Author: Aaron Weber

What happened to Carrie?

My uncle’s been in the hospital again, and spent a couple days more or less unconscious. When he came to my mother was sitting in the hospital with him, and he looks over at her and says, without any warning, “So, what happened to Kerry?”
My mom says “Carrie?”
“Did he win in Virginia? How about Tennessee?”
“Oh! That Kerry, yes, he’s really out in front now. I haven’t really been paying attention for the past couple of days, but there’s an article here if you want me to read it to you…”

So she ends up reading him the New Yorker profile of Kerry, and an in-depth article about military privatization and Halliburton, and so forth, for the better part of the afternoon. Later, he had to tell my grandmother (again) how to print email from his computer to bring in to him, and he was feeling well enough to be annoyed at her. Theoretically he’s got under a week to go. I’m betting more because he’s as stubborn as my grandmother is.

Maiwwage

The Phoneix, not the world’s greatest alt-weekly, has really good coverage of the marriage debate around these parts. My favorite is the woman who had a commitment ceremony and says weddings are a drag when you have two bridezillas. That and the poster “My Pedophile Priest Supports Traditional Marriage.” Happily, we’re now describing the debate in terms that take control of the debate: pro-marriage (people who are in favor of love, kindness, and all that is good) and anti-marriage (homophobic benighted forces of darkness who can’t stand the idea of true love or goodness).

I sometimes wonder how it is that people who disagree with me can exist. I mean, sure, there’s people with whom I have honest and reasonable disagreements about, say, Ben Stiller, or trade policy, or religion or what have you. But there are some basic cultural issues that I feel that it’s important to share, like plurality and the separation of church and state. I’m willing to imagine that people think homosexuality is a disgusting sin, but I’m not willing to think that reasonable human beings can’t understand that their opposition to it is a religious opposition.

And then it occurs to me that there are people with a radically different worldview: Middle America. Which is why I have to read blogs like Koolgrrrl’s Guide to Life. She keeps me in touch with the mass of humanity that isn’t in major coastal cities:

We were supposed to see Mystic River, but that was before I realized that Julia Roberts is NOT in this version! Somehow I got it confused with Mystic Pizza. I can be a dimwit sometimes–in fact, that’s the hub’s “pet name” for me. Dimwitted Deb. Or Double-D’s.

I’m still trying to decide if she’s a Jean Teasdale-style joke or not. I mean, it’s not like I’m such an incredible snob that I would be unable to imagine someone saying “what a true artist” about Celine Dion. No, in fact, I am that big a snob, and it was her admiration of Celine Dion that really made me think it’s an elaborate joke.

Carthago Delenda Est

Did you really have to sow salt in the fields? Well, maybe not. It’s not like I want it to die. I just want it to fade into insignificance. Not the literal Carthage, of course, which is already long gone and replaced with another city, but my metaphorical, personal Carthage. We all have one, or several. And I want mine to go away and never bother me again. All the Carthage-sympathizers around here need to realize that they’re either with us or against us, and that Carthage is not us.

Book. Dwarf. Bookdwarf

My dear Bookdwarf has gotten her own domain now, via the hoster with the moster, Sharp Hosting.

I was kind of waiting for him to post about it, but my buddy Dave told me this dream he had, where he Howard Dean was hanging out with him and his friends. Dean had just lost some primaries, and was just being generally annoying, and they couldn’t figure out a polite way to ask him to leave. Hmmmm.

Intelligent Discourse

I turned off comments because I kept getting spam posted, and it’s a real shame, not just because I like to get feedback from people who read the blog, but because it’s sometimes nice to read things like the following comment, a very recent reply to post from last April in which I made fun of the small portion of the anti-war movement which has dreadlocks and doesn’t bathe.

u r right war protesters r retarded, cuz they r fighting the wrong thing! everybody know that the war is a bad idea, even the foreign leader and they can’t do any thing about it cuz bush is doing all this within the laws. I think that protesters should protest the laws that let him do this! I think that the UN should make a law that says that all leader of countries should act on the best interest and safety of the people, not only their countries people but also the people in other countries too! This wouldn’t only end war but also it would end poverty and hunger. The laws are made 4 the best interest and safety of the people, they r not in my best interest if they promote war, hunger, poverty, and un-human treatment and I don’t think their in yours!
PS FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCCCKKKKK
WWWWWWWWAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRR

If it weren’t for people like this, I don’t know that I’d have much to laugh about. Except for maybe items in The Onion about gay marriage (“Isn’t that already legal? I mean, my sister’s married to a gay man and that’s no big deal…”)

Almond Joy

I got a galley copy of Steve Almond’s new book Candyfreak earlier this week; it’s due out in May and it’s genuinely excellent. I think what I like about him is that he’s smart and self-conscious and funny without being pretentious or annoying like Dave Eggers. Anyway, when it comes out I’m buying like three copies to give to friends.

It’s quite a good piece to pair with Fat Land, which is about how this country got so… well… fat. Fat Land isn’t as good as Candyfreak or Fast Food Nation, my other relatively recent food-related read. But read it in tandem with Candyfreak and you’ll see the parallels. Add in Schlosser’s other book, Reefer Madness, and Michael The Botany of Desire, and you’ve got quite a collection of books about the way we consume, live, and grow today.

And Gay Penguins

When I was in 10th grade I was required to take a religion class. At some point the teacher had this whole explanation about how there were two sources of rules for life, the written law (the bible) and the natural law (the world). And since homosexuality wasn’t in either, it was wrong.

At that point I raised my hand and tried to point out that there were gay monkeys, and he said, well, we can leave Aaron to talk about the sex lives of monkeys, and everyone laughed, and he went on to the next part of the class.

Well, fine. Let’s leave me to talk about gay penguins and how they successfully raised an adopted chick.

Also can I mention the Times’ URL naming conventions? Very sensible: date, section, and then a number and a word designating the topic: this article’s file name is 2004/02/07/arts/07GAY.html. Giggle.

Feedback

Today I got a call from someone who works in IT over at one of the tech companies in the area who said “hey, I found a lot of documentation errors in Evolution 1.4, and I printed out the manual and marked it up, can I bring it by for you?”

This means of course that I have a lot of work to do, and it’s annoying to find so many mistakes in something I’d thought was done. On the other hand, it’s deeply gratifying to know that someone out there actually cares.

Cares about me. Yes, Me.

Happy week of crappy chocolate advertising.