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The Truth in Eli’s Blue Tattoos

David Irving, a British historian, will be in prison for the next three years after claiming for decades the Holocaust did not happen. The Austrian sentencing judge called Irving a “falsifier of history” who had academically challenged the Holocaust research of other scholars. One researcher, Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University, fought back against Irving and won but she feels Irving’s imprisonment will only make him a Free Speech martyr.

When the Western mindset of freedom and Free Speech meets anti-Muslim cartoonists and Holocaust deniers like Irving, there is a strange and dangerous conflation of the radical worst of us becoming memes for a movement. The best evidence for fighting the David Irvings and others who press lies over ugly truths is in the specificity of the body and the revelation of embedded truth that erupts to the surface when crushed into the flesh. When I was a teenager, I worked at a television station as an on-camera movie reviewer.

There was a man who worked in the film department named Eli. Eli was the only person who could take a piece of ruined raw film, fix it, and have it on the air for the evening news in five minutes. Eli was old school. He could fix anything mechanical. The new videotape revolution happening around him held no interest. He was pure celluloid and chemicals and darkrooms. Eli was a “Jew in Nebraska” and that was extremely rare in the 1980’s. He moved to Nebraska after World War II after surviving Auschwitz and surviving Auschwitz was even rarer than a Jew in Nebraska.

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Haunted by the Tragedy of Wendy

Today I am haunted by yesterday and the tragic death of Playwright Wendy Wasserstein. She died of lymphoma at the age of 55. Her sister died of breast cancer at 60. Wendy, unmarried, left behind a six-year-old daughter named Lucy Jane who was born three months premature and weighed 1-pound, 12-ounces at birth.

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Lucky in Harlem

When we moved to New York twenty years ago from Nebraska — after first deferring through Washington, D.C. for a year — we rented a giant, three axle, Ryder truck for the price of a van — they were out of vans when we arrived with our prepaid reservation — and we motored into the muggy urban core of the Big Apple by driving down the wrong way of a one way sliver of Riverside Drive near Columbia University in the repressive heat of a mid-August afternoon.

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Men and Kindness

One lesson young women know, but can never quite learn, is how many young men misunderstand kindness from a woman as affection. The difference between kindness and affection are bright and clear. Kindness is what you should extend to every person. Affection is reserved for intimate reciprocal relationships where the affection expressed is given and not demanded. Young men are anxious to connect to young women.

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One Year Under God

Over the past year, I’ve written about the ridiculous effort to “save” Terri Schiavo‘s body from her dead brain, the ruse of Intelligent Design, and the tragedy of Homeschooling and then recently in The New York Times genius Frank Rich nails every 2005 coffin closed on the open and un-brawly intents of the religious right and other pretenders in two paragraph gems from a jewel of an essay:

An ersatz war on Christmas fits all too snugly into a year that began with the religious right’s (unsuccessful) efforts to destroy the box office and Oscar prospects of Clint Eastwood’s “Million Dollar Baby” and “save” Terri Schiavo and that ended with a federal judge banishing intelligent design from high school biology classes.

In his sweeping 139-page opinion, that judge, John Jones III, put his finger on the hypocrisy of many of those most ostentatiously defending faith from its alleged assailants in America. Referring to the fundamentalists on the Dover, Pa., school board, he wrote that it was “ironic” that those who “so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the intelligent design policy.” That passage fits much of the dishonesty and cynicism perpetrated in the name of religion in America over the past 12 months.

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Yahoo Mail Beta Disappointing

Last Friday I was finally invited to participate in the Yahoo! Mail Beta and I was immediately disappointed in the experience. From what I had read all over the internet since the Beta program was introduced, I thought the new Yahoo! Mail Beta was going to finally allow me to jump online and run all my 15 email accounts — I would settle for four — from one centralized location instead of having to use Outlook 2003 as my meter of reading, delivering and managing email.

Yahoo Mail Beta

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I am My Own Whore

This post was originally titled, The Why I Do Not Comment On Other Blogs Manifesto, but it seemed a little precious and pretentious — and I try to save all my pretension and preciousness for the content of my posts and not waste them on the title — so I chose to call this post I am My Own Whore because it has a puckish ring of the ugly truth.

In my post Please Adjust your RSS Feeds, my fellow bloggers and I discussed a discussion that I have had at least 10 times here in the last month and in email and on other blogs when I am asked, sometimes in a roundabout way, but usually in a direct manner: Why don’t you post comments on my blog?

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More Than a Dead Rolex

After 15 years of service, my stainless steel Rolex Datejust died yesterday. The hands will only move backward instead of forward.
Rolex watches have a terrible reputation for being handsome but then dying at an early age. My Rolex never failed me a day in 15 years and I will miss its ugly magnifying bubble for the date and its dull blue face. 

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Central Park Saffron Gates

The unveiling of the ugly “draperies gates” in New York City’s Central Park was the epitome of what I call “Pretentious City Pretend Art.”

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Trying the Google Portal

I have been playing around with the new Google Portal and the experience is interesting but unmoving.

I like being able to drag-and-drop live content around on the Google portal page. The interface and environment needs a lot of work but that probably won’t happen because Google loves ugly!
If you want a mature portal interface, Yahoo! Plus is a real knockout.

I find Yahoo! Plus the easiest portal to manage. The Plus version, at least, looks really good.
I exclusively use the Yahoo! Plus beta RSS feeds for all my news now. I love seeing the minute and hourly feeds updates instead of the conventional dry once-a-day news updates I used to see there.
Give the Google portal a try. You might like it.
Then try Yahoo! Plus. You’ll like it better.