Stains

Ban School Football

An examination of the brain of an 18-year-old high school football player who collapsed and died showed degenerative brain disease, chronic traumatic encephalopathy. The boy had suffered numerous concussions playing football.

Recent evidence suggests that most NFL players suffer brain damage during their careers. A Boston University study of six brains from players who died between ages 36 and 50 showed that five of them had it. NFL players, particularly linemen, tend to die young, both from brain damage and heart disease brought on by their 300-pound-plus bodies.

A sixth player, Tom McHale, formerly of the Bucs, Eagles, and Dolphins, and who died of a drug overdose last year at 45, also has been diagnosed with CTE.

It's an epidemic. Players even in high school are much, much bigger, faster, and meaner than they have ever been. High school football is destroying young mens' brains. Why is this permitted? Not only permitted but encouraged and lavished with spending?

Whither Sarah Palin?

Most Democrats are pretty eager to see the celebutard pageant queen with the avant-garde language skills, Sarah Palin, lead the Republican Party off a cliff, but history suggests she won't be in the spotlight much longer, and will not be leading anybody anywhere.

Do you know who the dyspeptic-looking gent above is? That's William L. Dayton, who ran as John Fremont's vice-presidential candidate on the very first Republican ticket in 1856. They lost, to Democrats James Buchanan and John C. Breckenridge. After the election, Dayton, a former senator from New Jersey, held some important jobs, including New Jersey Attorney General and U.S. Minister to France under Abraham Lincoln, but he never attracted so much as a whiff of support for the nomination as president or even vice-president again.

This is pretty typical. Losing veep candidates do not go on to the presidency. Losing presidential candidates can, like Dick Nixon did, but even that's pretty rare. Veeps? Never. Well, there was one, but it took him 12 years to get back on the ticket.

Don't believe me? Here's some more:

Joseph Lane, George Hunt Pendleton, Francis Preston Blair, Jr., B. Gratz Brown, Thomas Andrews, William Hayden English, John Alexander Logan, Allen Granberry Thurman, James Gaven Field, Arthur Sewall, Adlai Ewing Stevenson (grandfather of the later presidential candidate, and himself a former vice president, which isn't the same thing), Henry Gassaway Davis, John Worth Kern, Hiram Johnson and Nicholas Murray Butler, Charles W. Fairbanks, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (our sole exception; lost in 1920, ran again and won, on the top of the ticket this time, in 1932), Charles W. Bryan, Joseph Taylor Robinson, Charles Curtis, Frank Knox, Charles L. McNary, John W. Bricker, Earl Warren (later Supreme Court justice, but don't tell Sarah that!), John Sparkman, Estes Kefauver, Henry Cabot Lodge, William E. Miller, Ed Muskie, Sargent Shriver, Bob Dole (who did later run for president, but was very instructively beaten), Walter Mondale (ditto, and another former veep), Geraldine Ferraro, Lloyd Bentsen, Dan Quayle, Jack Kemp, Joe Lieberman, and John Edwards.

And now Ms. Palin.

I wouldn't get your hopes up.

Besides, if she doesn't shut up soon, I think some of her fellow Republican governors are going to take her out to the pool and drown her.

Today Let's Change The World

Originally uploaded by Fnarf

The Credit Crisis and the Bailout

I wrote this originally in an email to my cousin, who lives in Mexico, and doesn't understand "the bailout" issue very well. I don't understand it all that well either, but this is my take on what's happening, in what I hope is simple and straightforward language. Corrections welcome if I've mangled any economic truths here.

Here's the problem: modern economies run on credit. If the baker down the street wants to buy a new mixer so she can make more cookies, she goes to the bank and gets a loan. This is how ALL economic expansion works. Ultimately it goes back to the Federal Reserve, which loans to big banks, who loan to small banks, who loan to people to do stuff. You do the same thing when you take out a mortgage.

The loans are secured by the promise of value. If the bank thinks your house is worth the money, then your mortgage is safe and they'll loan it to you. Ditto the baker's mixer. The loan money is used by the person borrowing it to create some kind of value, and that value is partly used to pay the loan back. There's WAY more money outstanding in loans than anyone can pay back, because you're not expected to pay it all back NOW; you have years to pay it. During those years, you have to grow, or you won't be able to pay it back.

