Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

My friend Elaine of Kalilily lays claim to crone-dom, but never seems to grow old. Everytime I turn around she’s up to some new adventure–planting a garden, joining the Dean team (yay!)–now she’s taking a poetry course. I like this one so much I want to share it, but do yourself a favor, go over and check out the other good stuff in her blog!

The fabric of our lives.

Yesterday
I sent a package
to my second cousin,
stationed in Iraq –

six pairs of
white cotton underpants
and a package of
vitamin C lozenges,

because even though
I protest this vile war,
urge presidential impeachment,
and grieve for those collaterally damaged,

I remember her
before the wars — that
feisty tow-headed toddler,
mindful motherless girl,

adventuresome young woman,
who took a calculated risk
that tossed her into desert dirt,
and a longing for
fresh, clean underwear.

(copyright EF 2003)

Why do Google searches turn up lots of bloggers? Is it because bloggers are basically one big link farm, sucking up bandwidth from real news sources and putting Andrew Orlowski’s knickers in a twist?

Dave Winer links today to two other theories–both suggest that “respectable” papers like the New York Times are shooting themselves in the foot when it comes to page rank.

First, Dave quotes Doc: “The ‘googlewashing’ Orlowski talks about was done by the Times, not by Google, and not by bloggers.” Google indexes pages that are on the Web. When the Times hides its archives so you have to pay-to-view, Google can’t find them. Open the archives, and those pages will start showing up in Google again.

Second, Dave cites a Microdocs study of what pages Google leaves out when it does searches. The telling point here is that Google often ignores pages that haven’t been updated in the past few months.

I use Manila, so my old stories are stored–not just in a page based on the month I wrote them–but also in “departments” that get updated each time I write a new story. By putting this story in my “Life, the universe, and everything” department, I am calling Google’s attention all over again to similar stories I wrote some months ago.

So the whole problem can be solved if the NYT turns into a blog and (this is my idea, not Dave’s, I want the credit!) starts using Manila. No, don’t bother to thank me, Mr. Orlowski–all in a days work for this hard-working blogger.

If I hear one more “Democratic” pundit claim that Dean can’t win….

First, how good are they at predicting politics? Would they have predicted

• that Bush with his history of drinks, drugs, and AWOL would end up President?
• that the Religious Right would trash McCain and go for Bush?
• that millionaire Yalie Bush would successfully paint Gore as a dishonest elitist?

Second, is Dean the “lefty” that they claim? Dean, who balanced the Vermont budget and gets top ratings from the NRA? Dean is a guy with beliefs he actually believes in, and principles he has spent years trying to live by. He’s not a toe-the-line lefty, or righty, or centrist.

And that’s the real problem for the self-styled “Democratic Leadership Council.”

Dean is not a paranoid Bush-lite Democrat. He’s not a DLC sock puppet afraid to blow his nose without a focus group telling him how loud to honk.

I have baaaaaad news for the DLC:

• It costs big money to get sock puppets elected.
• The Republicans are the party with the big money.
• Democrats win by running a candidate people want to vote for, who runs on a clear honest platform of social justice.

That’s how Carter won, it’s how Clinton won, and it’s how Dean is going to win.

What did the artist leave out? Check yesterday’s post.

That flight suit photo-op story is hitting the blogs in a form the dead-tree press most likely won’t, er, touch. Oh yeah, both the WSJ and the NYT recycled the “Bush-in-flight-suit-sexy” meme–to quote Maureen Dowd

Lisa Schiffren, a Quayle speechwriter who wrote the “Murphy Brown” rant, gushed in a Wall Street Journal piece entitled “Hey, Flyboy” that President Bush in a flight suit was “really hot . . . as in virile, sexy and powerful.”
She polled her soccer-mom girlfriends in Manhattan and got the same reaction. “He’s a hottie,” said one. “Hot? SO HOT!!!!! THAT UNIFORM!” said another. And a third panted, “That swagger. George Bush in a pair of jeans is a treat to watch.” (If it gets any hotter, Wal-Mart may have to ban The Journal.)

But will they pick up on “Republicans bring back the codpiece”?
Will they take up the growing speculation that Bush’s flight suit was–errrr–strategically enhanced?

