Snowed in.

Ignore the "post time" -- I haven't left the house for close to 48 hours and don't recall when I last hit "refresh" on the "new post" page. There's at least 12 inhes of snow on the ground from the last two days and only now -- Sunday about one o'clock -- is there enough sun to make shadows fall on anything. Snow's starting to fall off the branches of the trees -- those that it didn't make snap and come crashing down in the night, anyway.

Don't want to keep reading. Had enough on Iran and Al Jazeera for one week. Want to do something else. No idea what.

Little kitten. Did I write about her? I don't remember. Got a new one. Little bobtailed black and white furball. She yowled all night the other night and I tried to catch her once but she got away (this before it started snowing). I tried again and managed to back her into the entrance to the fallout shelter. Grabbed her as she ran out, sustaining a deep bite to my hand and some "average" cratches on my forearm. Petted her and put her in my bedroom away from the other cats with her own food, water, and litterbox. She yowled all night again while hiding under furniture so chased her down and put her in the crate and put the crate out in the car so I wouldn't have to hear her -- this was the night it snowed so much. Of course, this time she managed to bite straight through my thumbnail. Twice during the blizzard my conscience got the better of me and I went running out in my bathrobe to fetch the cat only to have to put her out again two hours later when she would just not stop whining.

Then yesterday I figured out I just can't handle this at all and put the crate, with her in it and the door wide open, complete with food and water out the back door. Here's your chance for freedom -- she took off a few minutes later, only to return maybe half an hour after that, not wanting to burrow through the snow drifts. Still yowling, but now cold and wet and miserable, too. I brought her in AGAIN and she remains indoors now. She still whines at night but less, and not in the "I'M DYING!!!" way, so I guess progress is being made. Picked her up twice yesterday and she hissed and swatted at me but didn't do the whole "life or death rip his hand to shreds" thing that she did twice before.

I honestly don't know whether this is a kitten I can "tame" enough ever to make a pet but at least if she has to go back out she's not going out unfixed.

I want to go out and do something. Like I said I'm up to my eyeballs in Iran and *need* to get away from it just for a bit. I should return books to the library but the downtown one is super-creepy, I suspect doubly so with this weather being what it is. The one I checked the books out from is across town and I want to avoid going cross-town 'til the snow's more gone than it is right now.

Tempted to go out walking but am terrified of icy sidewalks. 2006 has so far been by far the least catastrophic year I've had since I moved to Albuquerque. I'd like to keep it that way and keep things moving in that general direction.

First year here (2004), I have a stalker attach himself to me like a leech, my tyres get slashed at work, I keep dropping doughballs as a coworker gets murdered on break, my life gets threatened several times from several different people, I finally test positive for HIV, and then suddely get told a week later I'd tested *false* positive. It was the best ending to the worst year ever I could possibly have hoped for.

Second year (2005), I get out of working graveyard, then go back to working nights after witnessing DPS's 1950s-style bar raids, then get thrown in jail, with all the fun and adventure that entails, *and* see people I know disapear and people known by people I know murder or be murdered. The violence still happens, but it's one step further removed from me, which (as long as it's happening anyway) is not a bad thing.

Third year (2006) -- no jail, no HIV, no serious threats of bodily harm, no murders and no disapearances, just some crazy weather and a few stupid purchases on credit. Near the end of the year, the people at KUNM think to give me a microphone to take out into the wide world -- ironically at the exact moment my existence becomes completely and totally unnewsworthy. The pendulum would seem to have swung however tentatively into the "net positive" area.

I got fed up with the "feedback loop" nature of the stories coming out of the bars -- they went in cycles and metacycles and wound up being utterly predictable: the crazy street pusher will come back in half an hour and try to cause a scene when you won't let him in, we'll get "surprise" inspected three weeks from now, someone will disappear six weeks from now and turn up in another state two months from now, and then all the bars will get raided the month after Pride but we'll stay open 'cause we've got "feelers" out everywhere in *all* the bars. I really do not need to stick around for another year of more of the same.

So in a year I've gone from staring down crackheads who say they've got guns at a bar late at night to not wanting to walk to the mailbox or dumpster 'cause I'm afraid I'll slip and fall.

On the other hand I've gone from struggling to get stories about the bars covered to trying to cover "the US versus Iran" on my own. A year ago it was "this drag queen disapeared", and now it's "who's gonna start the next middle east conflagration?". Maybe I'm just finding challnges more worthy of my time. Who knows? I *do* miss feeling "in the middle" of it.

No work tomorrow. Being Monday there *should* be a News Department meeting and I'll be free to work there with the telephones that can record interviews. Hopefully that will happen. I don't know -- everything's shut down strangely with holidays and all.

24 hours of snow.

I've never seen such a thing. Never. I never imagined it was physically possible. Maybe in Alaska or something, I suppose. But -- wow. Snow for a whole day. This isn't normal. Not down here.

We had this "big winter storm" just last week, you see. As a rule, we have *maybe* one of these each year: schools will close, tourists will take charming/shocking pictures of snow on cacti, and certain people will die on certain highways, but everything else will go on just as normal, then everything will go back to how it's "supposed to be".

The forecasts said there'd be another little something following it for good effect just in time for the holidays ("white christmas" in a Bing Crosby way and what have you), but no one expected what we're seeing now. Interstate highways are closed, flights are cancelled, and it takes at least twice as long to drive across town as usual, blah blah blah.

And there's *another* winter storm set to hit us *next* week. Who would ever have thought weather didn't follow the dictates of popular music?

I'm talking about seven inches of snow so far, *in* Albuquerque, with four to six more expected before 5 PM tomorrow. I have no clue what that much snow looks like, much less how anyone may deal with it. It's *not* "normal".

I know, I know. This isn't *anything* to Minnesotans (with apologies to Mike, to whom I've failed to respond to emails recently), who are surely laughing at us for saying "tire chains? what are those?". But in New Mexico it's quite a big deal. I had to leave work two hours early this afternoon 'cause I just didn't trust the roads and drivers on 'em (including myself). All normal rules are off when suddenly people slide sideways and forward without intending to.

While I'm apologizing to readers -- happy birthday to Weasel -- which I think was the 27th -- but it may have been the 28th -- I'm not 100% sure. It's either two or three days after Christmas. I'm pretty sure it was the 27th. At any rate -- congratulations to him on being a year closer to death.

Speaking of which:

Aww -- the pending Hussein execution poses "ethical problems" for US-based corporate TV networks who might not want to show his moment of death publicly. Read Michel Foucault's "Discipline & Punish", you fuckin' shits, and you will understand this so-called "crisis" that you face ain't nothin' new, nor even (by a long shot) the most important aspect of current "criminal justice".

Meanwhile Iraqi Kurds claim this summary execution is a travesty of justice, even separate from human rights claims, calling Mr. Hussein's trial a summary execution by a kangaroo court.

Boing, boing! And who is in whose pocket?

My eyes, overnight, sure won't be on NPR. (I don't care what east-coast elitists make of all this, seeing as Mr. Hussein never quite managed to dress fashionably to begin with.) I want to know what happens. Period. My eyes, tonight, will be on Al Jazeera.

Don't knock it 'til you've tried it, folks. They piss off *everyone* involved, without exception, and still somehow manage to get the story right.