If the baker goes to the bank and the bank says "sorry, we can't loan you anything right now", the baker is screwed. They might say that because they think her business model is bad -- "these cookies taste like crap!", but they also might say that because THEY don't have any money.

This is all highly regulated. The amount banks can lend is tightly controlled, based on how much THEY have borrowed, which depends ultimately on how much the Fed wants to pump in. You might think the Fed could just pump in as much money as they wanted, and everybody'd have all the loans they want, but if those loans exceed the growth rate of the economy, you get inflation -- what they call "printing money". Your money is worth less, because there isn't anymore VALUE going around, just more dollars.

But there's another consequence of loaning too much: if they loan to people who can't pay, they don't get their money back. Remember that they've loaned way more than they actually have, and the banks have to pay their loans back too. Bad loans mean they can't pay, and banks fail. That's what's happening now; there isn't enough value in the country -- all the goods and services and so forth that we make -- to pay the loans. Banks are going tits up.

The problem that leads to is a "crisis in liquidity", which simply means there isn't any money available for new loans; it's all gone out to these bad loans, and the banks don't have enough money to pay their own bills, let alone loan out more. So nobody can get a loan for anything right now, not even good stuff like expanding a really successful business.

A liquidity crisis is bad in many, many ways. As I said, EVERYTHING in this economy depends on loans. Ultimately, that's where economic expansion comes from. Not just bakers buying mixers, but college students getting student loans -- virtually ALL college students today need loans. No loan, no college. That hurts the students, and it also hurts the colleges, which can't pay their bills.

Another example: durable goods. Not too many people go in and buy a car with cash; they get a loan. No loan = no car, which is bad for the car buyer but REALLY bad for the car maker, the dealer, the auto worker, the brake repairman, everybody. If you can't get mortgages, real estate agents and construction workers and carpet salesmen and furniture makers suffer. There are many examples.

So what happens is -- and this has happened MANY MANY TIMES in lots of economies around the world -- you have economic contraction instead of expansion, massive unemployment, government tax revenues fall, all these bad things. Everybody suffers.

So one possible way to forestall this is to bail out the banks.

That's what Congress is trying to do now. The problem is, bailing out the banks -- buying their bad loans so they can lend to good people again, paying off their debts, paying their depositors, etc. etc. -- means giving an absolute TON of money -- they're saying $700 billion but nobody really has any idea, it could be several times that -- to the very same people who got rich off all these bad loans in the first place.

To a lot of people, it looks like rewarding bad behavior. When the guy down the street can't pay his bills, they take his house; when the rich asshole on Wall Street can't pay his bills, he wants Congress to give him billions. That looks like a bad idea to a lot of people.

Unfortunately, there isn't any other choice. You NEED these banks to stay alive to keep the economy going. Without a bailout of some kind, we WILL have a major, major recession, contraction, maybe even a full-blown depression like we haven't seen in almost 80 years. It's by FAR the worst situation we've had in all that time. You just have to look at what happened in Japan during the "lost decade" to see how bad it can be -- we could easily be talking about massive, massive unemployment for ten years or more.

That hurts the entire world. Imagine what happens to Mexico's economy if (a) they are suddenly unable to sell anything to broke Americans; (b) stop having any tourists and (c) have all the migrants stop going to America because there's nothing there for them. In a fragile country like Mexico, a major depression in the US is going to cause a TON of poverty like you've never seen before, African poverty. But even strong economies like the UK, Canada, Germany, etc. will suffer.

Global depression is a bad thing. The people blocking the bailout now are doing so from an understandable position -- why should we bail out these rich assholes who have destroyed themselves -- but the consequences of not bailing them out will be EXTREMELY DIRE.

This is in fact what government is FOR -- floating us through a bad economic time. We used to have these episodes ALL THE TIME in the nineteenth century, but they were short; the Great Depression in the 1930s, though, was long, and something needed to be done, and FDR did it. In addition, all sorts of regulations were put in place to prevent this sort of thing from happening again. Unfortunately, the Republicans (with plenty of help from Democrats as well) have systematically gutted those regulations, so that we are in many ways right back where we were in 1929.