For more visuals of the Bush Top Gun display, check out this WhiteHouse.org parody, scroll down, and click on “hunky flight suit sausage strut.”

Yet another Bush campaign photo op, paid for by taxes.

To the Romans, “Rosa” meant a generic five-petaled flower. In fact, almost any five-petaled flower you see is from the “Rosaceae” family.

And May is the month when their flowers are everywhere.

The family includes such wildflowers as “cream bush, toyon, cinquefoil, horkelia, blackberry, thimbleberry and strawberries.“

“The fruits formed from the Rosaceae flowers …include apples (Malus), almonds, cherries, peaches, nectarines, plums, sloe, and prunes (Prunus), pears (Pyrus), blackberry, loganberry, boysenberry, raspberry (Rubus), strawberries (Fragaria), quince (Cydonia), loquat (Eriobotrya), rose hips (Rosa), medlar (Mespilus)…. Rosaceae also account at least one nut, the almonds (Prunus)….

“The Rosaceae family includes four subfamilies.

1. Rosoideae: many shrubs, perennial herbs, few annual, deep hypanthium, fruit hip, flat-like appearance, including genus Rosa, Rubus, Geum.
2. Prunoideae: woody plants, trees or shrubs, one carpel, pit, includes peaches, plums, cherries, nectarines, apricots, almonds.
3. Spiraeoideae: mostly woody trees and shrubs with a few herbaceous perennials, flat like appearance, including genus Aruncus, Spiraea.
4. Maloideae: trees and shrubs, fruit pome, including genus Aronia, Crataegus, Malus, Sorbus.”

I still remember my astonishment when I learned the actual meaning of this sentence:

“I can give you a very good price on this fine used car.”

You know about iron deficiency. I grew up with irony deficiency. A lot of kids get that, growing in New Hampshire. It’s a side-effect of high-minded New England parents.

It’s not that New England parents never lie–it’s that they truly believe “Nice people don’t lie.”*

“Nice people don’t…” is a strong and wide-ranging New England anathema. For example:

• Nice people don’t hurt other people’s feelings.
• Nice people don’t make rude faces out the car window.
• Nice people don’t wear white shoes after Labor Day.

For me, growing up was learning that nice people do. Human frailty isn’t something as rare, tragic, and final as a train wreck. It’s as common and often as funny as little kids getting chocolate on their chins.

Digression #1: [rant]The Republican Astroturf guys weren’t chocolate-y children. Their scheme to con small-town newspapers and their readers was carefully planned, by people who made good money as a result. Grrrrr. [endrant]

Digression #2: Another deception that floats around doing harm is the long-discredited claim that “venting” anger is good. BZZZT! Wrong. Encouraging people to talk about how angry they are, or to act it out in symbolic ways, actually makes them more angry and violent, not less so.

Digression #3: So maybe I should take my own advice and shut up about stuff I get mad at, like those Republican Astroturf guys? Nahhhhh….

I went to BlogLunch with Halley Suitt and Scott Johnson, and both sides of my brain now feel so good:

Baby pigs goofing around with a peaceful tiger? This image came from Sukree Sukplang/Reuters–here’s their explanation:

“Sai Mai, a 26-month-old female tiger, plays with baby pigs at a zoo in Chonburi province, 50 miles east of Bangkok, May 7, 2003. The Royal Bengali tigress was born in captivity and breast-fed by a female pig for four months after her birth.”

No kidding–at the Sriracha Tiger Farm (Thailand), you can visit those tiger-and-pig mixed families.
amazing moments as the comely, but scarred lass feeds a croc.”)

Ethnic groups in close contact rarely share space like good-natured tigers and happy little pigs. Pakistan glowers at India–Argentina smolders at neighboring Chile.

Who hates Northern Irish Protestants? Northern Irish Catholics, that’s who! Neighbours who ride the same bus routes and love the same tin-can brands of instant coffee and rice pudding.

I’m tired of pious hopes for cheap solutions. I can imagine human groups finding peace–IFF (scientific jargon for “if and only if”) they aren’t in conflict for the same scarce resources. If I see your needs as a threat to the needs of my kids–I’m not going to like you. No matter how well I know you, I’m not going to like you.