This is brilliant, and so British:

LONDON — Trafalgar Square is a place of patriotism and past glory, of dead men posing in perpetuity on enormous pedestals. But on Monday, it became a place where Suren Seneviratne, a 22-year-old disc jockey, stood atop a 26-foot-high plinth, wearing a homemade panda costume and hyperkinetically talking on the phone…..He was the seventh participant in “One & Other,” a grand project that is meant to stretch the boundaries of sculpture by placing 2,400 people on the square’s usually vacant fourth plinth, for an hour apiece, from now through Oct. 6.

The proceedings are being broadcast in a live Webcast on http://www.oneandother.co.uk/, with a disclaimer, true to Mr. Gormley’s warnings, that “offensive content” may appear. NY Times

I tune in during the day — it’s amazing.  I don’t doubt there are some  who will be dull, evangelical,  obnoxious, political, and even repugnant, but that’s the roll of the dice — and how different is that from teevee, for example?

But the positive side is, it’s performance art at a new level (literally), with the spotlight on urban British people whose capacity to entertain goes back centuries.

Enjoy.  It’s summer.

TODAY ONLY!

AT 5 MINUTES AND 6 SECONDS AFTER 4:00,

ON THE 8TH OF JULY, THIS YEAR,

THE TIME AND DATE WILL BE:

04:05:06  07-08-09

Be prepared!  Sorry for the short notice.  Have a nice day.

Arriving home Tuesday night, I observe the thermometer in the kitchen registers 91.  It’s 90 in my bathroom (was 86 this morning, before dawn).  Is this the greatest weather, or what?  This is why I moved to Florida, not those irritatingly crisp cool autumn days that remind you unhappy relocatees of the climate you left up north.

Which, by the way, they’re enduring right now, along with clouds and rain.  And they’re miserable about it.  Go figger.  Or better yet, go back!

+++++   +++++  +++++

So what do we make of this?

An imaging study of Chinese and Caucasian people has found that their brains respond less strongly to the pain of strangers whose ethnicity is different when compared with strangers of their own race.

Such automatic neural responses don’t necessarily translate into behaviour, cautions [one cognitive scientist].. “Just because there is this difference in ACC [anterior cingulate cortex] response it doesn’t mean that we are inevitably going to behave less empathically toward the other group.” –  New Scientist

More evidence, I suspect, that essentially, we human beings are a superficial lot, prone, perhaps hard-wired, to respond to appearances.  Skin color.  Hair color.  Body weight. Big tits.  And Bigger Tits.  Oh, I already said that.

So when white people watch a pack of drooling rednecks pull some unfortunate Black man from his truck to kick him into broken helplessness, drag him over to a tree and hang him dead, it troubles them less — if at all, in the South — than if the driver of the vehicle was Caucasoid.  This help explains things a little bit.

It also helps explain how Japanese soldiers could march American prisoners across unforgiving terrain in unbearable conditions until they dropped dead of starvation,. sickness, or exhaustion, then worked survivors down to broken bones.

And then there’s Abu Ghraib.

It’s what Jean-Paul Sartre was talking about when he said “l’enfer, c’est les autres,” almost universally misinterpreted as “Hell is other people.”   What he meant was, Hell is when people turn you into “the other,” which was a concept of self he developed, that boils down to dehumanization.  You are regarded by the rest of the world, for one reason or another, as less than a human person, less a moral being, less am equal in the human race.  Wallpaper.  Background noise.  That’s hell.  Not “other people.”  Shitheaded Americans.

All that noted, I think the study over-reaches.  There are incidents aplenty of people of similar or identical racial groups treating one another horribly, not feeling (and in some cases truly enjoying) their pain.  The British and the Irish.  The Aabs and Jews.  Different flavors of Chinese, divided by faith or region.  Separate tribes of Native Americans, who treated one another as least as inhumanly as the European invaders.  Liberals and conservatives.  Women with small tits and women with big tits.  Jesus Christ, won’t I ever grow up?