The thing is, these regulations DO hurt the economy a little. But they are NECESSARY; we give up a tiny bit of free expansion, but gain security, because the regulations prevent the economy from overheating and these markets from getting out of control. We can fix things when they break, or could; now we can't, and that's why we're in this fix.

What they SHOULD be doing is talking about rationalizing the deficit by raising taxes on the rich and putting some of the banking regulations like the Glass-Steagall provisions that were gutted in '98 back in place. But Congress is too stupid and pigheaded to do that. So the best we can hope for is this crummy bailout.

Yes, it's crummy, but it's necessary. That's what it boils down to. For once Bush is probably right. Ironically, now the House Republicans are against him. But they don't have any solutions of their own, just "NO!" They're like two year olds, really. Always have been, these damn Republicans.

Right now, it's a game of chicken. We need a bailout, but no one really knows how bad it's going to get without one, and everybody's just sort of waiting for one side to blink. I go back and forth; I think we can do a lot better deal than this one, but we have to do SOMETHING. Unlike the Republicans, I'm not willing to throw away the country for ten years just to spite these Wall Street jerks. Too many people are going to suffer.

ADDENDUM: I go back and forth on this one. I could be happy with this defeat if there was some indication that a better deal was coming. I absolutely do not agree that we can just let these banks fail; the people who would suffer most are not white-shoe Wall Street guys but everyone else, the ordinary people with their investments for retirement. And even more importantly, the forward motion of the economy.

A dead economy is going to have dire effects on lots of other things. Any chance at a rational energy policy, or workable health care, dies too.

But this bill? It stank. But we need something.

Nicky Samuel

For my birthday I would like some boobies, please:

I hope to get away with this because the woman in the picture, Nicky Samuel, is surely in her sixties now.

Nicky Samuel was the wife of Nigel Waymouth, who owned Granny Takes A Trip, probably the grooviest boutique on the King's Road. She was Ossie Clark's best customer, and modeled his clothes. The above picture, taken after Ossie's show at her house at 28 Mallord Street in Chelsea (built for the painter Augustus John, and used as his studio), gives a sense of her irrepressible high spirits. The early seventies were sexy, and Nicky was glowing with it this night.

I can't find any information about her. I know she modeled, and this amazing picture of her in another incredible Celia Birtwell print (shot by Norman Parkinson), appeared in the December 1972 Vogue (British edition):
Just lovely.

Both these pics were taken from Judith Watt, Ossie Clark 1965–74, London: V&A Publications, 2003.

The King of The King's Road

• Judith Watt. Ossie Clark 1965–74. London: V&A Publications, 2003.

Produced in conjunction with a retrospective exhibition of Ossie Clark’s life and clothes at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which ran from 15 July 2003 to 2 May 2004. The book was designed by Vaughan Oliver at V23 (of 4AD Records renown).

Ossie Clark was an exotic bird. Unjustly forgotten in the roll call of Swinging Sixties fashion designers, he was one of the most significant figures moving the sixties forward into the seventies. Hugely popular with the society set and the rock’n’roll aristocracy in the years leading up to punk, he dressed people like Bianca Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, Jerry Hall, and Gala Mitchell (who appears on the back of Lou Reed’s Transformer), and consorted with the likes of Bryan Ferry, David Hockney, and Anthony Price. Perhaps most notably he designed Mick Jagger's ridiculous white catsuit that he wore during the infamous 1972 US tour.

While Clark's full flowering came in the early 70s, he was a key figure in the mid-sixties as well. Even earlier, as seen here in 1961, as a student in the early part of the decade, at the Royal College of Art in Manchester, he was foreshadowing the decade that hadn't really started yet; his hair is pre-Beatles but her skirt is pure Mary Quant (years before Mary Quant):

By the mid-sixties Ossie was a superstar, in Alice Pollock's King's Road shop Quorum, and in Vogue, as with this magnificent quilted coat (on Chrissie Shrimpton); as usual, Ossie was quite the visual sensation himself, almost as bold to look at as his clothes:

But his real genius was not in Swinging London but later, in the Baroque sixties, and well into the Glam Rock seventies, when he started producing his classic flowing bias cuts using the prints made by his wife, Celia Birtwell. Her botanic prints were breathtaking and possibly an even greater achievement than the perfectly-cut garments themselves. Just look at this blouse, from 1969:

Ossie Clark's story doesn't end well, like a lot of sixties stories; drug abuse, divorce, bankruptcy, exile, and a sad end in 1996, when he was murdered by his male lover. But for this amazing decade, he made some of the prettiest clothes anyone has ever seen. This book is a beautiful tribute.

