equally as horrifying (and amusing) as the classic Triumph at the Star Wars premiere clip. The very big difference between these two groups isn't that one is funny and worthy of mockery and other, but that one is violently attacked and beaten and the other isn't. You've got my support on that one, but whining about a lack of universal respect is both counterproductive and ultimately doomed. Focus your efforts on what matters.

Can you understand the words that are comin' out of my mouth?

I always find the resumes of voice actors rather odd, probably because there is always at least some typecasting with "real" actors that puts them in a limited box and lets you see at least some similarity between roles. Not so when all you're using is a fairly flexible voice divorced from the prejudices and preconceptions that go along with physical appearance and personal mannerisms.

Today's strange discovery: the guy who does the Budweiser "Real Men of Genius" commercials also did the voice of Captain Keyes in the first Halo.

Humbug

Lileks' best ever?

Mele kalikimaka

I've somehow lost my total and unquestioning hatred of all Christmas music. If someone is trying to think of a gift for me, I'd like it back, please.

The traffic around here during the day has been simply absurd the last two weeks. Don't these people have jobs?!?

I have purchased over 50% of my Christmas gifts the last two years at some tiny gift shop hidden away in Rice Village whose name I don't know. I detest gifts that are either functional or personally inappropriate; somehow this place always has multiple wonderfully absurd objects perfect for my sisters or parents. At something approaching a 200% markup, unless I'm very greatly mistaken. Maybe I should just give Christmas cards with half as much money and a coupon good for one free kick at my nuts. Same fleeting pleasure for the women in my life, same overall pain to me, but less financial cost.

I have given up on love. This happened about 18 months ago, but I only realized it today while watching various couples shopping. Oh, I've stumbled onto a few possibilities in that time, one of whom was as fantastic as any woman I've ever found before or will again, but I've lost all interest in seeking them out, and the pain of losing the targets of opportunity is a small fraction of what it used to be. I think being without hope is an excellent thing, provided the void isn't replaced by despair.

Update: To be fair, the redhead working at the last place I shopped did make me rethink this last point a bit. Daaamn.

Update II: On the subject of music related to religion, I discovered the rather hypnotically appealing menu music of Civilization IV is the Lord's Prayer, of all things, sung in Swahili.

Furious storms on the horizon

Mr. Poon notes an annoying local (NYC) commercial that was replaced by a more subdued apology. Sadly, this is a recurring phenomenon, as some of us (9:45 p.m. comment) recall to our sorrow.

For inexplicable reasons my dorm had a sattelite feed that brought us all of the local networks from New York. This wasn't usually a problem, as our entire hallway mostly just watched ESPN and Skinemax. But that changed during the 1996 Olympics, an experience that scarred me forever.

Almost every fucking commercial break included this insanely, moronically, obnoxiously long commercial praising their amazing! and! revolutionary! Doppler! 3000! Weather! System! Apparently it would change my entire life, plus tell me whether it was going to rain in New York. I suspect this was a service that I probably could have gotten from other channels, but it was in any case useless to me since I lived in College Station, TX.

The link above noted it was "at least" a minute long. I timed it once, just as I was about to tear my own eyes out to avoid watching its sheer awfulness one last time. One minute, fifteen seconds. Can you imagine? Have you ever seen anything longer than thirty seconds?

But try to put aside the sheer human misery caused by this monstrosity. What kind of morons in charge of a local station in New York City thought it was a good idea to waste this kind of advertising time repeatedly on weather promotion? My outrage as a viewer was almost swamped by my disgust as a potential investor. They ran this damn thing during the women's gymastics and the highest ratings they were going to get! Uh, or so I hear; I didn't watch. Why not just burn a pile of cash and cram the still got ashes up my ass? It'll cost you just as much and piss me off about the same, but it won't take up 75 seconds of my life that I can never get back.

They did, in the end, issue an apology, just as in the case P cites. Theirs, however, then immediately launched into the original commercial again for several seconds, before ending with "oops, sorry." I guess we now know what happened to their advertising genius. It took him almost ten years to get back in the business, but you can't keep a good man down.

If I were Pat Robertson, I would have used this guy to justify and explain 9/11.

But thanks anyway

I just got a call from the law school's new! and! improved! career services office, the second since I graduated. They seem awfully enthusiastic about helping me, and I'm surprisingly reluctant to tell them why I don't want or need their help, instead just giving them a rather cold brush off.

