I finally broke down and subscribed to a French cable service. I rationalized it by telling myself I would watch French TV and learn to understand these people when they jabber at me, but I know I'll just watch BBC, and Jon Stewart, if he's on any of the channels. I'll also probably watch all kinds of stupid movies as long as they're in English and not dubbed. Though I did watch "The Crow" in German once in a hotel, out of boredom.

So as to make my life easier, I decided to bundle my Internet and cable services, since I'm getting them through the same provider, France Telecom. (Adding phone wasn't an option, for some reason, even though I get that through them too. I no longer question these things. You have to pick your battles.) Bundling the services, however, required me to get a wireless connection. "Wireless" is the biggest fucking lie in the universe. I got at least 20 wires here, and I ain't even using some of them.

The instructions are only in French, so it took me several hours to install the modem, called a Livebox. How cute. It has a big glowing ampersand on its top, that slowly brightens and dims. Wonder how much electricity that uses. Now I gotta hook up le decodeur, but the Ethernet cable (wireless my ass. bastards.) isn't long enough to reach from the phone jack in the bedroom, where the computer is, to the TV in the living room.

There is a phone jack in the living room though, and I have hopes that I can hook up the Livebox there, near the TV, since the computer seems to only be attached to this little gadget that looks like one of those tiny Japanese vibrators. I guess that's the "wireless" part. Of course, if that works, I have to figure out how to piggyback the phone on top of the modem, or move it to the bedroom.

This bullshit has eaten hours of my life. Precious time, never to be recovered. Damn you, France Telecom.

Maybe I should've picked the Venting category.

Hi, I've drunk an entire botrtel of riesling. How are you, Killoggsers?

A man called me at the ungodly hour of 11 this morning and said, Is this Leslie Davenport?

I said yes.

He said his name was Somethinrnother and he was in the 17th, and he was trying to give people hope for the future based on the Bible.

I said I wasn't interested and hung up and made coffee.

How did this fucktard get my name and number? Is no place safe from these people?

The NYT ran a story Jan. 22 (which I would link to if the cheap fuckers weren't charging to read it) about missionaries descending like flies upon the vulnerable survivors of the tsunami, in Sri Lanka and Indonesia. It begins:

"A dozen Americans walked into a relief camp here [Sri Lanka], showering bereft parents and traumatized children with gifts, attention and affection. They also quietly offered camp residents something else: Jesus. ... The Americans, who all come from one church in Texas, have staged plays detailing the life of Jesus and had..."

You get the picture. The story I read had a great quote from the Web site of this Texas-based church saying that Aceh was "ripe for Jesus!!" It called this an "opportunity" to get into an area that was usually closed to foreigners.

Bleah.

From Margaret Cho's blog, http://www.margaretcho.com/blog/blog.htm.
(No, as a matter of fact, I DON'T know how to post a link.)

"Omni Hotels stopped payment on the check. I said I would not accept their money after they turned the microphone off after a few minutes of my performance. ...

"I am sad this corporation has no dignity, that they just have to be petty about what was their 'mistake' to begin with. If they wanted to have no controversy, no 'message,' no meaningful entertainment, why the hell tap me? If they didn't know who I was, then that was their fault. If you hire 2LiveCrew for your daughter's confirmation party by accident, you still have to pay them even if you unplug the sound system during 'Me So Horny.' "

Yes, I finally got my French work visa, without which I was doomed to a shadow life without health care, bank account (and thus phone account), or apartment. Actually, I have an apartment, thanks to a friend of a friend at work who likes to practice her English, but apparently no one else in Paris would rent to me without this shiny sticker in my passport, plus residency statement, plus proof of employment and income. And probably some other things I'm not aware of.

By the way, who knew that one cannot copy a house key in France without proof that one is the owner of the property accessed by said key, or forms filled out in triplicate showing that you are the renter and that the owner approves of your plan to copy said key?

I'm not making this up. Except for the part about forms in triplicate, I'm just guessing there.

I've lived here nearly a month now, and I've been keeping a supremely uninteresting blog, at welliswan.blogspot.com. Josh put a link to it up top there, you know, in the links place. Don't expect profound cultural insights or stirring romantic exploits. Mostly it's me doing mu usual feminist critiques of American movies and talking about what I drank last night, or bitching about bureaucracy. If anything truly exciting happens, I'll report back here. And, of course, once I get my digicam I'll put up all sorts of great photos of Paris in spring, or more likely summer, since funds are dwindling.