Next up: a brief look at one of Ossie's friends and favorite models, Nicky Samuel.

The Human Race Must Be Exterminated

Here’s the incontrovertible proof.

Wordle

Here's what the front page of this blog looks like when run through Wordle.

What eggs are chickens!!

What eggs are chickens!!
Originally uploaded by Tim Kiser

One of my favorite Flickrites is the wry Mr. Kiser, who travels around Middle America unearthing treasures, like this pair of billboards. I could make any number of jokes here, but none of them would approach the wonderfulness of these signs, so I'll just let you enjoy them.

Take an hour and flip through the rest of Tim's stream, too. It's very charming. His grammar is a little shaky at times, but his eye is keen and his perceptions faultless.

All Dressed Up

• Jonathon Green. All Dressed Up: The Sixties and the Counterculture.. London: Pimlico, 1999 [1998].

The book was retracted immediately publication when the author was sued (successfully) by George Harrison of The Beatles and Caroline Coon of the charitable group Rescue for stating that the latter had solicited donations from the former with sex. Apparently that's not true. I don't care either way; but I agree with the author when he says in a new introduction to the paperback edition: "too many individuals, famous for fifteen minutes when that cliché was still fresh, have become modern-day Miss Haveshams, clinging forever to their once relevant past." A bit petulant, perhaps (and George had a bit more than fifteen minutes), but true of sixties partisans nonetheless, hanging onto the past.

Ah, but what a past it was. This is an English book, so it's an English, and particularly a London, perspective (with a dash of May 1968 in Paris). Many of the central Sixties ideas and expressions came originally from America, but the English Sixties was quite different than the American one. Their pop music was very different, of course, and they had "Swinging London", and they didn't have the JFK-RFK-MLK assassinations and Kent State and Chicago 1968, except second-hand.

To an American, the English story isn't as well-known; we know about the Beatles, and the Mods and Rockers, but who in the US has ever seen a copy of IT, or has ever heard of the Angry Brigade or Michael (not Malcolm) X?

This book is a comprehensive overview of the English threads that make up that thing called "The Sixties" -- not the actual Sixties, but the Sixties of the mind. I'm still waiting for the book that tells the whole story, wherein the top-selling pop singers are Dean Martin and Englebert Humperdinck, not the Beatles and the Stones; wherein new car models like the Mini and the Ford Falcon matter more than the avant-garde galleries; and wherein the creation of a new mass market of JC Penney clothes and color TV and explicit sex in popular books and movies matter more than what which radical leftist said to which other radical leftist in some dingy commune. This isn't that book.

But "The Sixties" was a real thing, and as Green points out, it still reverberates today -- in 2008 as much as a decade earlier when this book was written. It's not just the familiar names, like Margaret Thatcher (a bluenose art censor from Finchley, among other things), Mary Whitehouse (Christianist loon morals advocate), and Richard Branson (alternative-press hanger-on); it's the whole zeitgeist of the times. It still gets people riled up, as former 60s people are firmly in charge of major institutions on both sides of the Atlantic (and both sides of the intellectual divide). The 60s still matter, and it's this version of the decade that Green covers so well.

He starts by covering the antecedents: starting with the Teddy Boys, who were sort of the Edwardian English version of American bikers without the motorcycles, and the Beats, who were wholly American but had a major impact in England and Scotland. That impact is spelled out here, from Jim Haynes's Edinburgh poetry bookshop to the famous poetry reading at Albert Hall in 1964, which was sort of a coming-out party for all the freaks in London (who quickly made whatever fragments were left of the Beats obsolete). His chapter on the Mods is very good; he's very finely tuned into fashion ideas, and grasps the "three waves" of Mod, with only the last, greatly watered down, being the sort of Mods who made the papers.