I suppose it's related to some tension I'm feeling towards my family. I'm frankly amazed neither my parents nor grandmother have tried to stage an intervention or push past my vague assurances that I'm "working on something." I'm tempted to tell them more so they can stop worrying.

Nothing is more sure to worry them. In three or four weeks I'll know that it's definitely not going to happen or almost certainly will, but it will take at least a couple more months to lock up, and I really don't want to deal with constant nagging and hysteria in the interim. Still, if pressed over the holidays I suppose I'm obligated to come clean, no matter how insane it is guaranteed to make my mother.

Christmas is dead, long live Christmas

Phoebe thinks Christmas should not to be a national holiday.

Leaving aside how someone who likes France can advocate not receiving superfluous holidays based on religious happenings that she doesn't believe in, I doubt very much that revoking its official status would change much. I noted somewhat facetiously that I've known plenty of Jews at school and work who've taken off multiple days for their own holidays. How many Christians (and French style opportunists) wouldn't expect and receive the same treatment and take the day off anyway?

Schools would surely allow it, and if they didn't parents would just let them skip and take an official absence. Must government run schools force their teachers to show up to what will be entirely empty classrooms in most of the country just to appease Establishment Clause sticklers? Won't this be worse for Jewish anti-Christmas angst when in addition to the comedy cliche of getting nothing but a damn dradle while all of the gentiles are getting bicycles and video game systems, now they're the only kids in school, too? (I take it as given that all of atheist parents not named Newdow will play along to allow their kids to have a day off and not be picked out as areligious heathens attracting their peers' scorn or worse.)

How many private employers will decide to remain open on Christmas just because the U.S. Post Office is? Surely not many. And for those that do, my vague memories of one of my least favorite classes suggest this raises mildly interesting Title VII issues. Blatantly avoiding getting trapped in any accurate recitation of the relevant standard, I seem to recall that reasonable (or some reasonably close term of art) religious accomodations must be made. Interestingly, those are far harder to make for the majority religion than a minority, which is presumably why convenience stores can keep themselves staffed. The Walmart in Tuscaloosa can surely function just fine if it allows all of its Jewish employees to take a day off, but not so much the Christians. Let a thousand futile(?) equal protection suits bloom!

Perhaps it's best to consider a national Christmas holiday as a reasonable response to an awful coordination problem that would exist in its absence. Yes, that's not the reason it was created, and it represents yet another example of self perpetuating and justified government action. But it still looks like a pretty good reason to stick with it.

The reasonably sized wasteland

Some thoughts from Sunday evening television viewing:

1. The "dustball" PSP commercial

People are more stupid than I can imagine. "It's like a carpet that you can watch outside?" I suppose that like the Quizno's spongemonkeys they're going for extreme weirdness that forces you to remember the product name and wonder if it could possibly be as terrible as its advertising.

Beyond the sheer badness of it all, though, I found myself offended by the heavy Spanglish accent. What jew doin', etc. Spoken by what looked like sentient balls of pubes? I suppose that sort of thing might appeal to the wiggers who disproportionately buy stuff like this in popular imagination, but probably not to the late 20's to 30's urban professionals who actually do.

I leave aside whether the use of the accent itself is offensive. It reminded me at first of minstrel shows, but it is a real accent "honestly" come by learning English as as second language, so... Right, don't go there.

2. The Simpson's Christmas Episode

Angel (Lisa): Blessed are you Mary, for your son shall be King of the Jews!

Mary (Marge): So, not a doctor.

I haven't seen many Simpson's episodes the last few years and haven't much felt much guilt despite the fact they've improved from the nadir of the turn of the century. Tonight, however, was gold, and it would have been perfect with a little less Moe trying to kill himself action. It rings a little too true, guys.

3. The History Channel on your PSP?

In a very weird yet oddly effective move that I'm surprised didn't happen before, I see the History Channel has enlivened their WWII retellings by substantially replacing bad actor reinactments with custom video game footage. Given the overabundance of German killin' electronic entertainment they obviously had a lot of engines to choose from, and the level of detail and customization to the story they're telling is impressive. Once I get over the bizarre out of body experience of seeing this stuff used to represent real events I'll probably decide it's brilliant.

White lung

How the hell do people run when it's cold? When it's below 40 my throat and lungs flake off in frozen (shut up) patches, and when it's below 60 I develop this truly grand cough that makes me think I'm going to die, albeit only after I get home and start to warm up. Perhaps I should swallow icecubes during the day and breath regularly from my freezer to become acclimated.

