Actually, $1.99. At QFC. Breakfast sandwich, banana and a cookie. The sammy was slightly stale. And I scored, for free, white schmutz on my pants from my chair in the "dining area."

I never eat fast food hamburgers, and when I do, there's usually a reason that has something to do with whiskey. But today, hell-bent on spending less than $2 on lunch, I tried in vain to find a McDonald's in downtown Seattle. I just moved here, okay? It turns out I totally missed the outpost at 3rd and Pine. And now I've found this disturbing internet tool that could help me plan a road trip without ever losing a chance to indulge in the dollar menu.

Where else can I get a $2 lunch?

One thing about working for an alt-weekly: For better or worse, you end up much closer to the fast-beating pulse of the paranoid left. The LaRouchies tend to think you're convertable, the 9-11 conspiracy theorists flood you with emails, and, more recently, the secret detention center worriers beg you to expose the Bush/Halliburtion plan to round up "unpatriotic" Americans en masse.

I have no idea if the detention center fears are well-founded or not, but as a service to our worried readers, who have been posting about this in the comments for some time, I offer this story from the sometimes-accurate lefty news service TruthOut.

Recent developments suggest that the Bush administration may already be contemplating what to do with Americans who are deemed insufficiently loyal or who disseminate information that may be considered helpful to the enemy.

Top US officials have cited the need to challenge news that undercuts Bush's actions as a key front in defeating the terrorists, who are aided by "news informers" in the words of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Plus, there was that curious development in January when the Army Corps of Engineers awarded Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root a $385 million contract to construct detention centers somewhere in the United States, to deal with "an emergency influx of immigrants into the US, or to support the rapid development of new programs," KBR said. [Market Watch, Jan. 26, 2006]

In the October 9 issue of The New Yorker, Mark Singer writes about the criminal adventures of Richard McNair, a convicted murderer who's finagled a number of stunning escapes from U.S. prisons (and remains on the lam as I write this.)

The video above shows McNair working some of his criminal magic. Shot by a police officer's dashboard camera, it shows McNair being questioned by Louisiana policeman Carl Bordelon, who received word of an escaped convict then found McNair running down the railroad tracks.

Despite having no ID, lying about his eye color, and giving two different names (first he's Robert Jones, then Jimmy Jones), McNair talks his way out of it.

Enjoy, and if you see anyone resembling Richard McNair, call 911.

As I type this I'm on the couch at home, sick, undoubtedly dying—though my girlfriend says I'm just a whiner. Making matters worse, a Reese Witherspoon movie called Just Like Heaven is on and I can't stop watching it. Things, obviously, are bleak.

My question for Slog readers, since I'm bored and Reese just made a miraculous recovery from her coma: What sort of remedies/comforting rituals do you reach to when you're sick? I obviously need some guidance.

"Are gay men allowed to cry?" Eli Sanders asked me a month ago, and I promised to provide an answer within a month. That month has passed and this is the answer I have for him: no. Absolutely no. Why? Because--and women, though I don't speak for you (yet), please pay close attention--crying is base, low, and primitive (in the unloaded sense of that word), which is why babies do it all of the time.

Now, what we need to do is make a clear distinction between two human states: one, emotional; two, feelings. Which is the higher state and which is the lower one? Emotions are certainly lower and feelings are by far higher. Feelings are developed over time, and, as the neurologist Antonio Damasio has pointed out, possible only in animals with the capacity to remember, to reflect on what is remembered, and to refine those rough memories into "precious memories," as the great Sister Rosetta Tharpe once called them.

I'll give you cry babies this: Emotions are the foundation, the ground, the soil for the development of feelings. But, and this is a crucial but, once you have outgrown emotions, which are useful to babies because they can't talk, they must be abandoned (in the same way playing with toys is abandoned) and the adult must move on to the vast and dark sea of feelings. Emotions, which can be found even in worms, are incapable of making real art (and there is such a thing as real art), only feelings can produce something like the opening of Shostakovich's "3. Largo" in his Symphony 5.

Leave crying to babies and become who you are--an adult! (Americans have the hardest time with this adult/children distinction, which is understandable. It is a consequence of socialization that the majority of Americans worship and stay stuck in childhood. When having to pick between ruling over children or adults, America's dominant socializing machine, capitalism, will invariably pick the former, which is why 50 Cent is a millionaire and Cecil Taylor is unknown.)

That's what she and Al Sharpton say, and they're threatening to sue.

This weekend a friend of mine lost her sister to a household accident: The 32-year-old Edmonds woman was cleaning her bathtub and her tub drain simultaneously and the combination of the two products created a lethal gas. Her family asked me to remind everyone to never mix cleaning products. Specifically: Do not mix bleach and ammonia. Do not mix bleach and acids. Do not use two drain cleaners together, or one right after the other.

Thanks for noting it. Now, back to our program.

Malawi -- A 1-year-old boy whom Madonna and her husband are seeking to adopt left for England on Monday, flying first on a chartered plane to South Africa, then on a regularly scheduled flight to London, where the singer has a home. The boy, David Banda...

