Good news!

Boston used to have a pretty decent commercial-alternative radio station, WFNX. Then I moved to Germany. On a visit back to the states in May 2001, I noted that 'FNX had turned to crap. More specifically, it had turned into an all-boy corporate cock rock extravaganza, and apparently they'd lobotomized their DJs to boot.

'FNX is coming back. That link is a bit fawning, as it goes to a blurb by the Boston Phoenix, which is owned by the same media company as the FNX radio network, but the writer does disclose. Sort of. If you think the word "flagship" actually means anything, that is.

Now if only the commercial-alternative radio frequency of my youth, 92.7 (formerly WDRE) out of Long Island, would return to form. The playlist at the "new" 92.7 could be worse, I suppose, and the website includes DRE history like the shreek of the week. Though I'm tempted to re-order the list chronologically for 1989-1993.

It happened to me in November, and it happened again this week. I got so stressed out I became physically ill. After a few days of just sleeping, eating, reading, and watching non-war-oriented television, I'm feeling better now.

I'm burnt out on the war. I hope I'm wrong about everything, I suspect I'm probably not, and there's nothing I can do about it besides continue to vote for candidates who will handle international issues better than the ass-clown we're stuck with now.

In eight weeks, I'll be on the road to LA. I'll probably be in Ohio by now. It's time.

Our relatives think we're never coming back from California. I think they're just hoping we finally settle down, and they no longer care where. We'll see.

Okay, so it's not fair to bury a big personal announcement in a political rant no one will read.

I'm moving to Los Angeles. Soon. Rick, the cat and I are getting in our (the bank's) new (used, 1999) car on May 22 and hitting the road, arriving in SoCal on June 2 if all goes according to plan.

Kiss my ass, New England winters!

Since I'm an equal-opportunity curmudgeon, a comment about protestors from an anti-war friend of mine in San Francisco:

What pisses me off is that most likely fewer than half of the people you see in all these protest marches voted in the last presidential election. I have zero respect for people who protest and don't vote. I hope 4 years of Bush will convince radical lefties that an unexciting center-left democrat will be like re-electing JFK after 4 years of this clown. All those people who told me 2 years ago there was no difference between Gore and Bush so there was no point in voting need to suck my left nut.

I'll agree with that, even though I voted Nader. (Hey, I did so in Massachusetts where it doesn't matter if you vote for Bill the Cat -- the Dem will win those electoral votes). For 2004, I'm going to campaign hard for whoever our Democratic choice is, even if it's someone repugnant like Lieberman. 'Course I'd prefer Howard Dean.

More fuel on the I-hate-everyone fire: the anti-war email forwarded to me by a friend which links to a website mentioning "George William Bush." Nice credibility there, doves. (It's "Walker," for the record.)

I'm not saying I'm pro-Iraq-war. But it would be nice if the left got its shit together at some point in my lifetime. And yes, I'm going to start doing something about it again as soon as I get out of Geographic Transition Mode and can commit to Dean in 2004 in L.A.

The media has been going crazy wondering if Saddam Hussein is alive or dead. Valid question, but we should be asking the same thing about Dick Cheney.

Partial googlism results for "Where is Dick Cheney?"
dick cheney is a conservative without compassion
dick cheney is merely vice president
dick cheney is not dead yet
dick cheney is really in need of peace in the middle east
dick cheney is not the only member of his family to have been given a high
dick cheney is touring england this week
dick cheney is a liar
dick cheney is george w
dick cheney is a jesse helms republican who has voted repeatedly against working families
dick cheney is evil
dick cheney is person??
dick cheney is the main white house bridge between the pentagon and the state department
dick cheney is relying on our cultural amnesia to wipe away his record on south africa
dick cheney is no doubt a man of some intellect
dick cheney is at
dick cheney is hiding there's no telling what might pop out if the gao sues uncle dick
dick cheney is hard to pin down
dick cheney is also coming under increasing pressure
dick cheney is a chronic abuser of women
dick cheney is that he has a bad heart
dick cheney is still mostly being kept in secret locations
dick cheney is chief executive officer of halliburton company
dick cheney is a senior
dick cheney is eyeing rosalyn robinson as though she had just asked him to dance the hokey pokey
dick cheney is the perfect angel of mercy to prelude the harbinger of doom
dick cheney is lying
dick cheney is one of the ultimate washington insiders
dick cheney is at the center of the corruption of the political process
dick cheney is
dick cheney is a crook
dick cheney is right in the middle of it
dick cheney is resting at home as he adjusts to his new pacemaker and prepares
dick cheney is one of them
dick cheney is a walking time bomb; only the 'ticker' is his heart that's about ready to explode and not a real bomb involved
dick cheney is clearly the second biggest threat
dick cheney is visiting 11 middle eastern countries
dick cheney is at it again

