More Jules Verne

We're having a Jules Verne fit here, after the article on the subterranean body of water (see my post, Jules Verne was right!). So we thought we'd rent 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea from Netflix. Well, the search on Netflix turned up a treasure which I highly recommend. Did you know that in 1916, there was a blockbuster movie version of 20,000 Leagues, containing the first underwater photography sequences in movie history?? They're fabulous - it's too bad they aren't in color but you can't have everything, and they are clearly live underwater sequences of coral reefs.

The movie is a total hoot. Apparently Verne's plot wasn't enough for the filmmakers, so they incorporated another whole story, about an evil ship captain, a bereaved Indian prince (not Native American), a Child of Nature (female of course, and wearing a sort of leopardskin dress) living on a Mysterious Island, and four American Navy men in a balloon, also marooned on the Mysterious Island when the balloon blows off course. I spent about half the movie asking, "Who are these people??" They tie it all together in the last reel, sort of.

And the submarine! The submarine looks amazingly like a modern submarine. I guess form follows function, although Captain Nemo's cabin seems to have more wood paneling and hangings than the U.S. Navy would provide. They even have diving suits, and "self contained oxygen tanks" which allow them to stay under the sea "indefinitely" (they look about the size of a small propane tank). You scuba divers, quit giggling. This was 1916. There are a number of sequences of people in diving suits with lead shoes, walking around on the sea bottom, and one where a couple of guys suit up, climb down to the bottom, and walk ashore, and then help each other take the suits off. It's obviously quite real, this was much too early for trick photography, and I have no idea how they did this with a hand-cranked camera. They have wonderful footage of circling sharks and barracuda, shot from below.

The best of it is - you don't have to listen to Kirk Douglas singing "A Whale of a Tale."

Been There, Done That

I thought I'd written on this subject before, but as I look back, the last time I quoted George Santayana ("those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it") had to do with Prohibition and the war on drugs, not real estate. However, it's real estate - specifically the current melt-down in the so-called "sub-prime market" - that brings the quote to mind now. I guess when you're right, you're right all the time.

Everyone is now freaking big-time over the fact that the housing market has flattened out, and you can no longer buy a house for a mortgage you can't afford, wait 4 months, and sell it for enough to cover the outrageous amount of money you borrowed and put a little extra loot in the bank for yourself. Apparently everyone thought the housing market was going to continue heading skyward indefinitely. Let me repeat another old saying that's still true: what goes up must come down. Isaac Newton only dealt with physical objects; but this also applied to skyrocketing markets. In fact, to date in human history there has never been a skyrocketing market in anything in which the bubble hasn't eventually popped, causing a large number of investors to lose their shirts and everything else. But every time a new bubble comes around, everybody convinces himself that "it's different, this time." No, it isn't.

The infuriating thing about the looming massive defaults on sub-prime home loans, which have already taken down a number of

• Lenders who specialized in sub-prime loans because they're so profitable
• Investors who bought "securitized" sub-prime loans because the interest rates are so high

is that we have been here before. Recently. In fact, we were here in my adult lifetime, in the late 1980's, when that iteration of the housing bubble popped, doing exactly the sort of damage this one is doing, and incidentally bringing down the entire savings and loan industry in the U.S., which had to be bailed out at great expense to the taxpayer. That would be you, and me. I wonder who we'll be bailing out this time.

Yes, I remember all of this from the '80's: the negative amortization loans. The low-to-no down payment terms. The adjustable rate mortgages where nobody bothered to ask if they could afford the payment after the adjustment. The desperate scramble to buy a house on any terms, for any price, just to get "into the housing market." I even think I remember "no doc" loans, where the lender just asks how much you make and writes it down; I understand these are called "liar loans."

The real tragedy is that the loan companies, investors, possibly the U.S. economy itself if things get really bad, are all secondary victims. The primary victims are the people who took out these loans, which they couldn't possibly afford, which a rational lender would never have offered to make to them, in order to buy a house to live in, which they assumed would be an investment to protect them in retirement. These people will now lose the house, ruin their credit rating and their personal financial position, and probably never be able to retire in comfort at all. And all because of the bubble madness.