Good news for me: no work on New Years' Day. Why is this good news? Uh, 'cause I can spend all day that day at KUNM. Hooray! With apologies to Bill, who did invite me over for ham, his invitation's not quite the "show up or get fired" thing I've faced from prior employers at holiday time; and like it or not, bigger things are going on worldwide than claims going out. I'd *love* to eat the ham, and my denying to do so has nothing to do with Kosher/Halal restrictions. It's just, you see, there's a better story for me if I spend that time in the newsroom trying to get hold of former Bush XLIII staffers and what have you.

So, uh, I dunno. I guess I'll spend most of Monday at KUNM. YAY!

Good for you Cory Flinthoff. Your courage in never venturing more than fifteen feet beyond the Green Zone is -- well -- words fail me. I'm not exactly criticizing you. I'm not sure I'd do much different if I were where you are and didn't know a word of Arabic beyond "I WANT THE BEST FALAFEL, NOW!".

Eid. Great time for a summary execution. Except for that whole "how dare you insult 1/5th of the world's population" thing. Hm. Not that I'm an expert on preventing non-state actors from engaging in terrorist activity against the US. But it does seem rather DUMB to summarily execute *anyone* without a fair trial on a feast day that the followers of a religion you claim not to be declaring worldwide war against, while claiming you have no standing in inter-sect conflicts.

And Dr. A.Q. Khan? What of him? Last I heard, the man who sold the bomb to Pakistan was in hospital. Poor Dr. Khan. But far be it from any US citizen to ever point a finger at URENCO as a key node in nuclear proliferation, even as they build the National Enrichment Facility outside Eunice, New Mexico, despite local objections to Uranium tailings with no clear strategy as to how URENCO's subsidiary, Louisiana Energy Services, will deal with the wastes.

Even Bush XLIII should not be executed on the eve of Eid, should he ever be convicted of crimes against humanity -- not that the last duly elected Governor of Texas ever showed such solid common sense as to commute a single capital sentence when he was governor.

Expect an explosion. I don't mean just a single car bombing here or there. This is a horrible idea. Horrible. My guess is that whatever violence occurs these next few days will be summarily chalked up to "sectarian strife in Iraq" (thank you, NPR) and not to any US actions whatsoever. No one is actually responsible, you see, it's just all those damn stupid bown-skinned Muslims fighting amongst themselves for reasons we can't ever pretend to begin to understand, since they're all clearly incapable of rational thought themselves, being brown-skinned Muslims living in the "Middle East". Yes. Thank you again, NPR, for your insightful (albeit racist) analysis of these things.

And no, this writing doesn't have any "hidden" messages in it. (And if you disbelieve me, ask the CIA -- even as the current administration passes on the CIA's duties to Military Intelligence.)

No one's actually responsible, you see: it's just those damn dirty brown-skinned Muslims failing to resolve their differences according to the mandate set out by the Bremer's Iraqi National Congress. And goodness knows, Achmed Chalabi is *such* a fine exemplar of Islamic moralism in action. Or something.

Wooo. Cory Flinthoff had to transfer between phone lines in the midst of a radio story. Woohoo. What amazing journalistic courage -- the NPR correspondent had to pick up a second line in the midst of an interview.

WOW.

NPR, you have done it again.

Done what?

Failed.

Happy Eid, everyone.

Another few days in a total news vacuum.

Yep. Back down to El Paso.

First Christmas home in something like 4 years. Usually I go down for New Year's Day which is my father's birthday. This year I got to go for Christmas. It was, honestly, rather odd. Now suddenly the Ethiopians are 600 miles from Mogadishu. Hm. I didn't even know they were *in* Somalia to begin with. What the hell happened? Oh yes. I stopped listening to six hours of news every day.

I took the old roads down except those stretches of it that have been taken over by the freeway (I-25, mostly). Stopped at the Owl Bar on the way, of course, which was even more than usually abuzz with activity, what with the potential of the space shuttle landing at White Sands for only the second time in over a quarter century, which wound up being a wash.

The holiday itself was more than anything a roving food orgy. The days were spent going from meal to meal to meal to meal. Some were exceptionally special, while not a few felt rather obligatory. After you've eaten six times in a single day, it's physically hard to eat again "because it's the tradition", which quickly starts to reek of "because you live in the richest country on the planet", which quickly starts to smell of sheer entitlement, which sours the efforts people make because you happen to show up.

My father was weird. His health is bad, bad, bad. He goes in and out of lucidity and spends most of his days hooked onto an oxygen machine 24/7 watching TV. Most of the time he doesn't talk. Then, when he does, it's roughly a 50/50 chance that what he'll say will make *any* sense whatsoever.

I took my radio recording equipment with me to get comfortable with talking to people while wearing earphones and sticking microphones at them. Good thing I did so with family before trying it on strangers -- all it takes is a few people jumping *back* from you to realize you're being just a *bit* too forward! And I'd rather have that person "jumping back" be my own mother than some person who's supposed to be sharing with me his or her views on US foreign policy toward Iran.

It also doesn't help that I interviewed my father who, as I said, went from making sense to talking nonsense only to flip back. Now that I've done that, though, I think that particular minidisk is pretty well useless -- it's *filled* with "practice", some of which means something to me personally, now, which you could not pay me to record over. Good thing I bought five minidisks to replace those I "waste" by this practice recording thing.

Also spent much of the weekend reading Scott Ritter's book, "Target Iran: The Truth About the White House's Plans for Regime Change".

It's a damn shame -- Mr. Ritter is exceptionally credible. As a former UN Weapons Inspector in Iraq who helped to stop SCUD missiles from hitting Israel, he stands in a unique position to say whether or not Iran's nuclear program is indeed credibly geared toward weapons production.

The copy editing of his latest book, however, is so downright amateurish that his book is *much* harder to read than it needs to be, despite the neither uncommon nor insurmountable problem that Mr. Ritter tends to speak far better than he writes. This isn't the left turning against the left; this is simple *copy editing*, and I now have *very* little faith in the ability of Nation Books to accurately copy edit their own writers' work.

I'm talking about major grammatical errors on every single page, sometimes with multiple major errors on the same exact page. I'm not just talking "apostrophe abuse", though this happens in spades, but things like sentences that make *no* sense, and spelling IAEA director Mohammad Al Baradei's name more than one way making those of us who notice these things wonder whether they're talking about two different people with similar "foreign sounding" names. And by "major grammatial errors" I mean precisely the sort of thing that leaves a reader wondering who precisely is the subject and who precisely is the object of an action in any given sentence.

Journalists can not be counted on to put "(sic)" behind each and every grammatically misatributed quote, especially where Arabic names are quoted in non-Arabic contexts. (Journalists are not linguists, as a rule.) And if they do, they throw the quotations' credibility into question in readers' minds, even if to do so is not their express intent, because they do not know the language, even on its most basic levels. This is utter stupidity when something as simple as "how do we transcribe this person's name" come into question, repeatedly, as it does in this book. Clearly.

Shame on the publisher. Even as I laud them for daring to publish this man's thoughts: shame on the publisher. This is what I'd expect of high school freshmen in a strictly Roman Catholic High School. If they'd meant to open a meaningful dialogue they'd at least have managed to ensure accurate translations within specific conceptual frameworks.

What finally drove me over the edge was seeing confusion between "Iran" and "Iraq". Oy vey. As in, you *have to* know the context from fifty pages back to figure out that the word just used *should* be "Iran", and not "Iraq", as printed, given than both nations have had their names mentioned in the context of weapons inspectors' readings of the evidence these two different nations presented for or against their own nation's cases, at this or that point in history, whereas only certain persons' names appear conjoined with either nation's claims, specifically.