This question is for my brothers and sisters in Malawi, a country that was once joined with Zambia and Zimbabwe to form the Central African Federation: As a people, why are you so fond of the surname Banda? The certainty with which one knows a day must have a sun stands next to the certainty that the minute one hears a Malawian has entered a room is the very same minute one will hear the word "Banda." It's always this Banda, that Banda, those Bandas. Really--I'm being very serious now--why the utter lack of diversity when comes to this one thing? The name of that Madonna boy could so easily have been Hastings Banda.

Because I sure don't. This email came to editor@thestranger.com:

My name is XXXX XXXXXX and I am currently a senior at Redmond High School. As a senior I must complete a Culminating Project, this is one of the graduation requirements. I have chosen to create a fashion magazine. The reason that I contacted you is to ask you if you would be interested in becoming my Field Advisor. A Field Advisor (FA) is "an adult community member who will provide role modeling, academic assistance and career connections for a student working on their senior Culminating Project." I understand that you are busy as the editor of a newspaper, but please let me know if you are interested.

I get at least one email or phone call like this every week and, being Catholic, they fill me with guilt. I truly wish I could help you out with your Culminating Project, XXXX, but I am, as you put it, busy as the editor of a newspaper. I also don't mean to single you out, but I've been meaning to say something about this and your email came just as I sat down to work this morning.

Over the last six months I've started to feel like it's open season around here. I get a request like yours practically every day—I have barely have time to respond yes-or-no, much less serve as FA to two dozen high school and college students in the Seattle area and across the country. Does anyone? Do the other students at Redmond High School get positive responses—or responses at all—from the community members they cold call?

If the answer is yes, well, then I feel even more guilty. But if the answer is no, well, then I feel a little bit better about my inability to serve.

Death-row prisoner gets pregnant in solitary.

Her womb has been swabbed by God. Praise her.

I'm writing my column in what has to be the weirdest of Milwaukee's 800+ bars. It's basically a photo copy of a photo copy of a photo copy of every bar and hotel lobby Philippe Starck designed for Ian Schrager back when they were re-inventing hotels and lobby bars together. It's glitzy and ritzy and... and weird. Really weird. I don't even know where to begin.

Well, let's start with the door. The bar is attached to a hotel—a Comfort Inn, of all things. At the Comfort Inn, the toilets are still sanitized for your protection. And the sign on the door to the hotel bar?

"Aqua: Upscale Restaurant and Bar." Uh, if you're an upscale bar—really upscale—you don't have to say so on the door. And then there's the interior. It's like Liberace met Star Trek in a dark alley somewhere and decided to beat the fuck out of Love American Style.

Check out the bar...

It's hard to see in my photo, but the bar is made up of water tanks illuminated from inside with blue and green and lavander lights. And they're bubbling, boiling, like some sort of massive, manic lava lamp. Now take a gander at the white baby grand piano...

And here's the host stand—two clear Plexiglas fifty-gallon drums, bubbling away. One green, one blue.

Clear Plexiglas barstools...

But this is the pièce de résistance: a huge mural of two... zebras. Necking.

WTF? The mural is huge—the length of the bar—and it's hard to concentrate on my column, what with all the zebra love on display.

Oh, and I'm the only person in the bar. It seems that the freaked out bar at the Comfort Inn isn't one of Milwaukee's hotspots. So I have all this glamour to myself....

With Seattlest deciding to "Ask a Dot-commer" about one of this week's noteworthy events, I thought I'd ask a homo about another of this week's happenings: the Jim McGreevey reading at Elliott Bay last night.

I'm not a huge fan of McGreevey, the former New Jersey governor who came out of the closet two years ago, at age 47. Here's what I wrote about him in the Stranger's Queer Issue this year:

Gay rights groups applauded McGreevey's courage in coming out of the closet at age 47, but a lot of homosexuals I knew wanted to slap him for taking so long and causing so much harm along the way. My ex-girlfriend from long ago, herself no fan of closet cases, has a stock answer to the question of how to punish people who fuck up in the way McGreevey has fucked up: "Their punishment is their life."

So I didn't make it a point to be at his Seattle reading as he flogged his tell-all book, The Confession. But a couple of gay men I know did. Here's the report from one, who wants his handle to be "Another Late-Bloomer for Change."

I was drawn less by interest in the book itself, and more by curiosity about him as a person. Aside from the fact that he was a terrible reader, and the writing seemed pretty cliche (quotes Dostoevsky), when he moved to the Q & A he was super charming, informative and inspiring. He called attention to our unfortunate two-party system where one party opposes gay rights and the other remains silent; he reminded us the we have a voting population where 30 percent of voters self-identify as Evangelical Christian; and he spoke about the need to never settle for anything less than gay marriage because if we do it will always be just that: less than marriage.

He also spoke of hope that the culture will change, repeating again and again that 'time is on our side' as the intolerant age and eventually die. (Perhaps this changed culture will also be guided by politicians who never have to apologize for being gay — or in his case, closeted.)