You can say, they should have read the fine print; and they should have. But if you aren't very well educated (and there's a whole generation or two of Americans who aren't), the fine print may or may not have made it clear to you that you were not going to be able to make the payments on this loan. The lender certainly did not. And the housing market is now going down and sideways, and you can't refinance, because you owe more than the house is now worth; and besides, interest rates have gone up, although not as much as your adjusted rate has. In short, you the borrower are screwed, and you're going into foreclosure Real Soon Now. And it's only poetic justice that the lender who loaned you more money than you could rationally expect to be able to repay is also screwed.

166 years ago, in 1841, Charles Mackay wrote a book called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. It's still in print; it is regularly reissued with new material. The latest edition I see on Amazon was reissued sometime in the mid-90s. It should be mandatory reading in every school in America. Assuming American schools still teach students how to read; but that's another rant.

Great Minds Think Alike

The synchronicity is delightful here. Just about the time I was drafting the last post, on the well-known evils of the passive voice, Kyrie O'Connor was on WWDTM discussing the "passive exonerative"!

I haven't heard it yet - I was at a rehearsal this morning during the broadcast, and my husband told me about it. I'll have to download today's podcast. But what a WONDERFUL term for it! I Googled the phrase and find it's used quite a lot and has turned up on DailyKos and in William Safire columns. The latest relevant use, actually about Awful Alberto, is a very similar post last Wednesday in Jeff Weintraub's blog, So It Goes. It's also called the "past exonerative" and "past passive exonerative."

The So It Goes post ends with a summary that is better than I could have written:

Politicians who use it think they're dousing a fire. They should all remember the teachings of their composition teachers. Because when the rest of us hear "mistakes were made," we know the fire has only begun to burn.

Hiding Behind the Passive

"Mistakes were made." That's what our Fearless Leader has to say about the U.S. attorney mess. Let's set aside the implications of the Attorney General of the United States firing U.S. attorneys because they were insufficiently politically pure and zealous. That's too obvious to bother with.

The point here is the appalling obfuscation caused by - the passive voice. Anyone who has stayed awake in English class knows the difference between the passive and the active voice, but for those of you who slept through it, here are examples:

Active: I hit the ball.
Passive: The ball was hit by me.

A little thought will tell you that you can't write a sentence in the active voice without making it crystal clear who is doing what to whom. I hit the ball.

When you write in the passive voice, though, you can obliterate responsibility entirely, merely by leaving off those last two words, "by me". The ball was hit. Who hit the ball? We don't know. A man was killed. Who killed him? We don't know, unlike when Bob Marley sings, "I shot the sherriff."

This is why politicians adore the passive voice. It's very rare that you'll find one speaking - and certainly not writing - in the active voice. You'll know when you do find one because ... they will be more interesting to listen to. Writing or speaking in the active voice, you tell a story. Writing in the passive voice, you produce a government report, or a political speech, in which no one is responsible for anything. This is why you'll never see Alberto Gonzalez stand up on his hind legs in front of cameras and say, "I blew it."

And of course, if you never have to admit responsibility, you also never have to repent for any errors that "may have been made". You never have to look inside your soul, or your karma, or whatever you have, and consider that you might possibly not have handled that last incident in the best possible way. Because you didn't make the errors: they "were made."

The other two groups who dote on the passive voice, and use it almost exclusively, are academics, and business management types. The business management types, of course, operate under the same imperatives as the politicians. No business executive ever wants to come out and admit that he screwed up, big time; "mistakes were made." Also, neither business executives nor politicians (two groups which interbreed regularly) ever ever want to report bad news up to the next level. The boss must only hear good news. The boss wants to know that the situation is completely under control; so that's what his juniors tell him. In the passive voice. Regardless of the actual facts on the ground.

It's that nearly universal business practice that makes me almost willing to believe that the board members at Hewlett-Packard genuinely did not know what their underlings had commissioned the private investigators to do. Nobody wanted to tell the boss anything but what s/he expected to hear. (Almost willing to believe...)

