Speaking of Pantex.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Safety Alarms Raised at Nuclear Weapons Plant

from which I quote the following:

By about 2000, the leaks in Pantex's roof were so bad that workers had to cover bombs with plastic when it rained. In summer 2004, a power overload tripped transformers, causing a plant-wide blackout. Last July, another electrical failure occurred when rats gnawed through wiring, according to weekly safety reports. And in August, a storm swept over the plant that left standing puddles in nuclear production areas.

and also:

In one case, involving the disassembly of a missile warhead, technicians improperly used red vinyl tape to secure a crack in the high explosives surrounding the plutonium sphere of the hydrogen bomb. The use of the tape itself was not faulted, but technicians misread engineering instructions and caused an even bigger crack.

I dunno, I've always been a big fan of the "duct tape and paperclips" school of mechanical engineering. It pains me terribly to think there might be applications where it's just not the right thing to do.

Thanks to POGO for bringing regulators' attention to this story, and my attention to it through RSS feeds. (But damn it, you guys *really* need to learn how to write headlines.)

LA Times buried the lead, though.

Because certification surveillance testing of existing weapons has been severely hampered and is now backlogged, Bush XLII gets to argue to Congress on behalf of the "need" for a "reliable replacement warhead" (RRW) program:

Ralph Levine, who once ran the Energy Department's nuclear weapons surveillance testing, wrote a letter in 2005 asserting the backlog would allow defects in nuclear weapons to go undetected for years. As a result, he said, Energy officials removed him as manager of the program, and he retired last year.

John Duncan, who until four years ago headed surveillance testing at Pantex for Sandia National Laboratory, agreed that testing problems at Pantex are undermining confidence in the stockpile. Even today, the certifications of nuclear weapons are being made with less certainty than scientists should have, Duncan and Levine said.

And one last quote:

The stress of working with nuclear weapons has been exacerbated by an abusive management, said Henry Bagwell, the former chief of the Metals Trade Council, the principal union at the plant. "They treat people badly," said Bagwell, who left last year after 24 years at the plant.

Bagwell said that when he attempted to raise a health and safety problem involving toxic beryllium dust in 2003, he was demoted from X-ray technician to janitor.

Interesting times. I know I've quoted quite a bit but there's lots more to it. It's an excellent article. Read it.

Bell Trading Post.

Armen, from the Iran group, invited me to take a tour of the amazing big old building behind me.

Now for the first time I know what it is.

His father was one of the people who was involved in building it in 1946. It was the Bell Trading Post. The room I look into from my kitchen window used to hold something like fifty looms. They streamlined the production of native jewelry by using assembly line techniques and sold their wares at all the national parks before the days of t-shirts and baseball caps.

They also made military insignia from time to time -- tens of thousands of oak leaf clusters during the Vietnam War, for instance.

Recorded the tour which was guided through the shell of a building by the son of the first owner. The director of the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe took the tour and asked the most knowledgable questions. I plan to put the tour on CD and give him and Armen a copy.

The vacuum.

News Department meeting today. Last time we had one of these, it was a source of sheer joy for to me to be welcome at it as someone with an idea ("Iran") deemed sufficiently newsworthy that I be given a recording kit with a cardioid Shure SM-58 mic to stick in peoples' faces. Today it was more mixed relief that they had started up again with the regular meetings mixed with low-level annoyance at being kept away from urgently pressing stories.

Meaning I'm not at the legislature! I'm at the station. I love the station, but as a rule, news doesn't *happen* in the hallways there! It *happens* in the Roundhouse. My "natural" time to be at the station is when the legislature's shut down for the day and no one's in Studio C, meaning I have a whole board and hours to work with in editing gathered sound.

Unlike at the Roundhouse, at the station, I can't just casually stick my head out the door into the hallway, and turn from one newsworthy event to another while scanning over three or four more by my glance. Overheard conversations at the station are as likely to be about wiring and impedance factors and Charles Mingus and Bob Marley as they're likely to be about how many people will die from cancer if this memorial passes or how many millions of dollars will go to Corporation X if only bill Y gets out of committee right now which is why Senator Z must absolutely commit to voting for/against it before those mere voting constituents who drove five hours to Santa Fe get their chance to address the committee (assuming the elected Chair allows public comment in "his" public meeting on the issue).

We're one of -- what -- maybe twelve states nationwide? -- with *no* campaign finance limits whatsoever. That's why it matters, this session -- these relatively weak "ethics reform" bills. It's *far* too easy to hear about them on radio and think "that's no big deal, compared to what's required at the federal level".

As things currently stand in the State of New Mexico: the hypothetical "Widget Manufacture Company, Inc." (let's call it "WMCI") can currently give *any* NM elected representative (right up to Governor) however much money they want ss campaign contributions, gifts, or in-kind contributions; and the recipients of these gifts are not legally required to disclose WMCI's contributions to them to *anyone*. (Proposed ethics reforms would generously "cap" gifts and contributions to candidates for office, and require disclosure.)

WMCI can hire however many lobbyists it wants, and it currently only costs lobbyists $25 to register *as* lobbyists. A Representative or Senator can literally choose to retire from public office on any given morning and become a highly-paid registered lobbyist for WMCI on that same afternoon -- before a key committee hearing, without so much as changing clothes or clearing out their desks. (Proposed ethics reforms would mandate a scant year between retirement from public office and registration as a lobbyist.)

Whether WMCI manufactures ladies' undergarments, speculates in real estate on 17th Century land grants of the Spanish Empire, emits massive quantities of greenhouse gases, trades water and/or mineral rights, or builds Plutonium pits for nuclear weapons matters not, and will not matter, even if all proposed ethics reform measures pass both houses of the legislature and are signed into law by (former Secretary of Energy) Governor Richardson.

Free speech is only free here insofar as you can afford to outbid your competitors to buy it from the people who control the key committees -- and of course, the Governor.

This isn't Texas, where the Governor has little real power over the legislature.

To my Democratic Party freinds outside New Mexico: *if* you want to see a Blue Dog clone of Bush XLIII on steroids take over the White House, then you should definitely vote in your Primary Elections for Bill Richardson.

Gee. I wonder how New Mexico ever came to be the only state in the Union to have the whole nuclear fuel cycle (from exploration to disposal) contained within its own state borders.

I mean, with no disrespect to the Independent Republic of Texas, it's all fine and well that you've got "the tombs" at PANTEX and low-level radioactive waste disposal permits at WCS. But let's face it -- Texas couldn't build a nuclear fission weapon on its own if it had to. New Mexico absolutely could.

The way you listen to and hear the news *changes* radically when you wake up to sounds you gathered and copy you wrote the day before.

Forget Iran. The US needs a "Grand Bargain" approach toward the Rogue State of New Mexico.

If Albuquerque's Bernalillo County ever seceded from the Union, it would be the third most heavily nuclear-armed state on Earth, trailing only the US and Russia.

Back to what I was saying.

After being in the broom-closet office off the Senate Gallery with everything I need to record stories, being at the station is *almost* a let-down. Six months ago, being at the station, much less being in the newsroom, still less saying "give me that and I'll give you this back" was just *the* most exciting thing in my life! Now I'm just mildly annoyed to deal with old equipment and desperately want to get back into the committee rooms without delay.

It kills me. I need the day off, but things keep happening, and damn it I'm not there to cover *any* of it, which makes me crazy. It's a day to sort of bargain up to better equipment, but I'm dying what with not having to choose between committee hearings happening right then, now that I'm just starting to figure out how the state really works. Negotiating equipment upgrades is grand, but damn it, headphones and microphones don't really matter. Somewhere, possibly in a backroom off a public hearing room, someone's deciding life-and-death issues and I'm not there 'cause I'm down in Albuquerque saying "this side just doesn't work".

I have to sit on my broader enthusiasm in the hopes that it will turn out better in the end for having bitched and moaned to get better equipment no one else was using at the time.

I think it will.

Jim checked out a working set of headphones to me, which is a definite improvement over what I have been using. One earpiece was quite dead. So I just used a personal set which simply didn't shut me out from ambient noise, meaning I was as well off watching the levels without listening to what I actually recorded. Useful experiment, since now I know what I need to aim for in waveforms. But damn it, I *know* I can do better, if I can *hear* the difference as I record instead of having to guess what may hit which range. Being *able* to guess is a useful skill. But it sure sucks to drive 120 miles only to find the sound from a quote just won't work.

Now I finally have a proper set of headphones, after he spent a good ten minutes untangling cables. Such are the joys of nonprofit public radio.

Also he let me check out the hyper-cardioid Audio Technica "shotgun" condenser mic. That's the News Department's most super-sweet deal for the field: expensive, sensitive, and highly specialized equipment you can't your hands on without knowing what to ask for *and* proving a legitimate need for it. I need it because it's my best chance to stay stationed observing committee decorum and *still* get committee members' comments *and* public comments without getting thrown out of the committee by the Deputy Sergeant at Arms (who *should* be the doorman at Foxes, he's so good, though I don't think he swings quite that way).

If I'm smart, I'll drop into the Engineer's office and look at the manual before I use it in the field. I have to stay in town tomorrow. Maybe that is my chance.

This particular microphone is fabled in the newsroom. Steve tells me he took it out in waders into the Rio Grande one day and then switched back, once on dry land, to the Dynamic Shure SM-58 for a close-up interview. When he got home, he realized he'd left it on the riverbank and had to drive clear across town to retrieve it, only to find the gates to the park had been closed, only to have to jump a fence and hike two miles back to get it.

