Like in this NYT Tea Party article here.  Excellent feature, but it doesn’t really indicate that anything but a very small minority of Americans has taken leave of its senses. Which isn’t anything new. Yet the Democrats seem to be collapsing. Why? How genuinely widespread is the crazy and not-crazy opposition when they’re not being shown on a 24-hour news channel?

Or is offscreen even a relevant political category anymore? Maybe I’ll just watch Fox for a while, that should clear up any questions I have.

According to the NYT, Tina Brown is hot on creating a new publishing imprint that will rush books to market just a few months — one to three for writing, another one or two for editing and production.

It’s a fabbo business idea. Books fail because people’s interest moves on too quickly, she argues. True enough. Who cares about Iraq these days? Or Lehman brothers. Or what happened yesterday…  Polanski who?

But, c’mon. Damn. They’ll be short books, some 150 pages, and if you’re a beat writer, know your stuff, don’t mind working like a dog for a few months, it’s totally doable. Nobody’s going to expect prose that shimmers, and yeah, they’ll probably sell.

And this will increase the pressure on writers even more, to produce more, write faster, report less, edit less, fact-check less, write shittier sentences. We’ll get long, sometimes beautifully written academic tomes on one end of the market, and quick-turnaround jobbies by journalists and freelancers (thus further reducing the intellectual reputation of journalists) on the other, and the smart middle will be further hollowed out. More unintended consequences.

I’m going to go invest in some stock for anti-carpel tunnel products.

Asked if his current position was under the effect of his imprisonment, (former vice president Mohammad Ali) Abtahi said the situation in the prison helped him to reach a conclusion about the recent incidents. Abtahi said he had no problems and concerns in the prison and praised his “courteous and polite interrogators.” He added that his friends who have not been arrested yet share the same idea. He concluded, however they “have not the courage to express the same ideas.”

This is horrifying. More so because we have seen this before, seen generations of brilliant intellectuals and dissidents wiped not just off the planet, but out of history, out of memory. Now again.

Don’t forget the Greens.

1. I took great pride when young in being born during the witching hour, which (according to me, and not Wikipedia), was the hours between 12am and 1am on Halloween Night. It doesn’t seem to have given me any magical or demonic powers, but I’m certainly still a night person. I can make pretty good scary faces, too.

2. The longest train trip I’ve ever taken was also one of the shortest, scheduled Seattle to San Francisco, but in fact Portland to somewhere in the Oregon Cascades. The train didn’t make it to Seattle, so Amtrak bused us south to Portland. The train met us there, then died in the middle of a snowstorm a few hours later. Night came, people started freaking out without any announcements (or lights, or heat) from the folks in charge, and eventually Red Cross came and gave us coffee, donuts and blankets. At dawn, a bus came and drove us to Sacramento.

3. Ice cream: it’s OK, but it’s really an excuse for the cone, which channels one of the few really celestial textures on the planet: crunchy. See the next entry.

4. I’m mildly obsessed by toast. Or maybe not mildly. Have you ever tried Acme Bread toasted just perfectly with a bit of jam? Or German billion-saat-brot with a slice of ham? See, poetry.

5. I’m scared of flying. You should be too. Big, heavy things oughtn’t to float though the air with the greatest of ease, no matter what physicists say. I know my own personal experience has nothing to do with ease at all, unless a few drinks have been procured beforehand.

6. I have tried to learn Mandarin Chinese several times. The first time, I got so anxious every time I approached the classroom, or even the general area, I dropped out after half a quarter. Better luck the second time on my own, but I remember none at all. I’m doing much better with German, danke.

7. At various times I have played baseball, soccer, run track (hurdles and sprints), run cross country, and been a diver with distinctly sub-Louganian grace. For all my deep and abiding commitment to the computer-driven lifestyle of writing and geekdom, I’m pretty sure humans were meant to get up and move around once in a while. I really ought to take that advice.

8. I have no idea when I’ll leave Berlin. This city has afforded me the time and mental space to write a silly and intermittently serious kung fu novel, for which I owe it a great deal. It is rewarding and infuriating, and I can’t think where I could next be as happily sub-economic as I am today.

Und so, on that note, I meme-tag onwards.

I hadn’t exactly done my homework. I knew that at some point they set up lots of tables in Sept-Oct and drank enormous beers (the liter-large glass is called a Maß, I now know). I hadn’t realized the town was mostly destroyed in the war, (see: Berlin). Much has been rebuilt, and the town center’s Rathaus looks as gothic as ever, despite having been built largely in the in late 1800s; but the city as a whole has the feeling of modern German, certainly not medieval or quaint Bavarian.

We spent one day hiking out to the Kloster Andechs, a monastary on a hill south of the city that has brewed its own beer and schnapps since the mid-1500s. It was a perfect fall day, the forests strewn with yellow leaves, the Alps jagged and white in the background. The little villages in the hills there are still what I think of when I think Germany, despite having almost never experienced them. Smoke rising from steep, tiled roofs at sunset, onion-dome church steeples in every town, blue-and-white striped maypoles in front of homes or towering over town squares. A few pictures on Flicker here.

I remember when we brought her home, she and her runtling sister Soomu, Frida was the wide-eyed brave one, coming out of the box to explore our apartment, while timid sister stayed behind. She was always the gentle one, purring even when she was nervous, licking an arm or a wrist, getting picked on by her mercurial sister. She ate like a racoon, using her white paws to pull a bit of kibble from her bowl, dipping it into her water bowl as though it needed washing. She developed a habit of jumping into the shower as soon as we were finished; it seemed just another quirk, but turns out probably to have been a symptom of progressive kidney failure.

Godspeed to whatever kittyplace you go, O fuzzy one.

Aimee described it best: Like the energy of gay pride and Castro Halloween, but with neither the full flamboyance or freakiness of either. Which isn’t to say it was bad, just far straighter.

A few pics on my flicker account here:

Inside the wrapper was an assortment of art, beautiful unique silk screens, memories and manifestos, none of it particularly connected but all of it thought- or emotion-provoking. One hundred copies only; if you weren’t lucky enough to an issue of Papergirl thrown at you, or have one unwrapped for you at a party later that day, odds are that you’ll never see one.

I want to subscribe, I told the writer. She laughed, and said I can’t. Just be at the right place at the right time for Papergirl #2.

Someone on Flickr has a picture of one of the “artgifts” in preparation.

And because it’s the magic powers of antioxidants we’re talking about here, yerba mate may well have the same effect. I think it’s time for a gourdfull now, my ears are ringing.

But she talked and smiled nonstop, and that was the magic that won us over completely. No strings attached. I could understand only the barest gist; the differences between Italy and Germany, and the similarities between Japan and Germany. She passed around pictures of she and her boyfriend, and we briefly debated afterwards: tranny or real woman? She had breasts, after all, and rich dyed reddish hair framing her fleshy face. But there was no real question.

Afterwards drinks at a bar where the floor was covered in sand, and even the negronis came with pineapple floating with the ice. Now the birds are singing confusedly, and we glare at them on our way home even though the clouds are slowly lightening in the sky. Give us time, O give us time.