I haven't been around academics enough to know why they use the passive voice. Maybe they want to sound like people in power. But it seems very odd to me that the most powerful people in both business and politics, deliberately express themselves in a way that makes it impossible to tell what they actually do, or whether they ever do anything. Maybe they don't, and that's the whole point.

This is a selective phenomenon, by the way. Not all politicians do this. Read the Gettysburg Address. Or any of FDR's fireside chats. Or Winston Churchill's speeches.

Jules Verne Was Right!!

I knew it! In Journey to the Center of the Earth, Jules Verne's characters go down through endless caves and finally come to a huge underground sea (which, remarkably, they can see to navigate around...). Well, in today's Yahoo News, we see an article entitled Huge 'ocean' discovered inside earth. There is apparently a huge body of water deep in the earth's mantle, under east Asia. In fact, it appears to be centered under Beijing.

They don't say anything about the giant whirlpool Verne described in the middle of his underground ocean.

Rocking and Rolling

It's funny, just today I was discussing the USGS Earthquake web site with a colleague at work. Then this evening (about 40 minutes ago), I was sitting peacefully reading the newspaper when the whole house started to rock and the windows rattled. This quake was located 16 KM deep and 2 KM NE of Lafayette, CA - which is about 10 miles from my house. Maybe 12. It was magnitude 4.2, which is a healthy shake, enough to make the house creak really well.

If you've never sat through an earthquake, they're very unsettling, because your house isn't supposed to shake under you like that. Also, they create a weird form of time dilation - the seismograph traces (available on the USGS site) show that the shaking lasted for 12-15 seconds, but it felt like about 5 years. And this was a relatively minor shake; I remember the Loma Prieta quake (6.9) which I would have sworn went on for 30 seconds or longer (but Wikipedia says it was 15 seconds; I'm still not sure I believe that). There's always a point in a quake where you ask, "Isn't it done yet??" and it's not.

With all that, it's over now, and nobody was hurt, and nothing even fell off the shelves (at least not here). At least we don't have tornadoes.

The Candidates

It's sad but true that the 2008 Presidential election campaign has already started. Like many liberal feminists, I'm torn between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The trouble is, I feel I ought to support Hillary to become the first female president; but I have the feeling that she is running, not because she thinks she can do things better (although she may think that too), but because she wants to be the First Female President. She's nothing if not competent, and would undoubtedly do a good job. I just get bad vibes from her.

I get really good vibes from Barack Obama, and I don't think it's because he's a youngish, good-looking guy. (You have to be my age to call a 46 year old a "young man", sigh...) It is unfortunate that he's a smoker (and I think he's raving crazy to commit to quitting smoking at the same time he's running for President). But what would you rather have: a competent, intelligent guy with one bad habit, or Dennis Kucinich? What I like about Obama is that he seems to have a sense of proportion; even better, he has a sense of humor. My husband commented the other day that no one at that level of politics has used humor the way Obama does since Ronald Reagan. Nobody in the current administration has a sense of humor, and unfortunately, neither does Hillary Clinton.

I'm trying to stay uncommitted, and see what happens. We'll all see more as the campaign unfolds; but for now, I'm leaning strongly toward the guy who can laugh at it.

Librarians and Bad Words

I'm somewhat boggled by the recent flap over The Higher Power of Lucky, the recent Newbery award winning novel which contains several repetitions of the word "scrotum." Apparently a librarian from Durango, Colorado, complained about it on LM_.net, a librarians' listserv; and the whole thing blew up from there.

Mind you, it's been wonderful for sales; the book went from the 600s on Amazon to the top 40. Just for evidence, here is the (first) offending passage, about a man

who had drunk half a gallon of rum listening to Johnny Cash all morning in his parked '62 Cadillac, then fallen out of the car when he saw a rattlesnake on the passenger seat biting his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.

Apparently this incident is mentioned several times in the book, necessarily repeating the word.

Here are the things that bother me about this:

Numero uno: I think that incident is funny. It's my crude nature, or my upbringing as the daughter of a Missouri farm boy, or something. Also, I want the next sentence; I may have to borrow the book from the library so I can find out what happened to the dog.