Yes, we human beings are perfectly capable of ignoring our brains’ basic messages, pushing ‘way beyond our  hardwired dependence on superficial appearance, and despising members of our species on entirely different irrational grounds.  We prove every day — every hour — that our brains have quite little to do with what we feel, think, and believe.  Look around and tell me different.  Yeah.  Thought so.

But First……Is everybody headed to the Staples Center in LA for One-Glove Jack-o’s Dirt Nap festivities?  Whoa, Nellie!  Turn dem hosses around!  We have our very own Jackson Memorial right here, in downtown Miami.  See you there!

* * *

Guido is off for 10 days, out of town on a mission of mercy.  Her sister had open heart surgery, so Guido headed up to the City of Bodily Harm to assist with her recuperation.  She left Friday, leaving me in charge of our vast domain and Kingdom of Cats.

Wow!  Bachelorhood!  It’s been, well, it’s been a lifetime.  Maybe two.  I don’t what to do first.  A house near the beach all to myself, two cars, big screen teevee, refrigerators stuffed with beer and tequila in the freezer……

Well, first I mow the lawn.  Then I do the dishes.  Then I clean up the litter pans and the cat yak I discover after I damn near slip on a puddle and fracture my skull.  Then the dog needs a walk.  Go get the neighbor’s mail.  Good thing Guido left me a list.

Exhausted, I’m asleep just after dark.  That’s good, because I’m up three times in the night, awakened by the crash of furniture and household objects going over as the kittens play chase and grab-ass.  How come they don’t wake me up when Guido’s here?

So goes the weekend.  I barely have energy to empty the bottles, let alone whore around.  Plus we have all this high-tech kitchen equipment I don’t know how to use, from the oven to the coffee percolator. I haven’t had coffee in 2 days.  Dorothy, I’m decaffeinating!

Is it Monday already?  Damn, it begins anew.  I got up at 5:30 with the idea that since it’s all on me to feed 6 cats, walk the dog, clean the litter pans, restore whatever wreckage the beasts have created over night, etc., as well as what I usually do myself every morning (stumble into the crapper, moaning, and try to squeeze shit out my ass while swatting bloodthirsty mosquitoes with the same newspaper I’m simultaneously attempting to read), I better start early.

Guido doesn’t know what she’s missing.  Well, that’s wrong.  She knows exactly what she’s missing because she’s the one who does all of the above (minus my porcelain-based performance).  But she’s one of those irritating creatures who doesn’t mind getting up early, and actually likes walking the dog.  In fact, she runs with her.  I find the concept alien, even evil.

Allow me to anticipate your next insinuation, which all my friends and emailers have already expressed.  Certain I won’t hit the hook-up bars for a game of chance, you want to know how many times, and where, I’ve brought myself off since she left.  You want to know if I pulled the pud in the back yard, waxed the carrot in the kitchen, buffed the helmet in the bathroom, climaxed in the Caddy, etc.  Convinced I performed for the animals, you want to know which ones and what gender.  And you’re wondering if — make it hoping that — they’ll find me suspended from a closet door, handcuffed, a rope at my throat, and my dick swinging limply, as I channel David Carradine and Vaughn Bode.

Yeah, well I’ll let you know.

But it’s true I won’t cheat on her.  No hike on the Appalachian Trail for this happy (if temporary) bachelor.  I couldn’t if I wanted to: Guido locked up my balls and stashed them somewhere in her impregnable fortress of a kitchen.  I couldn’t find them with a GPS, a black box beeper, and a mission statement.  Even if I had the energy to search.

So if this week’s blogging is a bit scarce and scattered, you’ll understand, and hopefully, forgive.

PS   Would somebody like to invite me over for dinner?  A man needs more than grapefruit, potato chips, and sliced low-fat cheese with his beer.  Any hot young single women wanna meet Squathole?   Squathole@gmail.com.  Heh heh just kidding.  Whoops, I forgot to delete that.