The worst mistake is when a word which *should* clearly be "Iranian" is rendered as "Iraqi". This clearly demonstrates that this is no mere typographical error (e.g., "Irani" or "Iraqian"), but the effect of haphazard galley proof reading by someone who clearly neither knows nor cares the difference between "Iran" and "Iraq" (both brown-skinned Muslims, after all) in the context of the issues at hand here.

This is just plain-out WRONG. Nation Books might as well say "whoever it was, they were dark-skinned Muslims, so it clearly doesn't matter who said what" in a footnote.

I understand there was a sense of urgency in getting this particular book to press, and that they might have had different readers copyedit different parts of the manuscript as a result. But this sort of mistake happens again, and again, and again, and again, in ways that can have nothing to do with one person's error, unless that person had significant editorial authority to begin with.

Appaently, either (a) no one was in charge at the editorial level, or (b) whoever was ultimately in charge had no clue what they were doing, or (c) had a vested interest in seeing the readings of the author's words misrepresented.

Nation Books would have done *far* better to preserve its editorial credibility by coming out a week or two later than it did, without such elementary school level errors, than they did by having come out with this book a week or two before.

Sad. Indeed, pathetic. Best intentions led astray.

Mr. Ritter's to be honoured for having written this book, but Nation Books is shamed by allowing it to go out under its imprimatur with these ridiculous errors put into permanent print: the imprimatur itself is made incredible. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.

I dearly want to cite Mr. Ritter's analysis in my own story, but can not, because the editing of his book is so absurdly bad.

I want my money back.

I want the coming war on Iran un-declared.

I've got four minutes, more or less, to explain to the otherwise disengaged listening public why this is important enough that they should contact their elected representatives. Unfortunately for me no one lays out better than Mr. Ritter in this dreadfully edited book why guarantees made by Iran to the IAEA were made in good faith on behalf of a country the editors seem incapable of telling from its neighbour on account of a single keystroke clear halfway across the keyboard.

Nothing would waste those precious seconds more than a straight-up descriptive linguistic analysis of what they're not reading in the paper.

Cat rescue, yeah. That's the direction I'm goin' from this point on out. ;)

I go this morning to get gas and it seems that "the accidental President", Mr. Gerald Ford, has died, at age 93. Huh. OK. So now I guess we get two weeks of laudatory memorials. Sure explains all the half-masted flags. I hear they're all gonna fly half-staff for thirty days, which is fine, if you ask me, 'cause we should be flying 'em all half-mast anyway 'til US servicemembers stop dying in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But no, flags don't fly half-mast for that. They fly half-mast for the only prsident not elected to any nationwide office instead, who failed to remember authorizing the Indonesian genocide against the Timorese. Fine with me. I'm as cynical as anyone. Half-masted flags make the most flag-minded aware of current sentiment, even if they can not pretend to know exactly why.

Half-mast flags serve to lower mood. Maybe some people will think it's for the most recent dead in Iraq and Afghanistan. If in these thirty days one tenth of them start to question the state of things right now, well, that's not a bad thing.

Strategic incoherence.

Unless you're even more of a news junkie than I am, you probably haven't heard of Flynt Leverett. He's not exactly a raging lefty ideologue.

Between 1999 and 2003, Mr. Leverett served as Senior Director of Middle East Affairs on the National Security Council. He served as a Middle East Expert on the U.S. Secretary of State's Policy Planning Staff, and is a former Senior Analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Yep -- yet another high-level intelligence officer who worked in the Bush XLIII administration, only to leave in frustration over administration policy.

He wrote a report for the Century Foundation (again, not quite a Marxist shill organization, that), entitled "Dealing with Tehran: Assessing U.S. Diplomatic Options Toward Iran" -- and yes, I have actually read the report, which they published about two weeks back now.

Quoting from the Century Foundation's press release announcing the release of his report:

Leverett warns that any incremental, issue-by-issue or step-by-step approach to engagement with Iran will fail. Moreover, he says that America's current options to coerce Iran, either militarily or through sanctions, are strategically weak and could undermine important US goals. Internal divisions within President Bush's administration, Leverett argues, have left it mired in a 'strategically incoherent approach to diplomacy on the nuclear issue,' preventing substantive progress toward a settlement. The U.S. needs a comprehensive and coherent approach.

So. Coercion won't work. And this from anything but a self-important pacifist with no connection whatsoever to government. Hm. (Fleischer cartoon music on "Happy Feet". Kick ass. I love my radio station. All of a sudden it's 1932 again and nothing's changed.)

Mr. Leverett goes on to write a shorter Op-Ed for the New York Times based on the findings of his 30-page Century Foundation Report. New York Times Op-Ed Editor David J. Shipley still hopes to publish Mr. Leverett's Op-Ed article.

Being a former administration official, Mr. Leverett is obligated to submit his pending publications to the CIA Publications Review Board for (what else? -- drumroll, please) review -- in order to ensure state secrets aren't disclosed. This CIA review is limited to searches for classified information. It does *not* exist to deal with policy questions.

Since leaving the government, Mr. Leverett has not had a single word changed in over 20 reviewed articles, not counting several longer studies (including the above-cited "Dealing with Tehran"), and his book Inheriting Syria: Bashar's Trial by Fire (Brookings Institution Press, 2005).

In the case of his New York Times Op-Ed, though, publication was inexplicably blocked.

How?

The CIA Publications Review Board passed the Op-Ed on to the National Security Council, who claimed, in turn, to find (unspecified) classified information in the article, and subsequently blocked its publication.

Buh.

Fine with me. I don't depend on the New York Times for my opinions, anyway. I can just read "Dealing with Tehran". I'd strongly recommend you do the same. It's absolutely fascinating.

According to Scott Shane's 19 December 2006 New York Times article, Mr. Leverett's wife, Hillary Mann, a former State Department Middle East expert herself, sent a copy of the Op-Ed to the State Department for review on Thursday, which was rejected for publication, and subsequently rejected yet again the following day by the National Security Council upon submission of a "new version" of the article.

Bush XLIII = incoherent = state secret. Amazing. I'd think it would be undeniably obvious any time he spoke.

The governor's a fuckin' moron = state secret. Hm. Heaven help anyone who can read the King James Bible, on the basis of which he claims to base state policy in a state where the state and religion are supposed to be separate.

Do yourself a favour. Read "Dealing with Tehran" now and save yourself the trouble of following this story as it develops.

Eminent Domain abuse is gonna be a big issue this coming State legislative session. If I want to keep living where I live now I practically have to lobby for Eminent Domain reform. Guess that means I can't report on it! Fine with me, since I seem to be onto "bigger" stories in the meantime. Maybe my next story will be all about cat rescue. Yeah. That'd be great. :)

In the meantime I'd tell you who I hope to interview, but eh, that'd be scummy, or something. (I've got a couple of half-decent leads, as you might well imagine.)

Oh. There's that Lybian HIV case I mentioned once before in passing -- I don't know the first thing about it except it's a bloody mess. But NPR's reporting on it, so it must be at least as important as what the truly fashionable young ladies are wearing this season in New York (and what can possibly be more important than that?). I mean, I'm sorry, but are skirts two inches shorter or two inches longer this season than they were this season last year? Damned if I know. It's really not *that* important. After all, it's only five or six capital cases at hand. A few nurses and doctors may die, but what effect will it have on the latest fashions? Were they ever such snappy dressers to begin with? I don't know. But here's the latest Al Jazeera (الجزيرة) story on it, just in case you really give a rat's ass about such life and death issues where the chronically unfashionable are concerned.

