peacedividend is full of eels

Can someone tell me what this is? It's been growing over the top of our fence for over a month, now. The other side of the fence is home to a multigenerational Chinese family, only the kids speak English, and I don't think they know a lot about gardening. Plus it would seem weird asking through the fence; we're pretty private around here, only talk on the sidewalks and at Halloween. But I'm totally baffled, have never ever seen one of these before. I wonder if it'd be growing differently if it were resting on the ground.

So I was up on Haight Street today (Hoopty, I think I barrelled right past you at Ashbury. sorry.), and as I was getting into my car I was approached by this gang of young men. They wore shirts and ties, and carried backpacks. I groaned, quietly, and shut my door before they could say anything. Too late: one of them was an eager little guy, and started up his patter right through the window. "I'll come over to your side," he said, and I'm all "No, you won't," but yes, he did. "Roll down your window," he smiled (he was hunkered down to Miata height), "I won't mug you." I regarded him, and thought "Duh, I could slice and dice and cook you for dinner, little man," but rolled the window down to humor him a moment.

I called out "Are you going to ask me to accept Jesus Christ as my Personal Lord and Savior?"
He wrinkled his brow, blinked a couple times, and looked at me.

"Well," he said, "you should..." then he snapped back to normal. "But that's not what I'm here to talk to you about. I'm like to interest you in a little wholesale promotion; we're selling these..." My window was up before he could slide the merchandise into my lap. I was halfway down the block before I started cracking up, but man oh man the look on that kid's face was priceless. I think I may have shown him his calling.

Get ready for another El Nino year:

The creature, officially known as an olive ridley sea turtle, moseyed a little ways up the beach and plopped down as Walder stood, mouth agape, fumbling for his camera. He managed to snap about 25 pictures before the turtle shuffled back into the water and swam off, as if nothing was out of the ordinary.

The word of the day is S A T I R E.

I have gotten so many emails, mostly from friends who still go to protests*, not getting that the Dow-Chemical site is a leftier-than-thou hoax. It is not actual Dow Chemical(tm) propoganda.

...cops found Ryder carrying a remarkable array of painkillers (liquid Demerol, Percodan, Vicodin, Morphine Sulfate, etc.)

That sounds like every junkie I knew in the 80s, almost precisely. Except there's no mention of klonipin or valium. Who is her dealer, sheesh!

(later) No, wait. She didn't just have valium, she had liquid diazepam. And some Endocet to wash down the vicoprofen. That's just silly. Geez, Winona, get a PDR!

Harvey then "tried to have sex with the front of the van,'' Green said. "He was rubbing against the front of my van. He laid down and had sex with the pavement, kind of pushing up against the pavement.'' Harvey then switched from being "very happy to being very mean and angry-looking.''

better than puppets:

Dow Toxics
Once profitability is on the line, our moral responsibility becomes clear. Dow Toxics's global Public Affairs organization offers many opportunities for a career that will challenge you to extend beyond your reach.

Oh how I wish I got local cable access. Darn you, Directv, I want kittypr0n!

Unionized strippers picket for more booty
"Two, four, six, eight, pay us more to gyrate," they shouted.

Dear Diary,
I had the weirdest dream last night:
It took the Japanese scientists 90 minutes to graft the rat's brain into the thigh. (It) grew and the mouth of the baby rat even moved as if trying to drink milk...

Today is World AIDS Day

I remember when my very first friend got sick.

They say it's good luck to see a motorized condom with a headlight in its tip on the 1st of the month.

I had this dream this morning in which there was sort of a fake civil war going on.

This year we are doing something revolutionary:

I'm so touched: I received an invitation to Santacon Cymru
New Orleans was fabulous, last year, and I'm sure Iain and friends will make Cymru as memorable as London was.
But it looks like we're grounded.

U.S. Copyright Office, FAQ
58. How do I protect my sighting of Elvis?
Copyright law does not protect sightings. However, copyright law will protect your photo (or other depiction) of your sighting of Elvis.

"I got out of my car and he just came after me. I threw my keys at it, my hair clip," she said. "It chased me around my car. It was hysterical. Then the police came."

Are you pondering what I'm pondering?

....if conducted carelessly (such experiments) could lead to outcomes that are "too horrible to contemplate." He gave as an extreme example the possibility that a mouse making human sperm might accidentally be allowed to mate with a mouse that had made its eggs from human cells.

Whereas my TiVo thinks I need The Sex Monster three times a week and twice on Sunday.

Him: Honey? We ran out of stones and leaves
Her: Oh, can't you just use the wall?

It's hot outside again today. You know what that means.

I dreamt last night that I was wearing an old, beat up, down parka with frayed sleeves. The cuffs had been sewn, badly, three or four times over. Brendan and I went to a store, and I tried to buy index cards but could only find those little plastic sleeves that people used to slide over Rolodex cards (still do, if those people work at a certain retail clothing giant). I took them to the register, along with the 1/2 empty (1/2 full!) bottle of Aquafina water I'd been carrying, and this sketchy old lady took like a year working on our transaction. She ended up charging me for the water, too, and was going to charge me for the jacket til I pointed out that we'd entered the store with both these items.