“The Iraqi people will soon be dancing in the streets of Baghdad like those liberated in Kabul.” — Ken Adelman, Pentagon Defense Policy Board, 10/6/02

“You’re going to find Iraqis out cheering American troops.”  — Paul Wolfowitz, 2/23/03

“My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.”  — Dick Cheney, 3/16/03

Iraq celebrated the withdrawal of American troops from its cities with parades, fireworks and a national holiday on Tuesday as the prime minister trumpeted the country’s sovereignty from American occupation to a wary public. — NYTimes, 7/1/09

How prescient, those architects of the Iraqi war.  They accurately gauged the temperature of the Iraqi people, and determined they were starved for the liberation the destruction of their cities and institutions would bring.  They anticipated Iraqi’s embrace of slaughtered innocents, months of no power or plumbing, suicide bombings in marketplaces, faceless innocents bleeding in the streets, ritualistic decapitations, etc., all in return for the their liberation to democracy.

Even before the invasion, the Monkey Boy administration knew how beloved American troops would become.  They told us so.  They promised.  Perhaps they were unaware of the distinction between a Sunni and a Shiite, and that tribal hatreds dating back a thousand years still bubbled beneath the surface, but for certain they knew how these desperate for democracy Muslims would throw themselves in gratitude at the feet of American soldiers.

Bush and the crew knew back then that your average Iraqi, no matter his faith, wanted those weapons of mass destruction removed.  And no matter what their party affiliation, in their heart of hearts, they believed that Sadaam Hussein (Obama’s uncle, on his father’s side) must be punished for engineering 911.

And there, in yesterday’s delerious celebrations, you see the proof.  How wrong we dissenters have been!  The Defeatocrat resistance, echoing the cowardly cop-outs in France and Germany, has finally been exposed.

President Bush, we humbly apologize.  History will redeem you.

First 3 quotes from “The War in Quotes,” a Doonesbury book.  There’s more and even better stuff.  It’s fabulous reading.

Like most Americans, I don’t give a stained bedsheet who’s fucking whom.  Wanna cheat on your beloved?  Lie about it to your wife and kids?  Have a blast.  Ain’t nunna my bidness.

Here’s a study that says 54% of Americans “know of” somebody who’s been unfaithful.  I bet that’s low.  I bet more than half of those who told pollsters they don’t know are either lying, cheating themselves, or just don’t want to know.

When it comes to sex and lovers, lots of people cheat, and most of them lie.  Bee Eff Dee.

Where it chafes my nethers is when these same braying jackasses get up on their hind legs to moralize at the rest of us.  And this, of course, is precisely what the social conservatives of this nation do best and most.  They vote for the Defense of Marriage Act while they’re running behind their wives’ backs.  They push for abstinence-only programs while they’re hooking-up and knocking up.  Evidently they can’t simultaneously keep their legs open and their pie-holes shut.

And they want us to take them seriously, even give them respect!

[Gov. Mark] Sanford voted to impeach Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky saga. ….Sanford called Clinton’s behavior “reprehensible” and said, “I think it would be much better for the country and for him personally” to resign. “I come from the business side. … If you had a chairman or president in the business world facing these allegations, he’d be gone.”  Charles Blow, NY Times

That was before Marky-Mark was caught “hiking the Appalachian Trail.”

The same article cited above provides data showing that “states that went Republican in November accounted for 8 of the 10 states with the highest divorce rates in 2006.”

And “Conservatives touted abstinence-only education, which was a flop, when real sex education was needed, most desperately in red states. According to 2006 data from the Guttmacher Institute, those red states accounted for eight of the 10 states with the highest teenage birthrates.”  And my favorite:

[A]study titled “Red Light States: Who Buys Online Adult Entertainment?” …..found that subscriptions to online pornography sites were “more prevalent in states where surveys indicate conservative positions on religion, gender roles, and sexuality” and in states where “more people agree that ‘I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage.’ ”

So the good news is, the lying, cheating, back-stabbing conservatives who represent these states accurately reflect the depraved, hypocritical morals of the majority of the sanctimonious immoral frauds they represent.  At least in America’s god-fearing, bible-reading, respect for life and the sanctity of marriage red states, democracy in America is preserved.