Wow. Winter storm and I-40's closed both West and East of Albuquerque. That's gotta be good news for transuranic nuclear waste shipments to WIPP.

So. Personal bullshit: took me a solid hour and a half to drive home from work this afternoon. It usually takes fifteen minutes.

Auditions.

Time the US Media -- hopefully starting with NPR -- stop speaking of the all-but-absolutely certain change in power in Cuba in terms of something other than "auditions".

Pardon me for saying so, but this isn't about "theatre".

Not posting lately.

Not that I don't want to but the Iran thing in the context of the Arab-Israeli Conflict has me using practically all my brain power on that. Poor readers -- those who commented on the last post got seventeen-page emails in response as I try to figure out where I stand in relation to all that's going on.

Took out the trash and actually mopped the living room floor for the first time since I ripped the carpet out. Figured a bad job mopping would be better than none at all. Turned on the gas heater in the living room since unlike last year gas costs less than electricity.

Cooking spaghetti. I avoid smoking by going out to buy things and avoid buying further clutter by buying food instead. I got tired of the whole "potato tacos/quesadillas only" thing so splurged and got some great spaghetti sauce on sale in nice glass jars I can reuse. It's dumb, I know. But that's my entertainment these days.

Haven't gotten out of my bathrobe all day. May go out later or may not. Don't really know just yet.

Can of worms.

Thinking out loud.

So they give me a microphone and minidisk recorder yesterday, show me how to use 'em, and let me loose on the world. They are clearly *insane*.

My intent is to cover the meeting of the group organizing a demonstration around preventing a war against Iran. I walk out without *anything* useful where sound is concerned.

I mean nothing against *anyone* in the group and apologise if any of this sounds the least bit dismissive. It's not intended as such: you're doing important work and whatever it takes you to get to the point you can make a decision I salute you for doing it. (Remember, I've always been the sort who'll sit at home listening to the news 'til something catches his fancy.) It just seems to be how groups of people tend to work in general when there's no strict "command structure", and this is my *first* news story.

I know now that I know *nothing*. So I have heard the news each day and listened closely and gathered all sorts of nifty information that suddenly I don't know *what* to do with now that it's up to me to file a story. So I've written on and on and on and on for years on end and suddenly, big deal. It doesn't matter since I've got to scrunch it all down into a few minutes -- *after* I figure out who to ask what. And it's up to me. The KUNM staff is extremely helpful but it's not like I can go and say "who should I ask what". If I can't figure that out I have got no business doing this, period.

It's like standing around, enjoying the landscape, and feeling pretty good about how much you appreciate and understand the landscape when suddenly a midget rides up on the back of a galloping donkey and slaps you in the face with a hot water bottle filled with Kool-aid. Yes, it's exactly like that.

I was *severely* premature in thinking I'd get a usable story out of just one night's meeting at this stage in the game. If the issue were "globalization", it'd be '92 and we'd have vague misgivings about this NAFTA thing that no one really seems to understand *why* it's important. The most that most people can absolutely positively *say* regarding *this* potential war, right now, is something along the lines of "Seymour Hersh thinks this may be a possibility based on quotes from anonymous high level former intelligence officials with ties to the CIA".

". . . and *how* many gunmen were on that grassy knoll?" listeners will wonder if I ever utter those ridiculous words or anything like them into a live mic. Truth or not, it's not newsworthy until it can be made both *concise* and *credible*.

The meeting was basically two hours of going in circles. It was productive in the end, but the actual decisionmaking seemed to take about twenty minutes. Maybe everyone just had to go through the two hours of back and forth about inclusivity versus focus and process and organization and structure before they were ready to commit to making a decision. I respect that. But it's not newsworthy. The headline, if it had one, would have to read "Locals Meet, Discuss Meeting, and Agree to Meet".

The people who talked least seemed to have the best grasp on reality in terms of trying to explain why this matters *now*. But still: the issues are complex. Erring on the side of caution, or trying to, not knowing for sure which side *is* the side of caution (treating minidisks like they're *film*), I didn't record the meeting itself. May have been stupid -- but I knew pretty early on it wouldn't be worth listening through two hours for maybe thirty seconds' "amusement value" quotes. My favourite of these was when one of the raging grannies -- who does *amazing* work -- "caught herself" deep down a rabbit hole, vehemently proving a point everyone agreed with, complete with precision percentage citations of slightly differing public opinion poll results between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq.

It was a valid point: basically "Iraqis want the US out". But everyone in the room agreed on that, and trying to *prove* it proved ridiculous, besides which is had *nothing* to do with Iran, all of which she suddenly realized *as* she said it. I do this all the time when I try to discuss this thing. (Pity my mother for having to hear all about the Martyr Hussayn on the phone.)

This illustrates exactly what is wrong with this story. I don't know it. To a considerable degree, I *can't* know it, and no one wants to admit they don't know a thing completely if they dare to speak of it. That might be the *only* way I *can* approach this: I'll *never* be an expert on Iran, but I *must* be credible in telling others what I know about those organizing around it locally.

The day I say something well-intended but even slightly untrue about Iran (or Israel) on the radio will just happen to be the day someone from Iran (or Israel) hears something on the radio and calls the control room threatening to call the FCC *furious* that I would so arrogantly misrepresent this, that, or the other.

I have *immersed* myself in Iran these last couple of weeks. I could immerse myself for *years* and *still* not have the whole story. You think you've found where you can focus on it, but before you know it, you're off on a tangent you absolutely can't get out of save by bottoming out and realizing you've gone absolutely nowhere really fast. Thus: 88% of Sunnis and 72% of Shia in Badghad want the US out. And we got there in a civilized discussion from discussing a whole other country.

It's like a cartoon where you've got the crew of a spaceship navigating through an area with an unusually large number of black holes: one slight miscalculation and vzhwoooompht! you're in a whole different universe where nothing, I mean *nothing* is the same, which isn't to say it doesn't make sense, it just doesn't make sense according to the order of the universe you are accustomed to living in most of the time. This story has *at least* four such "black hole" threads running through it:

1. Nuclear Proliferation,
2. Islam and the West,
3. Israel and its Arab Neighbours, and
4. The U.S. and Iraq.

There are plenty more, but these, as far as I can tell, are the bare minimum you kinda have to touch on at least just a little bit in passing if you're gonna tell a coherent story about *why* this matters right now. You could *easily* create a flowchart taking up a HUGE wall just showing what affects what. Thus, in theory, it's possible to come up with such flows as "North Korea may or may not affect Iran which affects Hezbollah which affects both Lebanon and Israel which affects Syria which affects Iraq which affects the United States which affects Iran".

I think I need to pick *one* angle and one only to focus on. And I need to do it regardless what the Iran group chooses to focus on.

I've got between two and eight minutes. Gee -- I wonder if I have time to talk about the Ottoman empire and the Balfour Declaration. I kinda doubt it.

"Pick your poison" is what this story's telling me.

One war criminal fewer.

General Augusto Pinochet is dead, at 91, having escaped justice for the hundreds of thousands murdered, disappeared, tortured, and driven into exile from Chile under his autocratic reign.

Let's hope it doesn't take us quite so long in this country to fail to bring our own unelected war criminal (coughbushfortythreeahhem) to justice.

Meantime: I seriously propose burying Pinochet in a coffin in the potters' field with someone else in the same coffin to save Chile the cost of nails, since he so clearly approved of just this very same practice in his own day. (It's what he would have wanted.)