We finally got away from her, and back to the action-adventure part of the dream where I was rescuing enslaved children from the second floor of the building.

Why Oil Sheiks Love A Good Hummer

Well, not exactly. I have written perhaps 3/4-4/5 of a novel, 50,651 words of it between 11/1 and today. I actually do hope to have barfed out a complete first draft by the end of the month, because man oh man I can't wait to go back and really develop these characters and fix some of the events in the sequence that gets our plucky heroine from Point Nowhere to Home. She's had a great time, this month, but she's not quite there yet.

Thanks for egging me into signing up, Mig, and for being so crazy prolific as to keep me writing at least every weekday. Now I think I'm going to go read a little bit.

Dental nightmares are the most horrific I can think of. I used to have them all the time, thankfully not in a few years now. They're just the worst, especially when they come true.

Waiting for the elevator in a garage today, we neatly avoided Death By Britney Clones.

For $46.00, Neiman Marcus will sell you a xmas ornament emblazoned "Fuck or Treat."
Do they have a wishlist?

No, I was right the first time: it totally is earthquake weather.

Playtarot
My new favorite.

"I don't want any faggots on my team," Hearst told a Fresno newspaper reporter, adding, "I know this might not be what people want to hear, but that's a punk. I don't want any faggots in this locker room."

Mmyeah. That may or may not play in Fresno (CA), but not so much with your ticket-holders here at home. Or, say, in Miami, where the hope this is that one day this is true nation-wide. But right now, it's the sort of thing that only sees a reaction three weeks after the fact. No letters to the editor, no email fwds; Fresno Bee readers just went with it.

Spasmodic has a fabulous new design.
Go peek in on my better half!

We also thank God for the blessings of freedom and prosperity; and we acknowledge the importance of faith in our lives.

There's a thread building on the wKen show about the modern prosecution of laws that are based on archaic religious mores (and flat out prurience, in London, but this is about America so never mind). A conflict arose when some friends assumed that by wKen's postulation (that the cops in his past home state, TX, are behind the times for fining a woman for owning sex toys) he actually meant that all Texans are stupid and all Californians (his other home state) are better than everyone else. It's been widely illustrated there that every state (especially LA, which shares the focus of wKen's discussion), and probably every country, has some funky laws on the books. But they're not always based on religion, and they're always not prosecuted.

Of course, we should all just be grateful we're not in Nigeria or Belarus, both of which are in constantly in the news because of their religious laws and the mass violence supported by the lawmakers against religious minorities. There it's not just a question of giving a blow job, or buying alchohol or motor vehicles on Sundays, it's more of a problem if bear a child out of wedlock, think beauty pageants are o.k., or are Hindu or Baptist Evangelical.

We all have it pretty good, but really we haven't come that far on the issue of Church vs. State, as a nation, since 1620.

"We do believe the population is more at risk this time of year than other times," Mr. Benepe deadpanned. "But we haven't seen any people walking around in the woods with blunderbusses..."

As if rabbit's feet weren't enough: neuticle keychains

Spiders in a dream are a sign of general good luck; to kill one signifies good news; if it was spinning it augurs approaching money; climbing a wall it's a harbinger of success in all that concerns you most deeply.

I had this dream that I was visiting a house, and someone in the house had trapped a bunch of spiders in a cage. It wasn't right, clearly, so I was going to rescue them. I picked up the cage, and saw that this one poor spider was zealously throwing himself at the door of the cage, trying to escape. He was so worked up, I set it back down and opened the door. He came barrelling towards me across this tabletop. He didn't stop when he ran into me, just kept going, trying to burrow into me. I was wearing a belt or something, and he sort of battered at it, so powerfully that had to work to stay standing, and felt this "shukashukashuka" vibration.

I woke up, and when I went back to sleep I had nicer dreams, still with spiders.

I have a tiny bump on my belly this morning.

I'm in the home stretch, on the first draft of this novel. I've re-done the outline probably 4 or 5 times. Characters have surprised me with the basic motivations behind their behavior. Social entanglements have shifted, and a web of obligations and priveledge has been reified then killed off by the protagonist. She's doing pretty well, and might actually make it to a conclusion as satisfying for the reader as for the character. It's conceivable that I might even let my mom read it.

The hardest part is stopping myself from going back and editing right away, before finishing the big brain dump. I find myself preoccupied with cleaning up certain early, or even middle, bits immediately. They embarrass the better writer I've become and look like just what they are: exercises in removing the cobwebs that have coated my atrophied storyteling muscles.

Doing something for the first time is hard, when you're hypercritical. I just have to trust that I'll live up to my trend of following through and achieving the standards I set. There will be plenty of time for alchemy when I have finished spitting out the basic elements. Yeah. OK. Back to it, then.