Too bad he still isn't Governor.

My other friend at the reading reports that he went home, fell asleep, and...

...had an amazingly hot and surprising sex dream about McGreevey.

I've demanded details (and an interpretation of the suspected meaning). More to come...

UPDATE: The friend writes:

It is too graphic to write about — but it was also incredibly hot. I don't have time for an interpretation, except that I went into the reading not respecting him b/c of the shitty choices he made, etc..., and left respecting him and, obviously, finding him attrative.

Two recent experiences brought this picture to mind: . The picture was taken in 1977, and the young family that's arranged into an indestructible unity by a portrait photographer is an African family.

While reading the last story in Dambudzo Marechera 's House of Hunger (published in 1979 and shared that year first prize for the Guardian Award for fiction--the other winner was Neil Jordan, the now-famous Irish filmmaker), I thought about the new film The Last King of Scotland, which is set in the capital of Uganda, Kampala, during Idi Amin's rule (72 to 79). What connects the portrait, Dumbudzo's short story, and the movie is the lost spirit of African modernity.

To use Dumbudzo's words (which are far from words of praise), the pictured African family is a "modern African family"--the future unit and standard of a fully commodified African society. If all had gone as planned and desired for Zimbabwe, and Uganda, whose capital attempted to modernize its look and architecture--as is shown in the movie The Last King of Scotland--the pictured "undifferentiated unity" would have been as universal as toasters in this society.

I love Philly—and it's not just because Philly has a two-line subway system that connects with numerous regional commuter rail lines. (And let's not mock Philly's two-line system, Seattle. How many rapid transit lines do we have?) Walking around Philadelphia yesterday I spotted lots of other stuff to love...

Like food carts...

Seattle's Wigland may be history, but Philly's Wigland lives!

The stitched-and-trimmed remains of Joan Collins and Linda Evans are performing live onstage in a legitimate theatrical production!

And, finally... and best of all... look at these men. Look at them! They're standing on a sidewalk in front of a bar...

With beers in their hands! And there are no fences, no moats, no barbed wire, no barriers at all. A smoking ban just went into effect in Philadelphia, and there's been a lot less grumbling from addicts than there was in Seattle. And I'm convinced the smoking ban went down easier here because drinkers are allowed to step out of a bar, beer in hand, and have a smoke—just like it's done at pubs in the United Kingdom.

Contrast Philly's adult approach to outdoor drinking with Washington state's, which grows increasingly ridiculous with each passing year. Fences around beer gardens, two lines of fences creating little moats, eight-foot freaking chain-link fences at Fremont's Oktoberfest—all to protect the kids. Pretty soon in Seattle we'll be drinking in lead-lined underground bunkers to protect the kiddies from alcohol.

But in PA they trust that adults can stand on a sidewalk outside a bar, drink a beer, smoke an idiot cigarette, and refrain passing beers to any toddlers strolling by.

Two things:

1. What's the use of the goddamned internet if there isn't a goddamned site that helps you pronounce things you see on menus? There should be a place where you can click to hear the pronunciations of dishes you want to order but don't because you don't know how to say them: bánh mì gà, yebeg alicha, lapin confit (don't give me that look Annie Wagner—we didn't all study French). Something like this, but not just for Indian food and not expressly designed to mock people.

2. From the Dept. of Five Years ago: Everybody and his step-grandmother has heard about the "rejection line," but I only recently got ahold of the number (from a friend, I swear): 212-479-7990. Call it. Try the options. Rejection line! Hee-haw!

That is all.

This story, via The Washington Post, is soul crushing from every angle. Enjoy!

A talkative 9-year-old boy came to Helen Briggs on Valentine's Day 2000. She was a foster mother with years of tough love and scores of troubled kids behind her. But she grew to love this boy. Within the year, she'd talked her husband into adopting him.Now, six years later, Briggs and her husband, James, a maintenance worker for the city of Alexandria, are taking the highly unusual step of trying to unadopt him.

In 2003, when the boy was 12, he sexually molested a 6-year-old boy and a 2-year-old girl still in diapers. She said it was only then, as she waited outside the courtroom for his sexual battery hearing and caseworkers handed her his psychological profile, that she found out just how damaged the boy had been when he came into her life.

...He'd been hospitalized seven times in psychiatric institutions and diagnosed as possibly psychotically bipolar. He'd thrown knives, kicked in walls, pulled out all his hair and threatened to kill himself. He'd heard voices telling him to do bad things. His confidential case file shows he most likely was sexually abused.

Briggs hired an attorney to terminate her parental rights. But in Virginia, a child older than 14 must give consent. The boy, now nearing 16, wants Briggs to be his mother forever, according to the voluminous confidential case file and e-mail and phone records Briggs subpoenaed for her lawsuit and provided to The Post.

By the look of things (and if this is indeed the case, it would make a lot of sense), the only institutions celebrating Columbus Day are banks.

