The Problem Is Guns

Not mental health, not Islam, not Christianity, not white supremacy, not homophobia, not an innate flaw in the Human Race.  Nothing but than casual, nearly universal access to machines designed to kill many, many human beings in a short period.

Tossing out these intractable facets of human nature to obfuscate the root cause of massacres is the preferred tactic of gun apologists.  Blame Orlando on homophobia, blame Charleston on racism, blame Aurora and Sandy Hook on mental illness.  All amorphous social problems with no immediate solution.

Unlike, say, enacting basic, common sense gun safety regulations at the federal level of the sort that have proven very effective in other countries.


Vox has a very good 'explainer' on why we can't do it that basically boils down to three letters:
NRA.  So the foundation of our Gunpocalypse ends up being the same as for most of our other 'impossible' problems- capitalism.

Anyway, guns are the problem. I'm having ten or so individual arguments about this and thought I'd compress them all into one blog post since they all use the same couple of talking point arguments.


#1:
OUR RIGHTS!  THE CONSTITUTION!

A:








#2: Crazy people are crazy, we must fix mental health!

A:
Crazy people who can't easily stock up on firearms are less able to murder large numbers of people.  Okay, sure, let's improve our rudimentary mental health services- great.
In the meantime, let's do what we can to eliminate access to assault rifles, extended magazines, etc.

#3: People are violent and will do stuff anyway, so gun safety laws are pointless.
(this is really popular among touchy feely FB liberals.)

A:
See above.
I'll take an inherently violent populace armed with knives and bats over one armed with assault rifles and semi automatic pistols with extended magazines.

#4: Without our guns the EVIL GOVERNMENT will steal our rights!

A:
If push comes to shove Uncle Gomer and his basement full of illegally modified ARs won't be doing shit against the armed forces of the United States of America.


#5:  Hunting and Fishing!  Home defense! Varmint control!
A:  Good news!  Revolvers, shotguns and hunting rifles have you covered.

#6: (my favorite)  Cars kill way more people than guns, I SUPPOSE YOU WANT TO BAN CARS TOO YOU DUM LIBTARD?!

A:
Cars are heavily regulated.  You need to take a test to get a license to drive, you must renew your license every few years, you pay a tax for ownership, you are required to carry insurance and are liable for damages they incur.  Car makers are also subject to onerous safety regulations to make them safer.  And it is illegal to drive race cars on public roads.

I'd very happily apply the automotive model to firearms.

If I had my wish there would be no private ownership of guns.
Which I realize is Utopian thinking along the lines of "we don't need gun saftey laws if we eliminate mental illness, racism, homophobia, etc"

But restricting access to a particular subset of firearms and accessories that enable these massively fatal attacks can and must happen.

RIP Lau Kar-Leung

2016 continues building its legacy of carnage, claiming one of the HK's greatest action choreographers and directors.

Commemorative film festival entries available on Netflix:

The 36th Chamber of Shaolin
One of the greatest films ever made.


Return to the 36th Chamber
A worthy sequel.


Disciples of the 36th ChamberAnother classic



A mighty legacy.

Adios, Democratic party

So this primary thing is at a rolling boil, with the likeliest conclusion remaining unchanged- Candidate Clinton.  Also unchanged is my low opinion of HRC and belief that she's a weak candidate with bad judgement who will make a poor president.  She'll beat Trump thanks to inexorable demographic change undermining the efficiency of running explicitly racist, xenophobic national campaigns, but is also the embodiment of a political dead end I was hoping we could back out of instead of pitching our empties out the window, stomping on the gas and crossing our fingers that the airbags deploy.

Ah well, c'est la vie!

This all has hipped me to the fact that I'm no longer a Democrat.  Once you reach the conclusion that capitalism is the root of most evil you're at an impasse with our two political parties.  Not that they're the same, but that both serve capital above all and everything else is cosmetic.  Bernie is no kind of actual revolutionary but his funding model has let him go off script, bringing up solutions that are standard in European democracies but verboten here- single payer healthcare, subsidized college education, curbs on the excesses of the free market.

