here's some humor to lessens anyone's nervousness. today i woke up thinking okay so now we have a candidate, but guess who has $180 million for the fight?

but, i fear no chimp. for more tension releasing funniness, you must check out bushorchimp:

also, for further relief, watch bush's new ads, which he plans to unveil tomorrow: . they are soooo bland, but i guess he only plans to convince those who are already convinced, you know, that other half of the country...

eeeek! how am i gonna make it to november without having a heartattack or a hernia or a hemorrhage or something horrible!

So this morning I got negged at the polling both because if you change your party affiliation, it doesn't go into effect until after the next general election. Apparently this is designed to prevent people from doing exactly what I tried to do, which is changing parties just so you could vote in a primary.

The funniest part was of course the white haired ladies in charge at the polling center. Clearly old ladies are at the helm of the civil infrastructure of American voting. Sometimes, based on who gets into office, I think they may be the only people in the country who vote!

But they kept calling me dear and were flustered by the confusion I caused when I wasn't in their books. One lady asked me if I was sure I wasn't a Republican! I just looked at her with my eyebrow raised like "whadoo you think?" But then another lady explained why it was I wasn't eligible to vote in the primary. She actually said it was a "slap on the wrist" for changing my party affiliation. Ah, the American electoral system. Nothing like freedom of choice, eh folks?

Well it is over two months late but today I will finish my Moby Dick paper. That friggin whale just keeps slipping away. Here is some mad Ahab for y'all:

"What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare?"

Good question.

In other news, yesterday I tried oil painting for the first time in years, and it was just as frustrating as I remember it being. After three hours all I had was a blue grey blob. Most of what I have painted in the past has been water color, and oil painting mixes with that experience about as well as, well, oil and water. But I'm not really that frustrated. I was thinking "well, like all great human endevours which amaze us when done well, oil painting is really hard." That makes sense to me. As I'm getting older I'm less and less surprised when difficult things are difficult, and that difficulty frustrated me less because of it.

What else... went to the pink in search of art instruction, but my teacher wasn't there. where is he? he must be somewhere. "I miss you"... Moriah and I had an awesome time as usual, and we ran into Rachel so it was a regular group thing. The company of fine ladies kinda makes up for my lack of man flesh. But not totally. Nothing personal ladies, that's just my biology.

I think I may drive to Ellicott Creek Park now before the sun goes down. Funny how the car substitutes more and more for actual body movement.

Then tonight, more painting, the concluding paragraph of My Moby Dick Opus, and of course the oscars. Viggo will have to stand in for an actual human once again...

Hey I like the linking right to our journals feature. I was just working on my homepage, old and crummy as it may be, when I saw the linking thing. If anyone is interested in reading old crummy poetry or looking at poorly photographed artwork, or in otherwise analyzing my psyche circa 2000, please feel free to follow this .

I've been reminded that I haven't written in over a year. I can't say that I had nothing to say. There is the ghost of a journal about skiing, but it's been exercised. When you fall you will always fall on the part of you that has no meat, which is our missing tale. Lucy is the oldest one still standing.

The limit of anything is where it becomes something else. Otherwise there would'nt even be continuity, there would only be stasis. Ex-stasis means moving on from holding still, moving out of the body. The horizon is someone else. Difference is the source of imagination.

Could it be that the possible 44th president of the United States is a reincarnation of the 16th? Creepy...

Also, some (selective, since its a poll) good news from Polling Report.com

Newsweek Poll conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates. Jan. 22-23, 2004. N=1,006 registered voters nationwide. MoE ± 3.

"Suppose the next general election for president were being held TODAY and you had to choose between George W. Bush, the Republican, and [see below], the Democrat -- who would you vote for?" If "Other" or "Undecided": "As of TODAY, do you LEAN more toward Bush, the Republican, or [see below], the Democrat?"

Bush John Kerry Other
% % %
1/22-23/04 46 49 5
1/8-9/04 52 41 7

In case you were in doubt this is to serve as my official endorsement of John Kerry for President 2004!

Also, a good Kerry page is actually his senate home page:
Brother won three purple hearts in Vietnam then came home to Capital Hill and testified in the Senate against the war. What more could you want in a president?

Happy Birthday Paul! May fresh fish rain on you all year!

Believe it or not I found this page today for work purposes (don't ask) and it may be one of the weirdest sites I've ever seen. What is particularly strange is that it is part of the National Archive, the same organization that maintains documents like the Federalist Papers and the Emancipation Proclamation.
When Nixon Met Elvis:


There's a really interesting and ernest letter that Elvis wrote to Nixon while on a plane with some Senator, and either the turbulance was bad or else Elvis was very drunk. In the letter, Elvis offers his service to the President, since he has intimate knowledge of "the drug culture, the hippie elements, the SDS, Black Panthers, etc." who "do NOT consider me as their enemy or as they call it The Establishment." He asks to be appointed a federal agent even. Later he adds that "I have done an in-depth study of drug abuse and Communist brainwashing techniques and I am right in the middle of the whole thing where I can and will do the most good."