Numero two-oh, as Molly Ivins used to say: "scrotum" is not one of those "you can't say that word in polite company" words that George Carlin used to have so much fun with. It's a scientific term, dammit; it's in Gray's Anatomy (the book, not the TV show); it's in the encyclopedia. True, it's a body part that isn't normally discussed except by men with prostate problems; which is why, if you want to refer to it, you don't have one of those handy, "we all know what it means" synonyms to use. You have to say, "scrotum."

Finally, the whole business is completely out of character for librarians; and I was a librarian for 17 years. Most of the librarians I know would rather have a kid read a book that contained the word "scrotum" than not read at all. In fact, most librarians know that the kids already know all those "bad" words, and reading a book containing them will not corrupt them any further. It's much more important to get them to read at all.

Having read the article on Yahoo News, I'm relieved to find that it was mainly this one woman in Colorado, and a few like-minded souls; and most of the library community is perfectly fine with the book, which is what I would expect. We would all be better off if we worried about genuine problems, like global warming and whether Dubya really is crazy enough to bomb Iran, and quit expending energy on the reference in a children's book to a male body part; and not even "that" male body part.

Not Black Enough

This is last week's news but that's how it goes sometimes: I'm befuddled by the arguments among leading black political figures about whether Barack Obama is "black enough."

The facts aren't in question. Barack Obama's father was a black Kenyan, his mother a white Kansan. The old southern word for this genetic mixing was "mulatto." In the peculiar classification of American society, where your ancestry is sometimes more important than your actual skin color, Barack Obama is clearly identified as African American, or (as we used to say in the sixties), black, despite the fact that I've known Indians who make him look like Michael York. The issue, of course, is that Kenyan father, a man who grew up a free man in a reasonably free country and came to the U.S. to attend college. A man, in short, with no personal connection to the American experiment in slavery, or the Jim Crow laws.

Obama's run for the presidency, however, has sparked this sort of reaction:

Some African American leaders came out against Obama because he announced his candidacy Feb. 10, the same day as the State of the Black Union, an annual event organized by Tavis Smiley to gather prominent African Americans. It drew 10,000 people and would have been a perfect venue, those leaders said.

Author and Princeton University Professor Cornel West said Obama's decision to announce in Illinois instead shows he "speaks to white folks and holds us at arm's length."

The Rev. Al Sharpton of New York, who ran for president in 2004, was also upset.

"We cannot put our people's aspirations on hold for anybody's career, black or white," said Sharpton. "Just because you are our color doesn't make you our kind."

I don't know what has the "black leadership" more annoyed, the fact that Obama grew up either in Hawaii (known for its cosmopolitan race mixing) or outside the U.S. altogether, thereby missing out on the essential racial injustices which everyone else had to put up with, or the fact that he's the first black candidate for President in the history of the country who actually has a sporting chance to win it. Or could it be because he never talks about the issues of black America, but only about the issues of America? I assumed he announced his candidacy in Illinois because that's where he was elected to the Senate. The people of Illinois are his employers; they have a right to know he's applying for a new job.

No one has mentioned this, but I wonder if the traditional black leaders also resent the fact that, when you hear Barack Obama speak but can't see him, you can't tell he's black. You certainly can't say that about Rev. Sharpton. Obama speaks pure midwestern American, without the "black accent" that even many well educated African Americans have. I'm not talking about "ebonics"; just a distinctive, not quite southern twist of pronunciation and phrasing. Not all blacks have it; northern blacks in particular have northern accents; but almost all the people who have it are black. People underestimate how much they are judged on their speech patterns.

I thought that both Professor West and the Reverend Sharpton did themselves a disservice with these public remarks. They sounded envious; they sounded petty. They sounded like children bullying an unpopular new kid. I wonder what they will say when President Obama takes the oath of office, as I'm quite sure he will one day, whether it's in 2008 or later. He has plenty of time; he's only in his middle 40's.

You just don't get it

My dad used to say, "I buy you books and buy you books, and still you don't learn nothin'." According to an article by a New York Times writer, our Congressional representatives are inventing new and clever ways to get lobbyists to pay for their entertainment, this time using the representative's "personal PACs" as conduits. Apparently these PACs can pay for anything up to and including dental work and house repairs; so, the lobbyist makes a big PAC donation, the PAC buys the legislator tickets to an expensive outing, and the lobbyist goes along, paying his own way.