This is as good as source as you're likely to find for the main political threads of the decade, beginning with the CND marches in the 1950s, which accomplished little but were a model for all of the street action that followed, including the events in Paris in 1968. He charts the rise of the rather plodding New Left, and its split into various flavors of Revolutionary Socialism on the one hand, and boring, accomodationist left-Labour on the other -- which nonetheless accomplished a great deal of good, through the efforts of Roy Jenkins and Lord Annan in breaking down some of the bleak old morality code. And he also shows how the alternative-society freaks paid little attention to either side, preferring instead to make their own mistakes in the realm of dope, rock and roll, and fucking in the streets.

The art world played a major role in creating the atmosphere of newness and fresh creation, primarily filtered through the galleries of Robert Fraser and Barry Miles. Miles's Indica gallery was as much a part of the London scene as the Scotch of St. James or the UFO Club, and artists like Peter Blake set the visual tone much as did Mary Quant in fashion.

The spread of pot and LSD, the famous censorship trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover, gay rights, women's rights, the growth of the alternative press, and the burgeoning rock scene, so different than the old-school sharkskin-suited promoters like Larry Parnes, with wild-eyed hippies putting on light shows and free (or not so free) festivals on a Woodstock-like scale; it's all in here.

Green covers an astonishing amount of detail here, with dozens of obscure names and movements filling in around the obvious ones. He doesn't shy away from ridiculousness; perhaps the emblematic episode of the 60s in Britain was the utter chaos of Apple, where the biggest pop group of all threw away millions of pounds in spectacularly insane fashion rather than give them to the taxman. The Beatles are of course at the center of many of the stories here, but the more interesting ones are on the periphery, in the offices of IT and the rotting hulks of pirate radio.

Green is good at showing how the impact of the actions of a relatively few innovators (or blowhards) on the wider society. The horror that Carnaby Street almost immediately became (so reminiscent of the Haight-Ashbury, though in very different ways) sprang from the genuine creativity of early tailoring stars:

[...] home of such traditional 'gents outfitters' as Aquascutum and Austin Reed, it was a block down from Newburgh Street where ex-photographer Bill Green, trading as 'Vince', had a decade earlier set up London's first ever outlet for chic young men. His original patrons were the gay musclemen, airing their pecs round the corner at the Marshall Street Baths, but Vince soon found itself selling to a wider market--not the teens (they couldn't afford its prices)--but Peter Sellers, Lionel Bart, John Gielgud and similar showbiz celebs. It was the start of something big. Green's star faded by the late Fifties (he moved into catering) but a replacement did all he had and more. John Stephen, a refugee Glaswegian who learned his trade in the military department of Moss Bros., set up his first business in 1957, working in Beak Street under the name of 'His Clothes'. When His Clothes was accidentally burnt down he shrugged, and moved round the corner to Carnaby Street. And where the older generation still went to Vince, Stephen attracted a new breed: Cliff Richard, Tommy Steele: the pop stars. He undercut Vince, putting immediacy and excitement in the place of traditional tailoring standards. Attuned to the ephemerality of 'youth culture' he drew in the young, including--at first--the Mod exquisites. As Nik Cohn explained 'There were ... ploys, lots of gimmicks and publicity stunts. But this was all embellishment. Underneath the central equation was that every time you walked past a John Stephen window, there was something new and loud in it, and when you counted your money you found you could afford it.' By the end of 1961 Stephen had four shops of his own and his imitators--Donis, Domino Male--had opened in Carnaby Street. They had a new name: the boutique. Originally it had meant a store within a store, dealing the latest fashions. It was a bit Frenchified, a bit camp, but no one objected to this little tribute to Carnaby Street's gay origins.

Carnaby Street truly took off in 1963, the year of Beatlemania, a brief interregnum in which the Establishment believed that it could grab 'youth' and consign its eccentricities to the dump-bins of commercial exploitation. Two years later it was dead, a tacky carnival Midway full of Union Jacks and hucksters, inflated rates fattening the local council coffers, tourists blocking its passage as they searched for the real-life version of what they'd read in Time.