Here's a quick note: In Columbus's time, the whole function of a bank was to hold and protect large amounts of gold. Now that the gold is gone, and paper notes--which once promised this or that bank has a hold of your gold--are becoming nothing more than magnetic traces in computers, what do banks in our world actually hold? The answer will certainly be found in Pascal's insight that there is no difference between an ordinary man who, night after night after night, dreams that he is a king and a man who, day after day after day, is an actual king.

We know we have Slog readers all over the world because we asked once and got responses from France, England, Germany, Norway, Australia, Scotland, and even Antarctica. I don't know how many readers we have in India, but I do know we have at least one, Daniel, a friend and business journalist who recently sent me this letter about his day.

Which gave me an idea for a Slog feature. Maybe this will work, maybe it won't, but I'd like to publish some letters from our far-flung Slog friends. You don't have to be that far-flung to qualify—just somewhere interesting and outside of Seattle. San Marcos, Texas works. So does Burien, Bremerton, Brooklyn, Boise, Oslo, Omak, Pullman, or Paris. So if you're reading this blog from somewhere outisde the Seattle city limits, send me a letter about your day, and maybe I'll publish it. Here's my email address: eli@thestranger.com.

And here's the first letter, from Daniel Sorid, whose assignment in Bangalore ends this month:

Sussy, the maid, and Vasant, the driver, had left for the evening. I lay in bed, ill. My 8-pound maltese, Napoleon, sat beside me and playing with a stringy toy. I could take no more of the stomach pain. It was time to call the doctor.

Dr. Sri is an ergonomics specialist, which means he consults for foreign companies on how staff should sit in their chairs. He may possibly have some other qualifying medical certifications. At the very least, he is a sharp dresser and can prescribe drugs. Sri and I have a deal: I call his cell phone when I'm sick, describe what's wrong, and he rattles off some medicine that I've never heard of. I look it up on the Internet to confirm it's not some pill for hair loss or acne. It usually works. "Norflox TZ and Astymin Forte," he told me this time, and I duly scribbled it onto a blue Post-it. Doctor's visit, Indian style.

Continue reading "Letter From Bangalore" »

I love clouds.
And so this article, which led me to this website for the cloud appreciation society, is incredibly satisfying. Here is my favorite cloud of the bunch, June's Moby Dick sexy pinup:

Which brings me to the subject of love letters. I'm speaking of old-fashioned romantic love letters. I've never received a love letter, and I've only written one in my life. It was to my first serious boyfriend in college. I was living in France at the time and missed him terribly. The letter contained the line "If you fuck Anita* (*not her real name), I will rip out your tongue with a shrimp fork. Happy Valentine's Day!� Obviously, I suck at writing love letters. It was never sent because he fucked Anita before I got the chance.

It is extremely difficult, not to mention risky, to pen a successful love letter. Writing about love is an easy to slip into melodrama or cliché (e.g., "Our love is a fairy tale love the size of infinity�), and if the object of love rejects (or worse, ignores) the sender's sentiment, the letter instantly becomes a token of failure and humiliation. The duality of the love letter is one of its draws. Another is the implicit privacy that surrounds it. In general, people don't pen love letters to have them disseminated in the public. They are written for the satisfaction of the sender and the enjoyment of the receiver. Reading another person's love letter, even with the consent of the author or object, is like voyeurism; a peek into someone else's private and vulnerable insides.

Well-written love letters are touching. Poorly written ones are cringy and hilarious.

Which brings me to this website, created by a female who decided to write 300 love letters to family, friends, crushes, "dream lovers�, strangers, idols, roommates, etc. She was shooting for all types of love, which made her goal more interesting to read, but more convoluted.

By the end of this project I wanted to be able to write a love letter to anyone, a stranger on the street, or someone I have nothing but scorn for. I wanted to be able to pull out and vocalize the small thread connecting me to them, them to me, the something in them that I found beautiful or real...

The letters are organized on her website chronologically, and color coded by recipient ("pink/red = lovers, brown = people I don't really like, gray = anyone�). Here's an example of a brown love letter:

I know next to nothing about you. Only that you are broken hearted and that they almost cut off your arm and that there is some kind of nice electricity. It's still too early to know if it's just the electricity of I think you're cute, you think I'm cute, or maybe something else...hmm...you are so full of possibility right now!

The draw of love letters is that they aren't something you are forced to write, they're something you are compelled to write. Can someone train his/herself to locate love, and write about love, in strangers and "people [you] don't really like?� From her comments and letters I got the feeling that rather than expressing all types of love in letter form, the author was dwelling on/attempting to bait romantic love. Either way, it's an interesting site if you like love letters, real or faux.

Prisoners rehabilitate death-row dogs

Since August 2004, the Safe Harbor Prison Dog Program has brought animals destined for doggie death row at area shelters to inmates like McMullin for training as pets.

On any given day, about 50 dogs are being trained by some 100 inmates at the combined medium- and maximum-security prison. They frolic in a penned area in the shadow of guard towers and high fences, or splash in a plastic wading pool. Because they can be trained quicker as pets than as service animals, they're ready for adoption in just a couple of weeks.