When will our brilliant elected representatives get the point that: We. Do. Not. Send. You. To. Washington. So. You. Can. Party. You are elected to study public issues, draft and vote on bills, and things like that. Being elected to Congress doesn't give you any kind of a right to take relaxing little outings on the lobbyist's dollar. Maybe what we need to do is make it illegal for Congresspersons to go out socially at all. Either that or require public funding of all campaigns. But who would vote for that?? (Apart from me...)

The quote that really got to me, though, was this one:

Some members of Congress said it would not bother them if the upshot of the new rules turned out to be more contributions.

"I am not going to hide from the fact that we have to raise money," said Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Alpaugh (Tulare County), who has invited donors to his political action committee on a wine-tasting tour in June, modeled after the movie "Sideways." "Only a moron would sell a vote for a $2,000 contribution."

So, Mr. Nunes - how big a contribution would you sell a vote for? After all, as the old joke goes, we've already established what you are. Now we're just dickering over the price.

Mayor Newsom and the Man Code

I don't normally pay a lot of attention to San Francisco politics - Oakland politics is enough trouble for any normal citizen. It's been impossible, though, to miss the brouhaha going on over there about the mayor's, um, experiment in intra-office personal relations.

The short story is: during his divorce, Mayor Newsom had an apparently short-lived affair with his appointments secretary Ruby Rippey-Tourk, who was (and still is) married to Alex Tourk, who was (and no longer is) one of the mayor's primary aides.

I'd say that sleeping with his secretary was sooo Fifties, if I didn't know from personal experience that it was still going on in the Eighties (no, it wasn't me, but I knew the participants); and obviously, here we are in the 21st century and it's still going on, in defiance of common sense, common courtesy, and every personnel code in existence. I wondered if the City and County of Ess Eff had a personnel code, but the answer (from one article) seems to be no:

"it does not appear Newsom violated any of the city's ethics laws by having a sexual relationship with a subordinate..."

The part of this which really boggled my mind, though, was C. W. Nevius' column yesterday about "The Man Code." Apparently Nevius' phone mail and inbox are full of horrified responses from his male readership, to the effect that by sleeping with his friend's wife, Newsom has committed the Ultimate Sin.

Many said they would never trust Newsom again as long as they lived.

Nevius' women responders, on the other hand, generally said, so what else is new? The men compared this to stealing from a friend, or framing a friend for a crime. It is Betrayal, they say - you don't betray your loyal ally, any more than the Mafia would. (They would, of course, if there was something in it for them, but let that pass.)

All these men are acting as if Ms. Rippey-Tourk had nothing to do with this. It takes two to tango, folks. Keep in mind, although the lady was working for the mayor at the time, nothing I've read indicated the incident was anything but consensual. Also, of the two participants, he was in the process of getting divorced; she wasn't. In fact, she's still married to the guy (although not still working for the mayor). But the whole tone of the male response seems to be, not that Tourk's wife betrayed him, but that Tourk's friend betrayed him. I can only assume that all these men are operating on the basic principle that Ms. Rippey-Tourk is her husband's property and has no independent existence and no will of her own.

And that attitude is a whole lot older than the Fifties...

The "Elder"

I had one of Those Incidents at the gym today. I'd finished my weight training and was pulling my stuff out of the locker, and I said, "Oof." Not for any reason; I just felt like making a noise.

The young black woman toweling herself off next to me jumped and said, more or less, "What was that?" (Background here: we didn't go into biography, but based on her manner and slight accent, this was an African woman, not an African American; also probably a Muslim, assumption based on the head wrap.)

"I said, 'Oof'," I replied, "no particular reason."

"I guess you said that because you are an elder." Now, I'll confess that this young woman was, oh, maybe twenty-something; so yes, I'm older than she is. But...

