Whoops.

I have to have a background check done by the FAA, including my travel and associations for the last seven years, fingerprints, and mental health records. It's not the same as a military clearance, but it seems almost as invasive. I completely understand the national security implications of letting the wrong people have access to technical data about aviation electronics (look what happens when you let untrustworthy individuals have access...).

...but DHS has already declared me a threat to national security, so this could end badly.

(I'm not actually against immigration; I'm against illegal entrance into the country and illegal residence regardless, but apparently that makes me just as bad.)

Semi-related, I finally got a paycheck and picked up the Mark Levin book; what sort of trouble will I be courting if I take it on my flights this weekend? I'm still in the "rise" part of The Rise And Fall of the Third Reich, but it's got a swastika on the cover, and I don't have the time/funds to deal with hypersensitive open-minded tolerance, so I haven't been taking it in public places. Sigh.

A tale of two quarterbacks II

Meanwhile, a source told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel on Tuesday that Favre has continued to use a cell phone issued by the Packers, and when the team checked the phone records, they showed "repeated calls to coach Brad Childress and offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell."

How much money have the Packers given Favre all these years? And he still can't get a freakin' free phone with a 300-minute plan to talk to the Vikings behind their back?? Heh!

On Tuesday, Dungy said he was optimistic the Colts' biggest question heading into training camp -- Manning's valuable knee -- could be resolved quicker than most people expect.

Woo-hoo! More importantly, Manning, Polian, and Irsay are watching this Favre/Packers thing and taking notes on how NOT to act in 5-6 years.

Speaking of Dungy, my copies of his new children's book arrived today. The illustrations are great. Reading it made me cry (I'm old and still haven't found anything I'm good at/want to do/am still young enough to do), but I think my small relatives will enjoy it when they're slightly older. It's promoted as ages 4-7, but the protagonist is 8 and the text seems a little dense for preschool (but what do I know?). (CBS interview about the book)

Behold the power of beer.

I just finished Ambitious Brew: The story of American beer by Maureen Ogle. I understand Budweiser now (I won't drink it, but I understand it). They've been brewing it with rice for 140 years.

In the first chapter, she describes the Milwaukee discovered by German immigrants in the 1830s:

"In Mettenheim [birthplace of Phillip Best], the land's potential might have remained cocooned in a web of restraints, dominated by lords and princes and worked by peasants burdened by illiteracy, heavy taxes, and impossible rents. Not so in the United States."

*blink* Sounds like they were escaping the United States of today, if you substitute "environmentalist wackos and nanny-staters" for "lords and princes" and "endless government regulation" for "illiteracy"...

And she quotes a letter to family back home, written by one Nicholas Frest in 1841:

"One cannot describe how good it is in America. In America one knows nothing about taxes. Here one does not need to worry about beggars as we do in Germany. Here a man works for himself. Here the one is equal to the other."

Unbelievable that he was writing about Chicago! They'll charge you 10% sales tax on a brew, on top of the alcohol, property, and income taxes the pub has already paid and included in the price, and I won't even start on the modern equivalent of "beggars."

Then there were the 1855 anti-German Beer Riots, laws passed throughout the 19th century specifically to keep Germans from drinking beer (while English-Americans were free to swill spirits), and the beatings, rapes, and lynchings of Germans during the early 20th century, and not just during WWI. See how my people have been treated! Make that reparations check out to "Heather." [This paragraph may be satire. Or not, I haven't decided yet.]

Light reading, or so I thought.

I've been a fan of the Mrs. Murphy murder mystery series (the main character is a cat in rural Virginia) for awhile, but the latest one just annoyed me. It was less of a murder mystery/small town story and more of a pro-abortion screed. I don't mind characters with different political orientations--the last book had a few offhand remarks about stopping the "unnecessary" war in Iraq, which I assumed were to make the reader see the characters as interested in world events or current fashionable thought--but in this book, all the main human characters seemed to discuss the sacred right to abortion and the threat of right-wing extremists on every other page.

I knew there was going to be cliche when the murder victim was an abortionist, but I wasn't prepared for just how much cliche. The murderer was a backwoods fundamentalist preacher-type, and one accomplice was a corrupt Republican/rapist. Only the second accomplice, a young attractive (promiscuous, natch) nurse deviated from the usual hackneyed stereotypes.

In one scene, one of the main human characters, a multi-multi-millionare, consoled her daughter about the abortion she got during her sophomore year of college by telling her the baby would have destroyed her life, her Seven Sisters education, blah blah, so she was right to kill it. For a dozen books, the daughter character has been portrayed as trust-fund baby who never worked a day in her life...what was there to destroy? What was there to lose by taking a semester off and interviewing nannies? OK, she might not have been able to marry the scion of a blue-blood New England family, but she divorced him a book later after he killed and dismembered two people...

Then the mother told her daughter about the joys of motherhood and how she shouldn't be afraid to embrace it and I threw the book across the room. The daughter character, who is childless, is now in her 40s. I'm sure in the next book she'll be paying thousands and thousands of dollars in an attempt to conceive, like most of today's 40-yo Hollywood celebrities, but that's just...so...the feminist ideal of aborting "inconvenient" babies during prime childbearing years and then successfully birthing a "wanted" child or two in the twilight of fertility is not a reality for most women, and seeing it normalized makes me nuts.

