We come in the age's most uncertain hour and sing an American tune.

Compare these two recent events in Oklahoma, and tell me if you figure out the punch line before I get to it: 

Case #1: The sweeping new immigration law in the state has become something of a sick joke nationally, since it includes things like making it a felony to give an immigrant a ride (imagine being sentenced to a year in prison ‘cause you stopped to pick up a guy whose car had run out of gas on the highway). But there’s nothing funny at all about it, because among its many provisions (many, many provisions) is a regulation making it illegal to provide medical care to any immigrant, even a child or an infant. Think about that for a minute.
There was basically no resistance to the bill. Combining the votes in both Houses, it passed 129-15. This means that 89.6% of the elected representatives chosen by the citizens of Oklahoma supported this bill.
Case #2: As a peace offering, the Ethnic American Advisory Council, a state agency, sent copies of the Koran to each and every state legislator in celebration of the state’s 100th birthday (earlier this year, the Baptist General Convention sent “Centennial Bibles” in the same spirit). Many GOP folks, however, refused to accept the gifts. One of them, some halfwit named Rex Duncan, explained, “Most Oklahomans do not endorse the idea of killing innocent women and children in the name of ideology.” 

Brothers and sisters, this is clearly not the case. 89.6% of Oklahomans endorsed that very thing this past Election Day.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Okay, this is the kind of story I love.
Thirty years ago there were these scientists, see? And they were conducting experiments on lizards. I don’t know why. It doesn’t matter. But they took five mating pairs of a particular kind of lizard (the Italian Wall Lizard, which is a good name) from the little island that they were indigenous to and put them on another, nearby island named Pod Mrcaru (that is not a misprint), just off the Croatian coast.
The lizards weren’t supposed to be there long. Unfortunately, right around this time, the Croatian War of Independence broke out. And, you know, suddenly, everybody had more important things on their minds than ten lizards in a strange place. And they just kinda, I don’t know, forgot about them.
So, I guess somebody recently remembered and went back for the lizards. And, man, Pod Mrcaru was crawling with the little bastards. They completely took over and drove all the island’s native lizards to extinction and now the place is pretty much wallpapered with the interlopers. Which I’m sure you expected. That’s how stories like this always end: new species is introduced into an environment and grows out of control. God knows it happened back home, both with ladybugs and kudzu. I don’t know what folks were thinking when they brought kudzu to the Commonwealth.
Anyway, but that isn’t the whole story. The scientists found, when they examined the lizards, that they weren’t the same any more. For one thing, the source species eats mostly insects, which are easy to digest. But these lizards were eating mostly plants. It turns out that they have grown new organs specifically to help them digest plant matter! They grew something called a “cecal valve,” which is musculature between the stomach and intestines that holds food and essentially allows it to ferment, so that their digestive system can break down vegetation. Their heads got bigger, too, allowing for a stronger bite (presumably for tearing leaves). And their social structure changed; the new lizards aren’t as territorial as the original species, and they apparently mate somewhat more freely.
And all this happened in thirty years! According to Duncan Irshick, a biology professor at UMass, that’s like humans spontaneously growing a new appendix in a couple of centuries. Who knew it could happen so fast?
So, anyway, yeah, and the point is this: the next time some fundamentalist wacko tells you evolution is a myth and that there’s no evidence for it, ask him, “Say, have you heard about the Croatian lizards?”

Got info from the National Geographic …check it out!
 