Of course, the Establishment COULD grab youth and consign its eccentricities, etc., and just a couple of years later I was having my mother buy me tragic versions of these fashions, filtered through The Monkees' TV show, at JC Penney and Frederick & Nelson in Bellevue Square. But that's another story. This story is wonderfully told, though, in this book, whatever frigging George Harrison thought. It expands wonderfully upon the brilliant essay that opens Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, and makes a nice sixties companion to Groovy Bob: The Life and Times of Robert Fraser by Harriet Vyner, Quant by Quant by Mary Quant, and the more mainstream period history Run It Down The Flagpole by Bernard Levin (or his later The Pendulum Years), to name a representative sample. I liked it at least as much as I did Shawn Levy's poppier, less political Ready, Steady, Go!. But good luck finding it; I had to get mine through Interlibrary Loan.

The Birth of The New

Doug Englebart using the chord keyboard

On December 9, 1968, a researcher at the Stanford Research Institute named Doug Englebart gave a presentation at the Fall Joint Computer Conference that introduced many of the computing concepts that we now take for granted, fifteen years before anyone in the general public ever heard of them. Englebart and his remote colleagues Don Andrews and Jeff Rulifson in Menlo Park (home of SRI, 30 miles south of San Francisco, where the demo was held) showed the first computer mouse to the public there, the first rasterized (drawing-capable) video monitor, the first live teleconferencing, the first inter-user messaging system (forerunner of email), the first use of hypertext (forerunner of the web) and even a rudimentary form of what became the internet.

Doug Englebart speaking

This demonstration was later called "the mother of all demos" by author Steven Levy, a phrase which has become rather oddly famous, because while it's more or less true, it's also kind of dumb. But nevertheless.

Console with chord device, keyboard, and mouse

Remember, this was before history. The personal computer had been developed; no PC, no Mac. No one on earth had a computer in his or her home; if you wanted to do computing, you went to a computer center at your university or business and sat at a console which probably didn't even have a text-only monitor; your only display was a TTY, a printer with a roll of pin-feed paper. No graphics of any kind, except for early forms of ASCII art (pictures made from typed letters). No windows, no icons, no menus, no nothing except a command line waiting for your typed, punch tape, or punch card input.

I used one of these computers, with punch tape and a TTY, in high school in 1973; I don't remember what model it was, but it was a mainframe belonging to the Dallas School District, and we connected to it via an antique modem at probably 50 baud. We used cartons and cartons of pin-feed paper, writing our stupid little BASIC programs (I remember helping write a not-very-successful bowling game) and printing out our terrible ASCII art. I remember getting yelled at (not too forcefully) for using too much expensive connect time. Of course, there was nothing like an internet nodes anywhere near us then. That was five years AFTER Englebart's demo of technology that was to become so important decades later, but totally unimaginable to us hobbyist fiddlers.

Don Andrews demonstrating the potentiometer mouse; note the cord traveling the wrong way, under the hand

Englebart changed everything on this day. While his vision for computing was ultimately unsuccessful -- he didn't accept the emergence of the PC in the 1970s, for instance -- his ideas were unusually revolutionary and ahead of their time even in an industry marked by rapid advances. The mouse didn't really catch on until the Apple Macintosh in 1984, for instance. The internet, then called ARPANET, didn't come online until 1969, and wasn't opened to the public outside of universities and research companies until the late 1980s. But it was all here at this demo, at least in part.

Programmer Jeff Rulifson

I knew most of this from reading books. What I didn't know is that video exists of this historic event. You can watch it here (streaming Real Audio with good descriptive text) or here (Flash). Finding this video is rather mind-blowing; to me it's like finding video of the apple falling on Newton's head. This is the birth of a new world, even if no one but a thousand geeks knew about it for another decade. It's probably the most boring video in the world to most people, but if you're interested in seeing where all this internet stuff came from, this is the source. At least watch the first mouse segment here if you can.

This post is illustrated with some screenshots I grabbed. This is real nerd action the way it should be!