Yeah. It's *that* special.

I like it. I plan to use it well. Maybe 20 or 30 or 40 years from now it will be on display for newbie volunteers to wonder "how did they actually use that thing?". Some microphones get that, others don't. I think this one will. They catch the history and hold the sense of time when they were used. Generations not yet born marvel at the engineering of the day and wonder how it ever picked up sound to begin with.

One step closer to impeachment.

SJR 5 passed out of Senate Public Affairs today.

Two committees down, and one to go! If it passes Judiciary, it hits the Senate floor for debate and -- just maybe -- a vote.

Over 90 people showed up to address the committee.

Committee Chair Senator Feldman had an egg timer and gave everyone up to two minutes, with the understanding that there'd be a vote after an hour. (Just like what would be required in the US House of Representatives if SJR 5 made it all the way.) More than half the people who wanted to speak got to do so. No one who came and signed up to speak opposed the bill. Not one.

Amazing how many people who feel deeply about this have no clear understanding how the process works. It's very simple, really. In today's case, for instance:

Immediately following public comments and subsequent questions to sponsors from committee members, Republican Ranking Member Senator Stuart Ingle moved to table the bill. Republican Member Senator Kernan immediately seconded the motion, thereby effectively closing debate. This was, apparently, due to a miscalculation on her part: the count of Senators in the room, by party, at that moment was 3 Republicans and 3 Democrats. The tabling motion thus failed by a tie. (Perhaps she forgot that sponsor Senator Ortiz y Pino, who was seated before the committee at the time, also had a vote.)

Chairwoman Senator Feldman asked for closing comments from Member Senator Ortiz y Pino (SJR 5's sponsor) and cosponsor Senator Grubesic. Attendants and staffers were deployed to track down Democratic Member Senator Mary Kay Papen and Committee Co-Chair Mary Jane Garcia. As the testifying Joint Resolution sponsors and Chairwoman Senator Feldman made their respective comments, Member Senator Kernan left the room. At this time, a motion was made to vote on the Joint Resolution's passage, resulting in a 3 to 2 vote, with Member Senator Ulibarri, who had been considered a swing vote up 'til the moment that he cast his vote with his party, voting in favour of passage.

Neither Democratic Senators Papen nor Garcia could be reached for comment as to why they were absent. At the same time Public Affairs was meeting, Conservation and Finance committees were meeting as well, but neither Senator is assigned to either committee.

(It's not nearly as involved in the script for the morning news.)

Ghost town.

In the Roundhouse after mindnight. Only a few janitors in a whole different part of the building. As silent as it is right now, it is unpeaceful in the day. Especially at morning, when all the citizen groups come for their one-day dog and pony shows. The legislature is a total circus.

I LOVE IT.

Covered the Senate Conservation Committee today. One meeting. SB 431 had been tabled. I never thought the phrase "backroom deals" *literally* meant deals hammered out in back rooms. Well sir, it means exactly that, and nothing else. The machinations and the back and forth was one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. It's like a Palace Chat, but with real people: Maybe 12 people in the room really *matter* at any given time. People come and go. In and out. All the time. Most of the time it's not the person talking who's the most important to watch. It was "if so-and-so comes back, the bill will stall 4 to 4, but if that other person comes back, it will pass 5 to 4." Chairman Senator Griego doesn't allow recorders in his public meetings. In this case, and I quote, "There will be no discussion from the public at all." Again, Chairman Senator Griego: "Go to Senate Finance." If I talked that way to the people who elected me, and pushed off responsibility for discourse to the next committee down the line, I wouldn't want radio stations recording it, either.

In the end, I think it was a simple stalling tactic. I think he wanted SB 431 to remain tabled -- i.e., dead in the water. If he couldn't ensure that, he could at least make its passage go smoothly by not allowing public comment, meaning "his" committee could continue with backlogged regular agenda items. For a while he would not let the bill come off the table until Senator Pinto was in the room. He came back, which is what started the whole back and forth, in and out thing that was so amazing to watch. It was a dance that took place in a committee room, two hallways, and a suite of offices.

And one backroom.

Senator Pinto is the Senator in whose district the pulverized coal-burning electric plant will be placed, if Sithe Global gets its $85,000,000.00 tax subsidy wish granted by the legislature. (Yes, that's eighty-five million.) The long-term concern is that they might "grandfather in" the brand-new, 19th-century technology power plant if and when Federal Guidelines ever change to mandate IGCC "cleaner coal" gasification and underground carbon sequestration.

Politicians and lobbyists alike think at least three steps ahead. At least the ones worth following do.

It should go without saying the plant will go on or near Navaho Land. There's conflict within the Navajo nation as well, just as there is over Uranium production. But I can't cover that. I don't know how. It's not my story. I cover the NM end of things, as best I can, on any given day.

The legislative process seems to come down largely, in the end, to "he who most adeptly manipulates the Rules of Order wins".

Senator Ryan positively made my day when he protested "dragging out" the process while the bill remained tabled, specifically citing radio coverage of the Desert Rock Coal Plant Controversy.

I do believe KUNM's Jim Williams broke that story.

I don't think there's been a single story about it that hasn't at least gone *through* KUNM.

Now I've got a little finger in that pot as well.

I feel good about the day. Sent off an inordinately complex 4-part cut-and-copy. I should have just recorded it but there's some trick to not making the microphone SCREEEEAAAAAAAMMMM in your headphones or through the circular marble hallways that I haven't quite figured out yet. Maybe they can use it. If not, that's fine -- it's a continuing story.

When you walk around with a microphone people notice you. Their reactions seem to be *either* very positive or very averse. They either want to talk to everyone or they don't want people knowing what they are really up to. There's *no* middle ground.

The bill passed, 5 to 4, with Senator Altamirano once again the only Democrat to vote with the Republicans.

Synopsis.

I'm working on finding a way to post the sound, but blogger won't let me. At least I don't think it will. (If anyone knows where I can host fairly sizeable monaural mp3s that I can just link from here, that would be simply fabulous.)

Besides I haven't even heard it yet, besides which, it's not mine -- just some of the work in it's mine. It was collaborative, really. It *could* have aired the way I had it but it would have kinda sucked -- Jim shined it up and fit more news into less time. This is mostly things that I didn't even *know*-- like the fact that the number of pending Uranium exploration permit requests has shot up in a very short period of time. I have no doubt it will have an impact, and not, at its best, for *anything* either Jim or myself did.

The story, or really, the story segment, since it's just about a minute in Jim's five minute daily dispatch from the Roundhouse, is about Unelected Senator Ulibarri's Senate Joint Memorial 10, the stated resolution of which is to break down "existing barriers" to Uranium production in the State. It reads like legislation written by a lobbyist. Great choice for a first story. I could have gone with any one of at least a hundred aspects of the story and made a good three minutes out of it. I didn't have 300 minutes to play with for the five-o-clock deadline, though. The heavens dropped an angel in my lap in the form of an elderly Navaho lady with cancer. She stood up, bracing herself on the backs of the seats in front of her. She opened her mouth, and she spoke.

Nothing.

Else.

Mattered.

The public testimony was easily one of the most intense hours I have spent in my entire life. I got the whole thing on tape. One hour. I could recount it in painful detail. I won't bother.

Four hours later it was *the two* best soundclips: totalling 33 seconds of sound.

The second best one doesn't bear mentioning, except that I edited it just the same way I edited the best one.

It took me that long to edit out the word "grandkids" the second time the new lymphoma patient who just lost her long Navaho hair mentioned hers, fighting back tears. There was a crystalline, birdlike *music* to her voice. It hurt to have to edit down, down, down. Make big pauses smaller. Cut out repeated repetitive repetition. Even that was tough because of the *way* she said things -- if she said one word twice, it had two *slightly* different meanings. Bring point "A" closer to point "B". Finally I had to sacrifice words like "community" when she listed all the people she doesn't want to see get sick. She even had the wisdom to acknowledge that there's good that comes from mining, and closed with the thought that those who support it should deal with the cleanup. It was a timeless plea. It's going to be with us as long as humans walk the earth. The pauses were characteristic of Navaho speech, and I had to shave them just as close as possible to maintain the natural "gait" of her speaking. I don't do the Clearchannel-style "delete silence" thing (though I know how) -- I mean going in and cutting out individual slices of tape as short as seven hundredths of a second.

Yes, seven hundredths. My animation background finally serves me quite well, and for that matter, the Navaho lady whose voice will, by tomorrow morning, have reached something on the order of 60,000 drivetime listeners. If I hadn't poked my microphone toward her, she would have been heard by the roughly seventy people in the room, and then her voice would have gone into the walls.

I asked a staffer whether committee meetings are routinely recorded, because I was surprised not to see a court reporter. He smiled, said "yes", and pointed at my gear.

Committees are where all the real work goes on. Floor debates are a joke. Floor debates just take time away from votes that pass bills into law.

Once I heard that amazing woman's voice, *nothing* else mattered. It was *not* about me, running around like a silly chicken with my microphone. It became *all* about getting *her* voice on the air that *same* night.

Thanks to Jim it happened.

Greetings from the Senate.

I write you from the public broadcasting room just off the Senate Gallery in the East Lobby of the State Capitol Building in Santa Fe. It's more like a broom closet with a little baby board, an MDR, a CD, a microphone, and *lots* of TV cameras. I now have an office in the same building as the Governor.