Ouch. I remarked that I don't think of myself as an "elder", although since I'll be 61 in less than 3 months, I suppose I have to admit it. And she was extremely polite (if a little startled by this odd woman), saying that I was, at any rate, her elder. It's a remark that an American wouldn't have made; and it made a point that, frankly, I'd rather wasn't brought up. I guess I have to get used to it; if anyone anywhere has figured out a way to turn that clock back, I haven't heard about it. But I prefer to think of myself as "well seasoned," or maybe "experienced"...

Hang In There, Molly

A small sidebar article in yesterday's paper said that Molly Ivins, the columnist, was going into the hospital; Molly has been fighting breast cancer. I just want to say, Molly, that our thoughts are with you, and we want you to keep fighting. There are very few people who speak truth to power the way you do, and we need your columns, and we miss your wonderful humor. Come back to us, Molly, hale and healthy!

"Don't Judge Me"

In yesterday's Letters to the Editor, one Mr. David Woodworth, of Walnut Creek, complained that teenagers don't get "much respect or appreciation for our troubles." They have to work all the time at school, he says, and they don't get paid; school is hard and colleges are a nightmare. Furthermore, he says, adults "think lowly of me because of the way I dress," although they know nothing about him.

This letter was apparently sparked by a recent excursion to the mall with friends, in which some adults gave him and his friends the hairy eyeball. He objects to being judged on his appearance, by people who don't "truly know me."

Mr. Woodworth, you lay claim to a 4.0 GPA, which implies that you have something resembling a brain, but you are allowing your sense of grievance to keep you from using it. If people don't know you, sir, how else are they supposed to judge you, except based on how you look and dress? (Don't suggest that they shouldn't judge you; that one is hopeless.) Everyone in society is judged based on how they look and dress, from the CEO down to the janitor, by people who don't "truly know" them. Happens every day.

I doubt seriously that you plan to take these snarky people aside, buy them a cup of coffee, and spend time persuading them of your worth; so you'll have to get used to being judged by your looks. If you don't like the judgment - try changing the way you look. If you and your friends were shambling through the shopping center dressed like gangstas from the 'hood, because you think it's cool, you'd better get used to a negative reaction from the adults you run into. (Note: I have no idea what you were wearing...) Adults have been looking suspiciously at adolescents for at least 2,500 years, and they aren't going to stop because you don't like it.

You should also consider the possibility that the people you thought were giving you dirty looks were actually thinking of something else altogether, and you just happened to be in front of them. When you're twenty, you worry all the time about what people think of you; when you're forty, you don't care what people think of you; when you're sixty, you realize that no one was thinking about you at all.

And your grievances would be more impressive if you didn't sound so much like Rodney Dangerfield. Life is tough, young man, for all of us: you, me, the CEO and the janitor. Very few of us get much respect these days, partly because very few people give much respect. You may have been glared at by adults who thought you were glaring at them. You'll never know.

As a matter of fact, I agree that many teenagers do have it rough these days. Without knowing any more about you than your letter in the newspaper, I don't know if you're one of them or not. I do know you're wasting your time complaining about something that's probably beyond your or anyone's ability to change, because it's rooted in human nature.

Give Us Money Or We'll Pledge

As I usually do on Saturday, I've been listening to KQED, being a devotee of Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. In the break we got the local announcements, including the current round of warnings that the winter pledge drive is scheduled to begin next week. Last fall KQED did pretty well with a "pre-pledge" drive, which urged people to go online and pledge in advance, with the bait that if KQED got enough money up front, the pledge drive could be shortened or, at best, eliminated. They got 6 pledge days worth last fall; this time I think they're only 2 days to the good, so far.

What I realized today is that the wording of these announcements, all friendly and well-meaning as they are (and it's all voluntary of course), is like a shakedown. Give us money or we'll do something you won't like. As shakedowns go, a pledge drive is pretty innocent, and many people were going to donate anyhow; I'm just shaking my head at the way they're presenting it.

I'm also fascinated by the fact that they're only shaking down their Internet-enabled listeners (because, of course, the web site is there; the people who donate by mail already have; and the people who want to donate by phone need someone to answer the phone...).

But it's a good cause, and I'll even endorse it: readers in Northern California, please go to the KQED web site and donate now, so they'll shorten the pledge drive and I won't have to listen to so many pledge breaks!