I say god bless the Red States of America, and I say Amen.

When Government, Religion, and Capitalism Converge

On Saturday, amid the most violent clashes between security forces and protesters, Mr. Alipour was shot in the head as he stood at an intersection in downtown Tehran. He was returning from acting class and a week shy of becoming a groom, his family said. [...]

Upon learning of his son’s death, the elder Mr. Alipour was told the family had to pay an equivalent of $3,000 as a “bullet fee”—a fee for the bullet used by security forces—before taking the body back, relatives said. Mr. Alipour told officials that his entire possessions wouldn’t amount to $3,000, arguing they should waive the fee because he is a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war. According to relatives, morgue officials finally agreed, but demanded that the family do no funeral or burial in Tehran. –NY Times

“Well, okay.  Here’s your dead son.  We hacked out the bullet — might get a little messy; we’re kind of shorthanded here.  Feel free to mourn your asses off, but keep it off the streets and out of the mosques, and dump the dead body away from the city.  Have a nice day.  Allahu Akbar.”

Sounds like their model for providing care to veterans and their families was based on ours.

“He Pushed Too Hard”

Sky Saxon, the mop-haired bass player and front man for the psychedelic protopunk band the Seeds, whose 1965 song “Pushin’ Too Hard” put a Los Angeles garage-band spin on the bad-boy rocker image personified by the Rolling Stones, died Thursday in Austin, Tex. He was thought to be 71. — NY Times

Not quite Jack-o power when it comes to coverage.  I remember these guys.  They had exactly one song (which everybody remembered), but they packaged and re-packaged the sound to fill whole albums.  Same concept perfected by AC/DC.   I love the “He was thought to be 71” line.  Read the obit for the explanation.

Just Wild About Harry

Too late for Valentines or Mothers Day, but certainly a gift of love.  Which, depending on your supply of batteries, keeps on giving.

“Special effects.”   More like special ed.  Or special olympics.   Played for hours, eh?  Olympic something, anyway.

I missed this story the first time around.

A court rejected Thursday the appeal of convicted serial killer Robert Pickton, a pig farmer in Canada’s in westernmost British Columbia province sentenced to life in prison…. Pickton was found guilty in December 2007 of second-degree murder in the deaths of six women, in Canada’s worst serial-killings.

Note to kids on summer vacation: “Serial,” as in a series, one after another.  Not like Sugar Frosted Flakes or Count Chocula.

Prosecutors had argued throughout his trial that Pickton picked up drug-addicted prostitutes from Vancouver’s squalid Downtown Eastside, killed them, butchered them and disposed of their bodies by feeding them to pigs or taking them to a rendering plant.

Now for the juicy bits.

Police testified about finding three severed heads and other body parts in a freezer and buckets on Pickton’s area pig farm, human bones beneath a pig pen, and a gun with a dildo over its muzzle holding traces of DNA from Pickton and one of the women.

This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home.

This little piggy had roast beef, and THAT little piggy had a gun!

One prosecution witness testified in court that she saw Pickton butcher a woman hanging on a meat hook at his farm.  Another witness said Pickton had once described to him how he used handcuffs, a wire, and a belt to kill prostitutes, then butchered them and disposed of their bodies.

I don’t think Mr. Pickton will be addressing members of the 4-H club any time soon.  However, I’m puzzled as to why the movie hasn’t been released yet.

It’s vital to keep in mind that Canadians have their own extensive redneck population and traditions, and that love of violence, firearms, alcohol, and anything with an engine all figure in as comfortably there as they do in, well, Davie.   I don’t know a whole lot about pig farming, but I suspect it’s not a particularly genteel activity, requiring its practitioners to desensitize ‘way down, and develop a tough skin.  For all I know, comparing the feed to the fed, this sick-o felt more for his pigs than the prostitutes.

Wait, go back.  What’s with the gun and the dildo over its muzzle?

His final act:

“How do you feel, Michael?”

“Bad!  I’m bad!”

