The Lactation Station Breast Milk Bar

The Lactation Station Breast Milk Bar is part of "Five Holes", presented by Fado ("... a non-profit artist-run centre for performance art based in Toronto, Canada.")

FIVE HOLES

FIVE HOLES foregrounds our bodies by examining aspects of the five basic human senses. The presence of bodies -- the performer's body and the audience members' bodies -- is an essential element of performance. We 'perform' when we bring our bodies into relationships with an audience in time and space. FIVE HOLES considers some of the ways in which sight, touch, smell, hearing and taste allow us to perceive.

The LSBMB is staged by performance artist Jess Dobkin.

We are not sure which hole this is meant to represent.

Now I have seen it all

Who:
A female driving an old beat-up red pick-up truck with a male passenger.

Both look like a cross between Daisy and Onslow from the old BBC comedy, Keeping Up Appearances and characters out of Deliverance

What: Just you wait and see.

When:
5:30 PM, Friday, September 22, 2006

Where:
Red light at Kruse Way and Kruse Way Place, Lake NoNegro, Oregon

Why: That's what I keep asking myself.

How:
This has me stumped. I didn't think there was enough room in the pick-up for the female to do what she did to the male, but events proved me wrong.

This is one time that I wish that I had a camera phone. As I pulled up behind the red pick-up truck at the red light, the female leaned to the passenger side and completely disappeared from view; simultaneously, the male continued to bounce around in his seat in a highly agitated motion. This continued for a minute after the light changed green. After several toots of my horn, the female re-appeared, after completely tooting the male's horn. He leaned back in his seat, and more or less collapsed there as they drove off, leaving me disgusted in their wake.

It left me ringing with the sentiments voiced by the priest from Harold and Maude, who said

"I would be remiss in my duty if I did not tell you that the idea of intercourse - the act of your... body... commingling with... withered flesh... sagging breasts... and flabby buttocks... makes me want to vomit. "

Beware Professor Osama

Roas Brooks has a terrific op-ed piece in yesterday's LA Fish Wrap.

Rosa Brooks: Students, Beware Professor Osama

Fear-mongering conservatives are on their perennial crusade to purge universities of liberal professors.

Rosa Brooks
September 15, 2006

WITH SEPTEMBER upon us, it's time to reflect on that perennially popular back-to-school activity, Bash the Professors.

According to David Horowitz's book, "The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America," American universities are dominated by "a shocking and perverse culture of academics who are poisoning the minds of today's college students with … hatred of America … and support for America's terrorist enemies." His crusade against "radical academics" is not, alas, a lonely one.

By coupling his overheated rhetoric with a seemingly respectable campaign for "academic freedom," Horowitz has managed to snooker quite a few students and politicians into supporting his agenda.

Horowitz's website, discoverthenetworks.org, laments that most professors hold liberal political views, and he urges greater ideological "diversity" on faculties. On his Students for Academic Freedom website, he asks students to report "abuses" of academic freedom by professors, and state legislatures to mandate that public universities comply with what he calls the Academic Bill of Rights...

Brooks adds this devastating irony at the end of her piece:

The right-wing assault on supposedly liberal universities appeared to have run out of steam after the '80s, but it revived after 9/11. Capitalizing on increased anxiety about national security, Horowitz and his ilk were able to start denouncing the academics they disliked as not merely liberal but pro-terrorist "sympathizers … of Osama bin Laden."

Last week, they insisted that universities be purged of liberals and "improved to serve national security," and they urged students to "strongly criticize … the continued presence of liberal and secular professors."

Oh, wait — whoops! Those quotes were from — respectively — Ayatollah Abbasali Amid Zanjani, the hard-line Islamist president of the University of Tehran, and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Silly me, getting my militant conservative Islamic extremists mixed up with my militant conservative Judeo-Christian extremists! Though now that I think about it, they seem to have an awful lot in common.

URPL8SUX

This very funny post made its way to The Smoking Gun.

NOTE: We don't find the Nazi or racist ones funny, so we're leaving them out.

Here are some interesting license plates:

State License (Language ) Translation
NY BIGPNS (Doh!) Put in some vowels
NY BYTETH1S (Doh!) nun needed
NY ELBECHO (Spanish) male body part
NY CTO XYEB (Russian) 100 male body parts
NY CGA2MDRE (Spanish) My Mother! Your mother!
NY 3M WOJ8 (Doh!) Read it in a mirror
NY EFF EWE 2(Doh!) Doh!
?? 2HOT2DOU (Doh!) Doh!
NY UP TOUS (French) Manges moi
NY POTVINSUX Doh! see this and the item below

POTVIN SUCKS - Bib
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Product Information
Eeewww Baby, Baby!!! It’s okay to make a mess in our easy-wash 100% cotton bib. It provides great upper body coverage to protect baby’s clothes. The sturdy closure makes this one-size bib fit newborns to 36 months.

