phonebashing

Pretty funny!

pornography

One time I watched a crappy porno (is there any other kind?) with an ex-girlfriend in the cat-infested apartment of a New York Times photographer. Most of the sex happened at the foot of some guy's coffin. This article about Inside Deep Throat by Anthony Lane is hysterical.

This Trib reporter has a good story about the strength and reach of the Republican's PR machine, and the ludicrous assertion of naivety in the Gannon/Guckert affair (plus he drops a great pun in the mix).

Oh sweet sweet Ownership Society, are you just a dream?

Privatized juvenile facilities! That's a capital idea (pun intended). Finally we can cut all those literacy programs which might discourage kids from reentering the prison system. Then who would fill all those nice, new prisons being built across the country? Oh noble and good spirit of the capitalist.

leisure

Taking a cue from the U.S., conservatives in France want to relax the country's stringent leisure laws, allowing private sector employees to work more than the current mandatory 35 hours a week. The proponents of the proposal cite low productivity and rising costs. But, according to Tony Judt, in a review in the NYRB, while the U.S. outworks France 1,877 hours a year to 1,562, our productivity is outranked by France, as well as Germany, Luxembourg, and others.

Dillingham

Bobbi says on her Dillingham page that villagers come into town to shop, or just to be in "the City of things". I thought that was pretty great.

attention educators!

Anybody interested in starting a school in Indianapolis with me?

Russell Means

Russell Means, one of the charismatic leaders of AIM, the American Indian Movement made famous at Wounded Knee, was at various points in his career, shot in the back by a BIA policeman (the bullet missed all vital organs and Means was quickly released from the hospital), shot at from a passing car (the bullet grazed his head but did no serious harm), shot in the chest with a .222 rifle (again, suffering little damage), and stabbed in the chest by a prison-made knife; he partied in New York with Andy Warhol the weekend before facing murder charges for an incident in the bathroom of the Longhorn Saloon in Scenic, South Dakota involving Means and a fellow AIM member, an incident which left a Lakota from the Pine Ridge Reservation dead; Means later (he was found not-guilty) ran as Larry Flynt's vice presidential candidate in Flynt's 1983 campaign for the presidency; after some traveling to Africa and South America, Means became involved with Hollywood, appearing in Last of the Mohicans and doing the voice of Chief Powhatan for the Disney movie Pocahontas. His daughter (Means was married four times) was Miss Teen South Dakota.

This is paraphrased from Ian Frazier's book On The Rez.