Awe! The prisoners save the puppies. That's cute.

(Thanks to the lovely Miss Alissa for passing it along.)

I hope this vehicle is owned not by a high-rolling frat boy, but an overly ironic indie kid.

(DMB = Dave Matthew's Band, for those of you fortunate enough not to know)

Me and Shaun outside Seagull

I just returned from a brief escape to New York City--something I strive to do at least once a year. The primary purpose of this trip was to attend the wedding of former Seattleite Jeff Wood, so I ran into plenty of Seattle and Portland folks at the ceremony, including Ben London, John Hollis Fleischman, and Bill Bernhard. The day before the wedding, I had the pleasure of checking in with former Vain stylist Shaun "Surething" Cottle. He moved to NYC earlier this year to open a salon with Le Tigre's Johanna Fateman and by all accounts, they're doing quite well. I know Shaun has many fans and friends here in Seattle, who would appreciate knowing that the Seagull Haircutters salon is kicking serious ass, snapping up celebrity clients of all stripes as well as the expected cadre of musicians and artists. Go Shaun!

In weirder news, during dinner with my friend Chuck Klosterman before the sold-out Hold Steady show at Irving Plaza, I learned that the German company who is publishing his book made a commercial to promote their release of Killing Yourself to Live, Chuck's book about traveling across the United States to visit landmark sites of famous rock star deaths. Is it just me or are commercials for books something previously only seen in conjunction with Dianetics or Oprah's latest literary endorsement? See for yourself here.

EDITOR: Your lead article by Brendan Kiley expressed more of my emotions than you can imagine--unless you too have hunted, killed animals by hand....

DEAR BRENDAN: "The Urban Hunt� is surely the most inspired piece of reportage that has ever graced the pages of The Stranger...

BRENDAN: I'm from WV, and I know the "take your date squirrel hunting� culture. I've personally killed and butchered our own hogs and chickens. I know where meat comes from. A couple of points: First, your hunting technique sucks to the point where it constitutes cruelty and is irresponsible....

EDITOR: This article disgusted me. I made it through the rabbits but couldn't get to the end of the pigeons....

We received dozens of interesting letters in response to "The Urban Hunt" and we're collecting them all here. More will appear in Thursday's paper.

American scientists John Mather and George Smoot have been awarded the Nobel Prize for physics for their work supporting the Big Bang.

This weekend I was loitering, contemplating whether or not to waste my youth through substance abuse, when I found this helpful pamphlet.

I was immediately drawn in by its Goosebumps-esque cover.

"Drug culture has been in America since the middle of the last century," the introduction explains. The pamphlet goes on to profile illicit substances your kids might be doing in the alley, at school or even in their own rooms. On the marijuana page, there's a list of actual street names for marijuana, some of which are just ridiculous:

blunt, grass, herb, sinsemilla, smoke, pot, reefer, weed, mary jane, skunk, boom, gangster, kiff, chronic, ganja, super skunk, purple haze, dope, nederweed

Shouldn't "gangster" be reserved for some harder drug? Maybe something involving rum-running and zoot suits? When was the last time you saw someone smoking boom in a zoot suit?

Anyway, at least seven of those names seemed fabricated to me, though I thought maybe I just don't roll with the right crowd and should seek some expert testimony. Those bolded "street names" are ones that both Dominic Holden, Seattle's premier pot-legalization activist, and David Schmader, Seattle's premier pothead, have never heard (though Holden also mentioned some they missed, namely hobbit leaf, hippie lettuce and "wacky tobacky").

So who wrote this thing? Since they obviously didn't consult the druggies themselves, I imagined a conference room full of middle-aged men, hashing out ideas of what they think those Young People are talking about in The Street.

It's far, far worse than I imagined. Check out the back of the pamphlet:

This morning, the Seattle P-I profiled Mars Hill Church, which just opened a new satellite church at Chief Sealth High School in West Seattle, under the headline "Young Families Finding their Faith in Mars Hill's Urban Ministry." The piece is an utterly uncritical—nay, glowing— look at the church's "urban ministries," focusing primarily on Mars Hill's plans to "become 'missionaries to the city,' displaying biblical hallmarks -- a commitment to traditional marriage and family, a dedication to serving others -- that would attract others."

"God has positioned us on the fault line between two worlds," [chief pastor Mark Driscoll] said, adding that those with more means have the opportunity to help their less-affluent neighbors in a city growing more densely populated.

Since urban areas bear so much influence in cultural, social, political and other spheres, "if you want to change the world, you must reach the city," Driscoll said.

The P-I describes Mars Hill's philosophy as "contemporary biblical teaching." Oh, really? Here are few of the things Mars Hill's members believe (all quotes are from Driscoll's sermons):

• God does not want women to have jobs. Their role is to get married, stay at home and have as many babies as possible. (Conveniently, birth control is immoral, too.) "Women will be saved by going back to that role that God has chosen for them. Ladies, if the hair on the back of your neck stands up it is because you are fighting your role in the scripture."