National Public Radio's (NPR's) reporting on this story is horrifically bad, and as "typical" as any example I can give off the top of my head why I don't like NPR and *always* listen to it with critical ears. They're reporting him as "a hero to some, and a villain to others". Doesn't matter that he's a war criminal in the eyes of customary international law in this kind of so-called "objective" reporting. All that matters is that they give equal time to the war criminal's supporters as to his detractors.

Yep. "How about those super-duper nifty autobahns, folks?" Yeah: "Dacchau and Auschwitz: not exactly milestones in the history of justice, but tell that to the blond-haired, blue-eyed person who gets to work in half the time" seems to be the kind of "reporting" involved here. You've simply gotta give equal time to the well-satisfied "Aryan" commuters if you dare acknowledge that millions of Jews, Roma, and Homosexuals (and "others", with cursory apologies to all the "others") did indeed all die butally for no good reason at the hands of the same government that built the autobahns, which let's face it, were just way more important than whoever died to build 'em.

NPR, you have done it again. Way to go. You've failed to live up even to the questionable level of journalism espoused by the likes of Edward R. Murrow, working for a private corporation in the '30s. Radio news is indeed about more than exquisite pronunciation.

We're *damn* lucky we've got a female President in Chile now who was herself a victim of Pinochet; otherwise, Pinochet's death might not even make headlines, even on a weekend when *no* news is news to the degree that precious airtime can afford to be routinely wasted on meaningless word puzzles and missing quarters and the like.

Protest today on Central at University -- would have been bigger but things didn't work out all that great! Hell, things go wrong but sometimes work out OK anyway. Finals week at UNM was a part of it. (As usual, it's the dumb shit that keep people away from things like this, much like a so-called "election" might just have come down to two people debating whether to keep working together in Precinct 150 -- or not: those who, for differing reasons, oppose the status quo don't have a chance to discuss and resolve their differences before going public before the world, therefore, is not deemed "newsworthy".)

So possibly was Bob Andersen's (spelling?) recent banishment from the public campus (at the University of New Mexico) for daring to criticize the UNM Board of Regents a part of today's protest's failure (or success)? I don't know. (I may go to the next Regents' meeting, since hell, where else might I actually *finish* my degree in Linguistics in this one-horse town?) Word didn't go out very far at any rate, just to a couple of email lists, with a very few flyers, not that flyers bring out all that many people to begin with. Not that those who oppose prevailing policies have that much of a chance to begin with. (Unless they get on the news during drivetime.)

So it was maybe ten of us holding signs along Central that went in Burma Shave fashion: "Torture is Evil; People who Torture are Evil; People who Condone Torture are Evil; People who Remain Silent are Cowards". However much I might disagree with the idea that any person is "evil", somebody had to hold the signs; and the demonstration, small though it was, did get overwhelmingly positive results from the public (one or two clearly drug-addled bikers notwithstanding). At this point we're just keeping the issue alive 'til it fires up again, which mark my words, it will. Shortly.

Gave a ride to Bob, from the local chapter of The World Can't Wait, who organized the demonstration, down to the homeless shelter where he works after the demonstration 'cause I was the only one there with both a car and time to spare.

We're all human. We all take time off from other important things to do this work. None of us do this sort of thing full-time, unless we're *very* lucky. We all burn out, and get involved, and then burn out again. Forums on racism and sexism are vitally important, but mark my words: burnout is no less big a problem. I'd love to see an eight-hour forum on combatting burnout at the Peace Center. Hell. Maybe I'll organize one. (Don't hold me to that, at least not right now, please. I don't want to burn out, again.)

Aww. Senator Sam Brownback (R) spends a phoney night in jail as part of his campaign for president. Screw him. (Literally. He's hot: power is sexy! I'd do him. And yeah, I know, I've got very low standards, but let's face it, he *has* got all his teeth, as far as I can tell. Yeah. I'd do him.) I want to know who his cellmate was (and what he got paid off with to leave Brownback well enough alone: a month's worth of Ramen noodles, possibly?).

Hell, I want to know why Brownack even *got* a bunk in a cell on his first (and only) night, period! I want to interview the inmate who got denied a bunk on his third night in jail 'cause they suddenly had a celebrity inmate. And I want to know just how many times the Gentleman from Kansas got awakened by the guards demanding his name and number.

If Brownback seriously wanted to know shit about the prisons, he'd have slept on the floor, his first night, and learned the hard way which ways he should just not sleep. And he would have stuck around at least long enough that the jail food looked *good* to him.

I've never been fond of Brownback as a presidential candidate, but this stunt reeks of total arrogance to such a point I have to actively oppose him. If he fancies himself some sort of Ghandi for having chosen to spend one especially protected night in the jailhouse, he's just a goddamned moron. If he proceeds far enough in Republican party primaries to get voted on in New Mexico, I might well just change my party registration on voter rolls in order to vote against him. Fuckin' shithead.

Chickenshit chickenhawk. And no one who's in jail for just one night ever *has to* take a shower, least of all if they've just spent the previous night on the floor of the U.S. Senate -- "lame duck" session or no. I'm guessing this shithead didn't get searched, processed, stripped, showered, and put in an orange jumpsuit with a tiny ziplock bag with 1/4 ounce of toothpaste and a comb. Theatrics of the worst kind, here.

Senator Brownback: FUCK YOU. Yeah. In the worst kind of way. No lube. No rubber. No nothin'. Bend over and enjoy it, pig.

So now we've eliminated him from the presidential running.

Notes on Peter Goodchild's play, broadcast from an L.A. Theatre Works production, "The Real Dr. Strangelove":

This needs to be made into a movie. A radio play doesn't *quite* get the story across, here. The accents alone (which I dearly hope aren't written into script) make it quite hard to follow, complicated further by the necessities of timing on radio. We need to *see* this on film. I'm picturing all black and white with mostly close-up shots of people in conversation with a few noteworthy exceptions.

The script is written well enough that it could be pulled off, without too much money, and shooting mostly on location. If LASG can get hold of Fuller Lodge for an evening, then so can a film company. (Hell, some bullshit Stephen Segal movie got hold of Foxes just this last week, only to make it look way worse than Foxes ever has actually looked.) But then: who's in charge of the New Mexico Film Initiative? You guessed it: former Secretary of the Department of Energy and now Governor Bill Richardson. It's not impossible, but it's a definite challenge. And no, I cannot imagine the "slow applause" scene happening anywhere *but* in the hall at Fuller Lodge. (Though I can think of maybe half a dozen other similar spaces that might fill the need for viewers who don't know Fuller's Lodge from Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon or what have you.)

So yes, I have just *barely* worked out the basics of my first radio news story one night before I'm set to talk before the news team at KUNM and convince 'em it's worth their checking out a shitload of expensive equipment to me that I don't know anything about to cover the same day in order to put something broadcast-worthy before 'em, and yes, I am already thinking "this radio play needs to be put onto film".

Meanwhile I fear lest I not get the "background noise" I need to make the story I've promised to cover come alive.

Fear not! I have a mid-term goal in mind as well. Two days ago, the very moment I figured "this whole Iran thing's way the hell too complicated" and literally found myself losing sleep over the differences between the differences between the Sunni and the Shia, a whole new story popped into my head, which served as the "marker" to me that I'd fleshed out the curent story well enough to consider someting totally different, if not wholly unrelated.

We'll see where it goes! It's almost certainly best timed to mid-April, but let's just say (with my sincere apologies to "ABC", whose real initials are not "ABC", but who justifiably prefers his real inititals not be used in this context for reasons I'd prefer not to reveal): it's about war tax resitance (a.k.a. "WTR", just to confugle you all with yet another TLA (three letter acronym)).