I start work Monday, I think. At some point in the next week I have to have a medical exam. I'm not sure why, or where, or whether I should just tell them upfront that I'm as crazy as Billy Bob Thornton, but I've learned to live with a certain lack of ever knowing what the fuck's going on.

Amities!

So, I'm moving to Paris. I'm very happy about it. Come visit. There's pastries.

As a kid, I read whatever my mom read. It never occurred to me that this was unusual. In fact, in my youthrul conception of the First Amendment I thought I had a right to read whatever I wanted. I have a vague memory of being refused a "grown-up" book at the Riverdale Public Library, despite my most well-thought-out arguments, and asking my mom, "Isn't that illegal?"

But I also had a really good sense for what I could and couldn't handle, emotionally. I grabbed mom's copy of "The Hobbit" when I was 8 and loved it. I left "Helter Skelter" and "Catch-22" alone, partly because they looked dull to me, and partly because of my mother's synopses: killing grossed me out, war bored me, and I was depressed by the idea of guys' guts falling out of their flack jackets. When I was 9, I was freaked out by the first few minutes of "Phantasm," as she predicted, so I went to bed after that, and I opted out of "Apocalypse Now" after she told me about the head-in-the-lap scene.

She was never one to sugar-coat anything, my mom. She summed up childbirth as "shitting a watermelon."

My dad, on the other hand, would tell me nice reassuring lies when I was freaked about something, as I usually was. Like, The tornado's not going to hit us. It just won't. And if it did, we'd go to the basement and be just fine. Said with absolute certainty. And really, what do you tell a kid? "Well, the odds are small, but if it does, we're toast"? Or he'd try the rational approach. When I said I was afraid of going to hell, he went and checked out a bunch of books on world religions, including something by William James. I was 9.

(To be fair, mom also made shit up about how we could survive a tornado. She just sounded less convincing, but then we lived in a trailer. Hard to sound convincing in a trailer. You shoulda heard her try to explain Santa and the chimney. And dad let me watch Salem's Lot when I was 9, which caused me years' worth of nightmares and a full-blown phobia into my teens. What the hell was he smoking? Oh yeah...)

Not sure what the point of all this is. I was just thinking about protecting children from disturbing things. My parents were certifiable in some ways, but they talked to me like a sentient creature with the sense to decide for myself what to read and watch, and the sense to come to them for explanation if it freaked me out. It worked pretty well.

I do think children should be shielded from some of the world's ugliness, and exposed to it gradually and with as much parental involvement as possible. Of course, most kids probably aren't as freakishly hypersensitive as I was. but they're not all jaded by 10 either. Neither extreme -- puritanical restrictions or total lack of them -- is effective in this respect. Kids WILL see/read this stuff, and that's exactly why some restrictions should be put on their access, if for no other reason than to make them think about it a little, especially the ones with no one at home to talk to about it.

I've recently tried to stop saying this. But it's such a habit I often don't even notice when I do say it.

Why? I'm glad you asked.

Something that sucks is bad. Worthy of contempt, abuse and ridicule. I do not want to be abused, ridiculed, or viewed with contempt.

But it's just an expression, you say. It doesn't refer to women. It used to be like calling someone queer. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But now, it's so common it's lost its original associations. It's a generic expression of dissatisfaction.

Bullshit.

Why are gays reviled for sucking? Because they do what women do. They take it.

Never mind that most gay guys I know are super-hyper-masculine.

A lot of virulent homophobia is triggered by guys' fear of discovering those feelings in themselves. Not just attraction to other men, but anything gentle and sweet -- that is, "weak." Anything that suggests they might, somewhere deep down, have it in them to suck.

So, my choice is obvious. Either stop doing the thing that is reviled, or stop reviling the thing that is done.

I'm perfectly serious, btw. Language is important. What does it say about us, that we can't ever talk about a person if we don't know whether they (he or she -- case in point) have a dick or not. For one thing, it says that this is the single most important thing to know about anyone. No other division is written into the language itself. Even honorifics are secondary. Penis, or no penis: only that MUST be known, and everything else follows.

So, no, I don't expect anyone to stop using That Sucks. You Suck. He/she/it Sucks. Even I can't stop. But I find that every time I hear it now, I remember what it means, and I cringe a little. And I get a little mad.

A New Mexico family is suing its local Catholic church over a funeral Mass at which the priest allegedly said their relative was going straight to hell.

The family of Ben Martinez, 80, allege that Reverend Scott Mansfield said he was "living in sin," "lukewarm in his faith" and that "the Lord vomited people like Ben out of his mouth to hell".