So much for staying off the war topic. Just felt like documenting a few ways things are already going badly, in case any of my readers have turned off the news (permanently) like I did (temporarily) this weekend.

Another reason not to believe Bush's drivel that we're not going to bomb civilians: The missiles don't always even hit the right COUNTRY. I know aiming a Tomahawk missile is more complicated than throwing a baseball against the broad side of a barn, but still, this does not fill me with confidence. We're not doing so well at missing Iran, either. And remember Afghanistan, when the US bombed the Red Cross? Twice?

Further proof that I'm right about America's detachment from the bloody reality of war: the media's apparent level of shock over the first combat deaths. And now that there are American POWs in Iraq, I bet military families are real keen on how nicely we've been treating everyone at Camp X-Ray.

In case you'd forgotten: October 9, 2002. "C.I.A. Warns That a U.S. Attack May Ignite Terror." Pleasant dreams.

For the sake of my own mental health, I'm going to try and stay mostly off the war topic. But think about this: I'm 28 years old, and this is the third war I've watched on TV (Gulf War 1991, "War on Terror" 2001, and this). For most Americans, war is something that only exists on television and in newspapers, and -- here comes a seemingly unrelated public art rant -- in memorials. Memorials can be very powerful; I was quite moved by The Wall when I saw it as a teenager. Still, there's only so much any architect can do to bring home years of devastation that happened somewhere else. Living in Germany, I saw a different kind of memorial: buildings that had been bombed and intentionally not rebuilt. At first, I didn't understand. The war was so long ago! You're making it look like you just haven't gotten around to the repairs yet! Later, I understood: this is one interpretation of the idea of "never forget." As a foreigner who wasn't even born yet -- moreover, as someone who Hitler would have rounded up had I been there and alive -- I still got to step into a bombed-out church in Hamburg and feel sympathy for the average German during World War II, getting attacked on their home soil for atrocities committed by a madman they didn't all support.

What are we doing with the World Trade Center site? Why, we can't waste that valuable midtown real estate. We're rebuilding! Because if we don't, the terrorists have won!

No, I think the terrorists have won if future generations work in offices built on that site, like nothing hapened. As affected as I was by 9/11, I was 3,000 miles away at the time and it didn't really sink in until I went to the site six months later and tried to wrap my brain around that blocks-wide hole in the ground where those buildings used to be. Until I saw the work trucks on the site, so dwarfed by the size of Ground Zero that they looked like toys, like the houses you see when the plane is taking off. A nice little memorial garden or memorial statue or memorial wall in the middle of a shiny new office park is not going to cut it. We need to show our descendants -- *and absorb, ourselves* -- what war really is. It's not a nice clean thing that happens on TV. People die, cities are destroyed. The tallest buildings in the nation can come down.

Most Americans don't get this yet. We see September 11 not as an act of war (though we did, of course, go to war over it) but as an isolated act of terrorism that we must recover from by rebuilding with pride/arrogance. We don't get it. Today, in addition to all my other thoughts, I'm selfishly afraid that someone is going to try (again) to *make* us get it.