• Women also should not seek leadership roles, either in society ("There is no occasion where women led a society and were its heads and the men complied and followed. ... It's a matter of Biblical creation") or in the church ("Every single book in your Bible is written by a man.")

• Homosexuality is an abomination. People who are gay can change. "Your banners, your floats, your buttons—they're not good. It's just like letting cancer come into a body... until the cancer consumes the body and kills you. ... We will extricate the cancer, and if that person who has the cancer is repentant and wants to kill the cancer, then we'll welcome them back. But they have to accept that anything but one man, one woman, one God, one life is sexually immoral."

• Evolution is a lie. Humans were descended from a man named Adam created by God a few thousand years ago. "The lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. This is the making of the first human being, our father Adam. We all descend from him and there was no human life before this man."

• Hell is a real, physical place, and"it's hot. Real hot."

Contrary to what you'd think after reading today's P-I, Mars Hill is an evangelical church with a radical-right agenda and a taste for conquest. "Contemporary biblical" theology is a completely misleading way to describe what Mars Hill teaches its legions of young members. The growing influence of right-wing megachurches like Mars Hill (3,500 active members so far, with plans to expand to 10,000), especially among young adults, should alarm anyone who believes in civil rights, reproductive freedom, and women's equality.

I expected that response to the Urban Hunt would be intense. I was ready for the angry letters ("you are a sick f'r") and the sad letters ("your recent article about hunting and killing stray animals in Seattle was beyond disturbing"), but the "me too!" letters took me by surprise.

There's the woman who hunted one of the world's largest rodent:

I studied hunting methods of the Chamacoco tribe in Paraguay—we basically went out in the canoe and slowly moved through the palm forests in search of them and shot at them with some whack rifles. It took days before we got one (they have become awful hunters due to being given canned food by missionaries... ) But, when we finally did get one, it was sooooo darn good. Dunno if it was actually tasty or I just thought it was because if my involvement in bringing in much needed meat...

And the woman looking for advice:

Glad to hear I'm not the only urban hunter-gatherer out there. I've culled ducks from the local arboretum, but my problem is that the meat turned out incredibly tough. Any processing suggestions?

And then all the people trading recipes and reminscing about hunting and game on this page in the forums.

Who knew?

Is there any other way to explain this sign I spotted Saturday night on Division St. in Portland?

One

Because it is Sunday, I want to bring up (or pick up) Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach, a 19th century German philosopher whose main contribution to thought is the idea that humans, or more precisely Christians, give God the credit for the good things they do or achieve in life and themselves the responsibility for the negative or the bad things they do in life. When we are good, we are close to God; when we are bad, we are all too human. I bring this idea up (or pick this idea up) because on Sunday, America's church day (with the hours between 9 am and 1 pm being its most segregated hours of the week), is America's football day. And on TV we see lots young athletes performing amazing physical feats, and, after performing these feats, giving God, not themselves, the credit. Player after player attributes the ability to throw far or run very fast, positive attributes on the field, to the father of Jesus. But, of course, if these same young players are caught driving drunk after a game, or sleeping with a whore, this is now their own fault. "Where did he go wrong?" asks the Christian. "God gave him a gift and he wasted it."

Amazingly, mainstream American Christianity has extended this God/good association to wealth, to prosperity, which is why there is, in the constitution of the ordinary American animal, no contradiction between making loads of money and being a good Christian--despite the fact that Christian morality is fundamentally the morality of the poor or, as pointed out in Genealogy of Morals, the morality of the slave. (When a black person enters a church in a poor community, that church has much more to do with original Christianity than the church entered by a white person in a rich community.)

Two

The other thing I want to point out is the single reason why, as a practice, philosophy surpasses theology. Not, as Hegel thought, because religion is limited to picture-thinking (parables, allegories, myths, and the like) and philosophy gets to the substance of God directly by abstract reasoning--no, it's because of this: Socrates, the founder of Western philosophy, knew how to laugh, whereas Jesus, the founder of Christianity, never laughed at all. Through all of the Gospels, Jesus is dead serious, thoughtful, angry, and even cries at one point (his greatest shame), but he never laughs. Even before he was executed by the city of Athens, Socrates, as we are told by Plato, laughed. Now imagine what kind of religion Christianity would be if Jesus had laughed on the cross? Indeed, Gibson's movie would have an entirely different meaning if the real death of Jesus was, in spirit, closer to the Life of Brian.

(A last note: In the song "Why Should I Love You?," which features Prince, a Christian of sorts, Kate Bush asks: "...have you ever seen a picture/of Jesus laughing?" Because she hasn't seen such a picture (and nor have I), she speculates what a smiling Jesus would look like: "...mmm do you think/he had a beautiful smile?/a smile that healed?")

My childhood home was located just three blocks from the Woodland Park Zoo. Because of this, I grew up fearing our neighborhood squirrels, which were more aggressive—due to familiarity with humans, or maybe from simply being harassed all the time—than squirrels in other neighborhoods.