My first collected sound is just about to air. About three hours from now. Not my voice, only some of my writing, but definitely my sound, pieced together as best I can, with a rough narrative around the gathered sound. In the end, the sound and editing of it are my work, as is the broad outlines of the surrounding story.

Jim Williams polished it to airworthiness. Writing for broadcast is a whole new skill set I have to get by *doing* (just like gathering sound *was*, a couple of weeks back). Things you wouldn't be caught dead doing in print you absolutely *must* do on the radio. So is narrating it. It's more important to get this story on air than it is who narrates it. This is *not* a game. It's deadly serious.

This is all I know: I gave him four inches, and after he'd edited the script, it was half an inch shorter and said four times as much.

Maybe if everything works out all right my next post will include some audio. :)

Senate Joint Resolution 5 update.

Not *new* news, really, but I'm kind of a slob. :^)

SJR 5 -- the legally binding § 603 joint impeachment resolution against Messrs. Bush and Cheney -- has to pass through two remaining State Senate committees before it gets passed to the floor for an up or down vote.

Those two committees are "Public Affairs" and "Judiciary".

The chairs of those committees are Democratic Party Senators Jerry Ortiz y Pino (my district, thank you very much, Elvis *has* left the building) and DiDi Feldman, who intoduced and cosponsored SJR 5 (respectively) in the first place.

Each chair (theoretically) controls the majority Democratic Party vote in each committee.

SJR 5, therefore, has a decent chance of at least hitting the floor for a vote before the state legislature adjourns.

If SJR 5 passes out of the State legislature, the US Congrss will be legally obligated to debate impeachment proceedings.

Whether the Democratic Party machine in this state can be mobilized to unify regarding the state-wide vote before the legislature adjourns is another question entirely.

(Palacers: what did I say might happen?)

News day is a very dangerous day.

Went to the News Department meeting at eleven and found it wasn't the usual meeting. Instead, the whole cast and crew (so to speak) were gathered around listening to and judging news stories for the Florida Associated Press Awards. Since I *barely* know how to stick a microphone in someone's face, I just "sat in" and didn't vote (though not voting didn't keep me from making bitchy comments, when needed). But what a priceless experience: to listen to various stories that various radio stations clear across the country think of as their very best to offer up.

Florida is a very different place! But there are similarities (voter suppression and corruption amongst state election officials notwithstanding). It's nice to sit back and hear local news stories about a part of the world I know nothing about, put together by people I don't work with. There's a *lot* more objectivity. Yes indeed that was a good interview, except that judging from the sound, it seemed to have been recorded from 50 feet away inside an æroplane hangar. And is the story of a single church *really* important enough to merit a radio story of that length? In Florida, maybe it is -- we have to sit on our regional preferences, sometimes. One story, about a Sexually Oriented Business (SOB) ordinance, struck home for me, because there's a similar measure that is on the front pages in Truth or Consequences *every* time I pass through that small town driving home to El Paso.

Then there were the sports stories. This was ironically *quite* instructive to me because I'm absolutely *not* a sports person! I didn't give a shit and couldn't be bothered to pretend that I did. Therefore I learned a lot about what makes a *good* news story, when absolutely *nothing* matters. Through sports stories. Go figure that one out. Such is the potential power of style, over substance, I suppose.

One was all about the experience of being at some sort of big, supposedly important basketball game (ho hum) and initially ranked *way* low on my radar screen because I honestly could not see *why* it mattered. They also didn't do the "balance" thing -- but, then, how could they? By finding fans of the other team to say "Gators SUCK"? It's not like they could find Iranian scientists to contradict US administration claims about WMD research and development based on fact-based findings by the IAEA. Their sound clips just plain old kicked ass, and that was that.

Hint to authoritarian regimes: you'd all be well advised to follow Hitler's model in terms of working the crowds at Nürnberg.

I must admit -- the audio collected, and how it was weaved into a full-blown story, made it compelling enough I couldn't quite *not* listen, even as I desperately wanted *not* to care about this stewpid sports story clear halfway across the continent, knowing full well that it just did *not* matter. By the end of the story, I almost cared -- if only just a little. It was a good story. I couldn't deny that.

Another focused, inspirationally, on the personal sacrifices of a young gymnast who may someday be Olympic Games material. Struck me as a better story, and while I came to respect her, it somehow failed to carry the raw emotional charge.

A third dealt with the closest thing I'd call to a genuine "issue" in sport -- that medical screenings are not required of high school athletes, even while a certain number of them die on the field each year from heart conditions and the like. The problem with that one? Countless weird technical problems: excellent story, well covered, but it just *sounded* bad enough that it was *really* hard to follow. Rough edits. I went to high school at a place where everything shut down for two weeks when a football player died on the field. Yet no such personal stories were offered, in this report. It was all numbers. It mattered, in a statistical way, but there was no human connection to listeners. It would have made all the difference in the world.

I'd tell you which story won but I'd screw my chances at the station forever if I did.

My personal overall favourite of *everything* I heard was an investigative journalism piece entitled "Prescription Drugs in Bradford County". Everyone gripped their hands on their chairs and gritted their teeth upon hearing the title and runtime, expecting a painfully dry and wonkish description of Medicare Part D. And boy, were we surprised! That's not what it was about, at all! It was all about abusable, addictive Schedule II drugs and the seemingly fly-by-night doctors that prescribe them to patients. The reporter started off with expressions of concern from pharmacists who dispense the drugs, and amazingly, went on to cover one prescribing doctor's side of the story quite admirably, although plenty of people said he was a quack. Winds up "pain" isn't something you can quantify. It ended just a bit abruptly, but it was a good, long story that gave us an *excellent* sense of the issue, why it mattered, and who it affected. I didn't know whose side I came down on, but cared deeply about everyone involved. Utterly marvellous. Raised questions. Made me think, without telling me how I *should* think.

My least favourite? Heh. I'm gonna burn in hell for even saying this, I'm sure -- but there was a "continuing coverage" story submitted by a commercial AM radio station about a guy who murdered several people and wound up on death row, only to get put to death some 16 years later. It was, indeed, "continuing coverage", but it was downright *lazy* reporting by a whole slew of hacks who sounded like they'd *just* got out of high school, only to be replaced by the next year's crop of high school journalism types assigned to cover the story 'til they got decent contracts 'til he finally got put to death. Frenzied descriptions of the panic that gripped a community from beyond the police tape, repeated ad nauseam, followed in time by "What's it like in the parking lot outside death row?" reports, again, and again, and again. What *was* his last meal? Was it chicken or beef? Did Brittney *really* show her you-know-what? Was her you-know-what better or worse than that of the convicted killer? Screw this. This isn't journalism. This is wannabe celebrity murderer bullshit.

It fast degenerated into a media circus covering a media circus with *no* real substance to the reporting. (If it had been the least bit critical of mass media coverage, if it had dared to raise a *single* controversial question, it might have *actually* deserved an award. It didn't.) It wound up with reporters reporting about the big white media trailer that just pulled up into the staging area across from the prison with 16 microphones.

No one asked the convict's family a single question. No one asked any of the victims or any victims' rights group a single question. No one asked whether the death penalty was fair, or served as a deterrent, or was even justified. The consensus seemed to be this story deserved the award because there were no other submissions in that particular category for that market.

At best, it was a sad statement on the death sentence coverage in that radio market. (If I say so myself, not that anyone asked me directly, it's a sad commentary on the journalistic stance where I live on the coverage of capital-offence cases.)

It won by default, and only by default. No one who voted wanted to risk their own careers sending the message "this is total fucking bullshit", even as we *all* knew that it was. I don't have a career at stake. If I did, I'd have voted against it, even though no one else was competing. It wasn't news. It was bullshit. It was extremely WRUF.

This wound up taking most of the day.

Then I went to a book signing by (Iran) Davar Ardalan, which probably did more to change my mind about NPR (at least regarding its Iran coverage) than *anything* I've ever gotten involved in heretofore.

Her book, My Name is Iran, (ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-7920-3; ISBN-10: 0-8050-7920-3) looks *very* promising.

She was born in the US and went to Iran for family reasons, where she became a veiled news anchor on Iranian State TV following the 1979 Islamic Revolution. (While living in the US, she dropped her first name, "Iran", during the hostage crisis.) She then returned to the US, where as a Journalism Student at the University of New Mexico, she worked under then KUNM News Director Marcos Martinez, who is supposedly retired, now, but still a presence at the station. I met the professor who recommended her to NPR (who said "You belong with Silvia Polgiole") in the autograph line.

She's now a senior producer for NPR's "Morning Edition".

I was the only person at the signing with a microphone. Because my microphone line wasn't long enough, and *only* because my microphone line wasn't long enough, the sound I recorded just sucks. I sat in the first row holding the mic up to the speaker in front of me, which recorded the words well enough, but also gave me 51 minutes of "hiss" from the speakers. But what I recorded was too priceless *ever* to record over, even if technical considerations make it utterly unsuitable ever to air.

Five feet more of cable and I'd have had 52 minutes of tape worthy of David Barsamian's "Alternative Radio".

Ms. Ardalan is a person close to, if not quite at the center of, the women's rights movement in the Islamic Republic of Iran. She knows Shirin Ebadi, personally. She interviewed Ayatollah Khomeini before he died. Her mother's currently translating the Qur'an, and (controversially) reinterpreting the passage in which it's said you can beat your wives, based on a strict reading of Sharia law and the actual practices (as reported in Hadith) of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), who reportedly shocked audiences at the UN by her questioning of Iran's President Ahmadinejad.