Who, me? I donate during the fall pledge drive...

And then there's Mrs. Henderson

Speaking of movies, last week we watched Mrs. Henderson Presents. If you haven't seen this movie, go rent it now. It is hilarious. Dame Judi Dench is known for her great dramatic roles, and there are some pretty dramatic scenes in the movie; but trust me, the woman is also a brilliant comedian with wonderful timing. I'm not going to blow the surprises by describing any of the delectable scenes, but do see it.

Fred and Ginger

Now that it's dark on Saturday evenings again, we're watching the occasional movie again, and yesterday we watched Swing Time, starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. This is the second Astaire/Rogers picture I've seen; a couple of years ago the Oakland Paramount showed Top Hat on the big screen with Dolby surround sound, always the best way to see a movie.

I have to admit up front, both of them are amazing dancers, and the costumes are fabulous, and the dancing set pieces are a wonderful show. I'm even more amazed at Astaire's stamina and brilliance because he smokes like a chimney. Ginger Rogers has an occasional puff, but Astaire has always got one going. Nobody was surprised at this in 1937, but it looks a little off now. At least, to a Californian.

What I regretfully admitted to myself last night was: there's nothing to these movies apart from the dancing (and maybe a song or so by Jerome Kern, or, so that's where "A fine romance" came from). Plots? You wanted a plot? For that matter, did you want reasonable dialogue? Go rent a Thin Man movie. Those are really funny, and the humor is - it's kinder. The humor in the Astaire movies, especially Swing Time, is pretty close to slapstick. If you like the Three Stooges, you might enjoy it; I don't. And the scene in Swing Time where Astaire performs as "Mr. Bojangles", in blackface, probably looked fine in 1937.

Not only is there no decent dialogue and no plot: frankly, the characters Fred Astaire plays are not very nice people. He plays sleazy opportunists (especially in Swing Time), and after about 10 minutes, I just want to smack him upside the head. Of the two movies, I'd say Top Hat was better: the plot had a little more to it, some of the dialogue was almost witty, the secondary characters held up well. But I don't think I'll rent another Fred-and-Ginger.

The Surge

So, the brilliant new idea is a "surge" of troops. We're going to flood Baghdad with American soldiers, to "stabilize the government." This drives me crazy. This whole situation is insane, as defined by Albert Einstein: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

We are an invading army in Iraq. That's why they keep shooting at us. You'd think even Dubya would get that.

The only people in Iraq who don't want the American troops to leave are the Sunnis; they know the Shiite militias are after them and the American troops are their only hope. Whenever we leave, now or in a decade, the Shiite militias will slaughter Sunnis indiscriminately (instead of just sporadically as they're doing now); and we will not be able to stop it. This has been inevitable ever since we insisted on democratic elections; 60% of the Iraqi population is Shiite, and they now run the government.

I wasn't blogging then; but before the invasion I said that if we invaded Iraq and took down Saddam Hussein, the ultimate result would be a Shiite theocracy. We're halfway there.

Everyone wonders why Nouri al-Maliki doesn't take down Muqtada al-Sadr. Simple - they're in the same bullpen; and in any case the Mahdi Army is better armed than anything on the ground in Iraq except our troops and maybe the Kurds. Mr. Bush makes noises about new constitutions and national unity governments and sharing oil revenues; this will never happen because the only people who would gain from it are the Sunnis, who are only 20% of the population and hated by everyone else because Saddam Hussein was a Sunni.

This is also why we can't stop the Sunni insurgency: they're fighting for their lives and they know it. Not to mention that, with all the killing there's been so far, in a society that still believes in the blood feud, the revenge killings will go on for years.

How many ways do we have to say this before Dubya hears? We. Can. Not. Win. In. Iraq. No matter how you define "win." We made the mess; but we can't clean it up. Only the Iraqis can clean it up; and we probably won't like the way they decide to do it. There's no way we can impose a solution on them unless we completely take over, establish a puppet government, and rule the place as a satrapy. I don't see Congress funding that.