One afternoon, around the time St. Helens erupted, I remember hearing my father yelling from the backyard. When I ran to the window to investigate, I found him swinging a rake frantically while half a dozen squirrels swarmed around him. They growled and nipped at him, some even leaping into the air and snapping dangerously close to his face. And long after my father had been forced to retreat indoors, the squirrels remained in this state of batshitcraziness, their clucking and menacing chirps taunting us through the windows. My father was shaken, but my mother couldn't stop cackling.

To this day I eyeball every approaching squirrel with suspicion. So I feel your pain good residents of Mountain View, California.

Adding to the growing online medical file marked "Hutch," the Prayer Warrior today offers this update on his mysterious illness. (Any Slog readers want to update their diagnoses?)

Dear Prayer Warrior,

Once again, they were unable to draw blood, which means I will have to see a specialist. Please pray that I will be able to get some results on my blood counts soon, in order to keep fighting this disease effectively.

Your Pastor,
Hutch

When I first saw the line of people bundled up and waiting on 6th Ave downtown between Pike and Pine, I thought: parade? soup kitchen? No, they've set up the folding chairs and grabbed the blankets for the release of a new Air Jordan shoe by Niketown Friday at midnight.

There's only about 15 people who've set up camp so far, but the guys at the front of the line are adamant that by tomorrow night, the line will stretch around the corner. "People'll form a second line and try to cut us," said one young guy, "They'll try..."

The first guy in line has been waiting since yesterday morning, but he's been counting down to the day he can own the shoes for much longer -- he started planning the wait when Nike announced the release date for the $155 Air Jordan 5 Retro (also called Grapes because they're officially emerald and grape colored) last January. He's taking vacation time from his job to wait for the shoes.

I don't get it, I said. First of all, they're just shoes. And couldn't you just buy them online? Or wait a week? I'm all for seeing movies on opening midnights, but tickets only cost $155 in New York and LA.
Plus, movies are entertaining. Shoes are shoes, which aren't fun.

The Air Jordan-obsessors say they've heard it all before; people walking by are often sarcastic or plain bewildered. But they justified it by saying they remember when the first Air Jordans came out and they were too young to buy them then. And, they say the shoes will be sold out as soon as they're released and online they're being scalped at (more) outrageous prices. They're right -- the shoes are selling for more than $200 on eBay.

Anyway, I'm sure Nike is thrilled. A few blocks away I noticed a street grafitti tag by cosmetics company Urban Decay: spray paint on the sidewalk trying to make it seem like they have some sort of popular following within the city.

The P-I takes a thorough look at the Bodies exhibit in the Life & Arts section today, including a nice photo of our beloved critic Lindy West examining the circulatory system of a human head:
^{Photo by Karen Ducey/Seattle Post-Intelligencer}

I find it strange that Museum of the Mysteries director Philip Lipson, whose "Museum" peddles ghost tours, doesn't see the irony in his complaint about the freak-show nature of the exhibit: "It's not treating [the dead] with dignity and is just making a peep show out of dead bodies."

Yes, I am slightly obsessed with this show. It opens Saturday; buy tickets at www.bodiestickets.com.

Censorship's no longer just for smokers--New York and Chicago health officials are considering citywide restaurant bans on artificial trans fatty acids (i.e. the flavor in your favorite fry and the stuffing in your heart attack) by 2008.

The [New York] city health department unveiled a proposal Tuesday that would bar cooks at any of the city's 24,600 food service establishments from using ingredients that contain the artery-clogging substance, commonly listed on food labels as partially hydrogenated oil.

Artificial trans fats are found in some shortenings, margarine and frying oils and turn up in foods from pie crusts to french fries to doughnuts.

A similar ban on trans fats in restaurant food has been proposed in Chicago and... would only apply to companies with annual revenues of more than $20 million, a provision aimed exclusively at fast-food giants.

Health officials have argued for years that trans fats hold no nutritional value and are a "dangerous and unnecessary ingredient,â€� as NYC Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden put it. Trans fats can easily be substituted for healthier oils with little or no tasty difference, in fact, the article mentions several foods and companies who have already made the switch—Wendy's, Crisco (yum!), Doritos, Cheetos, and Oreos.

But foodie freedom fighters are protesting that the bans are unwarranted and intrusive government regulation. Some are sure to argue that they're taking the [unconstitutional! burdensome! mean!] citywide smoking bans to the next hysterical level.

When our country is waist deep in an obesity crisis, should health officials have the power to tell citizens what they can and cannot eat?

This morning I previewed Bodies: The Exhibition, which opens Saturday in the former site of the temporary downtown library (800 Pike St).
Controversy surrounds the corpses' identities—the bodies are Chinese people who died unidentified or unclaimed by family members, and then were purchased legally by Dalian Medical University's Plastination Laboratories where they were prepared for display, according to Premier Exhibitions, who now owns the specimens. Some critics speculate that the "unclaimed" could be executed prisoners whose families were not informed of their demise; some bemoan the fact that the display company does not have the consent of the deceased to publicly display their bodies. Protesters have met the exhibit in other cities and I'm sure Seattle will have its share. A similar show in San Francisco, called The Universe Within, heard similar criticisms and then had to be closed when the corpses started to leak. NPR's All Things Considered took a close look at Bodies and other cadaver exhibits in August.
I was delighted and awed by the bodies on exhibit here and I am planning to go again. I've posted some detailed photos after the jump. First, though, ask yourself: If I were invited to observe the autopsy of a stranger, would I go? If the answer is no, you might want to stop reading here, and you should probably skip Bodies.

