"The Warrior Within"

their front lawn.

The artists, Jim Dault and Shala Dobson, say it isn’t actually meant to look like a vagina.  “Emerging from the powerful stone form are two warrior shields encircled by glowing feathers. The bronze shield has a hand impression showing good deeds. The aluminum shield has a flame symbol representing the spark of inspiration. The stone form represents the strong material from which a warrior is made,” is the description they gave of the piece, which is entitled “The Warrior Within.”  Wasilla High’s sports teams are The Warriors.

Nonetheless, it looks like a vagina and all of the students saw that right away.  At first the school covered the statue up but, I guess, they thought about it, figured they were stuck with it, might as well suck it up and pretend that all the snickerers are just immature and uncouth types who don’t understand art.

The problem is, it doesn’t actually look like “the spark of inspiration,” whatever that looks like.  Like the front grille of the ill-fated Edsel or the floral paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe, it looks like a vagina.

In my opinion, the school administrators should not turn away from that and pretend it’s not so.  They should embrace it.  A vagina is a beautiful thing.  50% of all the people on Earth have one, and about 95% of the other 50% spend most of their time and effort trying to get into one.  It is the portal through which we all entered this world, and the source of the greatest physical pleasure known to man.  I guess, come to think of it, “spark of inspiration” does apply.

Georgia O’Keeffe always denied that she was painting vaginas, too, and perhaps she wasn’t, deliberately.  They’re just flowers, she always said.  Nonetheless, through the sensuality of the flowers,  she expressed their sexual power, the nature of their nature, the eternal reproductive essence of their feminine force.

This statue does that as well.  As long as you see it as a vagina.

Joanne Rowling

who-can-be-the-biggest-asshole contest, there was a piece of news that brightened my day today, and makes me look forward to the future.

Joanne Rowling is writing another book!  (There’s a reason I prefer using Joanne to J K: when Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was about to be published, her publishers, being a bunch of narrow minded male chauvinist pigs, insisted that she use her initials because they didn’t think young boys would want to read a book written by a woman.  Really, one would think we’d have put that nonsense to rest a couple of centuries ago.)

It’s not going to be another Harry Potter book, of course.  She wrapped that series up quite nicely.  We don’t know what it will be yet, except that it is an “adult” book.  No, that doesn’t mean porno.  It just means it won’t be a kid’s book.

I’ll be surprised if it’s as good as the Harry Potter books.  They were inspired, a work of genius.  She says that the idea came to her during a train ride and by the time she arrived at her destination, the framework for the books was complete.

Trains are pretty amazing like that.  Einstein got his idea for the theory of relativity while looking out of a train window and I’ve written plenty of my poems while riding on trains.  I think it’s something to do with the rhythmic clicking of the wheels and the gently rocking motion.

But I’m pretty sure it will be good.  She’s a brilliant writer.  Clear, concise story telling, well developed, believable characters and a fun,  clever and creative sense of wordplay make for great reading, no matter what the genre.

I’m certainly  looking forward to reading it.

Remember this one?

mattered, when a nasty car crash happens right behind her.  Not a fender bender at all.  This was two cars coming from two different directions at speed who didn’t see each other and – whammo!

She didn’t even turn around.  I don’t know if she  was deaf, totally incurious or just so determined to stick to her script that aliens from the planet Zorgon could have landed – gay, terrorist, glow-in-the-dark aliens – and she would have completed her set piece about high gas prices.

It seems this kind of clip- a live news report being upstaged by actual news, or just something funny- is becoming more common.  Maybe that’s because of Youtube and social media – there are thousands of local TV stations around the world, sending out reporters to cover mundane stuff, and something’s bound to be happening in the background of some of the stories.  The Sarah Palin turkey grinding incident springs to mind, or the reporter who was  out reporting on a hurricane and people were farting around behind him, mooning the camera and so on.

It’s interesting.  It’s a look into reality, past the barriers to it that the news stations try to manufacture.

I think it would be a good idea to just place cameras in several interesting places around the world – Times Square, Venice Beach, Trafalgar Square, Red Square and so on.  Everybody that wants to be on TV could come and be on TV, people could come up to the microphone and report on whatever they felt like talking about or flash mobs and performance artists could do their thing, and it would all be live, real, uncensored and kind of interesting.  The down side is there might be long, boring stretches where nobody actually did  anything.  But that’s life.

President Buddy Roemer (not very likely)

series.)

As everybody knows, there are 4 candidates still in the race for the Republican nomination for which candidate is going to lose to Obama in November.  The thing is, everybody knows wrong.  Up until today, there were 7.  Of course, the press didn’t give a whole lot of coverage to Fred Karger (the gay candidate), Gary Johnson (who, like Ron Paul, is at least in favor of legalizing marijuana) and Buddy Roemer, whose big issue was getting the big money out of politics, which meant he was getting creamed by Romney, who spends millions of dollars per state and has the nearly unanimous backing of the party establishment, Newt Gingrich, who has a quirky Las Vegas gambling billionaire bankrolling his campaign and Rick Santorum, who also has a weird megarich backer, Foster Friess,  who doesn’t think women should have sex.

Ron Paul, like Roemer, is depending mostly on small donations.  He’s doing better than Roemer, but he’s also being left in the dust by dog abuser Romney, religious nut Santorum and evil marshmallow Gingrich.

Taking the money out of politics is a noble goal, but doing it unilaterally means you will lose the election.  You may disapprove of guns but if you go to a gunfight without one, on principle, you would be making a big mistake.

So, Buddy Roemer (who was governor of Louisiana for awhile, about 20 years ago) has dropped out of the Republican race.  He’ll run as an independent.

He’s still not going to be taken seriously.  In every U.S. presidential election, there are a half dozen or so fringe candidates – communist, socialist, libertarian, green, church of cosmic vibrations, whatever – and they get about 1% of the vote between all of them.

Once, on a road trip from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, we picked up a hitch-hiker who said he had run for president several times.  His big issue was that he totally rejected money, didn’t believe in it.  We bought him a meal, paid for his ticket on the roller coaster in the casino at State Line, and dropped him off somewhere after that.

He was a pleasant enough character, interesting to talk to and polite, but I didn’t remember his name a half an hour after he got out of the car and I certainly wasn’t ever tempted to vote for him.

If you can't trust Woodrow Wilson, then who can you trust?

I have a question:  When they say that these were destined for a 3rd world country, does that mean the Nigerian businessman I’ve been corresponding with  is now shit out of luck?  That would be a shame, as he promised to share some of the proceeds with me.

Mostly, though, my reaction to this story is a big OMG WTF – 6 TRILLION!  That’s a major amount of money.  And, despite the absurd amount, the quality of printing (and the fact that they’re going with bonds and not actual currency) indicate that this was not just a prank.  They were totally serious and  thought they were going to become filthy rich.

I remember about 20 years ago, police in the U.S. busted a marijuana growing operation and it made headlines because of the size of the operation.  A cop spokesperson  said “That’s more marijuana than we thought there was in the whole country.”

That’s the way I feel about this.  6 trillion – that’s more money than I thought there was in the world.  And that raises an interesting question:  how much money is there in the world, anyway?

It would make all of the arguments about economics much simpler if we actually knew.