Reinhardt sells his soul for eternal youth and a beard

This Onion story about his ban on Christmas is pretty much by the numbers, but what the hell is going on with the embedded picture "of" the good judge? If he ever looked like that I'm pretty sure it was before color photography existed.

Hey, little girl, want a piece of candy cane?

As usual, my best ideas always come too late. Or in this case the inspiration, which reminded me with only 8 shopping days left that I'd make a great mall Santa. This was in fact pointed out four years ago by my old work nemesis, who was rather apalled by the booming laugh I release when delighted at the misfortune of others. Only a slight shift of one syllable would turn it into the most sinister and piercing "ho, ho, ho" of all time.

Know your enemy

Dan Drezner points to this useful tool pinpointing the recipients of U.S. farm subsidies, perfect for the libertarian terrorist on your Christmas list if such a creature actually existed.

I knew her smile in an instant

It's true, every man really is looking for a girl just like mom.

Skirt-chasing playboy Daniel Anceneaux spent weeks talking with a sensual woman on the Internet before arranging a romantic rendezvous at a remote beach -- and discovering that his on-line sweetie of six months was his own mother!

"I walked out on that dark beach thinking I was going to hook up with the girl of my dreams," the rattled bachelor later admitted. "And there she was, wearing white shorts and a pink tank top, just like she'd said she would.

"But when I got close, she turned around -- and we both got the shock of our lives. I mean, I didn't know what to say. All I could think was, 'Oh my God! it's Mama!' "

I like to think this will turn into some sort of hoax; certainly it could have been better written by a more reputable source.

Via Southern Appeal, which you'd expect to know something about familial love...

Addendum: For god's sake, what kind of "skirt-chasing playboy" waits six months to make his move? Throw the style book away, Grace.

Update: Note to self: Yahoo news runs Weekly World News "stories."

Root for the bad guy

So says the DVD case of Payback, one of my favorite movies. It's a sentiment with which I entirely agree but which isn't quite apt in this particular case. I suppose Porter, Mel Gibson's character, is a bad guy: crook, killer, low life, bad husband. But he's by no means "the" bad guy; there are plenty of nastier characters around, even though Porter tends to kill them quickly enough that no one in particular risks upstaging him.

In any case, the great thing about Payback is its dark comedy, not Porter's level of badness. But there are plenty of other works of art where that's not the case. Let's take another recent movie, and a more popular one - A Few Good Men. As all right thinking men know, Jack Nicholson's character, Colonel Nathan Jessep, is the real hero of this movie. Yes, he broke the law, yes, a man died, and yes, I'll even grant that he should be punished for it. None of that changes the essential truth that in the larger picture he's on the right side, and the Tom Cruises of the world in their pristine "faggoty white uniforms" are probably doing more harm than good.

Jessep's famous speech and mannerisms remind me a little of Stephen Colbert's new Colbert Report on Comedy Central, which has surprisingly become quite a bit better than the Daily Show that spawned it. As Ann Althouse noted:

He's making the right-wing jerk character ... awfully lovable. [...] But I do think that with some of the political points he makes, the supposedly wrong position isn't all that obviously wrong, and spoken with assurance by a character the audience loves.... Well, who knows what a show like this might do to flexible young minds?

Precisely. It's so crazy, it just happens to be right!

Beyond the usually nerdy reasons, a love for bad guys, both in their own right and as misunderstood and wrongly reviled characters, is why I enjoy a lot of "literary" science fiction and fantasy. There are real limits on what serious bad guys can get away with in a world of modern forensics, law enforcement, and extradition treaties that don't apply when the author can make up his own societies and even physical laws.

One could even add mortality to that list of limiting factors, I suppose, although it's not a very interesting conceit. Still, as no great fan of The Lord of the Rings I've got to say that while Sauron wasn't ever convincingly portrayed as being all that bad, at least you knew that once he won it would be forever. In the worst case Hitler would have fallen to cancer or heart disease one day; Hannibal Lector's career must inevitably be shorter than Dracula's.

But the best bad guys of science fiction and fantasy have more interesting or subtle twists on reality. Brandin in Tigana (the true hero of what should rightly be regarded as a tragedy) is at base just your normal medieval conqueror miffed that his victims had the audacity to fight back. But throw in a magic spell to strip away the very name of the nation that killed your son - that's novel and interesting. We can understand pretty easily, if dimly, the kind of rage that leads to pogroms and genocide in the heat of the moment. But what kind of mind devises the cold revenge of a cultural genocide to wipe away all memory of those people as you patiently wait for them and their children to die off, unable to speak or record their triumphs, their history, even their very name? One rather like mine, actually.