Unfortunately, the emergency vehicle was fresh out of Babb-o Sanitized Prepubescent Boy Topical Application Pads, and the pop star perished en route to the hospital.

It is said — stupidly — that tragedies come in threes.  Like tennis balls, stooges, and adulterous 2012 Republican presidential candidates, I guess.  So this week, Hollywood (CA) bid farewell to the triumvirate of Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and now Michael Jackson.  Of course, it’s only Friday.

In my own limited experience, Ed McMahon was just some aging, overgrown stooge in a rumpled suit whose job consisted of flashing his dentures during Johnny Carson’s excellent commentaries.  Evidently he did it well, or perhaps I miss the point.  When it comes to teevee, I usually do.  In fact, it’s not clear to me that teevee HAS a point.

Farrah Fawcett, in her heyday, caused me to whimper and melt, then reach for my crotch.  In this I was no different than most males of the era, who drooled lustfully in her direction, whether she appeared to them on small screen, poster, or magazine cover.  It was all in her hair, eyes, and toothy smile: her slim, unexceptional body was there in a back-up role.  Not a great pair, but what a great team!

Jack-o, on the other hand, made me ill.  Not as much as Prince did (and does), or Madonna used to.  I never liked his music, and I never understood his appeal.  His personal life was something I tried desperately to avoid hearing about, but that was about as possible as not hearing news about OJ.

Dying as they did in the first week of the summer in the first decade of the Oughts, they’ll be linked for awhile, and then forgotten.  In fact, it’s almost the weekend.  I vote for accelerating the amnesia.  Whose round is it?

PS  Selecting the right graphic for this post was pretty easy.

Welcome to Pellet City.  Please watch your step.

Washington County’s [OR] “Bunny Lady” is back in the hutch after violating a court order not to own or control animals for five years. Miriam Sakewitz, 47, was arrested again Tuesday at a hotel after an employee reported finding rabbits hopping around in her room.

Problems for Sakewitz started in October 2006 when police found and confiscated nearly 250 rabbits in her home, including about 100 dead ones in freezers and refrigerators. Police said she broke into the facility where the survivors were being cared for…and stole most of them back. Authorities found her a few days later with eight live rabbits and two dead ones in her car. Another 130 were recovered at a nearby horse farm.

She was placed on five years probation, banned from owning or controlling animals and was told not to go within 100 yards of a rabbit.  Yahoo News

Holy Wabbit Twax, Elmer.  You’d expect somebody with this many rabbit’s feet to have better luck, y’know?  Better than her sense of smell, anyway.

Trying to visualize a refrigerator stuffed with dead rabbits, I don’t like what I see.  Is there room for the milk and fresh veggies in there along with the decaying carcasses?  Cottontails among the melon balls?  Paws in the peanut butter?  A rabbit can grow pretty big, and even mid-sized thumpers, multiplied by 100, add up to a crowd. Especially in a refrigerator.

I like the two dead ones in the car, too.  This is after she breaks into the rescue facility and steals them all back.  That’s when the hammer came down.  Five year’s probation and a restraining order.  They must take bunny-napping pretty seriously in the Pacific Northwest.

(How’s that gonna work?  What happens if she’s sitting on a park bench feeding the pigeons — not hard to imagine — and a rabbit hops by her.  Has she violated her terms?  If this happens here, she might find herself under the Julia Tuttle bridge with other desperate Leporidae offenders.)

But evidently she avoided that dilemma, only to backslide.  Maybe:

Authorities checked her residence occasionally and found it rabbit-free…..[But] county probation officer Susan Ranger testified in August of 2007 that Sakewitz had a rabbit in her home in June, had canceled counseling sessions and refused to open the door for unannounced visits.  Ranger said she found no rabbits when she finally got inside but did find a half-empty 10-pound bag of carrots. Sakewitz was sentenced to three days in jail.

Illegal possession of a controlled substance!  “Alright Carrot-breath, you’re under arrest.  You have the right to remain silent — hey, quit twitching your nose!”

Furry funny furry funny.