That's just one conversation; a friend of the abortionists wife was on the board of Planned Parenthood AND the board of the local Lutheran church (which I found hard to imagine in any Lutheran church I've been a member of, but I haven't gone for awhile) so there was room for "oh noes, our rights are endangered" conversations at the visitation, the funeral, the fundraising dinners, anytime two or more women met for lunch, on and on and on. OK, OK, I get it, can you please shut up and find a new dead body?

Of course, I finished the book (I knew the murderer was a cliche, but I didn't know which cliche). The cats and dogs in the story didn't seem concerned one way or the other about humans killing unborn babies, which was pretty consistent with their attitude throughout the series with respect to humans killing each other, and they solved the mystery and saved the day. But I don't ever want to re-read it. I read fluff to relax; if I want an abortion lecture, I'm sure there's a leftwing blog or two to accomodate me.

Bookshelves

Two competing theories of bookshelves: a) They're for impressing people with titles you haven't read; b) They're for impressing people with titles you have read. With a smattering of "you don't deserve to own things", straight out of those asinine cable shows where some bitch clears everything you've spent your life collecting out of your house, lets you choose one item to keep, and throws the rest away, because no one should own things they enjoy (just like no one should enjoy eating cheeseburgers or driving a car; 21st-century Puritanism is worse than it ever was when it was about sex).

Obviously I subscribe to none of those theories. To start, very few people who don't already know me are ever in my apartment to judge my reading, so if I buy a book it's because I want to read it. Or because someone's plane is three hours late--I love the used bookstore in the airport. I need more bookshelves, because the piles are taking over my bedroom. The cat has learned they are dangerous places to perch on or next to, but I keep tripping on them in the middle of the night.

The latest book is a Lonely Planet guide to München und Bayern, which arrived semi-mysteriously in the mail Tuesday as a very unsubtle hint. I guess I'm going to Germany in Mai.

Liberal Fascism II

Last night, instead of pecking at the refresh button every 7 seconds like a crack-addicted lab rat waiting for the SC returns, I went to bed early and read for hours.

The first thing that stands out is how wretchedly little I know, although that hasn't been a surprise for many years now. I had to start keeping a list of names to look up later. (One name I did recognize was Paul Douglas, Senator from Illinois, because he was instrumental in getting the Indiana Dunes set aside as a national park. Now how am I supposed to sit on the beach and relax without thinking of his admiration for Stalinism?)

The second thing that stands out is "Holy crap, if George Bush had actually done a tenth of the arresting, beating, silencing, fining, etc., of anti-war and other dissenters that the KosKids claim he has, he'd be about 1% as totalitarian as Wilson and FDR." Which I've noticed before, it was just jarring to see it all laid out together. (It's going to be interesting to see what happens if Hillary Clinton becomes POTUS and starts shutting down the kook left...)

In the chapters on Woodrow Wilson, I kept thinking, "Holy crap, he's an upscale Huckabee." Claiming he's doing the Lord's work, check; the government is the arm of God, check; big taxes to run big government, check; attempting to regulate family meals, check... Actually, I think I have that backwards; Huck would be trying to be a Wilson without the East Coast edjumacation and the ability to openly admire Bolshevism.

Also very interesting how Mussolini admired the American fascists and vice versa.

Finally, the eugenics and racism of Margaret Sanger/Planned Parenthood/their admiration of the Nazis/the Nazi admiration of the American left. Very little of that material was new to me. Especially after last week, when the news about the the U.S. abortion rate being the lowest since 1974 came out and the loudest reaction was "Oh noes! Brown women are having more babies--they must not have enough access to abortion clinics!" Heh. (Don't click that link, it's disgusting.)

I think there's more, but I feel kind of dumb today. And I have a lot to do before 5:30. Starting with disposing of the corpse who thought it would be cute to ask me what time the Colts play today.

Liberal Fascism I

My inscribed copy might take a few weeks, but the Borders at Fox Point had a stack up front on a table marked "new and noteworthy." Got through two chapters last night; not sure why people think the beginning is dry because it seems to me that Goldberg writes like he talks/blogs.

So far, the most fascinating part is in the intro, where he includes a URL and offers to engage anyone who wants to discuss the book "in good faith." I'm fascinated because I've been reading books for over thirty years (admittedly, the first year or two the books had big pictures) and this is the first time I've seen a discussion URL in the actual text. In the additional miscellaneous material included by the publisher, but not the author's text ("Anna Arkedyevna sighed, and logged into oprah.com to read about a new miracle diet while she waited for the samovar to sing...").

It could be an interesting trend, since very little on the Internet lasts for five, ten years. You'll probably always be able to find the text of Shakespeare online--someone will manage to procure tax dollars to fund the server--much like you can find century-old printed copies, but the YouTube video of kittens "acting" out King Lear is very, very fleeting.