Most of my favorite bad guys, of course, have nothing in common with me. By far the most loathesome and vile character I've ever read is that of Angus Thermopyle, one of the pillars of Stephen Donaldson's Gap series. (I ignore Donaldson's Thomas Covenant, the most vile literary creation ever, who has no redeeming qualities even as an object lesson or entertainment.) By the end of the first book I felt as dirty as I ever have reading about this piece of shit, who committed just about every crime you could imagine: murder, rape, torture, slavery, etc. Was there, I asked on the Usenet group that had recommended the series, a fucking point to this depravity?

Several, it turned out, as the subsequent books didn't focus so much around him. But to the extent they did, they made that early filth worth it. Note to self - never fall into the hands of a man so determined to do good and make the world a better place he's willing to do considerable evil with eyes wide open. By the third book I actually felt a little sorry for Angus. By the fourth I liked him just a little. By the fifth it was possible to consider forgiving him.

A skilled author working in the real world could have accomplished the same thing, but it would have been considerably harder to make it seem plausible. Modern pirates, lacking spaceships and FTL drives, can't evade the police for so long after committing such crimes, nor can today's police remake you, once you are finally caught, into their own cyborg slave for use in exceptionally nasty, risky, and morally ambiguous special operations. Sure, the geek in me likes this stuff on its own account, but the bigger part of me enjoys the greater dramatic potential it provides the storyteller.

Sometimes, though, I have to acknowledge that the scifi background is entirely superflous to what makes the bad guy so great. Take Banks' Use of Weapons, commonly regarded as his best work. It's science fiction, and it is set in his Culture background, but neither of those make it particularly interesting. There are no new neat gadgets or ideas, not much interesting Culture color. It's just a "typical" character driven story about a tormented man with a haunted past and the elusive flashbacks mixed in with the nominal plot that finally build up to the greatest shock I've ever received from any work of art.

(For those not planning to ever read it, it might be paraphrased in "real world" terms as such [highlight to read]: Simon Wiesenthal muses on his career as a Nazi hunter, interspersed with odd, misleading flashbacks to "his" childhood, all culminating with a last second revelation that he was really Adolf Hitler who escaped, changed his name and face, and tried to repent for his crimes. In spaaaaaaace!!! ).

[Update: Drat that lack of a white background. Oh, well, close enough and not to be repeated.]

War, central to Use of Weapons, is often a useful device justify bad behavior or at least make it harder to condemn. If not without any rules, it certainly operates by different ones, and can put a patina of legitimacy on actions that would otherwise be pure murder or piracy. So it's often useful to muddy things up even more by making your characters mercenaries or rogue ex-soldiers.

The Black Company, widely regarded as the old classic of military fantasy, takes the former approach, but ruins it somewhat by having the clients considerably worse than their hired swords. I like grim and depressing, but I prefer it carried in the heart of my protagonist, not imposed from above. Nice try.

Far, far better is the new and rightly popular Takeshi Kovac's science fiction series by Richard K. Morgan. As science fiction, I don't like it much - the central conceit, digital consciousness saved beyond death and implantible in new bodies via cortical "stacks" is a little too gimmicky and unrealistically explained, a common failing and why I'm often leery of SF for its own sake. What more than saves this series, however, is that Morgan makes competent use of his implausible magic technology in the plot, and then displays mad skillz in composing a dark atmosphere and a lovably psychotic character based on it.

Death shouldn't mean much when your mind can just be uploaded into a new body. The police don't even have homicide divisions anymore, just "Organic Damage." Morgan puts that comfortable distance between the reader and death, then burns it down and grinds up the ashes by layering on ever more over the top gory violence. (He won me over when the 30mm autocannon blew someone's torso apart as part of routine hotel lobby security.) And if killing the body isn't that bad because you know you can save the soul, or at least mind, exactly how evil are you when you deliberately destroy the physical receptacle for that preserved mind?

Well, it depends.

This week I've been enjoying less technogeeky moral questions, rewatching the first season of the new Battlestar Gallactica. I wasn't surprised that the AFI recognized it as one of the top ten TV shows of 2005, but it just as easily deserved a Golden Globe nomination if they were willing to classify it as a plain vanilla drama.

Much of what's so great about it doesn't really require the scifi trappings it rests upon. Father/son conflicts, sex, betrayal, and alcoholism seem to be plenty abundant here in the 21st century without artificial intelligences and FTL drives. And contrasting that with the core of the scifi based element of the story, the near total genocide of a race by its own creations, I'm struck by how much more interesting the lower stakes and less clear moral questions are.