Continue reading "Cadavers on Parade" »

Hysteria: It's all in your uterus head.

The whole Buju Banton debate has brought up one of my favorite questions: Should an artist be held morally responsible for his or her ugly, immoral art (or ugly, immoral personal life)?

It's a great, rich question, but much of the discussion around Buju Banton seems willfully obtuse—specifically, the demands that a boycott of Buju Banton should automatically necessitate the boycotting of other "offensive" artists, such as Ice Cube, Guns N Roses, Eminem, etc, etc, etc.

I resent having to parse the bullshit, but here goes: Yeah, the Beastie Boys considered titling their debut Don't Be A Faggot, but, um, they DIDN'T, and they never even proposed calling the record Don't Be A Faggot—Kill a Faggot, Perhaps with Acid and Public Burning, and Trust You've Done the Right Thing. Buju Banton's most controversial track celebrates and encourages the murder of homosexuals, wherever they may be. At least John Lennon had the good taste to only threaten to murder the one "little girl" he was in love with. (And sweet little Neil Young actually went through with it.)

And yes, hiphop and rock is filled with jackasses presenting women as stupid trash that's hardly worth raping, but show me the Ice Cube or Guns N' Roses track that calls for the immediate raping of all women, wherever they may be. You can't, which is too bad, as "A Call for the Immediate Raping of All Women, Wherever They May Be" might make a dynamite GN'R power ballad, but sorry, it doesn't exist.

There's free speech—including the troubling sentiments of Guns N' Roses, Eminem, NWA, Ice Cube, Public Enemy, John Lennon, Neil Young, etc, etc, etc—and then there's hate speech, which lays out a plan of direct action against an entire people, such as in Banton's contentious hit.

As for those stores carrying Buju Banton CDs—big whoop. I proudly worked at a bookstore that sold Mein Kampf. If Easy Street were to host an in-store performance by Buju Banton (or if Bailey/Coy hosted an author signing with Hitler), that would be a different story.

Which brings us to Neumo's, which did the right thing in rejecting plans to give Buju Banton a singular platform to spew his shit in the middle of the gayest neighborhood in town. Booking Banton was a bad idea, Neumo's realizes that now, and let's move on, and make sure Neumo's doesn't have to pay an excessive price for doing the right thing.

I took this picture at Fremont Oktoberfest this weekend. It was a beautiful day, the beer was good, and the crowd was cheerful, mellow, and well-behaved. (That might have something to do with all the cops crawling all over the place—you would think you were at Fremont Methtoberfest judging from the police presence.) But there's something wrong with this picture. Can you tell what it is?

My tiny mug of beer? Nope, you're supposed to wander around tasting the offerings of different breweries, something the tiny mug facilitates.

Give up?

There are no kids in the crowd behind my tiny mug of beer.

No kids were allowed at Fremont Oktoberfest—well, not behind the eight-foot tall fences where the beer was actually served anyway. There was a kids' area at the festival—outside the festival, really. But anyone who actually brought his kids to Fremont Oktoberfest and actually wanted a beer—which is, after all, the whole freaking point of an going to an Oktoberfest—was apparently supposed to leave his kids unsupervised the kids' area.

And what purpose is served by keeping kids out of the area where the beer was served at an Oktoberfest? The animating assumption seems to be this: If you let kids inside a beer garden at a public festival—Bumbershoot, the U-District Street Fair—they will get their hands on beer. And then, by God, we'll have eight year-olds binge drinking at our street fairs! Never mind that kids are around beer—and beer-drinking adults—in every damn restaurant in town every damn day. Just last week I took my kid to the Red Door in Fremont for a plate of nachos. I drank beer and he drank lemonade—sitting directly across the table from me! Oh, the humanity!

In Germany, which invented Oktoberfests, beer gardens are not on one side of a fence and kids' areas on the other. Swing sets and teeter-totters are plopped down in the middle of beer gardens, so adults with children can enjoy a couple of beers while keeping a watchful eye on their kids. This serves two crucial purposes. First, parents, it should go without saying, are frequently more in need of a beer than non-parents. Second, it allows children to observe responsible adults—their parents—drinking responsibly.

Colombia, home of the modern-day Lysistratas:

The girlfriends of gang members in one of Colombia's most violent cities have called off a sex strike aimed at ending a deadly gang feud... Pereira's security chief hailed the strike as a success, saying the women had shown they could win with what he described as "very noble weapons".

Quoth one of the gangster's noble molls: "I would prefer him getting angry to having to go and cry at his funeral."

Full story here.