I've got a few good web and email addresses I'm forwarding to others on the other side of the fence, where this whole Iran thing is concerned.

Maybe we'll build some bridges.

We'll see what happens.

*Excellent* article.

From BBC News, Middle East Bureau:

How Close is Iran to a Nuclear Bomb?

I found this in a *very* roundabout way by searching google for Ardeshire Hosseinpour, a search which turned up precisely 58 results.

Here's what the above article says about him:

Recent reports have also questioned whether the death in January of a 45-year-old Iranian scientist, Ardeshire Hosseinpour, might have been the result of an operation by Israel's intelligence service, Mossad.

Hosseinpour had been involved in the enrichment programme, but Iranian reports have denied that his death was due to anything other than natural causes.

Mossad is widely believed to have been behind a campaign of killings and intimidation targeted at the Iraqi nuclear programme and some of its suppliers in Europe in the early 1980s, but this has never been definitively proven.

There's lots of amazing stuff about A.Q. Khan, too. It's just a great article.

Here's a kinda crummy JPG based on the PDF file from Gulf News that interested me in searching for Ardeshire Hosseinpour in the first place. I don't think blogger lets me post PDFs, so if you want a copy of the PDF, lemme know. I think, and hope, you can make out the words through the compression. Click it for an easier-to-read version that's not so scaled-down.

Iran coverage from "Gulf News".

Gulf News is a newspaper based in Dubai, one of the United Arab Emirates, and is distributed throughout Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states and Pakistan. It's *very* interesting to see how they're covering this story.

Gulf News: In Depth: Iran Crisis

They've got pictures. Good ones. From *inside* Iran. That's what I like. Even Al Jazeera (at least on their website) shows way too many talking heads. Good pictures make stories and the people in them *real* in ways that radio never can.

Honestly -- when was the last time you saw a picture of, or even from Tehran? I bet you didn't know there are Zoroastrian fire temples in the capitol of the Islamic Republic. I also bet you didn't know that Tehran's Sister City is Los Angeles, or that over seven million people live there. (I love wikipedia.)

We're talking a *deeply* complex, *ancient* civilization, here. And we're talking about bombing it into oblivion -- why? So Bush and al-Sadr can stoke their respective second-coming fantasies? So Senator Clinton can look "tough enough to be president"? This is insanity.

Gulf News has an interesting article about Iran's most senior cleric, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who (in the paper's word) "slammed" Ahmadinejad for harming Iran through his hardline nuclear posturing. The article seems to indicate that this conservative cleric was addressing -- get this -- not his followers, but a group of reformists opposed to Ahmedinejad.

Amazing how a bellicose president who fails to meet campaign promises can bring together the right *and* left in *any* country to oppose him, isn't it? A phœnomenally bad president can indeed be "a uniter".

I could go on and on -- they've got a TON of articles, going *way* back.

This morning, I didn't even know Gulf News existed.

Another bombing in Iran.

From the BBC:

Clashes Reported in Iranian City

Provincial Police Commander, General Mohammad Ghaffari, says "the gang" had been ordered "by some foreign states to plant bombs in specific places and escape the country simultaneously".

Which foreign states, he did not specify.

A pleasant (if unproductive) day.

Woke up late after spending way too much time online last night researching stuff no sane fag ever would.

My mother's freind was in town for a conference and took me out to eat at my favourite Vietnamese restaurant, which I don't get to visit near often enough. The girl who served us was wearing a KUNM t-shirt, and I startled her by practically yelling out "KUNM!" when I saw her. She probably thought I was hitting on her or something. I wasn't, though, it's just you either have to pledge to or volunteer at the station to get one of the shirts, so I knew she was *somebody*. As she overheard the conversation, in time, she got comfortable enough to chime into it. She volunteers with the Youth Radio collective that does a show each Sunday at 7 PM. She was enthusiastic, but expressed frustration at having been asked about damaged equipment.

I don't know who does it, but it's a problem -- some damn fool ripping out the soundproof foam in Studio C, drawing smileyfaces on the microphone windguards, manhandling turntables and the like. Someone has cleverly attached price tags to various key pieces of equipment in the control room to raise awareness at what the physical equipment actually *costs* the station. I guess that kinda goes with being a public resource -- there is no guarantee whoever's using the equipment at all hours of the day and night will give it the respect that it deserves. And Studio C has someone in it, doing something, almost 24 hours a day.

That was my outing for the day -- I needed it -- I hadn't left the house in something like 36 hours, and am starting to live like a hermit.

Tomorrow, if I'm awake, which I definitely hope to be, KUNM is sponsoring a screening of "Inconvenient Truth" at Emmanuel Presbyterian Church at noon, and hosting a panel discussion afterwards on global warming. I don't know, but suspect, this is the upshot of Danny's frustration at having attended a "Move On" screening back in December when he wound up not being able to get any usable sound from the echo chamber of people who showed up to that. The News Department did a whole slew of stories this last week about global warming.

I like that attitude: bad meeting? Fine, we'll just hold one that's bigger *and* better.

I'm no big fan of Al Gore, you know -- here's this guy who talks all purty about global warming, and still (I think) invests in Occidental Petroleum. That's what the protest was about on 14 August, 2000 that wound up with police charging the crowd on horses and "sweeping" Pershing Square with hundreds of bicycles. That investment was why he couldn't effectively paint Bush as "the oil candidate", and a big part of why he lost the election (even though he actually won it, or something). But what the heck. It's a real issue, and I won't be going to hear him blather on, but to see who else locally shows up and what kind of dialogue happens on the issue. I'm going for the message, not the messenger.

Whoa.

It's amazing what you can find in Google just by searching for names you read about in books. The best results come out right near the top.

Yeah, I just fell down *another* big old rabbit hole.

As usual, these days, it's tied back to Iran, which is just *the* most fascinating subject in the world to me right now. Like Chinese medicine was for a while. Like Foxes was while I worked there. Like Japanese civiliztion was for a couple of years. Like Russia was in seventh grade, when I taught myself Cyrillic. Like when I taught myself hieroglyphics and carried around a notebook in high school filled with 'em. Like cartoon animation was the guiding passion of my life for almost a decade.

This is part of why my mother thinks I've got asperger's -- the way I get *intensely* interested in something and it becomes the *only* thing I deal with or seem to care about, until, without warning, for no apparent reason, I quietly drop it and just move on as casually as a child stops playing with a toy.

So before you freak out on the subject matter, and for you non-palacers, know that for years, the *only* thing that mattered to me had to do with the most arcane frame-by-frame analyses of old cartoons. I would drive *animators* crazy. I'd get into involved debates that would rage on for months, and sometimes even years, and say things like "judging by the way these masses shift in relation to eachother and the music, those nine seconds *must* have been animated by Rudy Zamora, and even though I *know* the Fleischer animation screen credits cycled through names; I *do* believe these nine seconds are his, based on scenes totalling 26 seconds screentime which I *know* are his from these *other* two cartoons, which span a period of three years during which time we can see his style come to its greatest maturity and sophistication, precisely at *this* point."

Today I barely remember the names of maybe five or six people in animation. I can still discuss it if I need to, but it no longer interests me. Not like that!

No, today, it's Iran. Rest assured, the time will come I drop Iran just like I dropped animation.

I'm reading Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone (ISBN 1-4000-4487-1) which I can not *possibly* recommend *too* highly. It was a National Book Award finalist for *excellent* reason. I had to buy it -- on credit -- because the library system has *one* copy on hand, and as lof last month, it's got 37 holds on it. By the time all 37 people check it out for three weeks each, over two years will have passed; and we may well be in the middle of a whole different kind and magnitude of war. I'm considering donating it to the library once I finish it. It's *that* important.

Anyway: I'm surprised to read in it that Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani issued a fatwa stating that any Iraqi Constitution would have to be written by elected representatives, not CPA appointees. In addition to being surprised, I wonder why -- because of something in Sharia law, a careful political calculation, or possibly a combination of the two? No big deal, I just wonder about the man's motives.

Viceroy Bremer's response on hearing of this ruling was basically "we'll just get someone else to write a different fatwa". It's one of the best "snapshot" examples of the total disregard, the *willful* ignorance by certain Americans with power to Iraqi society. (This book is so packed with this sort of thing, that if it weren't so deadly serious, it would read like comedy.)

Which brings me back to "it's amazing what you can turn up with Google".

It turns out Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has a website, unpredictably enough, at www.sistani.org -- imagine that. There's even a fairly complete and passably well translated English language section. The links at the top of the page don't work right, but you *can* get a *pretty* decent idea of the guy in his own words in translation (unless you can read Arabic).

Proconsul Bremer simply never bothered. Fifteen minutes online could have clearly shown him that no, you *don't* just "get someone else" to write "another fatwa". Sistani has an email address where you can submit questions about every little thing from cheese, to sodomy, to cat hair, and I have no doubt Bremer could have emailed him, too. (I'm *so* not halal it's not *even* funny. I'm probably misusing that word, too.) But no political questions. Not anymore.

According to the Wikipedia article on al-Sistani, he abandoned politics in September of 2006, and was the target of a foiled assasination attempt just on 29 January of this year. Funny how I never heard about it, even though I am a total news junkie. Things *must* be bad in Iraq if Sistani has abandoned politics. If I remember correctecly from In the Belly of the Green Bird, he was the ones who said, after the invasion, to give the Americans a year to get their act together and prove they weren't occupiers before driving them out.