There are more than a few conscientious objectors and war tax resisters in town, and I think they deserve to have their stories covered, however much their strategies differ from one another: ranging on the ethical scale from "lie through your teeth about how much you make" to "live on practically nothing and announce it to the world". These people refuse to pay taxes for war, sometimes at grave personal risk. The rest of us show up for demonstrations while paying for policies that we claim to oppose, however good our intentions may be.

War tax resistance has been around since at least the first world war. As a tactic, it works, even with so few people doing it *openly* (as compared to how many do it "under the radar") that the government (understandably) opposes it at every possible turn, since it significantly undermines governmental authority, not only on philosophical grounds, but actuallty deprives governments of their coercive authority to garnish earned wages in order to fund one opportunistic resource war after another.

War Tax Resistance builds a bridge between the so-called "progressives" who oppose war on the basis of a Marxian doctine of "class warfare", and so-called "fiscal conservatives", who oppose taxation on the basis of a "strict constructionist" doctine of "individual liberty".

The far left and far right thus come to a point upon which both can agree, for wholly different reasons, in resistance to paying their taxes for an utterly unjust war.

In short, war tax resistance is precisely where the so-called "mainstream" finds a common enemy worth its political efforts. Here both extremes in the left-right spectrum find common cause, albeit for completely different reasons.

War tax resistance is possibly the best embodiment of nonviolent resistance to war that we have in this consumer-driven economy, and also the ultimate embodiment of individual freedom: when opposition to tax withholdings (the sole idea libertarian economist Milton Friedman came up with, only to regret before he died) are refused, the coercive cash flow into coffers that makes war generally "good for the economy" quietly cease.

Whether that particular "good" primarily benefits the government itself or government contractors like Halliburton; Parsons; or Kellog, Brown, & Root remains, for the time being: a political question.

We will see where it goes.

Meanwhile, what can I say? Wish me luck! I'll need all I can get. I could have chosen some 100% local bullshit proposal by Mayor Riordan/Chavez to go up against. Goodness knows there are plenty of stories right there: the "community service" convicts forced to wear "Mayor Marty" advertisements on their backs as they clean I-40, the downtown trolley, demolition of local landmarks for downtown "development", or what have you.

Scew that all. Don't get me wrong: it's not that purely local issues don't matter. But oppose Chavez whenever you possibly can. He is a motherfuckin' fox. A goddamn liar. If you're not one of his well-connected developer supporters, I'll probably support you.

Do count on me against his bullshit proposals to change Albuquerque's chaRacter in his image. Chavez is a motherfuckin' clown. We're better, as a city, than he is as a politician funded by a few deep-pocketed developers.

Seriously. We've got bigger things to deal with than Chavez's so-called "legacy", as long as we manage to defeat him, eventually, who takes credit on city seals for Albuquerque's having stuck around a mere 300 years.

Thirty years from now no one will remember the shithead we now know as "Mayor Marty".

They will remember us.

If we do right.

Be well.

A very unproductive day.

Went to work and wrapped up what I could on closing the month, then handed it over to Bill who really is the only person who can do certain things. Eventually punched out early but stuck around and *loved* the fast internet.

Started out emailing Senator Byron Dorgan (D/ND), 'cause he's taking over chairmanship of the Senate Energy Committe, which oversees the Department of Energy, which oversees all the national labs. Heard outgoing Chairman Senator Pete Dommenici (R /NM) say on the news last night he was gonna invite Senator Dorgan down to Los Alamos and Sandia National Labs in order to impress him with the "importance" of the labs to national security and the state. I'm not being self-righteous (well -- maybe just a *little* bit) to quote the letter in full, but it definitely saves time and keystrokes over rehashing it it:

Dear Senator Dorgan:

Congratulations on your upcoming chairmanship of the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee. I understand that Senator Domenici has invited you to tour Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in order to communicate the importance of the lab to national security and New Mexico's economy.

Please be aware that LANL's nuclear weapons mission is far from universally supported by New Mexicans. Many of us believe that increased production of Plutonium pits in Technical Area 55 (as outlined in the National Nuclear Security Administration's "Complex 2030" proposal) will abrogate Article VI of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, ultimately undermining long-term national security objectives.

LANL's benefits to New Mexico's economy tend to remain highly concentrated in Los Alamos County, having little (if any) positive impact on the rest of the state, most of which remains deeply mired in poverty.

Los Alamos is also responsible for historic and ongoing environmental degradation at the headwaters of the Rio Grande, on which most of New Mexico depends for water. The lab's impact on air and water quality are almost wholly negative.

Please keep these countervailing factors in mind when considering legislation regarding Los Alamos.

If I can be of any assistance to you or your staff at any time, please do not hesitate to let me know.

Very sincerely,

[Real Name]
[Real Address]
[Real Telephone Number]

A decent letter. A bit wordy, but better than nothing. (I'm guessing Senator Dorgan won't exactly be innundated by emails from New Mexico before he visits.) Didn't touch on every issue, either. But I'm *editing*. What's up there counts as the "first draft" for my attempt to scrunch down very complex issues into a few sentences. By the time I'm let loose on the world with a microphone I have *got* to be passably good at it. By my last "letter" of the day I was down to four reasonable sentences. The more I write the better I get about saying more with fewer words.

Not here though! I can vomit and spew and bleed words all across the floor and go on and on endlessly in circles and the people who will read will read and the people who willl not will not and it doesn't matter. I love the internet.

Then I puttered around Voices In the Wilderness, eventually landing on their page devoted to war tax resistance. (After a couple of hours online I always seem eventually to run into the same sorts of sites repeatedly in different places -- hm, wonder what that's about -- maybe there *are* more people out there *doing* this than Don Shrader!) VITW no longer maintains the website, I guess since the whole US versus Iraq thing is now so insanely far *beyond* the sanctions regime which already constituted a crime against humanity. I couldn't quite place the organization's name 'til I realized -- oh yeah -- they were the ones who did the "Save the Iraqi Children" demonstration complete with several dozen Muslims praying at a "funny" angle to the grid outside the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles when I got a tip and had to sprint fifteen blocks to witness the largest mass arrest in the city's history. Good organization, but no wonder I forgot 'em -- I got distracted. (It only took me just over six years to get back to 'em, and now they aren't there anymore. Buh.)

So then I catch up on Complex 2030 since there *was* a hearing last night that I missed 'cause I forgot until *after* I'd put the brisket on the stove to cook for hours and hours. I asked (via email to Complex2030@nnsa.doe.gov) to get put on their mailing list 'cause I want hard copies -- yeah, printed on paper, baby -- of *all* this shit *as* it goes down. For posterity. Of course it's all subcontracted out so you can rest assured it's in the hands of the competent sub-sub-contractors just like whoever dropped a digit from my mailing address when I asked for the Draft LANL SWEIS way back when the fuck ever. (Don't you just love accountability?)

Complex 2030, if you haven't heard lately, is the NNSA's latest "vision" for fulfilling the nuclear weapons "mission" mandated by Congress (especially the Senate Energy Committee) by turning TA-55 at Los Alamos into a new nuclear weapons factory, manufacturing I don't know how many dozens or hundreds of Plutonium pits every year in an unsecured above-ground facility. (Duh.) There's more to it than that, naturally, but I believe the public comments deadline this time 'round is 17 January.