The Time Machine

It’s early spring in Dayton, Ohio. I’ve just arrived in town, and I don’t plan to stay, but I’m gonna rest a while and save up a little money. I’ve found a job, working at the local gas station-slash-convenience store. I’m a night person, and they’ve hired me to work second shift, 3-11 PM. These are perfect hours; I arrive late enough to sleep in, and get off early enough to go to the bar after work. But for training I have to come to the store in the morning for the first two weeks. At seven o’clock in the morning, to be precise. This is torture.
Belly’s second CD has just come out, and because their first is one of my all-time favorites, I’ve bought the new one on the day of its release, even though I can’t really afford it. The fifth song, “Super-Connected,” is the first to really catch my attention. It starts off very downbeat, with a slow, heavy-reverb bass line. Tanya Donelly sings the first verse in a tired-sounding, off-key sort of groaning whisper. She sounds, in fact, like me when the alarm goes off at six AM.
When that verse is finished her voice trails off, and the guitar starts up. It’s a rising-and-falling, grinding, aching sound. It sounds angry. It sounds unhappy to be alive. That’s me, too, as I struggle to sit up, to throw off the covers. I’m hung over, and I haven’t had enough sleep, and the arthritis in my knees has locked them in place during the short night, so that it’s painful to move my legs. I am outraged that I have to go to work.
But then a strange thing happens. Donelly returns, singing the next verse, but now her voice is stronger, more awake, as if she is becoming more sure of herself. She sounds defiant, though she’s still struggling. Now she means business. She faces the meanness and bitterness of the guitar, and she shoves it aside, and goes on.
And then she reaches the chorus, and suddenly there are harmonies, and the guitar stops grinding and begins to shimmer and pulse, and her voice soars. It is not a beautiful voice, but it means what it says, and is everything it wants to be. She is transcendent, otherworldly. She is the sun rising above the clouds, and she sings to me, and she takes me with her.
After that, each verse is stronger and stronger, and each chorus flies higher and higher, until the song achieves escape velocity and shoots off into space. It ends abruptly, except for a ringing echo of the exhausted drone from the song’s beginning. But now that sound is forlorn and abandoned. She has shaken it off. She is finished with it now, and has gone off to get busy living.
I can’t smoke in the house. Every morning I get up, and I get a cup of coffee, and I shuffle into the garage for a cigarette. I’ve put a stereo out there, and I play this song compulsively, over and over, every single morning. Early spring in Ohio is still winter-cold. Although it’s dawn, the sun hasn’t really risen yet, and there’s no heat in the garage. I sit shivering, nearly sightless in the dusty grey, having the first smoke(s) of the day, heaving great shuddering coughs and coming to life painfully but steadily, listening. It’s one of the greatest early-morning songs ever.
That was long ago, and though I still love the song I don’t listen to it as often as I used to. But sometimes, when I do, I close my eyes and I’m back there. It’s strange that some songs have the power to carry you through time, isn’t it? I love songs for lots of reasons, because of their great beauty or because they’re silly and they raise my spirits, or because they have an irresistible energy that I can draw from them. But the ones I love best are the ones that have an anchor in time and memory. It doesn’t even have to be a happy time that they’re taking me to. There was absolutely no reason to love six AM in Dayton, and I don’t miss it. I guess it’s the trip itself that’s important, rather than the destination.
I sit now and listen to “Super-Connected,” and it’s a time machine. I’m smoking the day’s first cigarette, standing in the freezing grey light of an Ohio morning in March of 1995. Everything is so clear, it can’t be a trick of my mind. I’m really here, and it’s amazing.

Murder is the sport of the elected

Well, I’ll be damned. You’ve heard of the “Clinton Body Count,” right? That’s the list that the craziest of the crazy right-wing bloggers started keeping of all the people the Clintons had murdered, either because they stood between him and the White House, or to cover up scandals during his terms as Governor and President. Well, it turns out I’m on it, Richard Winters, partway down the page.
Yes, that’s right. In case you don’t want to check the link, here’s the story: you see, there were these two guys named Kevin Ives and Don Henry. They stumbled onto some drug-running operation masterminded by the Clintons, but before they could talk, they were killed by a train on August 23, 1987. Except, it turns out, they were killed first and then their bodies were placed on the tracks. Which, I gotta say, doesn’t seem like the best way to commit a murder to me. I mean, it seems a little clumsy and haphazard, plus pretty damned pointless. And my opinion counts in this, because apparently I’m the guy who killed them!
And then a whole bunch of people “had information” on those murders (when you’re dragging two bodies along a train track, you’re gonna get noticed, even in Arkansas), so I killed them, too, one by one. And it really was a WHOLE BUNCH of people. I’m not sure how none of them managed to fill out a police report or talk to the press before I got to them, but hey, I guess luck was on my side while I was hunting them down over the next two years.
My favorite was James Milam. I decapitated him, but arranged the crime scene in such an expert way that the coroner ruled he died of natural causes. I wish I could disclose how I did that; suffice it to say that I’m The Man, and that The Man got mad skillz. There was Keith Coney, who died in a motorcycle “accident” (there were “unconfirmed reports” of a high-speed car chase…I’ll admit, that bit does sound like me). There was Jeff Rhodes, who was tortured, mutilated, shot in the head, put in a dumpster, and set on fire (yikes! like I have that much energy). There were other boring ones, too, shotgun blasts and stabbings that I won’t bother going into.
And then I was myself killed in a “robbery” in July of 1989, only of course it wasn’t really a robbery, it was an assassination made to look like a random crime. I guess I’d asked for a little hush money from the Clintons, so they had to silence me for good; or maybe they were wondering how, even after I’d killed a half-dozen or so potential witnesses, there were still so many people who “had information” on the Ives/Henry murders. I mean, hell, they still had another five or six of ‘em to bump off after I was gone! (Incidentally, they managed to kill one person via a bout of viral pneumonia; man, their skillz are even madder than mine!)
I am very distressed to learn that I’ve been dead for the last 19 years. I’m wondering why death hasn’t saved me from suffering through, for instance, the death of my father, or the end of my relationship with Bonnie, or seven-plus years of being ruled by a mendacious, war-mongering sociopath. Where’s my goddamned sweet oblivion?
On the plus side, I suppose this means that I can drink and smoke all I want, and eat lots of fatty foods.
Oh, yeah, and vote Obama. He doesn’t have a list yet.