And then there's the Aalulbayt Global Information Center, which is located in the 7,000 year-old city of Qom, in Iran. In addition to being the intellectual epicentre of Shia Islam, Qom's space center is one of only two sites from which midrange Shahab-3 ballistic missiles -- Iran's *only* missile capable of reaching Israel -- are launched.

Nearly 200 historic and culturally significant sites, including the Mar'ashi Najafi Library with its half million hand-written manuscripts, would be in the crosshairs if either Israel or the US decided Qom constituted a military target. Here's a ninth century Kufic script:


I visit that site to get a better sense of al-Sistani's politics and wind up getting totally sidetracked, spending *hours* looking at calligraphy I can't even read a letter of.

I'm sure the FBI could have a field day cooking *something* up to charge me with just having looked at my browser's history tab for tonight. I suppose in some people's sick and twisted minds, just linking to an external Shiite website and saying anything but "bad muslims, bad" constitutes "providing material support to terrorist organizations".

You know what, though? I honestly do not see how.

I *can* say this that's critical, however: I *still* don't have a clue whether al-Sistani's fatwa was more careful political calculation or deeply principled stance. But I've had *lots* of fun swimming in forbidden waters. :^)

Here's what I'm getting at: Sistani and his organizations are *not* hiding! He's got a website with his name on it, fer chrissakes, and his email address on the front page. It's like he's standing on a rooftop waving a big red flag on which are printed the words "HERE I AM! ASK ME ANYTHING!" He's not sending out carrier pigeons with coded messages attached to their legs, nor is he calling for backup on his shoe phone from beneath the cone of silence. His sites are more-or-less complete in several different languages.

So are Jerry Falwell's, I believe, though I can't be bothered to read him. But just like I can't be bothered to deal with Falwell, so apparently the administration can't be bothered to deal with al-Sistani. I suspect the costs of my ignoring Falwell can't compare with the costs of Bush and Bremer ignoring al-Sistani.

It's not like Shiites -- Iranian *or* Iraqi -- or Sunnis, for that matter -- are silicon-based life-forms from Andromeda that we carbon-based earthlings just can't possibly interface with. If we can't understand even the most basic underlying values of their culture, then that particular failure is ours, and ours alone.

There is no way -- *no* way I'm *ever* gonna be even *near* the same page as al-Sistani. (The sheer complexity of bathing is enough to make me dizzy.) But there is *no* good reason I can't try and appreciate, in a general way, where he's coming from. There's no good reason Viceroy Bremer couldn't, either. Even Bremer and Bush are human.

In other news:

I cleaned my desk today -- the big rolltop. I'm writing at it now. Sure is nice to have it usable. I don't think I'd cleaned it in over a year. Too many papers. Finally figured better to have 'em all in one box than on the desk. The box still has to be gone through, but at least I've got some space to work at that I didn't, this morning.

Finally wrote to Apple for my replacement battery -- months after I heard of the recall.

Boiled potatoes and made potato tacos. Didn't put enough garlic in 'em, but that's OK.

I'm eating oatmeal every day. McCann's. Don't know why I got on that kick but I like it -- it's relatively cheap and crazy as it may sound I can *feel* the difference eating healthily, even if it's only poverty that drives me to it!

I just realized I haven't eaten meat in over a week. I seem to be slipping back into my old vegetarian ways, if only by default.

I'm taking various herbs and vitamins and I swear they're making me feel *good*.

I interview at the call center on Tuesday. It sounds like dreadful work but if it all works out I should have my days free for KUNM *and* make enough to get out of debt in a few months. And I can't really be at my best while I'm servicing a debt -- hence the bandaid approach.

"Sure beats being in jail", I should tell myself, daily.

Be well.

One down, two to go!

New Mexico Senate Joint Resolution 5 (SJR 5), which calls on the US Congress to initiate impeachment proceedings against George W. Bush and Richard Cheney, and if passed, would legally require an impeachment debate in Congress, today passed out of the Senate Rules Committee with a unanimous vote by all Senators present.

No Republican committee members were present at the time of the vote.

The resolution now passes SJR 5 to Public Affairs, after which it should pass to Judiciary. If the bill survives both remaining committees, it will be put to an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor.

Thoughts on not smoking.

All the usual stuff: I don't stink, I get to smell and taste things, and I go through weird emotional states periodically where all I think I want is a cigarette.

But here's one benefit I've never heard anyone mention: the sheer amount of time that not smoking frees up!

I used to smoke a pack a day. Not counting the time spent earning the money for the cigarettes, not counting the time driving back and forth to get them, if it took me seven minutes to smoke a cigarette (in fact it would take anywhere between five and ten; I choose seven as a reasonable "average"), that's two hours and twenty minutes I would spend every single day just smoking cigarettes. True -- during some of that "smoking time" my attentions would be bifurcated between smoking and doing something else -- like driving, writing on the computer, or reading. But for that "bifurcated time" I find it's better spent *focused* on whatever I'm actually *doing*. And then rest of the time spent sitting in my "smoking chair" doing nothing but smoking is totally free!

Hence the anxiety that comes with quitting. All my engrained habits tell me I "should" be sitting with a cigarette in my hand, puff-puff-puffing away, and I find that I'm not and don't quite know what to do with myself. The disarray of my apartment starts to bother me, as do a thousand other little things. It takes me a while to figure it out, sometimes, but generally if I spend that time dealing with whatever problem, here or there, that taken all together is sufficient excuse to smoke, eventually those problems cease to be *a* problem, and a few days later not only can I BREATHE, my life's not total chaos, like I always thought it was.

My operative principle where that time's been concerned these last couple of weeks has been roughly "ANYTHING I can do is better than smoking". Even if it means driving clear across town to visit the library. Pointless driving's a bad thing, but it's better than smoking.

In the process I've just begun to discover some of the truly amazing libraries in Albuquerque's Public Library system. I like the Erna Ferguson Branch for its incredible selection of new books. I like the Ernie Pyle branch for its scrapbooks filled to overflowing with original clippings of his articles from the Pacific Theatre. I like downtown because it's close enough to walk to. I like the Special Collections library for its printing presses. (I aim to build a working scale model, and nothing helps more than having three working common presses right there to look at and figure out, plus a reprint of the book Richard Hicks used to figure out how to build his "Bobcat" common presses.)

I've written to politicians and a jailed journalist. I've learned how to *edit* sound on Adobe Audition. I'm *learning* how to write for broadcast. I've figured out a way that *may* get me paid a pittance for writing about stuff I'd love to write about anyway. I've met interesting people I never would have had the time to talk to previously. I've figured out how ads work in the alibi and written a propsal for consideration by a nonprofit that may want to take space. I've distributed flyers to places flyers might not otherwise have gotten to. I've gotten back into my account on eBay, and may even sell some of my crap through it that's just a bit too good for craigslist. I've started looking for apartments and work in the places I might actually want to live and work. Not smoking may be maddening, but there's method in the madness.

Car bomb in Iran.

Great -- now car bombings are spreading to Iran.

Let's just hope that Jundallah, the Sunni rebel group which took responsiblity for the blast, isn't one of the opposition groups in Iran with ties to the US (e.g., Mujahedin el Khalq/National Council of Resistance in Iran, a.k.a. MEK/NCRI, which was openly giving press conferences in Washington at the same time it was listed by the State Department as a terrorist organization).

I love fast internet connections because I can access sites I can't from home. I therefore get more in-depth coverage of stories from different perspectives than I am likely ever to get on NPR, where the deaths of Iranians is all too likely to be mentioned in passing between a hiccup and a sneeze.

Here then are two from the indomitable (but slow loading) English language Al Jazeera:

Iran Bomb Attack Kills Eleven Guards

Bush Unclear on Iran Arms in Iraq

Vigil-Giron scrutinized for missing state funds.

Former New Mexico Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron is coming under legislative scrutiny for three million dollars which seem to have gone missing in an audit performed by her incoming successor, former Bernalillo County Clerk Mary Herrera. Vigil-Giron denies any wrongdoing, and claims the three million dollars, which was granted to the state as part of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), was paid out to unspecified vendors.

I don't doubt it. Diebold (or was is Sequoia?) sure didn't take her on an all-expenses-paid cruise in 2004 to thank her for *not* giving them lucrative contracts for machines that didn't work and had to be scrapped four years later. For three million bucks all I can say is she damn well better have gotten a promenade deck stateroom. Perhaps state taxpayers will someday have the special honour of paying for an extended stay in hotel accomodations better suited to her kind.

Then last week something funny happened -- there was a proposal to establish a Film Museum, but the representative who wrote the bill withdrew it from consideration. Extremely rare. What changed his mind? He found out Governor Richardson wanted Vigil-Giron to run the new museum. She has no knowledge or experience of film. He didn't want his museum to be used as yet another excuse for executive welfare, and killed the bill rather than see the museum ruined.

Fun state.

In other news -- went to the Center for the Book at Albuquerque Public Library's Special Collections Library (in the old Main Library Building). Bless 'em they've got not one, not two, but *three* Richard Hicks common presses there out where you can actually touch and handle them, including the masterpiece "Bobcat No. 1". Not locked away in a room somewhere. The librarian was *very* helpful, and I helped him figure out where an "odd" part went which had slipped out of place on the 1400-style model.