The official Democratic reaction to these commonsense proposals has been....illuminating.
But I guess not surprising in a world where the head of the DNC recently went to war for payday lenders.


So, barring some kind of sharply leftward course correction, I'm out. I'll vote defensively in national elections- however debilitating her flaws HRC picking 3-4 new Supreme Court justices is preferable to Trump throwing knives at a gallery of Scalia wannabes vetted by the Heritage Foundation- but I'll be doing it as an unaffiliated voter until a viable Socialist party comes along.

Mother's Day

True Customer Tales: Trump & the Art of the Deal

(Trump's Rug Emporium, artist's conception) 

We've had a copy of Art of the Deal by Donald Trump on display by the register the last couple of weeks and it's been an entertaining ride.  The college town used book demographic isn't receptive to The Donald's message and I regularly find it turned around, face toward the shelf, or carried off to assorted faraway sections (favorite destination so far:  smut).  The few grudge bearing oldsters asking after it have been put off by the $15 price tag (which is a deal, we could get $20 for it on Amazon right now).

But today The Art of the Deal found its soulmate in a cranky, piss-stinking borderline homeless dude with black fingernails.

I've seen him around town for a while, but never in the shop.  He was grumbling past the door when he looked up, spotted Trump on display and bee-lined inside.  He dropped it on the counter, muttering something about holding it, then vanished into the depths of the shop, trailing an ammoniac stench cloud strong enough to make me consider just booting him on the spot.  But the place was fairly empty, so I held off.

He came back up with a paperback copy of 'the Text of the New Testament' by Metzger.
"Gimme this for a dollar."
I checked the price.
"It's seven dollars plus tax."
"UUUuuuuuuhn." he groaned, spinning toward the door.

He stopped short at the sale cart, and after a grunting, grumbling pause returned with two quarter books which I rang up.

"That'll be fifty four cents."

He dug through his pockets, piling half a microwave burrito, a dirty sock, a handful of Taco Bell Mild sauce packets and a selection of wadded up napkins on the counter.   He became frustrated, grunting "MONEY" before hurriedly shoveling his debris back into their pockets of origin and stomping out.

The fellow behind him in line failed to take this display in stride, and was further unnerved by the aggrieved shouts of "FUCKING....MONEY!" echoing through the doorway from the sidewalk.

I figured that for the end of the saga, but ten minutes later he was back, gripping a dollar in one weathered paw like the last flower of spring.  I rang up the cart books again, and he croaked out

"I need dimes.  Dimes, for the bus.  More dimes."

So, I gave him all dimes and a few pennies, which he counted out three times before they went to join the burrito in the abyss.  He gestured sweepingly at the Trump book still sitting on the counter.

"HOLD THAT for me, I'll be back tonight.  Fifteen fucking dollars!"

Will update if he makes it back.

Our First White President

Pick up Fuss from school and on the way home we had a short political discussion.

Dada, who are you voting for for president?

Well, in the primary I've voting for Bernie Sanders, and then in the actual election I'm voting for whoever is the Democratic nominee.

Then I had to explain a bit about primaries and whatnot.

Dada, is Trump a Republican?
Yah, he is. Who are you going to vote for?
I'm voting for Hillary.
Oh? How come?

Because, because she's the first woman president.

True!
Dada, can you believe that whoever is president will be the FIRST?
Really?

Yes.  Hillary will be the first Woman president, and Trump would be the first white President!

I paused, mouth open for an emphatic correction.

And then realized he's right, because the only president he's ever known is Obama.

That's true, Fuss, he'd be the first white president you've ever had.

Fuss nodded and went back to eating Cheeze Its.

David Bowie RIP

For years I've had a nervous tic when I get drunk- I corner someone at a party and pose the question "which rock act released a great album in the most decades?"

My answer is David Bowie, and none of my victims have topped it.