Uhhh -- I was goin' somewhere. I forgot. What? No, wait. I'm back on track.

I am listening to the most amazing records. Going through all the ones I brought up from El Paso. So far they're all quite good.

So then I get an email from the lady with Paso del Sur about a bill now before the senate -- S.B. 3873 -- which, if passed, would do a great deal to curtail abuses of Eminent Domain in the wake of that disastrous Supreme Court ruling ("bad law", I think it's called) that says governments can seize and destroy your home not just for roads and national defence and such but to sell it at deep discount to your favourite big developers in the name of "economic development" (today's version of "urban renewal", also known as "neighborhood revitalization", which all translates in English to "demolition" and ultimately "WalMart"). I told her let me know what I can do from where I am, and here was something I could do. I emailed both my Senators about it. Today it's El Paso's Segundo Barrio that's threatened by the bulldozers, tomorrow it'll be my apartment.

Then to finish off the day I emailed Representative Silvestre Reyes (D/TX) expressing my disappointment at his aparent change of heart at suddenly deciding we need more, not fewer US troops in Iraq and tell him that I hope he'll reconsider. (Anyone who read what I wrote about him way back whenever: I still stand by every word I wrote, but it's not helpful bringing that up to him now, is it?)

So I emailed the guy from ND about the stuff in NM, the guys from NM about stuff in TX, and the guy from TX about the stuff in Iraq.

I guess I got on a roll or something.

By the end of the day I was downright succinct. Not that I can prove it, since politicians *much* prefer webforms to giving out email addresses. (More hoops for you to have to jump through to get through to them, you see.)

Then I came in here to let my hair down or something. Fine with me. I get to sit by my window on my *fabulous* rugs (including two at "funny", downright 風水 angles) in my room that I've cleaned to retreat into for the winter and look out this winow as it was meant to be looked out of -- *without* venetian blinds! I also cleaned *part* of the kitchen counter. Again. It's never ending.

But yes, it was a very unproductive day today. Did absolutely nothing but putter around online and send a few emails. And hell, I'm *still* online. Oh, will the madness ever end?

I sure had fun, though!

Radio killed the video star.

Maybe not. But let's just say I'm not exactly being let loose on the world with video equipment.

Attended the weekly KUNM News Department meeting this morning. It's taken me two months almost to get here, mostly excercising patience as the election dragged on and on only to have Patricia Madrid give up in the last round for reasons I can't possibly begin to fathom.

Meeting was good -- didn't have much to contribute as I barely understood from listening all the names they threw around. It's one thing to hear the news each night, it's a whole different ball game to hear stories develop before they ever hit the airwaves. Did chime in once with a possible lead on an angle to a still-developing Eminent Domain story that's likely to be big this coming legislative session. (I knew who owned the Blue Spruce Inn, you see, because I worked for him at Foxes.)

Jim Williams handed out stories to be developed to a couple of people and surprise surprise within five hours they were developed into fully fleshed-out news stories. At noon it was little more than a rumour that two new Uranium exploration permit applications had been filed for land near Navaho lands with the State. By five PM it was a news story, complete with interview by telephone explaining what the process was and where it would likely go from there.

I've heard about newsrooms and "tight deadlines", but the whole process of putting together a radio news story is so new to me it's positively baffling that it *could* be done in a few short hours' time. And yet, somehow, it is.

After the meeting, peace be upon him, Danny Hernandez said "let's talk".

Danny and I worked as phone room captains during the pledge drive and drove eachother slightly crazy but ultimately accomodated eachother because we're both very exacting in different ways. (I am a total bitch about my European dates.) It wasn't until the pledge drive was over that I put 2 and 2 together and figured out he was as much as any other single person *the* reason I still vote! I can't explain why this escaped me at the time, except to say sometimes I merely hear a person's voice and say "oh my god, are you Waddell Dawson? I *love* your show!" (each time he signs off saying "have yourself a great -- great day", I find I always do), whereas some other times it doesn't "click" so fast. Danny's the latter. (Maybe he's got the gain set high, who knows?) At any rate, *his* reporting on elections was a BIG part of the reason I didn't finally get too scared to go out and vote in 2004, and knew where to find the County Clerk and chase down my missing absentee ballot to the Voting Machine Warehouse on South Broadway.

He is amazing. He doesn't own a car, and gets around *everywhere* on a bicycle. He's an elected official, on the Flood Control Board -- for my district, no less. (No candidate, including Nader himself, has ever *earned* my vote so thoroughly as he has earned it.) He routinely does interviews for the radio *while* riding his bicycle. (Anyone who knew me during my "I'm only going to bicycle everywhere" days may appreciate that this is an excellent person for me to be around.)

He shows me a couple of his stories that he's done -- yes, *shows* me -- what they *look* like in Adobe Audition, which is how they edit "tape". There are three elements to any news story: background noise, narration, and interview. He guides me through the basics of it, then and there. Avoid collecting too much sound, he says -- if I get three hours of in-depth interviews (like everybody tries to do their first time out) I'm going to spend weeks editing it down into a two- to eight-minute story. The temptation to get ALL the sound is strong, and to be avoided, because eventually whatever you capture in the field has to be gone through, cut apart, and pasted back together into a coherent story.

This is the guy who took the 90-minute train wreck of the second Wilson-Madrid debate for CD1 and turned it into a coherent story, fairly presenting both candidates' key positions the very next day. Less than 24 hours turnaround time. There's that old cartoon of mathematicians at a blackboard: "and then, a miracle occurs". That's how it seemed to me at the time. I think it's fair to say I now know slightly better. It's not a miracle. It's just judicious, maybe merciless editing. Every other news outlet talking about debates focused on "style", including what I wrote about it here. On KUNM, thanks to Danny Hernandez, you get a solid sense of what each candidate really stands for -- because of how he edits the story and writes his narration. Amazing. I could not be learning from anyone better, if you ask me.

So the next step is to develop and pitch a story. Last time I heard the term "pitch", I lived in Hollywood and had ideas of "The Player" playing through my mind and it was all about cartoons to bigshot studio executives in an environment where cartoons were considered to be "dead". Oh no, I could never do that, I'm woefully inadequate, and all of that. Bullshit. Surely I have some idea floating around inside my empty head somewhere.

Well -- what about those containers of nuclear wastes from Sandia National Labs found underneath a car at the State Fairgrounds? Seems to me I heard about it, then it disappeared from the news totally. Same thing happens every few months where nuclear wastes are concerned in this town. They routinely pop up, only to disappear without explanation.

"Winds up it was a false alarm", he says. "Good story, but not a good place to start -- it would have to be investigative". Ahhh. It sinks in and a light goes on. My *first* priority is *not* to win the Pulitzer, it's to learn the mechanics of putting together a news story. He advises me that my first story's bound to take a week or two to put together into something that can be aired, since at this point I don't even know the file formats and software that's involved. He says I ought to go for something timely, but not absolutely urgent -- something that can comfortably sit on the shelf for a week or two while I work out the mechanics of editing sound (about which I know less than *nothing*) without going stale in the meantime.

"What about the New Mexico Coalition to Prevent a War Against Iran?" I say. It's in its formative stages as we speak, and has well-recognized and respected local groups behind it, and they're meeting next Monday to formulate strategies, now that they've spent two hours hashing out a broadly inclusive mission statement.

Great idea, he says. Pitch it.

What, me?

Yeah. Pitch it now.

What, you mean *me*? Down the hall? In the newsroom? You want me to interrupt what they're doing?

Yes. To Renee. Go in and tell her. She'll love it.