You know, sometimes I feel like I'm losing my, how shall we say, "sense of humor" about American history, but then every now and then something comes along that is just so surreal you have to stop being so cynical. Or maybe you can still be cynical, and it's just really really funny...

I could teach someone how to watercolor, how to write a Google Poem, about Postmodern Body Criticism, and Photoshop text manipulation, so that they too could make something horrorshow like this:



Anyone interested?

What do the Apache, Comanche, Kiowa, Iroquois, and Black Hawk all have in common? Well, they are either the names of indigenous tribes or individuals defeated by the American Army, or else they are American Army helicopters currently used to defeat other brown-skinned people who stand in the way.

Personally, the use of these names makes me sick. You can't even find a page about the real Black Hawk's war unless you search for minus Down (-down), otherwise you get pages for that big-budget Hollywood state-backed propaganda bullshit movie about Mogadishu (which, admittedly, I've never seen, but I know propaganda bullshit when I don't see it.) Or you get pages for the video game of the same name. While it is tragic to me that anyone dies in a war, we lost about 30 soldiers in that entire conflict while "most soldiers interviewed said that through most of the fight they fired on crowds and eventually at anyone and anything they saw" (a quote from the book the movie is supposed to be based on .)

The real issue here is how little has changed. Do we name our helicopters after defeated Indians because they were worthy opponents and fearsome warriors, or because we so successfully and thoroughly eradicated them to promote our own agenda? What myth are we trying to invoke with these names? Is the story we tell today the same as it was 200 years ago?

To counteract the myth, here's (what I think is) the real story of Black Hawk:

Black Hawk was a Sauk leader who fought on the side of the British in the War of 1812, hoping to prevent further American incursion into his native lands. The Sauk had ceded most of their territory in Illinois in a disastorous and disputed treaty with the US gov't signed in about 1804. Black Hawk and others considered the treaty null and void because they felt that the individuals who signed it did not have the authority to speak for the whole tribe. Nevertheless, the Sauks had been pushed as far west as Iowa by the 1830's, where they encountered the hostile tribes of the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota. Caught between these warriors in the west and the encroaching settlers continually streaming from the east, the Sauk were in an increasingly comprimised position. Then, the final straw came when in 1828, President John Adams (a distant relative of mine, I should confess) sold the Sauk's Iowa lands, leaving the tribe essentially homeless. Left with little choice, Black Hawk decided to lead both the Sauk and the Fox tribes (with whom they had had an alliance since the early part of the century) back to Illinois in 1832, igniting paranoia amongst the whites who now made the new state their home.

Once in Illinois, Black Hawk faced attacks from the state militia (whose ranks included both a young Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, future prez. of the Confederacy.) Black Hawk's men were able to elude the troops for over five months, and they held out as long as they could. At one point Sauk/Fox warriors attempting to surrender were fired on by US soldiers. Finally they were defeated at the Battle of Bad Axe. Black Hawk was taken captive, and spent the rest of his life being toured around the east coast, at one point by none other than President Andrew Jackson, as if he were a curio, an exotic animal, an inanimate object.

This is what Black Hawk himself had to say (I find it so similar to what so many "beneficiaries" of our military aid would say today):

"I fought hard. But your guns were well aimed. The bullets flew like birds in the air, and whizzed by our ears like the wind through the trees in the winter. My warriors fell around me...The sun rose dim on us in the morning, and at night it sunk in a dark cloud, and looked like a ball of fire. That was the last sun that shone on Black Hawk...He is now a prisoner of the wh
it
e
men.
..He has done nothing for which an Indian ought to be ashamed. He has fought for his countrymen, the squaws and papooses, against white men, the cause of our making war. It is known to all white men. They ought to be ashamed of it. Indians are not deceitful. The white men speak bad of the Indian and look at him spitefully. But the Indian does not tell lies. Indians do not steal.

An Indian who is bad as the white men could not live in our nation; he would be put to death, and eaten up by the wolves. The white men are bad schoolmasters; they carry false books, and deal in false actions; they smile in the face of the poor Indian to cheat him; they shake them by the hand to gain their confidence, to make them drunk, to deceive them, and ruin our wives. We told them to leave us alone, and keep away from us; they followed on, and beset our paths, and they coiled themselves among us, like the snake. They poisoned us by their touch. We were not safe. We lived in danger. We were becoming like them, hypocrites and liars, adulterous lazy drones, all talkers and no workers...

The white men do not scalp the head; but they do worse-they poison the heart...Farewell, my nation!...Farewell to the Black Hawk."
(quoted in The People's History (Thanks to Terry for typing)).

(I should mention that this is Black Hawk's surrender speech...)

To find out more about the real Black Hawk, read Howard Zinn, The People's History, or check out this page, which is perhaps a bit too neutral for my taste but has a lot of primary documents, including Black Hawk's autobiography. . It's really a site that's part of a larger Lincoln project, so they can't make the whole thing sound too bad without impugning one of our most popular presidents.

Also, here is info from a .mil site on the various helicopters named after tribes: