Words

If I had a thousand pounds for every time I've heard people complain that the use of the word 'gay' to describe what these same people tend to refer to as the 'homosexual life style' had deprived them of the only word available in the English language to talk about the really important things in life, like, oh I don't know, party lights, streamers, summer dresses, just general joy and loveliness, I still wouldn't have enough money to wrest the term 'tea party' back from the misinformed bigots who seriously believe their pathological state of unreason to be 'political'. This thought came to me as I sliced into a rather good cake earlier today and wished that I had a few good friends with me to share it. A tea party, I thought, how nice. How nice that would be.

Partial but clear-sighted vision

Happy with restraint

OK, you've crossed Iran and Jamaica (and Zimbabwe and Iraq and Nigeria and...) off your list of possible holiday venues. You'd better cross off Fort Worth, Texas, too... You don't see why? Read this.

The world

I got this from Joe.My.God, who got it from See My Briefs, who got it from their friend Kevin. Thank you, Kevin. 

(You need to click on it to see the whole thing. Dont ask me why, ask Blogger. I just do what I'm told.)

Au revoir? I don't think so

New day

"I will listen to you, especially when we disagree."

Barack Obama

Hockey mom alert!

According to Popbitch: "Wasilla was recently named the meth capital of Alaska, with 42 meth labs busted in a single year."

Hey Sarah Palin

Via Jesus' General

God help us

“Say it ain’t so, Joe! There you go pointing backwards again ... Now, doggone it, let’s look ahead and tell Americans what we have to plan to do for them in the future. You mentioned education, and I’m glad you did. I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and God bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right?”

Sarah Palin debates.

Lest we forget

Lies, lies and more lies

And talking of Sarah Palin...

You can see the interview this comes from here. What's hilarious is that McCain implies that it was fine for him to use the lipstick on a pig metaphor, but not fine for Obama to use it, because Obama 'chooses his words very carefully'. Am I hearing this right? McCain says he can say it because he chooses his words as sloppily as he chooses his running mates?

Thanks to Joe My God for the captioned photo.

Very important people

Silvio Berlusconi will be making a state visit to George Bush mid-October to discuss world affairs. I don't know who's most likely to benefit from this, given that one is totally discredited at home and abroad, while the other has reduced his country to a sort of laughing stock and only keeps his head above the domestic waters by making sure that nobody ever, I repeat ever, interviews him in the way that is normal practice in the States. The only good thing that might come from the visit is that Berlusconi is bound to endorse McCain. As though Sarah Palin weren't horror enough.

No, you can't

Read this hilarious post from Jesus' General, which would be even funnier if it were satire rather than the simple truth. Here's a taste to get you in the mood:

No, you queers can't have equality at work or in marriages. Being gay is a lifestyle choice, like illegal immigration, and not an immutable characteristic like being saved by Jesus Christ, so it would be wrong to protect it from discrimination. Marriage is defined as being between a man and a woman, then between a man and a younger woman, then maybe the man and the younger woman's prettier friend depending on how the implants work out. Two men in a decades-long, committed relationship and raising healthy, well-adjusted children simply can't qualify as a real marriage or family like that enjoyed by those icons of family values John McCain, Newt Gingrich, Mark Foley, or Larry Craig.

Homes

I've just heard from a friend who's been made temporarily homeless for absurd legal reasons in England. Which makes Jesus' General's typically acerbic take on the McCain housing problem all the more pertinent, albeit obliquely. You can read it here.

Hot sex in San Francisco

David Isaak has recently said that the mere mention of sex in a title can increase the number of hits a blog gets exponentially. The title to this post is thus intended to lure unwitting sex fiends, particularly those based in San Francisco, to my blog and to the neat little Amazon widget to the right of this post, which magically makes it possible to order my book. Subtle? Of course it is. It's all anyone deserves who has nothing else to do with his time than type hot sex into a search engine.

The minute and the immense

There's an expression for someone who has to travel a long way to discover something he could have found more easily on his doorstep. Whatever that expression is, it could certainly be applied to me as far as the work of the architect Paolo Soleri is concerned. Born and trained in Turin, where I once lived, it took a trip to Phoenix for me to come across the man's work. The title to this post comes from his book Arcosanti: an urban laboratory? - a collection of thoughts and their applicability to his experimental town in the Arizona desert: Arcosanti. I only got to see the town from a distance, but we visited his workshop, where I photographed this chime.

This post isn't finished, merely interrupted. By dinner.

Dinner over. In this book Soleri comments:

The value, indeed the imperative of crowding, is documented by 3.5 eons of life. Organisms are by definition crowded, self-contained miniaturized realities. Organisms, societies, and cultures that turn away from such an imperative would be strange, paradoxical and ineffective exceptions. One such exception is the sprawl resulting from the age of the automobile [...] Sprawl is a pathological event. It suffers from gigantism with all the derivative handicaps and shortcomings: environmental disruption, waste, pollution, energy and time depletion, expensive logistics, segregation, and urban decay.

What's interesting is that Soleri should have chosen to build his experimental crowded city within spitting distance of Phoenix, a city that extends in what feels like an almost infinite grid across the skin of the desert. It's too ordered to be considered sprawl, but the overall effect, amplified by the general absence of high-rise building, is of a vast city clinging by its fingernails to the land beneath it, as though the land were about to tilt and throw it off. It's a city of space and distance, and is certainly unmanageable without a car. But do people spend more time travelling in Phoenix than they do in other large cities, where the work place and the home are separated for a host of socio-economic reasons? And would the traffic-free crowded urban environment of Arcosanti leave room for those people who don't - or don't want to - fit? Sometimes segregation is less imposition than a sort of freedom.

Multitasking

I've no doubt Ratzinger had a word to say about family values to the masses gathered today beneath his balcony. He works so much better with a friendly audience, even when they do know most of the jokes. There's a cosy feeling about watching an aged transvestite going through his paces, like warming the hands over a fresh cow pat.

But I'm getting distracted from the purpose of this post, which is to draw your attention to a post on the fabulous Jesus' General blog. It's entitled 'Family Values: Proud that Working People Can't Make Ends Meet'. Anyone who's read Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich (and if you haven't I recommend it) will know what it's like to survive as a low wage earner in the States, but even Ehrenreich doesn't mention that, for some politicians and, er, Christians, people who need to do more than one or two jobs to survive are a sign of just how great the country is. I've stolen the picture from it. Here's a quote to whet your appetite:

President George W. Bush himself told a divorced mother of three on Feb. 4, 2005: "You work three jobs? … Uniquely American, isn’t it? I mean, that is fantastic that you’re doing that."

Italy rules OK. OK?

Two reminders yesterday that the autonomy of the Republic of Italy isn't a given.

One. Rome's court of assizes decided that there was no case to be made against the murderer of Nicola Calipari, the Italian secret service agent who was shot while helping kidnapped journalist Giuliana Sgrena leave Iraq. Who was the murderer? An American soldier called Mario Lozano. Whatever the truth behind the events of that night (and without a trial it's unlikely we'll ever know what happened), it's hard not to see this as an act of capitulation to the United States government.

Two. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Vatican's secretary of state, announced that people should 'stop it'. He was referring to Curzio Maltese's inquiry in la Repubblica into how much the Vatican costs the Italian state. The most recent instalment, published a few days ago, looked at the ora di religione, obligatory in all Italian state schools although not for students, who can, if they or their parents wish, opt out. This isn't as easy as it sounds. The hour of religion (i.e. catholicism) is always timetabled mid-morning, rather than at the start or end of the school day; those students who choose not to take part - some of them as young as six - are usually told to 'wait in the corridor'. Alternatives? There are no alternatives. Comparative religion? Stop it!

This is already bad enough, in a country which now has half a million children from other countries and cultures in its public educational system, not all of them catholic. What's worse is the way the teaching of the hour is financed. Religious teachers are chosen by the local bishop, side-stepping the time-consuming and exhausting obstacle race of national competitions all other teachers have to undergo. They're paid, though, by the state, and their salaries cost something like €1 billion a year; in terms of occult financing to the catholic church, this is second only to the otto per mille scam I've posted about before. Not only that - they have tenure in a country where a significant part of the teaching is conducted by precari, teachers, often in their forties or fifties, who struggle from short-term contract to short-term contract, their holidays unpaid, their pensions rights undermined, their chances of a mortgage or bank loan seriously restricted.

Finally, as salt in the wound, they're actually paid more than their equivalent non-religious teachers, as a result of laws passed more than 25 years ago, laws that are still being contested in Italian courts by their lay colleagues.

No wonder Bertone wants Maltese to shut up.

They can't even bomb straight

The Pentagon was apparently working on a gay bomb, according to this article. A bomb that would release powerful aphrodisiacs, so powerful that previously heterosexual soldiers would drop their guns and dive into each other's camouflage trousers, rip off those sweat-stained green tee-shirts, grind their heaving pecs against... (Calm down, Charles).

And we're complaining?

The wackiest thing about the, er, thinking behind this idea (OK, we are talking Pentagon) is the assumption that the difference between straight men and gay men doesn't lie in the nature of sexual desire but in its quantity. The more there is, the gayer it gets!

Footnote to previous post

Just to give you an idea of the moral ambience within the Italian secret services, Pio Pompa (I just love writing it!) was second in command to Nicolò Pollari, ex-head of SISMI and now on trial with a bunch of CIA agents for his involvement in extraordinary rendition activities in Italy.