My New Favorite Car: Panhard Dyna Z

Panhard Dyna Z by David Bally

These were made from 1954 to 1959 in France. Aluminum body! Suicide doors! Front wheel drive. 50 HP from 851cc. More techno-gibberish here at Wikipedia and Citroënnët; really, I just care about the gorgeous streamlined shape of the thing. French cars are so beautiful.

Here's another shot of Dave Bally's friends' car, which he graciously allowed me to share:


Panhard Dyna Z by David Bally

Jerks

I know I haven't been a very good blogger lately. I'm sorry. I'll have some stuff soon.

Today I was emptying the food waste into the yard waste bin and I noticed that one of the young families that frequently park in the neighborhood to go to the zoo had left us a little present in Nancy's beautiful garden:

Two dirty diapers.

Thanks a lot, assholes.

Taking Away Their Toys

I'll just pretend to post this here for the benefit of my readers (uh-huh) who don't read Slog, and not because I'm blowing my own horn again.

You may have heard about the recent NPR broadcast about the little boy who wants to play with dolls and wear pink, whose parents, on the advice of his psychiatrist, have taken a harsh approach to making him behave like a proper little boy and stop with this horrible fag nonsense. It's a heartbreaking story. Dan Savage Slogged it, and as usual I had to comment. My comment was adjudged to be good enough to get another Slog front page. Of course, I'm chuffed, but I also think it bears repeating. I'm proud of what I wrote:

Look, people. The boy isn’t asking to go in and have his willie chopped off. He wants to play with dolls. He wants to identify as a girl for a while. That doesn’t mean that he going to be transgendered when he grows up. Maybe he will, maybe he won’t. Why don’t you deal with that when it comes up—or maybe let HIM deal with it? Then?

Nobody has to make a final, permanent, irrevocable decision when they’re six.

In the meantime, though, torturing him by taking away his toys and, most importantly, implanting in his mind the idea that WHO HE IS IS WRONG, is a really, really bad idea.

Nobody cares if you’re squicked out by gender reassignment surgery. Nobody cares. This isn’t ABOUT gender reassignment surgery. It’s about a little boy who is being turned against himself.

And, really, even if you think the surgery is “as bad as plastic surgery”, the correct response is—as always—”then don’t have it.” Adults who think it’s right for them have the right to have it EVEN IF THEY’RE WRONG. Even if they’re “making a terrible mistake.” It’s none of your damn business. And, you know, there is a large number of people for whom it absolutely WAS the right decision, and if they squick you out, it’s your damn loss, not theirs. I don’t have a problem with it, and I embrace my transgendered friends every bit as much as my gay and straight ones.

But that’s nothing to do with this tragic little boy. Maybe it will be someday. You don’t know, I don’t know, Dr. Mengele there doesn’t know, HE doesn’t know. He’s a little kid. Let him play with his toys.

I didn't say it there, but I'll say it here: if bullies beat up your kid, and you side with the bullies, I don't understand you at all.

Photo of pink child's coffins (by Maurycy Gomulicki) swiped from Pingmag.

They're On To Me

How do they know? It hasn't even happened yet. Way to rub it in, guys. Jeez.

No, I'm not going to send it in!

To top it off, Julio Franco, who was long the only major-league baseball player older than me, retired from professional baseball the other day. He was playing for the Quintana Roo Tigers in the Mexican league, which doesn't count; but last year, in September, he was with the Atlanta Braves, which does. You're not old as long as at least one guy older than you is still playing. Franco was that player for four blessed years, ever since Jesse Orosco hung 'em up in 2003. Thanks, Julio!

Bullshit!

Yes, it's sticking. Yes, we (and a hundred other families) have a giant yard sale tomorrow covering hundreds of blocks.

Snow on April 17th is BULLSHIT!

Boston ball grounds - 1912 (panorama #3), 9/28/12 (LOC)

Boston ball grounds - 1912 (panorama #3), 9/28/12 (LOC)
Originally uploaded by The Library of Congress

This is part of a panoramic series of pictures of brand-new Fenway Park in Boston in 1912. It's from a glass-plate negative taken by an unidentified photographer for the Bain News Service -- possibly George Grantham Bain himself, I wouldn't know. The Library of Congress has it up on their Flickr page.