1960s:
David Bowie (aka Man of Words, Man of Music, aka Space Oddity)


1970's:
(all of them)


1980's:
Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)


1990's:
(?, I need to check 'Outside')

2000's:
Earthling


 
and this bit of delight as a chaser.

Great Kung Fu Movies on Netflix

I got into a FB discussion of great martial arts films with my friends Tyrone & Brian earlier, noted that their top 10's had some stuff I hadn't seen and decided to check Netflix (which has added a ton of pacific rim content over the last few years).

My old Best ______ On Netflix Streaming posts are consistently my most read, so here's an early Throwback Thursday post: the best Kung Fu movies on Netflix Streaming.   A couple of these I haven't seen, but you can trust my pals- their genre knowledge is wide and deep.  In lieu of my traditional capsule review I'm posting trailers, which have become far more prevalent since the last time I worked up one of these posts.  If it made the cut, I liked it or someone I trust liked it.

Apologies for the heavy 90's flavor of this list, but that's what Netflix has.

Chocolate


Fist of Legend


13 Assassins
(okay not kung fu, but.....too epic to skip)


Ip Man


Flash Point


Wing Chun


Iron Monkey


Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon


House of Flying Daggers


Shaolin Soccer


The Kid with the Golden Arm


Shaolin Martial Arts


Heroic Trio
(not entirely kung fu, but BONKERS and GENIUS)


Supercop



The Big Boss
(not great Bruce Lee, but Bruce Lee regardless)




Not exhaustive, but should get you started and there are a lot of GREAT movies there.

More Than a Feeling

With his mama away meeting a baby in Boston, we're Batching it up this week.

Which was cool with Fuss earlier when we got home- he ran up the stairs shouting "It's just us boys, WOOOO!" then demanded milk and graham crackers for dinner.

But way less cool when bed time rolled around.

After reading a few books and fending off dozens of wiley delaying tactics, I had him settling down.
"Dada, it feels weird without Mama here."
I tried distracting him with the offer of her pillow, which he usually covets and purloins on the regular.
He was disinterested- "no, I already have my squishy pillow."
This is so out of character I nearly took his temperature.
"Mama gives me all the love, I'm worried I won't get enough love while she's gone," he mused in the dark.
This is the sort of thing he never tells anyone except under duress.
"I'll try and give you the Mama love too," I say.

I ended up calling in Coodgie from the Cozy Friends bullpen.
He isn't in heavy rotation any more, but Fuss hasn't grown out of him quite yet.
I'm glad a stuffed bear can still act as emotional backup, I can use the help.

Independence Day, F%#+ Yeah!

There are, it seems to me, only two perfect 4th of July anthems, each antithetical to the other.

This penultimate anthem of Middle America:


And this one, for Alice Miller America:



One is perfect for cookout sing alongs, the other is simply perfect.

I saw you at the perfect place
It's gonna happen soon, but not today
So go to sleep, and make the change
I'll meet you here tomorrow
Independence Day
Independence Day
Independence Day

Fuss Drunk Love

Eating lunch, Fuss is drinking his ginger ale out of an Ikea cup with his tongue.

fuss: Dada, mostly I like licking it up with my tongue, like a dog.
me: Why is that?
fuss: Because I'm the Fuss.  You never know *what* I'm going to do next.
me: That's very true.

Father's Day, again

I failed to note its approach until Facebook updates exploded my timeline like a creeping barrage at Passchendaele.

To those with engaged fathers who made an effort, congratulations!

To my fellow survivors of the less salutary version...keep your heads down.

true customer tales: The Grasshopper & the Spider

Two of our shop mascots are those old rubber toys with a spring and a suction cup, you'd push them down to make a seal and they'd eventually pop up and leap off the table. We have a spider and a grasshopper, and they've been dysfunctional as long as I've worked here, taped to a succession of cash registers until our latest (an otherwise exemplary Sam4s model) which has no suitable anchor point.  Now they're taped to the counter in front of the register, at the perfect height for fascinated children to mess with.