I want to get my hands on those machines when they're inked up and ready to go. :)

Recent reading report:

How to Spot a Liar: Why People Don't Tell the Truth and How You Can Catch Them. This one's a "business" book -- cheesy paperback with no bother for design or type -- perfect example of the kind of book I simply *never* waste my time on. I picked this one up though solely because of its title, figuring knowing how to spot a liar might be useful as long as I want to go 'round sticking microphones in peoples faces. I get it home and open it and am SHOCKED: it's about how to use military interrogation techniques in civilian settings. Okey dokey. Greg Hartley (one of the authors) is an instructor for SERE (Survive, Evade, Resist, Escape) school, which figures so prominently in Joseph Margulies' Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power. I got *way* more than I bargained for in what I figured would be a "throwaway" read.

Julia Hansen's A Life in Smoke. Intense and fairly powerful. The chronology's hard to follow but she goes into some very serious self-examination about her smoking, and criticisms of the chronology notwithstanding, the book played a major part in my (apparently) choosing not to smoke anymore, which is probably the best thing I can possibly say for it.

Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism by Eric Burns. An eminently readable account of the history of America's early newspapers. This is what got me wanting to look at a common press.

The Race Beat: The Press, The Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff. I've only *just* begun this one -- as in I'm *maybe* five pages into it. It looks extremely promising.

Job search? Ha, ha. Rent? Bills? That's what credit cards are for. I may work in a call center as long as I possibly can if I have to just to get rid of the bills which are now piling up. But I'm not willing to do work that has *nothing* to do with what I *love* to do. At least in a call center I'd get to use my voice. And they offer health benefits after thirty days. Yep. I sure could stand to get my teeth cleaned.

Restaurant = dead end. So is a call center, frankly, but it pays *way* better, *and* I may keep my sanity if I look at every call as nothing more than an exercise in modulation and cadence.

I've got your EFP in my pants.

It's been an interesting news weekend!

The US military presents purported "evidence" of Iranian involvement in Iraqi insurgent attacks against (at best) 1/2 of one percent of *all* US troop deaths to date, to US reporters on the basis of "not for attribution" sources on a news-dead weekend, knowing full well that by Monday morning, all the news is gonna be "Obama v. Clinton! Who will raise 100 million first!?!?!?"

Their proof? A lousy goddamned serial number, not on record, "not for attribution", utterly unavailable for independent verification.

OK, *what* serial number? I ain't that fuckin' dumb. I ain't that fuckin' brilliant either, but I can *definitely* tell you, down to an AM/PM timeframe on any given day, when which typewriter rolled off whatever assembly line in which factory in what state in whatever factory operated by whatever company, based solely on serial numbers printed on the undercarriages from seventy plus years ago.

I can *also* tell you which exact persons built what piano harps, mounted on which specific soundboards, based on serial numbers from up to 140 years ago.

Prove it to *me* that this supposed serial number means *anything*. If it is, indeed, a serial number, you should have nothing to fear by showing it to all the world! Serial numbers, if they're not fabricated, never mean *nothing*. If they mean *anything*, then showing them will only prove your case.

EFPs, eh -- "Explosively Formed Penetrators". Tell me that's not pulled out of someone's ass. Only a deeply closeted standing army with a "don't ask/don't tell" policy could ever come up with such a concept to begin with. Puhlease get over this whole machismo "firepower = masculinity" thing and start thinking strategically (if you can ever get a field commander in place who isn't promoted solely because he tells the unelected Supreme Leader what he wants to hear.) I hear that Isopentyl Nitrite can make for "explosively formed penetrators", and I can tell you in which bars you can legally buy it (and how much it costs, besides).

If you think this is a serious disinformational advance over allegations regarding "aluminum tubes", you are sadly mistaken.

The same US administration that jails warmongering journalists for not revealing their anonymous sources to grand juries thus gives anonymous "not-for-attribution" testimony to journalists to justify proposed attacks against Iran.

Meanwhile President Putin of Russia (hardly a staunch upholder of democratic principles in governance) openly cries out against the US when it moves unilaterally in Iraq against Russia's strategic gas-and-oil-reserve ally (Iran).

Meanwhile Defense Secretary Gates dismisses Putin's criticism's as the ravings of an "old spy", as though doing so made everything right, and could prevent a second "cold war".

Go figure that.

A second cold war, at this point, would be a most welcome development.

WWIII, anyone?

Fun world.

We live in interesting times.

I hate money.

I quit the restaurant. I snapped. Again. I've never done this. Never. Let alone twice in five weeks. I'm changing. I don't know how else to put it. My life's worth more than 2.13 an hour. My life's worth more than any dollar amount per hour. My time is not for sale. I can not live like that. Can not and won't.

I've got stuff I can sell. I think that's what I'm gonna do, for the short-term, at least. It's not a business plan. But I can stand to get rid of some musical instruments and furniture and what have you. Typewriters for twenty apiece would be lovely. If I were smart I'd sell the Gretsch -- but then it'll bug me that I let it go until the day I die.

I hate money. I hate what love of money does to people. It makes people who love money less than human.

Interviewed yesterday for a part time coffeeshop thing at a *very* high end boutique kind of place. *Very* part time. Pays well, but work only two days a week, to begin with. Want to. It's in the neighbourhood I want to live in. It's near KUNM. I need to call 'em tomorrow. I think they're flakey. Other options out there, too. Aiming to work for a KUNM business underwriter. Heh.

Visited Alibi yesterday to enquire after ad rates for the 17 March protest. Submitted a proposal to the mailing list of the group organizing for an advertising budget. Next meal coming from where I do not know -- Catholic Worker at the Peace Center, probably. Food not Bombs. I'm organizing to raise 800 dollars from 20 different groups at 40 dollars each to advertise a march, and have precisely seven dollars left for me 'til god knows what.

Need litter. Got cat food for three days probably. Got human food for one meal, more or less.

I need to get creative.

Gorgeous day.

I need to do what I love for a living.

There's no other way I can live.

I don't know exactly how to go about doing that. It's not something I can decide one day I'm going to do and then *make* happen just out of the blue. Right now I'm dithering like mad. One day's good; the next is not. One day I'm smoke free and productive; the next day I'm stuck in dirty dress shirts serving food and smoking to obscure the stress of doing work that's utterly beneath me.

This process started when I left Frontier, a bit before I started blogging. It's like water flowing through a funnel: I've been going down and in cirles for two years. now feel the circles I am going in becoming very tight. It's just a matter of time before I flow out the other side, but there's no turning back.

Working in a restaurant is not something I love. I enjoy that I'm moving around, but that's not the same thing. I could accomplish that by walking instead of driving, which would also save on gas. The work itself is, ultimately, meaningless.

I haven't made it up to Santa Fe for a single day of the legislative session. It's way the hell more important than serving spaghetti. Every time I hear there's a group going up, whoops. Damn. I work that shift. Then I have these ridiculous split shifts where I work lunch, have three hours off (in which I can't do anything since I'm dressed like a waiter) and come back for dinner.

This can not last. Serving spaghetti or lobbying state senators. Which matters more? There's only so much I can accomplish through phone calls and emails. Face to face *always* works better.

If I can channel some of the energy into *selling* old things that I used to buy I might manage to get rid of some clutter and make some money at the same time. I'm thinking flea market: a booth in an antique mall is way out of my range. It'll also help me get rid of some ballast for when I really truly have to move. It's gonna be sooner rather than later.

Unionizing the restaurant? Nice dream. If I do, big fucking deal, it will affect maybe ten people and take *all* my time and energy when I'm not actually working.

The radio is more important. The rapidly growing peace movement is more important. These things are history, unfolding, and I can either be part of them or watch them from the sidelines. What we do now, or fail to do now, will affect humanity for as long as humanity exists. I'm learning to go with the ebb and flow. I'm learning to commit myself to what I can commit to. I also learn to value what I'm doing.

Looking at neighbourhoods I want to live in. Apartments available everywhere. None this cheap. But if they're better it can be worth paying more. Aired out the place today, it got so nice and warm.

Looking at jobs in places I might want to work. Might still press for better treatment but I can't afford to go on a crusade for pennies which will also distract me from what I *need* to do. My mind's spinning.

Good meeting today. Productive. About March 17th. Big protest. National march on the pentagon. 40th anniversary of march on the pentagon for vietnam. Everyone feels the first flush of success from the Jan. 27th rally, and a pressing sense of urgency as US forces start fucking around with Iranians in Iraq. "Does this bug you? Does this bug you? I'm not touching you! Does this bug you?" Fuckin' idiots run the world.

Hehe.

I figured out today why I'm working for minimum wage in a restaurant. It's *not* because I am a masochist!

It is because we *need* a union.

Typical of a wannabe reporter: I realize I'm getting royally screwed, and watch staff drop off like flies, but instead of "walking", I stick around long enough to GET THE REAL STORY.

For once, I have a job I love enough to stand and fight for it, rather than get starved into something a *little* bit better (*if* I am *very* lucky). It is perfect enough for me that I would love nothing more than to make ends meet working my ass off a few hours every day for these people I genuinely *enjoy* working both with, and under, Italian tempraments and all.

I'm absolutely certain my employers are breaking the law. Intentionally? Unintentionally? I don't know that for sure. Not yet. That's why I'm researching, before I go and hit them with the law in their faces.

I love them, and would love to work for them for years to come. Nothing would make me happier than to be like one of those elderly waiters at Musso & Franks (I'm thinking of the one with the gold Felix the Cat pin) who's been around and waiting tables since dirt was rocks. That is precisely the kind of place this restaurant *can* be, and *should* be -- a longstanding institution in the community at large. It hurts the business that every time someone comes in for an anniversary, they're greeted by total newbie staff who doesn't know the menu, let alone who they are.