So what happens if the Lord doesn't vomit you out to hell?

Doug, one of my Georgia cousins (second or third, I can't keep up) has juvenile diabetes. He's in his late 30s, I think, not much older than me. One of his kidneys gave out a couple of years ago, and then the other started to fail last summer.

Since then he's gotten a transplant from his mom, at great risk to her, but his body rejected it. He's got a rare blood type and for some reason his doctors think he'll likely just reject any other organ that's not genetically similar.

He's on the list for donated organs, for what it's worth, but apparently Georgia isn't much of an organ-donating kind of place.

So, it's not looking good for Doug. His dad died a long time ago and he only has one sibling, a younger brother, who has flat-out refused to give him a kidney. Granted, it's not like borrowing a cup of sugar, but damn, it's his brother and the odds are his brother's going to die soon.

What I want to know is, is there a way to legally force his brother to donate a kidney? Like threat of imprisonment, or hell, forcibly admitting him and just taking it. My dad says that's crazy, but I don't think this guy withholding a kidney is that much different from murder at this point.

on the theme of friends, raised in carla's entry, scenes from the last two movies i saw.

25th hour:
Nikolai the psycho drug dealer tells ed norton, who is going to jail for seven years on drug charges, what he learned in 10 soviet prisons:
find out who the leaders are, who their friends are. then find a man with no friends, and beat him until his eyeballs bleed.

gangs of new york:
boss tweed tells bill the butcher (leader of the baddest gang, for those who have not seen this) that for appearances, a token gesture has to be made at cracking down on gang crime in the five points.
tweed: get me three or four men, men with no affiliations.
bill: three or four?
tweed: four.
next scene: four poor clueless saps about to be hanged in front of their families.

it's not just lonely being a loner. it's dangerous.
so why does anyone walk down that middle school hallway alone, out there in the open like a lame gazelle?

Frist defended his own civil rights record, which has been criticized by civil rights organizations. He said studies of his votes ignore actions such as “the fact I go to Africa once a year or twice a year to work with the African American community."

seems like a long way to go.

"Aircraft dropped 480,000 leaflets at six locations in southern Iraq last week, the seventh time they have conducted such drops in the past three months, according to military officials. The leaflets, distributed in areas where coalition planes recently struck, warned Iraqis against repairing fiber-optic cables and said rebuilding defensive facilities would put their lives in danger.

'We hate them,' said Mesa Ali, 25, a mother of two young boys who lives across the street from the site of the Dec. 1 bombing. The blast shattered her front window, covering her 18-month-old son with broken glass. 'They want to get the oil and make us slaves.'"

--- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23834-2002Dec21.html

"Ugborodo may sit across from Chevron's largest terminal in the delta, but the village does not have a gas station. Villagers buy their gasoline upriver and have it shipped here, paying three times what the rest of Nigeria pays.

One of the few decent-paying jobs for a woman here is prostitution. In their bright miniskirts, tank tops and halters, the girls at the Bush Bar flit from one American to another, sitting on one's lap, holding another's hand, rubbing another's shoulders. They called themselves Esther and Patricia, Milla and Helen, Gina and Joy.

'I love the people and culture of Nigeria!' one middle-aged American oilman said."

--- http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/22/international/africa/22OIL.html?pagewanted=1

So, would you rather be enslaved by:
1. your own home-grown homicidal dictator, or
2. a foreign corporate conglomerate that pollutes your land and pillages your oil for a fraction of what it's worth, leaving your community impoverished and at the mercy of unbelievably corrupt local rulers?

being that most of you are louisianans, you already have some perspective on Option 2.

"Well, the tits and the hair and the personality helped build the whole Dolly deal, but it was my music that brought me out of the Smokies. I had to get rich in order to afford to sing like I was poor again. I'd be up s---'s creek if I depended on [bluegrass] to make a livin'."


http://www.nashville.gov/parthenon/Athena.htm

I think they have a lot in common. You can't tell from this photo, but Athena has been gilded and painted, just like Dolly. (She also has a snake next to her and a medusa head on her breastplate, which Craig would appreciate.) She's 41 feet tall and weighs 12 tons. The Nike figure on her palm is six feet tall. She's smart and savvy, she's a benign protector, and she crushes all who oppose her will.

Dolly's only 5'4", without wig and heels, but I figure anyone who can play banjo with those fingernails could protect a city from the Persians.

And yes, according to my grandmother, who saw her sing on the local morning farm show 35 years ago, the tits have always been that big.