So, earlier a mom and little girl come up, and the little girl is seriously reminding me of Fuss.
The mom's trying to check out and have her get with the program, and the girl's totally ignoring her, wandering around in her own world with a book in one hand and a stuffed bear in the other.  Mom's getting progressively more frustrated and she does the counting thing and the "I guess you don't really want that book after all" thing, and is practically growling when the girl finally presents me with her book.

And is transfixed by our spider and grasshopper. 

While I'm ringing the sale the girl's trying to get the spider to stick, which it just can't, and ends up pulling it off the base.

"Put that back!" snaps Mom, reddening. "Right now! And don't touch the other one!"

The little girl locks eyes with Mom, purses her lips, theatrically drops the spider....then snatches the grasshopper off its base.

I burst out laughing, because it was such a total Fuss move.  

And then the little girl joined in while capering around her seething mom waving the grasshopper in the air.

"I'm sorry, I'm not helping at all," I apologized. 

"NO IT'S FINE" said Mom, from that alternate dimension inhabited by parents who were just pwned by their children and are heroically resisting the urge to drag them outside by the nearest body part.

Everything is in the perspective.  

I've been in her shoes, many times, driven to homicidal thoughts by my deliberately provocative child.  But seeing it from behind the counter, it was genuinely funny- this bold little girl insisting on her own agency and driving her mom crazy with it.  

Just like Fuss has always done, and hopefully always will. 

It Pays to be Pleasant

An important skein of homespun wisdom collected from my years at the shop is never give the volunteers a hard time.

Nobody's getting paid at a library sale, nobody's getting paid at a thrift store, and they're endlessly hassled by legions of scroungers and bottom feeders.  It's gotten bad enough at one of my regular stops they've posted a big NO HAGGLING sign at the register.

I always go out of my way to be amenable.  As I'm nosing around I'll straighten shelves, at a couple of my stops I'll haul books to the Goodwill for them (protip: around here, *everything* eventually ends up at the Goodwill), I'll help them sort the saleable stuff from the total junk in the back room, etc etc.  

And while advantage seeking isn't the motivation, human beings being human it does pay off.
When you buy a ton of stuff & you're not a jerk about it, there are perks.

Today's bit of slack came when the entire register system crashed at the outlet, so no credit or debit cards.  I had to run and grab some cash from an ATM- by the time I got back there was a ten deep line moving at a snail's pace and I was supposed to have the shop open in five minutes.

A brief chat with the manager & I was on my way.
"Remember the count and we'll ring it up next time."

Chalk up another win for common decency!

Dream Journal

I've been listening to Marion Woodman's Dreams: Language of the Soul in the car lately.  I don't usually remember dreams and cite it as a likely influence on remembering one this morning.

I was driving to work and coming up to an intersection noticed a regal weimaraner in human clothes protruding over a fence.  I slowed down and as I rounded the corner discovered a William Wegman photo shoot.  His traditional weimaraner was on a pedestal surrounded by a pack of other breeds, mostly pugs, also wearing human garb, like a monarch and their court.  I was very upset that my phone had died, preventing me from taking a picture of him taking a picture.

"Nobody's ever going to believe that William Wegman was taking pictures of PUGS!" was my last thought before waking.

Ferguson

White privilege is me being able to watch events in Ferguson with horror, with empathy, with anger and disgust, but without concern that what happened to Mike Brown (or Trayvon Martin, or that 12 year old with the Airsoft gun in Cleveland, or etc etc etc etc ETC) will ever happen to my son, because my son is white, and being white is the finest armor against official misfortune our society offers.

(For anyone who rankles at the term 'white privilege', allow me to offer an alternative courtesy of the excellent SF writer and blogger John Scalzi, who aptly framed it in video game terms:  Straight White Male: the Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is.)

