JanerBlog

Oh, so that's it!

Social Security Reform, Explained. Via cloudiness.

Some very disturbing commentary

Hey, it's Daily Kos, so here's your saltshaker to go with it. Still, it's really scary stuff:

Chinese Lose Faith in Dollar -- take the time to read the posts after this entry; they're all rather good.

Seymour Hersh: "We've Been Taken Over by a Cult"

Soldiers returning from Iraq have to pay for meals at Walter Reed

Failed Bush world leadership

Dollar Dump: Central Banks Shun US Assets

Here's one specifically about Norquist.

I'm hesitant to yank my stocks, but I'm currently rethinking whether or not to put my tax return money into my IRA for my annual contribution as usual, or stuff it into my proverbial mattress.

Thoughts? Dan, Virus, Jason, you wanna weigh in on these?

Jaw on the floor

Strange Bedfellows, indeed.

Via Tishalro, via Slate.

Hey, I'll take an energy revolution darn near any way it comes. Growing and/or reprocessing our own oil can only benefit America; it's not really isolationism, in this case -- it's self-sufficiency: the more of our own needs we can produce at home, the better off we'll be. See this article where the Engineering students at U of M recycled some of the 11,000 gallons of waste fat produced by the dining halls each year -- and turned it into biodiesel to run the busses that run in unending circles between central and north campuses.

To me, this epitomises "Conservatism": It's about conserving what you have so that you don't have to buy new stuff. Being self-sufficient so you don't have to be dependent on -- or worse, beholden to -- other people. Making do with what you have, and making what you have work for you. I was raised in a very conservative, self-sufficient household, and I simply cannot understand why Republicans have largely tossed this technology aside as happy-hippy crunchy-granola pie-in-the-sky spotted-owl claptrap. It's not. It's science, business and common sense all rolled into one.

It also astounds me how GM and Chrysler are still totally caught flatfooted on the whole hybrid thing. How ridiculous it is that we have to buy overseas to get an efficient car. I live in Michigan, home of the Motor City, and this depresses the everliving crap out of me. At least Ford is making some progress -- the Ford Dealership where I bought my used VW was in a very, very red part of the state; very rural and very Christian, and not precisely the types you'd figure on being environmentalists... and yet all the guys in the Used Car Shack were really impressed by the new Hybrid Escape.

I'm still a little unsure about brand-new technology; never buy a car on its first model year and all that. Plus, the only Prius/Escape/Insight I could afford is one that's 4-5 years old -- which means those big 'spensive battery packs are about to need replacing. That's why I picked my bean-burner.

Also, for the record, the VeeDub starts like a champ in -10F weather. She doesn't like it much, but she turns over on the first crank. Twenty seconds later and the idle's straightened out and ready to go. That's using b20; I can't wait until the weather's 40F overnight so I can run 100% biodiesel.

Oh, and the car's name is "Silverbean." I finally decided.

A thousand points of war

This is a personal, non-professional blog entry that pretty much sums up what I personally believe happened in Iraq. There were a zillion other reasons -- including the PNAC's desire to see the US as a kind of "benevolent" pseudo-empire, Halliburton wanted to make a crapload of money, and the self-admitted fact that Bush 43 wanted to avenge his Daddy's almost-assassins. It must made "sense".

For the record, I may be a pacifist, but I do believe that there are moments in history when one must take up arms against an enemy. I do not believe that the war in Iraq was one of those times.

For the record, I have no problem whatsoever with our servicemen and women; quite the opposite in fact. I have the greatest respect for anyone who is willing to lay down their life for their country, who is willing to make the greatest sacrifice of all. I have so much respect for these soldiers that I become morally enraged when I see people taking advantage of them: when a pack of chickenhawks throw our brightest and best, our youth, our armed services into the meatgrinder of war, taking literal hundreds of thousands of civilians with them, all for money. Not even for our continuing economic survival -- just so the rich can get even richer, and so that we don't actually have to do any belt-tightening -- just so that we can continue to live our extravagant lifestyles, unfettered by things like, oh, I don't know, humanity for our fellow man. This completely outrages me.

Also -- does it bother anyone other than me to know that out of Bush's entire warmongering cadre (Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rove, Libbey, Bush) the only one to ever actually see combat is Powell?

I heart geek cooks

Have I mentioned how much I love Alton Brown?

