action figures sold separately

we’ve got less than 2 weeks left to get everything together. we’ll be taking pics along the way.

the “things i will miss about the bay area” list would be way too long to write, but i’d love to hear other folks’ reasons they left their heart in s.f. (ahem, d & s are about to depart as well, and are headed for the quiet quiet. what will you miss most dears?)

for me, a couple include golden gate park, and how lush it was there the other day, and how easy to get to. and of course rainbow.

of course, there’s so much yummy we’ll be a part of in either portland or albuquerque. i was just thinking about that the other night, while sipping the new (1999) Frey Cabernet, having some good broccoli and seitan, and listening to A tell an engrossing story about third trimester bleeding while doing that incredible grrltrick of taking off her bra while keeping shirt on in one deft move. you rock, doc. that’s all i have to say.

on august 18, 1982, i went with 74,999 other screaming teenagers to see iron maiden, loverboy, scorpions, and foreigner (and a band called girl school whom i don’t remember). every summer the big local rock station would put on this festival thing called “Day on the Green.” This one was in Oakland.

remembering this concert and hearing i think i’m turning japanese (with its “No sex, no drugs, no wine, no women / No fun, no sin, no you, no wonder it’s dark / Everyone around me is a total stranger”) by the vapors on the local 80’s station got me thinking about the roots and strands of racism in the pop culture i grew up in through high school in the 80’s. Growing up in SF, the anti-latino stereotypes permeated the relatively conservative grade school and high school i went to. (the sexism and homophobia were severe as well, and that’s the subject of a blogrant soon to come). there was certainly a dearth of tools for challenging that crap, but these days thank dog there’s Rethinking Schools and a host of other progressive and radical educational resources out there. The web, despite all the crap one finds all over, also has a decent amount of incisive writings and resources designed to confront white supremacy wherever we find it in our culture.

i remember most starkly the anti-arab stereotypes in the first indiana jones movie.

conservative religious author gary north writes about the scene in the cairo market saying not only that it was the “greatest scene in movie history,” but fully glorifying the ideology of domination the scene reeks of, when he writes

Jones reaches into his pocket, pulls out a cheap revolver, and plugs him. He crumples, sword and all. The audience roars. In that scene, we see the confrontation between the West, which has adopted science, technology, price competition, and mass production, and the East, which has adopted mysticism, ancient technology, and personal self-mastery by an elite. The issue is resolved visually in that scene. One shot. All over the world, backward societies today are trying to get more of what the capitalist West has. Economic growth is spreading Eastward and Southward because a commitment to free market capitalism is spreading. “Raiders” came out in 1981, Reagan’s first year in office. Red China had liberalized its rural districts in 1979, but the resulting economic boom was not yet visible. The Asian tigers had not yet hit their stride, but soon would. That’s why that scene was not only definitive, it was prophetic.

wow.

Xenopus and Germline are playing tomorrow night with Forkhead at the Xotx club. (med band names via nonharmful).

Over the weekend we rescued a golden Pitbull (or Pit-mix, hard to tell) who had been hanging around the local high school and running around in traffic. We took her to the vet for shots and neutering and now she’s with the good rescue folks over at Planet Pooch. They will do all sorts of evaluation of her temperament and personality and come up with a plan for what kind of home she’d be best suited for and the things she needs work on. She definitely needs basic obedience training and lots of socialization. She is a LOVE- we spent a lot of time snuggling while she was here with us and she liked to bring me chew toys as gifts. She is named Nugget because of her lovely color and because she is a bit rough on the outside but precious inside. Check out more pictures and contact info for her here.

Over the weekend I read a lot of stuff on BAD RAP (Bay Area Doglovers Responsible About Pitbulls). The history of the breed is super interesting as are the qualities that Pits have. They tend to be extremely loving and loyal to their people, they are hard workers (often used as rescue dogs), they are intelligent and playful and great with children. Initially bred to fight by working-class English folks, they were brought to the US by immigrants and were favored as working and family dogs. As socioeconomic conditions became more complex and problematic in the 80s (the Reagonimix/Pitbull connection!) Pits started to be used more and more for fighting and became associated with poverty and crime and attacks on humans by poorly bred, mistreated Pitbulls trained for aggression. Now there is a Pit population boom as folks breed them in their backyards and then aren’t able to care for them or maybe even use them for fights or as bait for training fighters. Shelters are full of mistreated and abandoned Pitbulls who tend to be killed in greater numbers because of the bad reputation that they have which makes them less adoptable. Not sure how our Nugget fits into all of this but I would urge doggie-minded readers to consider the challenge of adopting a Pitbull at some point (maybe even Nugget’s your girl!) as it seems a possible way to address the injustice, poverty and violence in our communities that leads to stuff like this happening to sweet dogs like her.

hey all you non-profit tech folks: announcing the coolest resource since you didn’t know when! The Linc Project, Media Jumpstart, and the Progressive Technology Project have put together a completely interactive workshop, all of which is on the web for your use, called Using Technology to Increase Your Organization’s Capacity.

via randomwalks:

• The alabama supreme kourt ruled against a gay mom, calling homosexuality “an inherent evil” and more.
• the Observer says it’s time to stop being a u.s. lapdog.
• update/addition (via indymedia): Protesting is about to be declared illegal in Utah. No, you didn’t read that wrong. See the story.