One of Twitter's great strengths is giving outsiders a seat at the community table if they care to pull up a chair, and I follow a number of people who aren't shielded from Ferguson's conclusions by a lucky accident of birth.  Their conclusions and observations are the ones that should be driving the public narrative but are mostly overlooked.
Rather than compile a bunch of their tweets and links, I'll just say follow these folks:

Imani Gandy:
@AngryBlackLady
Roxane Gay:  
@rgay
Tressie McMillan Cottom:
@tressiemcphd
Elon James White:
@elonjames
Jamelle Bouie:
@jbouie
Baratunde Thurston:
@baratunde
Jelani Cobb:
@jelani9
Ta-Nehisi Coates:  

@tanehisicoates

They'll open the door to another place.

Harvey Pekar moments

I've had two so far.

First, rooting bins at the outlet I was afflicted with an unholy nerd couple taking turns reading stupid, racist jokes from a copy of 'Truly Tasteless Jokes' they'd extracted from the mass (insert pause to thank the internet for killing that particular literary franchise).  

Imagine being trapped between a pair of socially crippled nerds shout-reciting Monty Python skits at each other, only replace Monty Python with "jokes" like why do you never hit a black on a bike? and  why can't Rock Hudson get car insurance?  

After each perceived 'zinger' a contrived mini-argument broke out over which Ur-Nerd would officially possess the book once they purchase it and took it home.  Their braying, self-conscious laughter rang through the warehouse like the bells of an idiot Notre Dame.

Second, en route to the shop I stopped for a breakfast taco and came upon a disheveled older fellow reciting the plot of the Denzel Washington potboiler Man on Fire to the profoundly disinterested cashier.   

After the interminable recitation wound down, there was a pause.  

The cashier and I shared a sigh of relief, but too soon.

"There's this paper in New York, it's like the New Times here.  I lived in New York for a while.  And they did this article on celebrity tipping, like how much celebrities tip when they get a pizza or go to a restaurant or whatever.   And you know who was the shittiest tipper?"

The cashier, softer of heart than myself, answered.

"Who?"

"Denzel Washington, that's who.  Denzel Washington is a shitty tipper.  How do you not tip, he makes twenty million dollars a year, residuals from films....shitty tipper."

He rose from his stool and left, speaking not another word. 

Food: Leek, Carrot & Potato Soup

By request, the recipe for last night's dinner.  Like a good soup, the recipe is a mishmash of several different versions from different sources I've made over the years.   It scales up and down nicely, and you can do whatever you like with the seasoning, I like to use fresh herbs when I have them but whatever you have lying around is fine.


leeks, several bunches
carrots, one bunch
potatoes, two or three, for this soup I like russets.
chicken stock to fill pot about halfway.
butter (or olive oil)
salt & pepper to taste
other herbs & seasonings as you see fit


chop off the white & light green end of the leeks.
Rinse leaves & chop roughly, combine in pot with chicken stock and bring to a simmer.
Peel & chop potatoes, chop carrots, clean and slice leeks.
Melt 2-3 TBS butter or olive oil in large skillet, add leeks & carrots, sweat over medium heat.
When the leeks & carrots are ready, scoop the leek leaves out of the stock & dump in all the vegetables.  Bring to a gentle boil, then reduce to a low simmer for 45-60 minutes.
Season to taste- I like sage & smoked paprika along with the salt & pepper.
I use my trusty immersion blender to puree everything in the pot, you can also do it in batches in a food processor or blender, or just serve it as-is.

Voila, cold weather dining at its finest.

Veteran's Day

The best way to honor veterans is to avoid fighting pointless wars which shatter bodies and spirits and provide unstinting support when their service is done.  Recent American history has demonstrated an unslakable thirst for pointless wars coupled with a miser's parsimony in dealing with the resultant human wreckage.

I'll be skipping the public displays by politicians and other entities eager to wrap themselves in the flag, substituting a pair of films that memorialize the 'War to End Wars' with acidic, gimlet eyed clarity:

true customer tales: True Crime

I can't take credit for this one- the following is a transcription of a note left by my night shift co-worker.

"Do you have a book about the kidnapper of Elizabeth Smart, the young girl who was taken from her bed and kept for several weeks?"
"We might, let's check over in the true crime section.
"Oh no, it's not a true crime story, it's about a kidnapping & child molestation."
"......."