True "evil" is pretty rare, petty human failings and weakness universal. Certainly that's the case among the crew of BG, and even the one unquestionably "bad" human character, Baltar, is motivated exclusively by (extreme and undiluted) concern for himself, not any desire to actually hurt anyone else. On the other hand, it's hard to cheer on such normal "bad guys."

Except maybe by default. We all hate the uptight do no wrong good guys, right?

Thanks, New Orleans, I owe you a few

I woke up to find my water had been turned off. Fortunately I had bought quite a bit of bottled water after hurricane Katrina, so I avoided the horror of having none to drink or wash my face and hands with for the couple of hours it took to be restored. I'm pretty sure this made the whole ordeal worth it.

I was cheerfully reporting this news to a New Orleans refugee who is finally returning soon, and was informed that while she was glad that the misery of hundreds of thousands had limited my momentary inconvenience, she'd contracted the cold that I'd insisted was allergies when I refused to keep an extreme distance Friday. Outstanding! I'd done some cold/allergy research yesterday and concluded that while my symptoms fell more heavily into the allergy column, the length and inconstant timing of them indicated a cold, which honestly is better in the long term.

It's nice to be proved right. I'm sure she's thinking the same thing, when she can forget about her sore throat.

I think we used to date

In the midst of the latest amusing Tom Smith anecdote:

(An unrelated, but not so sweet story about this woman is that she would put two plums in a plastic zip lock bag, staple it to the wall, and practice ripping the plums out of the bag, over and over again. She got very good at it. Possibly some issues there.)

The wisdom of Salem

It's colder than a witch's titty out there.

I wonder where that phrase originated. Google only tells me that most people are morons.

I feel goodI knew that I would

Inevitably some random cold front inflicts a mysterious ailment on me around this time of year. I get to enjoy one day of an increasingly painful sore throat, a couple of transition days where the throat agony begins to decline in favor of a persistent but not terrible cough, finally ending in several days of nothing but massive snot production. Having begun stage 3, I'm able to get out of bed again.

I wish I knew precisely what causes this. I suspect allergies, given that antihistamines seem to knock it down to a tolerable level, but there's nothing predictable about when it hits me, no one else seems to ever come down with it at the same time (what, out of the literally dozen people you talk to in a given month?), and my superficial research into local pollen levels never reveals anything to worry about. I also suspect I'd get it more than once a season if it were something brought down by a northern, although perhaps the body develops temporary immunity after such a thing runs its course.

Whatever. Has it ever occurred to anyone else that it's sort of fun to be sick? Not the staying at home and hot soup stuff, but the actual discomfort caused by the illness when combined with drug effects. I've read a couple of sci-fi novels where jaded minor characters have given up on drugs to get infected with easily cured recreational diseases, and I can almost begin to understand the appeal.

There's a certain nice novelty to focusing so exclusively on unusual physical sensations. Indeed, although not a problem this time, I've been accused of being a little too enthusiastic about vomiting. "Could you be any quieter? It sounds like it's coming from your toes." Shout, shout, let it all out is my motto.

Another pleasant unpleasantness is the endless mental loop that prevents sleep, which I managed to combine with the worst moment of my illness Monday night. Whenever my waking moments are caught up in some repetitive simple task, whether it be a computer game, boring job, or sometimes a scene in a book that repeats in my head, I'm at risk of being infected with some undying mental short that keeps replaying in my head at some quasi-conscious level that prevents both sleep and sufficient rationality to get up and "reset" my mind by reading a book, watching some TV, or...something else.

Alas, having avoided Civ IV for several days didn't make me immune from playing the same fucking four moves over and over and over and over and...for about ten hours before I decided that half an hour of sleep in five minute chunks was all I was going to get that night. Perhaps the brain rotting nasal spray contributed, or the subtle agony of my intermittent cough. Well, the latter's gone, at least, but the former is going to be a staple until the weekend.

Explanation <<< cure

Still, I guess mom can stop worrying.

Via Mr. P.

The GI's general

I've fallen in love with "Omar Bradley."

False flags

I've been trying to get permission to do something that I'd ordinarily be disqualified from until next June, at which point a certain year term would have expired. I just learned that I must wait until January 3 to do it, because "I have to have waited a year."

It took every fiber of my being not to correct/clarify this. Some may say that I'm being manipulative, but I choose to interpret this as a calendar year issue rather than an actual mistake. June and January don't really look all that alike, do they?