This particular view shows the left field bleachers, the little jog next to them, and the famous Green Monster, the biggest wall in baseball, in the days before it was green; it's covered with advertisements.

The bizarre thing about this is the six or seven rows of seats in front of the wall. These must have been insanely dangerous, being closer than 300 feet to the plate (the wall is 304 feet, whatever lie the Red Sox are telling these days), and well within right-handed line drive range.

I'm guessing that's why these seats were removed. I've never seen or heard of them before. Left field at Fenway in front of the wall is famous not for seats but for "Duffy's Cliff", a slope of grass running up to the wall, an unprecedented (and never repeated) ballpark feature that confused and tumbled opposing fielders until 1934 when it was leveled. Duffy Lewis, the master of climbing this mountain, was the left side of Boston's incredible outfield of the teens.

There's a shot of his centerfielder Tris Speaker right after this in the series; Speaker is seriously on the short list of possibly greatest players ever -- a hitter comparable to Ty Cobb, and arguably the greatest defensive centerfielder ever (though I'll argue for Gary Pettis, a player I've actually seen).

There's no better place to watch a baseball game than Fenway Park. I know Safeco Field and all the modern parks have the brick and retro gewgaws that make numbskull traditionalists swoon, plus all the modern amenities like adequate toilets and edible food (or so they claim), but there's nothing like sitting in a hundred-year-old park and seeing the mound that Babe Ruth pitched off of and the grass Speaker and Ted Williams patrolled.

Unlike modern stadiums, the "rake" or angle of the stands is sharp, which raises the fans up but keeps them close. The views at Fenway are incomparable; you simply cannot get that close in a modern ballpark. For comparison, the closest row of seats in New Comiskey ballpark in Chicago is further away from the action than the furthest row at Old Comiskey, built in the same era as Fenway here.

On the downside, all the seats in the right field stands face not towards the plate but towards the field, resulting in about 10,000 cricks in 10,000 necks on a typical day, but hey, you can't have everything. The atmosphere is worth it.

Muscat Grapes Are Here!

My favorite table grapes are finally in stores. Yeah, yeah, they grow them in Chile or someplace and fly them here, but I don't care. They're sweeter and richer than regular grapes, with a honey-flower-citrus ping that I can't get enough of.

These are the same grapes they make Moscatel from, along with loads of other varieties, usually sweet. Asti sparkling wines from Italy are made from muscat grapes. I like 'em right off the stem. Check your supermarket.

A Fenny For Your Thoughts

I like booze. It's no secret. Love the stuff, and I've tried everything. When I go places I try to find exotic liquors, like the bottle of Suze (a gentian-and-vanilla flavored aperitif) I brought home from Paris, or the Xtabentun (Mayan honey-and-anise liquor) I enjoyed in Mexico.

Today I discovered a new one, from Goa in India. It's called Fenny, or Feni, and it's distilled from the cashew apple.


The cashew apple, as I also discovered today on Slog, is a false fruit that grows behind the true fruit (which bears the seed, or cashew nut as it's called) of the cashew tree.

I've never seen or heard of it before, and I'm quite certain it's never been sold in this God-forsaken state with its repressive licensing laws and state liquor stores. I don't understand why the State of Washington is in the retail business, selling me booze, and telling me what kinds I'm allowed to have and what days I can buy it on; or why the only place within a mile of where I'm sitting that can sell me ANYTHING stronger than beer or wine closes in FIVE MINUTES. Hmm, perhaps that's a rant for another day.

While poking around the web, though, looking for an online seller (whose deliveries would be illegal but unlikely to be traced or stopped) I did discover this Indian exporter, who praises his "Fantasy" brand Fenny with the words "it has been designed to manulise your string of ecstasy" and "you will find it hard to resist howling in to one now and then." Which is exactly what I like to hear.

"Howling into one" doesn't make any sense, but it's the best description of what happens to me and a bottle of 40-proof I've ever heard.

Tickets to Goa are out of my price range. If this was a perfect world, someone would tell me in the comments where I can order this stuff online. I won't hold my breath.