That's not the issue, though. It isn't personal. The issue is this: I'm pretty sure they are failing to pay us the actual minimum wage. I'm absolutely certain there is *no* accounting for what we are actually paid. Cash on the table is cash on the table. Period. Old school. To a fault.

They don't have the legally required posters by the time clock, more than a month after the city-wide minimum wage ordinance went into effect. That, alone, means that they're breaking the law.

On 1 January, 2007, The minimum wage increased in Albuquerque from the $5.15/hr federal minimum to 6.75/hr, minus tips. Tipped employees may be paid no less than $2.13/hr -- yes, $2.13/hr -- provided that tips bump up the *actual* amount they get to no less than $6.75/hr.

Meanwhile, staff comes and goes with alarming regularity. No one can be bothered to change lightbulbs or do place settings correctly. No one cleans anything unless they're verbally harangued to do so. Gee. I wonder why. It isn't necessary. Pay us decently and give us a week. See if the place don't sparkle. See if the roach problem doesn't suddenly disappear. It absolutely can. And *will*. If you'll only pay us -- not what we're actually *worth*, mind you -- but just what you can not pay us less than without facing the law in the same courthouse you broke ground on.

In a waitstaff of *maybe* ten or twelve, precisely *one* person has been there longer than a year. That itself says a lot about the business.

And hear me right, here: it's a *great* business! There is *no* reason we should not be packed with customers each and every night! There is *no* reason we should hire and fire and hire and fire between people "walking" on an almost daily basis. Except that we're all getting screwed out of our baseline legal entitlement, and no one sticks around long enough to figure that out and *do* something about it.

At this point I'm writing to my city councillor for clarification on the timeframe within which the tips *must* reach 6.75 an hour *is*, and asking about what sort of recordkeeping is involved, and whose responsibility that recordkeeping is, to begin with.

I've emailed one contact in one union and plan to walk into the office of another between my lunch and dinner shift tomorrow.

Hehe.

This is fun.

Regarding Iran! If you're still following this story at all (and I hope you are, since it means way more than what waiters get paid, which won't ever start WWIII), you might enjoy the Jerusalem Post's article entitled "Olmert: Iran Can Be Stopped Without Resorting to Violence". Personally, I think Israeli Prime Minister Olmert's assessment of the situation is a bit one-sided, but that's understandable. It says a lot, doesn't it, that he's arguing *against* use of force against Iran -- even as the Governor of Texas engages in a consistent escalation of sabre-rattling.

I still can't quite square his agreement, let alone Condoleeza Rice's, to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority's Mahmoud Abbas (a.k.a. Abu Mazen) in light of Hamas' democratic victory in open elections, given US assurances that we're "fighting for democracy" in the region and what have you. So was Hamas elected to power or not? If not, why not? And if they were, why will we not recognize them?

My first interview.

No Sunnis. No Shiites. No WMDs. No chemical weapons or F-14s sold by the US to whoever. No P1 versus P2 Centrifuge technology. No A.Q. Khan international nuclear proliferation network. No connection between URENCO and Pakistan's bomb through Libya to the National Enrichment Facility outside of Eunice.

"Easy" interview, right?

Riiiight!

So having a day off when I'm trying to do *anything* but smoke, I *finally* manage to track down Mr. MacQuigg, the gentleman who's running for the fourth district seat in tomorrow's school board election, on a platform of accountability and transparency. I say "finally" because I got a "disconnected or no longer in service" phone number for him online, then emailed him, asking *him* to call *me* since the phone number I got for him was "bad".

To my surprise, I hear back from him, then called him back, blah blah blah blah, and arrange to meet him at the same time I had only heard back from APS Board of Education officials *minutes* before their offices closed for the day promising me anything I wanted to know (in the next five to ten minutes -- dumb office trick).

The Bernalillo County Clerk's Bureau of Elections claimed not even to know who Mr. MacQuigg was, though his name's on the ballot. (Typical.)

At this late stage of the game -- the evening before the election -- he openly urges voters to *oppose* the mill levy -- which is *very* interesting, because he comes at it *not* as a "property rights" advocate, but as a veteran educator who articulately gives a rat's ass about whether the kids he's teaching learn, or not.

In my limited experience, there are two mostly distinct camps in school board elections, based on how I've heard them covered in the mainstream media in three states, now: those I call "the educators", who advocate more money for the public schools regardless how it's spent (to whom accountability's a grand idea, but only if you pass this new source of funding first, without strings), and "the property rights advocates", who consistently oppose *any* property taxes, on the basis that they're unconstitutionally being made to pay for other children's education in their district, regardless of whatever greater good might accrue by improved education funding (and who will *only* vote for increased funding *if* it's tied to broader standards of performance accountability by teachers to begin with).

That, at least, is my expectation of the story before I bother trying to cover it. Mr. MacQuigg blows all my expectations out of the water.

I think my prior assessment of school board elections may be grossly oversimplified, at this point, and intend to vote tomorrow, in my first-ever school board election ballot.

What makes Mr. MacQuigg *interesting* to me as a source is that he is a veteran *educator* (25 years) who has lived in Albuquerque for all of his life. Yet he opposes the proposed mill levy, even though it imposes no new taxes on property holders. By doing so, he *crosses* what I consider to be hard-set "party lines" on this issue, so far "downticket" that the vast majority of registered voters won't even bother showing up at the polls to begin with. Why?

To put it as neatly as I can: a combination of waste, fraud, and corruption, covered up by a lack of transparency and accountability on the part of Albuquerque Public Schools' Board of Education. He cites specific examples I *wish* I had just one week to investigate, credibly. His detractors, in turn, raise questions about him I'd love to spend another week determining whether they're purely ad hominem bullshit or have *any* basis in fact.

What was that high school in Los Angeles that wound up wasting millions of taxpayer dollars? I don't even remember, anymore. But if I had the time to investigate this story *before* the election, it might turn up (as usual) an Albuquerque corrolate to LA.

In LA: there was a super-duper brand new high school built on land that had all sorts of toxic waste problems nobody ever bothered to clean up before the school was built and set to open. All of which had to be remediated, in the end, at huge cost overruns to taxpayers, before it ever *did* open.

In ABQ: it looks like a significant portion of the proposed mill levy will go into the unnecessary construction of a boardroom (whose purpose could be credibly well served by *any* high school auditorium in the city), at the same time Susie Rayos Marmon Elementary comes under repeated complaints by parents whose kids attend class, amidst record snows, in aging, unhealthy, leaking portables -- some 30 to 40 of which could easily be replaced by the amount spent on the new boardroom.

With all due respect to my source, it doesn't help that I ask him repeatedly about the "Susie Rayos Marmon Boardroom", as he has called it in his blog. He calls upon a certain sense of irony which I do not have the luxury of calling him on, not knowing what the boardroom is, indeed, set to be called. I do not even know who Susie Rayos Marmon is, least of all that he calls the boardroom by her name because the funds spent on the boardroom could replace portable classrooms at the school named in her honour.

I dash politely out of his living room shortly after six PM and run to the KUNM Newsroom, where I know someone will be 'til seven. As I pull up to his door, I have to drive around the block a time or two 'cause KUNM's already covering someone from the "Yes on Mill Levy" side of the story, a position which all local commercial press has portrayed as "unopposed".

I go in and interview the gentleman who seems to have spent way more money than he has to begin with just to stand for office, who doesn't stand a chance at winning (as the *fifth* candidate on a five-party ticket), just because he strikes me as credible.

All his same-district opponents have yard signs. He does not have one. Not one. Not even in his own yard. Ten minutes' conversation wins me over sufficiently to the idea that he has a relevant grievance that I'm willing to risk my neck covering his story.

Yes. Mr. Iran himself risks his neck and his credibility on a District 4 school board candidate. Go figure.

Even if his candidacy's not viable, he raises several important questions about how mill levy funds will be spent, *if* the mill levy's passed, which it probably will be. He strikes me as a valuable source regarding how APS spends its funds. I grew up around frustrated teachers. He's credible.

I'll understand if he never runs again, but I hope he doesn't drop out of politics altogether. Seems to me this guy has got some credible reasons to oppose a proposed mill levy no one else bothers raising serious questions about.

At best, from where I stand, I can get his voice on the air to people going to the polls during drivetime. KUNM already covered the carefully-scripted "Yes on mill levy" stance, tonight, and *will* rerun the story tomorrow morning. I hope to give them something else to air, shortly thereafter.

Thus my thank you note to News Director Renee Blake, which I sent before I posted this, entitled "THANK YOU":

For all your help tonight as I came bumbling through the door ten
minutes to close with a *supposedly* manageable ten minutes of tape
but a whole set of skills *totally* lacking. It *is* very much like
editing images, except that soundclips involve the element of time.
Nothing makes up for the fact -- not that I don't know the software --
but that I'm dealing with a whole different *dimension* in what I hope
to edit, here. (I could extemporize for hours on linguistic theory
versus visual perception but will *try* and spare you that.)

Perhaps ten minutes after you left, I found myself obsessing over the
raw file in audition (unwilling to alter what you'd edited into a
usable soundclip, which I took as my baseline "ideal"). "Wouldn't it
be nice", I thought, "to have that quote about that boardroom and how
much it cost, cleaned up, too, so that when Mr. MacQuigg says APS isn't
accountable or transparent, there's something *concrete* he at least
*refers* to, rather than coming out of the blue making us *all* sound
like nutcases for even airing this? It's only fifteen seconds long,
too. Surely I can edit that in fifteen minutes."