Addendum: The more I think about it, it's entirely possible this is a deliberate mistake, the sort of thing people do when they want to avoid a rule they can't just ignore. And I suppose January is not an unreasonable midpoint of the DQ'ing thing, even if it's not the endpoint that technically should be measured.

That would also explain, just as well as the holidays, why this took longer than the official 72 hours. It just took some time for a creative solution to present itself. Or else someone is going to read the fine print next month, wake up, and kick me back to summer. Sigh.

Dead reckoning

I've picked up The Fall by Camus after setting it aside for a couple of weeks in favor of less worthy pursuits. It has much to recommend it: clever quotes about lawyers, more or less accurate descriptions of the self justificaitons of the self absorbed, and a sweet style that I like to think is three quarters correlated with my better blog moments in the regrettably distant past.

The best so far, however, are reflections on death and especially suicide as punishment of the living. Especially sharp maudlin teenagers may have brushed up against the idea that no one would really care (which may make them more willing to do it!), but surely none ever expressed it with quite such eloquence or detail.

Martrys, cher ami, must choose between being forgotten, mocked, or made use of. As for being understood--never!

I suspect pages 73-76 would do a lot more good than Prozac or a crisis help line for a lot of people.

And the whole damn complicated situation could have been avoided if I'd only shut the window

I was sure I'd blogged the intrepid cat that flew to France, but I can't find it. Nevertheless, the return:

Emily the cat is back — after flying home in the lap of luxury.

The curious cat who wound up traveling to France in a cargo container touched down at the Milwaukee airport on Thursday, greeted by her family and a horde of reporters.

A Continental Airlines cargo agent handed her over to 9-year-old Nick Herndon, son of the cat's owners, Donny and Lesley McElhiney. Emily meowed and pawed at microphones as the family answered questions.

Alas, not all cats in distress are so well treated.

A 35-year-old Houston woman who dialed 911 and claimed that her 2-year-old "baby" was trapped in a storm sewer has been charged with making a false report, a Class B misdemeanor.

The Houston Fire Department late Wednesday sent about 35 firefighters to her house. After arriving, they learned a 2-year-old cat named "Baby" was trapped, not a child.

Angelikue M. Richardson called for the Fire Department's help "several times" Wednesday night, District Chief Jack Williams said Thursday.

She finally told a 911 dispatcher that her "baby boy" was trapped in the sewer near her home in the 5900 block of Bolivia, he said.

Williams said the Fire Department does not have the manpower to rescue trapped animals.

But some receive better service.

Richardson said she was surprised at the uproar.

Apparently, there are some times when firefighters do help citizens rescue their trapped kitties.

As recently as Monday morning, firefighters spent about two hours rescuing an 11-year-old cat trapped in a tree near the Post Mid-Town Square Apartments on West Gray.

Johnette Duff, a resident of the apartment complex, went to a nearby fire station after several people tried to help her get her black cat out of a tree.

"She literally drove to the fire station, because she thought they wouldn't come out. She told them the deal, she physically went down there and then they came out," said Kim Begesse, assistant manager of the apartments.

Williams said, "There's a big, big difference" in the two kitty cases.

"First of all, when they got the cat out of that tree, the person probably did not call 911 and say, 'My child is trapped in a tree,' " Williams said. "The Fire Department's apparatus did not go out of service. They were ready to respond the whole time they were there. If there had been an emergency, they could have responded to it."

It's worth noting that aside from the very different methods used to summon help, Post Midtown Square (who hyphenates, copy editors?), where I used to live, is home to a lot of professionals who are overwhelmingly white, while someone who spells her name "Angelikue" is unlikely to be a person of pallor.

Worse, someone named "Johnette" surely deserves to lose her cat in as painful a way as possible just on general principle. I forgave the Johnene I knew in high school only because she was scorchingly hot, lived down the street from me, and I was the catalyst for my shift out of completely antisocial nerdom. Johnette, however, should bear the full measure of scorn for her parents' poor judgment.

Speaking of poor judgment, I can't help but think the fire chief doth protest too much.

Because of Richardson's report about a trapped child, the Fire Department sent firefighters to the scene. The call tied up three engine companies, two Haz-Mat units, two emergency medical service units, a ladder truck, a safety officer and a district chief, Williams said.

Why in the hell would you need even one Haz-Mat unit? Do they have some sort of suction pump they could use to slurp an infant out of a drain? Or were we worried about radioactive alligators?