Uhm. OK.

My mind takes a BIG leap of faith here.

I know better. I do it anyway.

I barge into the newsroom and interrupt Renee while she's working on this evening's stories, at the same time I know my parking meter has run out of time and I *need* to get to work 'cause we are weeks behind on claims.

"Hi, I'm sorry to interrupt . . ."

She takes of her headphones.

"Danny said I should 'pitch', I believe that's the term, an idea for a possible story to you."

Jim Williams turns around as well. I start to get scared. Surely this is when they call security and have me escorted off premises.

"Have you heard about the New Mexico Coalition to Prevent a War Against Iran?"

Jim has, Renee hasn't.

"Stop the War Machine is behind it, and there are other groups involved as well. They just had an initial organizational meeting last week, and decided to form this group specifically to focus on Iran, and are holding a meeting on Monday to plan actions for January."

Her words? Something to the effect of "Sounds good. Would you like to cover it?"

Before I think what I'm saying I say "I'd love to."

Surely I've lost my mind! I mean, there's Article Seven of the NPT and the difference between "nuclear power" and "nuclear weapons", and the whole Shia/Sunni angle, not to mention foreign policy implications, and let's not forget John Bolton resigned just this morning, and the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, not to mention the CIA-backed coup agaqinst Mossadeq which installed the Shah, who got overthrown by Ayatollah Khomeini in the Islamic Revolution, and the current administration's emaciation of the CIA in favour of Military intelligence and -- for god's sake -- I have clearly lost my mind! What am I agreeing to cover?

What about centrifuges, and the deeply buried compound at Nataanz, and how much Hexafluoride can they process in how short a period of time, and their timetables for nuclear weapons production, and the timetable for our own "low yield tactical" Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, and the B61-11 warhead, and the "Reliable Replacement Warhead" while we're at it? And are the Sunnis of Fallujah *really* truly Wahhabis? And what is the significance of Governor Bush meeting with the Shiite head of SCIRI (the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq) this very day? And what about the broken IAEA seals? And the reliability of Human Intelligence (HUMINT)? Can't I just put a kitten in a tree, call the fire department to rescue it, and please, please, PLEASE just make that into something not too terribly unlike a real news story?

It's too late! The words are out of my mouth.

"Great, so we need to get you some equipment checked out . . ."

"Oh, the meeting isn't 'til Monday. I'll be here next week for the meeting."

"Great, we can do it then."

"OK. I'll see you then."

So I've got a week to whittle it all down to a few key questions to ask a few key people about this whole messy Iran thing.

Next time I'll just ask fifteen registered Libertarians for their opinions about abortion. It'll be easier.

Window shopping.

Jury duty's over, which is why I've not been posting rapid-fire as I got accustomed to doing. Bad for the blog but better for my life not to have all that broadband access all the time.

The weather snapped cold out of nowhere this last week so a good portion of my time has been spent insulating my apartment from the cold. I refuse to turn the heater on, gas prices are so exorbitant. I had to get a little oil-filled electric radiator to replace the one that's barely worked these last three years -- it finally went dangerously blinky.

We've gotten down to 19° F and I've gone out with no more extra padding than a cardigan that makes me look dangerously like Mr. Rogers. As last winter, I've basically retreated to living in my bedroom and keeping that room clean and warm while not worrying too much about the living room and kitchen. That means NO CATS in my bedroom. It's been a big ordeal to get that idea through to them but they're catching on, slowly.

I got rid of the venetian blinds in the bedroom and living room and am in the process of doing the same in the kitchen. Figuring out how to insulate the windows has been trial-and-error tricky all the way. Weatherstripping is out of the question 'cause with the old casement windows you need someone pushing from the outside at the same time someone inside pushes down the latch. Not an option. My best bet, I figure, is a curtain.

I broke down and bought a curtain in sheer desperation from Linens & Things, which I nominate for "most horrible shopping experience of 2006". (No small feat in the same year my favourite Goodwill finally got "attitude" in pricing the donated crap they sell.)

Merchandise at Linens & Things is hidden a minimum of three different ways, and then finally stacked to the ceiling (unlucky you if you left your forklift at home). Everything's obscenely overpriced, and much of it is fraudulently labeled. The place reeks of cheap aromatherapy candles and is laid out like a maze in an animal experiment. Worst of all, there's *no one* there to help you select from between the Indonesian and Chinese sweatshop goods. The person in the curtain department -- assuming there happens to be one there (assumng there are three people on staff for the *entire* store to begin with) -- isn't there because she knows anything about curtains, she's there because there's not a line fifteen-deep at the cash/wrap right now. As for the range of colours and fabrics in curtains, it runs the gamut from "snotty teenager day-glo fluorescents" to "choleric diarrhœa brown". A simple Jacquard pattern with burgundy or maroon tones? Nope. My choices are puce or magenta.

I get the closest thing they have to "red" that will provide insulation without my having to buy four separate panels and it costs me fifty dollars. This was the cheapest option they had for my purposes, and I *needed* insulation on that window right away. The package indicated there were two 80-inch wide panels in it. I get it home and find out they mean each panel's forty inches. Fuck that. I'm getting a refund and *never* shopping there again.

I'll spare you the gory details of my search for curtains and curtain rods and concerns about balancing the need to keep out light with the need to let it in ad nauseam. But in the process of taking down the venetian blinds I came on what was *original* to this apartment.

Roll-up shades.

Yeah.

The cheap kind.

Don't laugh.

I know no one uses these anymore. But I do. They can indeed be a pain to roll up but the spring is adjustable -- something I never knew 'til I bought one of these. It's such an elegant solution to a number of real problems that the technology can only be a hundred years old. And there's *no* wasteful packaging.

I've been so emotionally attached to the stupid venetian blinds I couldn't see them for the horrors that they were even all the time I knew they bothered me without quite being able to articulate why. I lose the "nifty" patterns from the light through the blinds, but also the dust they collect, the spaces for stalkers to peer through, the blood splattered on them by previous tenants in other apartments, the noise they make when the cats play with them, the danger of the cord to the cats, the signature dents and folds from crackheads peering out from behind them watching for the cops, the fact that they were too wide for the window and amateurishly hung outside the window frame, and all the generally nasty Qi that I think tends to go with old venetian blinds that simply haven't been cared for.

I also get something I haven't had in the three years I've lived here.

PRIVACY.

I have two distinct modes now. "At home and open to the world" and "At home but please don't bother me right now". I can conceivably, if I want to, walk less than fully clothed from the bedroom to the bathroom now without looking over my shoulder all the time.

I also did laundry. I hate doing laundry. But since my bedroom was cleaned I needed to clean the afghan my grandmother made me since it's the only warm winter bedcovering I have and it hasn't been washed in three years. Some fine human being left a couple of old copies of the New Yorker on the rack where people leave free reading material. Searched at first for anything by Hersh about Iran, found nothing, opened up and poked around anyway and let's just say I've spent the last two days reading these New Yorkers and plan to get a subscription and go back to return these to the laundromat where I found them.

Long story short: everything I give a rat's ass about -- almost -- is in the bedroom. I'm reading actual periodicals now, not just stuff online. Never thought I'd do that. Checked out an amazing book from the library since I finally returned all my overdues and got my card cleared. Haven't left my apartment today -- not for *anything* -- which is extremely rare, but absolutely *wonderful*. I think I'll go offline now, make a couple of calls, maybe come back later to see if anyone's in palace, or maybe just go into my book and fall asleep in my clean warm bed.