Not so! At least not yet.

I swear: this is the last time I make fun of NPR for not getting every
subaltern contradiction to the story put out by the people that they
interview. And all ONE of my interviewees speaks excellent English.

I also discovered just precisely how annoying "uhms", "wells" and "you
sees" and all those little micro-delay tactics in normal speech
actually *are*, as I move the cursor back and forth as little as I
can:

well, i'm running because...
well, i'm running
ell i'm running
ell I'm running
lime running
lime running
mrunning
mrunning
mrunning
unning
unning
unning
("dang", I think, "I gotta either leave that 'well' in there or scrap it")
well, I'm running because...
(only to find I can't even delete the selection I meant to. hm.)

I *should* have spent that time writing up an introduction for Steve
to use on what you had made usable, already.

I looked up "delete selection" in the help files and was just starting
to think I understood things, in a basic sort of way, when -- at ten
past eight, the eight-o-clock person on the sheet for studio C walks
in the door and asks me if I'm someone I am not. (I suspect, but do
not know, she'd waited patiently for ten minutes before entering.)
Yikes! I'm not, sorry to say, 'cause if I were I might know what I was
doing. I can't pretend I'll do anything useful in the time I might
steal from her which she'd signed up for already. While clearing out,
I apologize, expressing appropriate shock, yes, shock! that I would
even be allowed to touch the equipment. She says she felt the same way
the first time she went on air, and I take it there are no hard
feelings. But I can't hog a studio learning basic, basic, basic skills
when others have shows to produce.

My god, public radio's a dangerous thing! Now I know what you must
tell all the crazies who call anytime Amy Goodman's interrupted by ten
seconds of silence. "It's not the CIA messing with the satellite, it's
just our junior wannabe cub reporter who doesn't know what buttons to
push when he's covering a school board election, so please, stand by".
;)

I try to quit, and Audition freezes up on me. I *think* I know I
haven't changed the pithy quote you extracted from that last question
I asked him but I'm not *absolutely* sure and *can't* remember the
exact filepath, and am unwilling to hog the studio any longer to
figure that thing out. Everything froze up after I found I couldn't
quite swing the "highlight and delete" thing you were doing so
smoothly it looked like second nature. At least I can confidently say
I didn't accidentally delete anyone else's work. I think. I hope. If I
am wrong, you have my permission to burn me at the stake in front of
the West entrance after hours. (But please, my last request: have
Danny cover it.)

I aim to go to bed in an hour or so and show up at five AM when I know
Steve will be there. I think I can take it from there -- find the
file, make a new one (I hope) if needed, and write out some readable
copy:

She sells sea shells by the sea shore.
The shells she sells are surely seashells.
So if she sells shells on the seashore,
I'm sure she sells seashore shells.

After all, isn't the mill levy all about sort of seashells?

Enough from me. THANK YOU and GOOD NIGHT.

Be well,

[Real Name]

Links.

There's a *very* illustrative article displaying the difference between the LA Times or NY Times, on the one hand, and Al Jazeera on the other, in terms of "burying the lead" at Arrests Spark Bahrain Protests. I should forewarn you: I don't know a damn thing about Bahrain, its government or citizenry, its religious makeup, let alone its internal dissenting voices. But it's really, truly nice to know they're *there*, taking a stand, and facing repression at the hands of the state just exactly like we do in this country.

Forgive me please if you're Muslim, but in the bigger picture, from across the globe, I no more give a rat's ass about the differences between Sunni and Shia than you likely give a rat's ass about the differences between communists (let alone the seventeen zillion sub-sub-divisions therein) and blue dog democrats.

That's not the point.

The point is that each culture has, within itself, significant social groupings that stand in opposition to the current ruling elites, which in turn, puts down such oppposition through variously brutal forms of state coercion.

Aside from independent media, the US press, as a rule, doesn't go out of its way to present the fact to the Arab world that dissent *does* exist in the US. To the degree that "the West" appears in Arab eyes as monolithically imperialistic, to the degree that "the Arab World" appears in Western eyes as monolithically zealous, the press is to blame in its failure to cover dissent, when simplistic "good guy/bad guy" storylines are more conducive to meeting deadlines.

And forgive me again, please, but I have more in common with people facing rubber bullets and arbitrary arrests in *any* country than I have with the elites that try to paint *any* other country (let alone a whole civilization) as a threat to the populace at large.

Apparently when Al Jazeera "buries the lead", it's buried in the first line of the story, directly beneath the headline. (Amy Goodman does some of the same.) I mean, come on -- this is a complicated story, obviously -- but even if you read *only* the headline and the first line of the article, you get a sense of that. Not so reading the LA Times or New York Times on articles of protests within their normal purviews, where the release of protestors arrested *might* make it onto page A-13. *If* we're lucky.

Then there's a totally different kind of story at Defence Tech: Starving Iran's Tomcats. While I have yet to render a verdit on the value of "unnamed sources" cited by the New York Times (cited in the article), the fact reamins: the US *did* sell 79 Northrop Grumman F-14 "Tomcat" fighter jets to Iran.

I hope to god I'm *not* the journalist who asks the grieving mother: "so how do you feel knowing your son was shot down by a plane manufactured in, and sold to Iran by, the US?".

Full moon lunacy.

Wednesday night, after pulling a double lunch and dinner shift waiting tables, I get two messages from David, one saying he has to work and won't be coming in 'til Saturday, the other saying he's definitely coming tomorrow.

I call Charles first, though, because I told him the previous night I'd call before he left for Durango since I want to give him The Alchemist from the March 2006 New Yorker. The subject of the article and Charles seem to my perception to be long-lost brothers.

Winds up Bill's had a stroke maybe ten minutes before I called and is being loaded into the ambulance while Charles is also on the other line to his mother in Mississippi.

The night is spent in vigil at Bill's house. Charles does his most brilliant *ever* monologues for me. He starts out vaingloriously self-important and lapses almost unconsciously into unalloyed brillance without, apparently, intending to do so. We'll probably never spend another evening like this in his parlour, since he's moving out of town. Because it takes sometimes hours of obnoxiousness to get there, few people ever see it in him, but I swear he gets into a mode where he rivals the best things, in improvisation, that Tennessee Williams ever wrote for stage. This is a man who can quote entire scenes of Shakespeare at length, from memory. He plays the bassoon. He will be missed. There is no one else like him in town. Bill gets discharged from the hospital, comes home, and goes to sleep.

I finally get home myself (as usual when I visit Charles) at six AM.

I wake up at eleven AM and run a handful of errands including going to KUNM to fetch a recording kit for a school board election story I *still* hope to cover. I hope you all vote in it and educate yourself about the issues. I had no clue it mattered until someone commented to me about it and just happened to put me onto a story I can probably cover halfway decently without a bunch of crazy conflicted emotional involvement. I've also got a tight deadline to work with: if the story can't run by Monday evening, it won't make a difference, at all.

One of the KUNM volunteers, I hear, has had a stroke as well. It's going around.

I call David, he confirms he's coming to town the same night. I get out of work an hour late. I go and pick up David at the bus station. He would have taken the city bus somewhere, but the last one ran seventeen minutes before the last out-of-town bus comes to town. (Great transportation planning.)

Today I worked the lunch shift and was in "stress response" mode all day long. Tips were correspondingly *lousy*. I go home where I expect to find David has gone out for the day. Instead, he wound up locked inside my apartment, unable to figure out how to work my doorknobs. The neighbours heard him and he told them through the door he's a visitor who can't get out.

We run out for lunch at Double Rainbow. We go to Peacecraft, the "fair trade" store (the only place in town with decent nylon rainbow flags from real flag material, though damn it, they don't have the eight-colour variety). I run his down the the gallery where Nakabashi is having his show and *just* make it to work on time at five PM.

At this point people are asking me questions like "what about that 14-top? I heard you were the big winner last night". I literally don't know what they're talking about. My sense of time has dissolved. I'm running on a few hour's sleep. I don't know what day it is. I barely know that I am in a restaurant, dressed like a waiter, and expected to perform waiterly, restaurant-like functions. By the time I'm allowed to go home I decide not to, because the *minute* I punch out I hear there's been a shooting five blocks from my house.

I get home and connect briefly to check email. In the time I'm connected, a message comes in from one of David's best freinds saying "we're at Joe's" and I drive out to find the place. I figure it's a pizza parlour like they said but it's a *huge* and crazy bar, one of those "Albuquerque places" that's getting destroyed to make way for the new Albuquerque envisioned by people like Martin Chavez who apparently wants no one who's not a millionaire to live within 30 miles of downtown. I work my way through it from front to back. I get about five compliments on my beard or my hat or my coat or what have you but no sign of David or his freind. Everyone's a freak, and I turn heads just walking in in clothes that keep me warm, because there's something "throwback" about me. I get another voicemail the instant I leave the place saying they're all at Frontier.

Goose chases, anyone?

Frontier has a new tortilla machine. They don't poke the tortillas with sticks, like I used to, anymore. Everyone in the kitchen recognizes me after a double take or two and it's old home week for a few minutes. I get my BB CARNE and sit down with David and his freind. I eat. We talk. I come home. Nothing's real, at this point. Nothing.

I am exhausted.

And then there's the energy. Yeah that sounds foofy. But *everyone* seems angry. No one seems able or willing to listen, but only capable of lashing out at eachother. On the roads, at work, in social settings, you name it, no one's thinking right these last several days.

That's the broad outline of it. Had to write it. Otherwise it would make me insane.

Be well.