I swear to god, on my way to work this morning I was thinking about the Pledge of Allegiance we recited daily when I was a schoolboy and how strange and reminiscent of a totalitarian regime that is (nothing of the sort is done here in Austria, for example, which hasn’t been part of a totalitarian regime for, eh, years) and how the phrase “one nation under god” always struck me as of questionable constitutionality in view of the separation of church and state; the recent discussion of “god bless america day” over at michele’s is what got me thinking about this I guess.

I even decided to post something about it. Then when I got to the office a guy asked me about buying used cars and that got me so confused it totally deleted the last three hours of my life from my brain and I forgot about it. Then I looked at blogdex and daypop and saw this.

So this means that my brainwaves are influencing Supreme Court rulings. This is obviously a recent development, because otherwise the United States would have a different president. No, wait, it was the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, not the Supreme Court. Doh me.

[For serious discussion of the Pledge, see peace dividend or wKen or basically anywhere but here.]

Inchoate babbling about bilingualism.

[Go there now.]

Investigative web reporter Michele uncovered a plot to give the eleventh of September a really stupid new name. This is a bad idea for a number of reasons, most of which Michele outlines in her post. My question, basically, for the proponents of “God Bless America Day” is, why does it need a new name at all? It’s not like it happened on 11 July or something, in which case people would be confused and think you were talking about a convenience store. And “911” has the extra “emergency number” bonus, in the USA at least.

Honestly, how many of you thought “God Bless America” when you first saw the televised images of the burning, then collapsing, WTC? For Pete’s sake. If you want to rename it, name it after what most of us thought when we saw that and call it Holy Fucking Shit Day.

Gamma has her own pie cherry tree in our back yard. A friend gave it to us when she was born. It’s nearly as tall as the swingset now, we get enough cherries to make a couple pies. She gets a bang out of it because it’s her tree. Yesterday enough were ripe and she helped us pick.

Unfortunately, she was wearing white pants, but I suppose her grandmother will be able to get them clean again. When we finished, she had a large clear Tupperware bowl full of cherries shiny clean from rains the day before and glowing in the bright evening sun. My memory is mostly monochrome with spots of vivid color, and that is one of the spots now. The batteries to my digital camera were dead, so I have to describe it here.

The way that red stood out against the green grass and her white pants and big smile. The skin of these cherries was translucent, so they both reflected the light, and glowed from within. She was so happy.

paella and cigars

(medium-length journalentry/poem about visiting a friend in newark a long time ago)

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three crazy bitches in the department store

[poem warning]

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