Alton's reaction to Supersize Me:

"We are fat and sick and dying because we have handed a basic, fundamental and intimate function of life over to corporations. We choose to value our nourishment so little that we entrust it to strangers. We hand our lives over to big companies and then drag them to court when the deal goes bad. This is insanity.

Feed yourselves.
Feed your loved ones.
And for God’s sake feed your children.

Don’t trust anyone else to do it…not anyone. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t go out to dinner every now and then…that is after all one of the great joys of life…but it isn’t life itself and that’s what I’m talking about.

Is MacDonalds food bad for you? What do you think? Does that mean you shouldn’t eat it? No, it just means you shouldn’t live on it or anything else made by someone you wouldn’t hug. "

Brum! Brum!

I got a new car! W00!

It's really super nice. It's by far and away the nicest car I've ever owned, and cost me more than the last three cars I've owned put together. Granted, that figure amounts to well under $10,000, but that's not the point. I've always been of the beater-car mentality: buy some hooptie for $2000 in cash and drive it till the wheels fell off. This has played out with the other five cars I've owned, and the most I've ever paid for one was $3700 for this last Honda Civic.

It's a 2001 VW Golf TDI, and I'm already in love with it. I got it for a song from a dealership in Charlotte, and I knew from the second I saw the ad that they had no idea what was parked in their lot. The bluebook for the car was $1500 more than their asking price, even with the 90K miles on the car. When I told them it got 50mpg, everyone in the showroom looked at me as though I were from Venus. Let me type that again, so no one misses it: This thing gets fifty miles to the gallon. Five-oh. I even got new brakes out of the deal. The salespeople were kind, prompt, professional and decidedly un-slimy, which made me very very happy. I was even able to put down 1/3 of the value as a down payment because I got such a nice asking price for the Civic. On Tuesday, I take it to the resident Kzoo VW Guru for a thorough onceover, and then I start my Grand Experiment: I'm gonna run this sucker on BioDiesel.

I had to get an older TDI because VW's warranty won't cover any damages created by BiodDiesel. There's not likely to be any, but if I got some bad BioDiesel, the warranty wouldn't cover the engine, as it's not an "Approved fuel". So why get a really expensive car? This one was worth the risk.

Dig this: My family are farmers. They grow soybeans. There's a local gas station in Manchester that sells 100% BioDiesel (b100). I buy my fuel from them, I help support local farmers, cause less pollution, get fifty miles to the gallon and get to reduce our dependency on foreign oil. Is there a downside to this?

I can't find one, other than the fact that I'll have to buy my fuel in advance and keep it in 5-gallon jugs till I can get back to Manchester for more. Sooner or later, with all the farmers around Kalamazoo, they'll open up a b100 pump around here -- right now the best they have is b20, which ain't good enough for me, as it's still 80% "DinoDiesel".

So here's to putting my money where my mouth is! I'm against the war, so I'm sending out a clear message: We can grow our own oil and reduce the need to kill people over resources. Down with big oil! Up with farmers!

Now if only American car companies would build a car as awesome as the VW TDI. It sucks that I had to buy a foreign car to get one that works this good and gets mileage this good, but hey, that's capitalism for you.I ain't buyin' an American car until the Big 3 can make one as good as a VW or a Honda. The minute they do, I'm on it like... um... white on rice.

On to the pictures!

Dude, this car is spotless inside. Looks like it just rolled off the factory floor. And the instrument panel lights up blue.

StruwwelKatie

Here's some leftover pictures from the day after Christmas. Our niece Katie has very fine hair, and the snowy winter day was very dry. By the end of the day, we were wondering if we could stick Katie to the ceiling if we rubbed her with the couch cushions.

("Shock-headed Peter", or Struwwelpeter, is an infamous German book of cautionary tales for bad, bad children, not unlike the Gashlycrumb Tinies. It was recently made into a highly successful -- and pleasantly disturbing -- stage production.)

Remembering

Donations in Will's honor may be made to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund or the American Cancer Society.

Regrets

Will Eisner is gone. He was 87.

Others who knew him have eulogized him with great eloquence, and I feel at a loss to say anything about his passing because I never met the man. I deeply, deeply regret this fact.

The closest I came to meeting him was when he came to the Motor City Comic Con a while back, around 1997, I think. I didn't go to the comicon -- couldn't afford to -- and my buddy Ric Conway went to the show, stood in line and brought me back the official program with The Spirit on the cover, autographed by none other than Eisner himself. Ric had said to Will, "This is for my friend Jane. She's writing her own comic book." Will smiled and said, "Good, we need more girls making comics." And that was it. That's the closest I've ever come to meeting the King of Comics, one of my greatest artistic heroes, right up there with Jim Henson.