The only reasonable course for us, in this mess now, is to start pulling our troops out; at least get our own people out of harm's way. Then Iraq will become a failed terrorist state? Iraq is a failed terrorist state now. Iran will influence the Iraqi government? It does that now. Given the stubbornness and stupidity of the current administration, I see no way out of this that won't leave the entire Middle East a flaming mess, and all America's fault.

Actually, there's one option that might - just might - restore some of America's reputation. Nancy Pelosi has taken it off the table; but we need to put it back. We need to impeach both the President and the Vice President, because they are both neck-deep in the lies that got us here, and put a new President in the oval office. A new President, a new administration, could break with the failed policies of the past and start some real diplomacy; and then maybe we would have a chance to clean things up.

Of course, Nancy Pelosi is next in line for the presidency after Dick Cheney. I can see where she would hesitate to give the appearance of reaching for the office. But we could do worse. In fact, we have.

Senator Boxer is Right

Senator Barbara Boxer is taking some flack for her remarks to Condoleeza Rice over the Iraq war. She made what seems to me to be a self-evident statement:

"Who pays the price? I'm not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old, and my grandchild is too young," to serve, Boxer told Rice. "You're not going to pay a price, as I understand it, within immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families.''

None of these personal facts is a state secret; and yet everybody is yelling, "Cat fight!" and making noises about "vicious feminine politics". Tony Snow even said that it was "a great leap backward for feminism.'' Feminism is not a subject on which I normally consider Tony Snow an expert, somehow.

What this really demonstrates is the fact that the news media (not to mention the Bush White House!) still doesn't regard women as real participants in the political process, and I'll prove that. Imagine it's 1973. The U.S. Secretary of State is Henry Kissinger, who is single; and that exact remark is made to him by Senator J. William Fulbright, who at that time was 68 years old, 2 years older than Barbara Boxer is today.

I have no idea what Fulbright's family was like, but given his age, he could quite possibly have said something like that to Kissinger about the Vietnam War; and no one would have said a thing about it. If you don't like Fulbright in the role, pick any senator from the 70's who opposed the Vietnam war and was in his middle to late sixties, with children and grandchildren.

This whole flap is because one female politician stated a series of obvious facts to another female politician; if one man had said it to another, or if Senator Boxer had said it to a childless man, it wouldn't have made the news. Senator Boxer is refusing to apologize, and she should refuse to apologize; if stating facts is offensive, we're all in trouble. The furor is being stirred up by the Bush White House, which is trying to devalue Senator Boxer's statements by labeling them a woman's opinion.

Things That Go Bump In The Night

There's an old story that I've read in more than one novel set in rural England before the 19th century:

A man comes home from a journey and asks his servant if anything happened while he was gone.
"The dog died, master."
"How did the dog die?"
"In the fire, master."
"What fire?"
"The barn burned down, master."
"How did the barn burn down?"
"The candles at your wife's funeral, master."

I've never seen it go farther than this; but as a slow revelation of disaster I've always thought it was blackly funny.

I had a "what happened while I wasn't looking" moment this morning on the Internet. We're having a cold snap here in California, the worst in 10 years - maybe the worst in 20. (All of you having ice storms in Texas and Missouri, just quit sniggling. 24 degrees Fahrenheit is cold for a seaside town, even if you're colder.) So the first thing I did when I brought my computer up was to check the National Weather Service site, to check last night's low. (It was 24 degrees.) And the first thing I saw when I checked the special weather statement was, "the tsunami watch for the central California coast has been removed."

Tsunami watch? Why are we having a tsunami watch? You already know, of course, about the 8.2 earthquake in the Kuril Islands at 20:24 PST on January 12 (that would be last night), but at 9 AM this morning, I didn't. Now, of course, the tsunami warning makes sense; and I'm just grateful that all we had was a tsunami watch, and not another disaster like last year's little Christmas present.

8.2 is a helluvan earthquake, folks; it's roughly the estimated magnitude of the 1906 San Francisco quake, and according to Wikipedia is the equivalent of a gigaton of TNT. Nobody seems to have died in this one, which means the human race dodged a biiiiig bullet. Happy New Year.