Some observations from this weekend:
* I will probably never again attend a cool enough baby shower that part of the mandatory self-introductions, right after "favorite color for spring," is "favorite swear word."
* I now know what a diaper genie is, though I sort of wish I didn't.
* The South Boston St. Patrick's Day parade had an awful lot of bagpipes. Aren't bagpipes Scottish? Am I an idiot?
* South Bostonians, possibly due to their high voter turnout and political clout, have relatively few potholes on their streets, and the boys in blue don't seem to care if they break open-container law. I expect cops wouldn't just chat pleasantly with me if I stood in the street with a Bud in *my* neighborhood. Not that I'd drink a Bud, ever, but...
* As seen on the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame inductions, Billy Joel isn't aging well, Elton John has gone insane from too much association with Disney soundtracks, Mick Jones looks silly in a suit, and Sting's voice is going. Should I know who Audioslave is? Is this like how I should know bagpipes are also Irish?
* My cat is still nuts.

So if you're pro-war, and someone sticks their tongue in your mouth, is that a "freedom kiss?"

Don't forget the Germans and Russians. That's Thousand Island dressing, rubella, and liberty cabbage, to you, bub.

(I know everyone and his mother is writing about this right now, so I'm being terribly banal, but then again, I also bitch about the weather a lot. I proudly wear the Miss Banal sash. The interesting stuff is not yet ready for wide public consumption.)

I've been back in Boston and dealing with both companies for almost a year, and I still don't know the difference between Keyspan and NStar. Even now, I have to look down at the most recent (outrageous) bill to tell you that Keyspan is my gas company. NStar is my electric company. It doesn't help that NStar also does gas, but whatever happened to names that actually let you know what the company does? Even Keyspan's full name, Keyspan Energy Delivery, doesn't really do that. What kind of energy? They could be pushing Balance bars for all I know. Just say "Keyspan Gas."

The English language. Live it. Love it. Name your companies with it. Please.

Update: Ask and ye shall receive. Jimmy Guterman kindly offered to send me the Clash video, and linked to me while he was at it (hello, friends of Jimmy). My email provider rejected the big file, but meanwhile, I found it myself. The problem was, I'd been searching on "Clash" and "tribute" and "grammy" and "grammies" and so on when all I needed to do was search on "London Calling." P2P weirdness. Even without a ton of Kazaa sources, I got the video in about 20 minutes; quite a nice change from when we'd wait hours to download a few seconds of video back in 1994 -- and invite all our friends over to the computer lab (via VAX "send") to see it, because it was video! on the computer from the Internet!

Sorry. I went into "Tell us again about the olden days, Auntie Jen" mode for a second there. Speaking of getting old, today is Ash Wednesday, the anniversary of the Boston Massacre, and the 28th birthday of supermodel Niki Taylor and superwriter Jen Muehlbauer. How is it? Better than 27. Fingers crossed.

A break (not procrastination, honest) between a long work phone call and actually doing the stuff discussed in the phone call. I'm still on that DJ Spooky talk. One of the cool things about Paul Miller is that he doesn't distinguish between high art and mass culture. At one point he mixed W.H. Auden with rap, something I wish he'd go around to all college 20th Century Poetry classes and do, just to wake everyone up. (Not that I don't dig ol' W.H.) How neat to be well-versed in all the topics he was spouting about: jazz, French philosophers, Burning Man, the Internet, etc etc etc. It makes one think a liberal arts education (he went to Bowdoin) isn't so useless after all.

On another musical note, the Foo Fighters really should have been doing "All My Life" sort of songs rather than "Learn to Fly" sort of songs all along, don't you think? And why can't I find video of the Grammy Awards Clash tribute on Kazaa?

State of the Union remix. Referenced in a talk I attended last night by Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid. He said he started the DJ Spooky persona by passing out stickers that said "Who is DJ Spooky?" just to see how many people would talk about "him" or "his" music -- sadly, the first thing I thought was "viral marketing." Shoot me. 'Course a better term for that is "meme." Speaking of memes, one of Paul Miller's friends Shepard Fairey, the guy responsible for Andre the giant has a posse. I should mention that I saw one of those stickers on my second day in Hamburg, on a lamp post right outside the bizarro executive hotel/apartment where I lived for the first month. "Surreal" does not begin to cover it...but then, does it ever?

Babble. Babble babble babble, procrastinate, babble. Procrastinate. Repeat.

I'm trying to love everybody. This century is making it awfully hard.

Not to get into Aimee Mann for the second entry in a row, but I'm ready for this to cease being one of my favorite songs.