I cannot speak about Eisner himself, but I can speak about his work. I remember distinctly the first time I ever saw Eisner's stuff. It must have been 1994 or 1995, and I was in a bookshop in Stratford Ontario. A pack of friends and I were there to see some Shakespeare plays, and we had a few hours to kill between the lunch and dinner performances, and of course we all gravitated towards books.

It was probably the first book I picked up, wedged in there between Amphigorey and some other cool art books. It was Dropsie Avenue, Will's amazing story that follows a plot of land in Brooklyn from its earliest days as rural farmland, as it becomes a squalid tenement, and finally, sanitized condos. It's a paraphrased story of the South Bronx -- I didn't believe it was true until I started doing some research. I thought he'd made up the transformation as poetry, as an urban extreme. No, he'd written this thing by looking out his window. I was stunned. Couldn't put it down. I sank underwater, enraptured by the story. While everyone else milled around, I stayed in one spot, eyes wide and transfixed, hunkered down behind the Graphic Novels rack until someone forcibly hauled me away. I was hooked, thunderstruck. Eisner had me by the throat from the second I opened the cover, in the same way the Spiegelman had years before with Maus.

Probably the thing that I like the best about Eisner's books are his characters: They're unvarnished human beings. They are not polished gems of humanity; they hate, scheme, trick, lie. They love, caretake, toe the line, pine for things they shouldn't. There're moments of unfocused racism from all sides: Black, White, Italian, Jew, Pole, Latino. There is poverty, there is wealth, there is shame, there is dignity. Most of his stories play out in a large ensemble cast where each set of individuals step into the spotlight, deliver their scene, then step back, enfolded into the largest character of all: the city. No one is ever lost: all characters influence each other, even a hundred years in the future. Eisner is a master, capable of seeing superbly defined individuals within their greater whole and treating both as a palpable character within his plot.

Above all, there is humanity. Eisner's stories are all unabashedly human, and find their tragedy and comedy in the living of life: individual moments drawn with stunning clarity into remarkable stories. Eisner doesn't require external stories to make his characters interesting: their individual moments are their stories, are the focus of their lives, are what makes them interesting.

There are moments when his characterizations veer off into charicature. Yes, he did have unnervingly racist characters in The Spirit. There's no getting away from it, and I won't defend these characters nor dignify them by saying "Well, those were the times" any more than I will allow older relatives of mine to continue using racial slurs because "That's how they were raised." It's inexcusable. In Eisner's later work, especially that after A Contract with God, he continually gets into race issues, some stories more gracefully than others. Still, it is my belief that Eisner's intent was not to degrade or insult. I believe that his stories were comprised of powerful characters who embody both the best and worst in humanity, and that he did his damndest to portray people as individuals as opposed to races. You see Italian mobsters and shylock Jews on one page, and on the next, the neighboring italian tailor and jewish shoemaker whose children marry and force the two men to get over their differences. He tells stories of racism and stereotypes because those stories exist -- but he also tells stories of those who break those molds, because those stories also exist. Eisner is an observer -- an observer of culture as well as of humanity, and that means portraying the best and worst moments.

Will, you were an observer of life, an artist of life, and an inspiration to us all. Your books told me that my stories were worth telling. Your works gave me faith to continue on with a seemingly unending project. You will always remain one of my greatest heroes.

Peace to you, Will Eisner.

Randroids

So some dude over at the Ayn Rand Institute is claiming that the US should not help tsunami victims. Now I'm all for bootstrapping, and not taking or giving unnecessary charity, because I agree, it does weaken a person's character and ability to receive everything in their lives without having to work for it.

But Lord God Almighty, I sure hope that if, in the course of twenty minutes, my house, livelihood, children and posessions were entirely obliterated, someone would at least give me food to eat and clothes to wear and possibly a loan to rebuild my house until I could get on my feet.

I can usually appreciate the objectivist viewpoint, but to quote my buddy Becky, this guy is a bastard-coated bastard with bastard filling.

Lurker Roll Call

Y'know, I keep hearing people say that they read my blog frequently, but I get about one comment every two weeks. Not that that's a bad thing; it keeps me from having to wade through and delete spam. The bad news is that I don't know who's reading.

Lurkers, sound off, wouldja?