• Two via nonharmful:
  • The Medicine and Madison Avenue Project presents approximately 600 health-related advertisements printed in newspapers and magazines. The MMA website includes historical material that put health-related advertising into a broader perspective.
  • A scientific piece from the Center for the Advancement of Health on how Some Domestic Abusers May Have Faulty Mechanism for Controlling Aggression, which, while it doesn’t come out and say anything about the fuckin patriarchy, does say this, to it’s credit:”It is important to emphasize that domestic violence is the culmination of a complex set of interactions between the perpetrator, the victim, the environmental circumstances and cultural mores in which the violence takes place,” Umhau says.
• The Village Voice on how nasty cops were at and around the w.e.f. protests. Mcarthyism was just the beginning. These jerks are serious.
• Fighting the War on Sexual Trafficking of Women and Girls, from saidit.org.
• and finally, this breakdown of the U. S. Fatherhood Initiatives: Control of Women and Children Under the Guise of “Responsible Married Fatherhood”, by feminista’s editor-at-large, Trish Wilson, begins:
  

  U.S. state and federal governments have taken special interest over the past decade in the ostensibly sorry state of American fatherhood. Single mother homes have been cited as directly contributing to high crime rates, teen pregnancy, juvenile crime, juvenile delinquency, poor academic performance, and juvenile substance abuse despite evidence that crime, delinquency, and teen pregnancy rates have been steadily dropping for over a decade. Most out-of-wedlock pregnancies were to women in their twenties and thirties. Teen pregnancies account for only one third of all out-of-wedlock births. 1999-2000 SAT math scores are the highest they’ve been since 1969. The highest rates of juvenile substance abuse are found in families where children are being raised by a lone biological father or a biological father and a step-mother, not in single mother homes with or without a stepfather.

new googlewhacks:

• sfelby requiem
• plasticine triangulator
• chessaholic cravings
• mild cheesaholic

but doing it on the web ain’t so bad, and my favorite quiz question and possible multiple-choice answer so far has to be:

Question 2 of 10: When encountering a YIELD sign you should:
a) Stop your car, get out, and do the Chicken Dance

um, what’s yours? shout back (or with any other crazy traffic school experiences), in the comments window.

Caution: Entering Rantzone (and then a mini story about the setbacks (and class privelege) i’ve had enjoying that most amazing of activities, bicycling). enjoy:

Folks (pundits, social workers, journalists) are hemming and hawing about the economy suddenly taking such a downturn now that the “recession” has been officially declared. Um, hello. Were y’all just not paying any attention during that whole Reagan-Bush I deal where everyone and their dog was losing their jobs and getting AIDS and being gentrified out of a home, and services were being slashed like a bad pair of teenageer’s jeans? While we’re on the subject of that desperation and the really shitty stuff that folks are pressed to do in order to survive, i recall how during the years in the early 90’s that i lived in SF, i had 6 (yes, six) bicycles stolen from me.

The first, a bike i was borrowing from my dad, was from a tree, overnight at a friend’s house. The bike was cable-locked to a pole and a tree on the sidewalk. Someone snapped the pole connected to the tree (a big job), and pulled the bike 8 feet into the air to free it (or snapped the cable, but there was considerable detritus, so i think it was the former).

The second and third were the two identical bikes i’d saved up for and bought for me and my dad to replace that one. Someone broke into my folks’ garage and yanked them.

The fourth was stolen from me as i stood next to it in UN Plaza during a Food Not Bombs serving. i leaned against a pole and was talking to some friends. a guy ran up, grabbed it, jumped on, and rode away. we chased him for a block and a half, and got about a foot or two behind him, but he was just a second ahead and got away. Two weeks later, stripped of its fairly good parts and worse for the wear, it showed up again during another serving. The woman who had bought it cheap sold it then and there to my friend and fellow food not bombs organizer alex, who now teaches sociology at brooklyn college. It came around, and alex took good care of it for several years afterward.

The fifth and sixth bikes (none of these were hotties, it wasn’t until recently that i’ve invested in a really good bike) were both stolen off of parking meters by folks who used a car jack to break the kryptonite lock. One was also in UN Plaza during a protest, not half a block from the fourth one, and the other was outside a club in the castro.

Nowadays, when locking my bike, i use a combo method: supertough krypto and cablelock through both tires. Funniest part is, when i was maybe 12 years old, my dad tried to teach me a lesson by hiding my bike cuz i’d left it by our back door for a couple hours, forgetting to go through the house and bring it in when i came home and didn’t have a back door key. when i remembered and went to get it, i was freaked. shit! someone stole my bike! little did i know, i was in for a long ride…

we haven’t disappeared. we just got back from death valley and are playing catch up. look for details soon on the run, the desert floor, coyotes, the crisis of our so-called democracy and the amazing music we are re-discovering.