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Enshrine this burger? WTF!

The LA Times once again proves that it can sink below the Bay Area Fish Wrap any day. Here is the latest bit of cheap commercialism masquerading as an "op-ed" piece.

When SWMBO and I lived in LA, "In-N'Out" described not so much the manner in which the thing was served, but rather its effect on digestion.

Enshrine This Burger
If the site of the first McDonald's is commemorated, why not In-N-Out?
By Mark Kendall, MARK KENDALL wrote the "Fast Food Dude" column for the Riverside Press-Enterprise from 2001 to 2004.
September 5, 2006

Rank this story up there with JonBenet Ramsey, Katie Couric, and Suri. Sure beats talking about wars we shouldn't be fighting and other depressing news.

Picture this: the "traditionally right-wing" Telegraph

1 picture = 1 kword.

From the "traditionally right-wing" Telegraph's The Week in Pictures

Their caption:

A visitor takes a picture of inflatable sex dolls displayed at the Seoul Sex Expo 2006

The ozone hole: still big, still bad

Nasa's Ozone Watch has the latest.

It is still a bit early to assess how this year's ozone hole will compare with previous years, but so far, it looks large and deep. Here is the latest satellite false color image (from September 2)

You may download a movie showing the evolution of this year's ozone hole here (Windows or Mac).

I've been studying this for five years. I am not happy. Here are some graphs for the numerati:

The first image shows the area of the hole; for comparions, the entire North American continent has and area of about 24.5 millions of square kilometers.


The second image shows the amount of ozone remaining in the atmosphere; normal levels prior to the 1970s were about 300 Dobson units (DU).

Still a long-haired gum-chewing pinko commie

Take the test yourself at Political Compass

What good are unions? - read this

From David Sirota's op-ed article in the Bay Area Fish Wrap

The war on workers
- David Sirota
Monday, September 4, 2006

U.S. Education Secretary Rod Paige labeled one "a terrorist organization." Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, called them "a clear and present danger to the security of the United States." And U.S. Rep. Charles Norwood, R-Ga., claimed they employ "tyranny that Americans are fighting and dying to defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan" and are thus "enemies of freedom and democracy," who show "why we still need the Second Amendment" to defend ourselves with firearms.

Who are these supposed threats to America? No, not Osama bin Laden followers, but labor unions made up of millions of workers -- janitors, teachers, firefighters, police officers, you name it.

Bashing organized labor is a Republican pathology, to the point where unions are referenced with terms reserved for military targets. In his 1996 article, headlined "GOP Readies for War With Big Labor," conservative columnist Robert Novak cheered the creation of a "GOP committee task force on the labor movement" that would pursue a "major assault" on unions. As one Republican lawmaker told Novak, GOP leaders champion an "anti-union attitude that appeals to the mentality of hillbillies at revival meetings."

The hostility, while disgusting, is unsurprising. Unions wield power for workers, meaning they present an obstacle to Republican corporate donors, who want to put profit-making over other societal priorities.

Think the minimum wage just happened? Think employer-paid health care and pensions have been around for as long as they have by some force of magic? Think again -- unions used collective bargaining to preserve these benefits. As the saying goes, union members are the folks that brought you the weekend.

The government's numbers explain how unions have helped their members. According to an analysis of federal data by the Labor Research Association, average union members receive a quarter more in compensation than nonunion workers. Eighty-nine percent of union members have access to employer-sponsored health care, compared to just 67 percent of nonunion workers. Unionized workers receive 26 percent more vacation than nonunion workers.

Unions also benefit nonunion workers. That's thanks to the "union threat effect" whereby anti-union companies meet higher standards in order to prevent workers from becoming angry and organizing. For instance, Princeton researchers found in industries that are 25 percent unionized, average nonunion workers get 7.5 percent more compensation specifically because of unionization's presence.

The flip side is obvious: The more corporations and politicians crush unions, the more all workers suffer. It is no coincidence that as union membership and power has declined under withering anti-union attacks, workers have seen their wages stagnate, pensions slashed, and share of national income hit a 60-year low. As Council on Foreign Relations scholars put it, the decline in unions "is correlated with the early and sharp widening of the U.S. wage gap."

Big Business claims union membership has declined because workers do not want to join unions -- a claim debunked by public-opinion data. In 2002, Harvard University and University of Wisconsin researchers found at least 42 million workers want to be organized into a bargaining unit -- more than double the 16 million unionized workers in America. A 2005 nationwide survey by respected pollster Peter Hart found 53 percent of nonunion workers -- that's more than 50 million people -- want to join a union, if given the choice.

Increasingly, however, workers have no real choice. According to Cornell University experts, 1 in 4 employers illegally fires at least one worker during a union drive, 3 in 4 hire anti-union consultants, and 8 in 10 force workers to attend anti-union meetings. When workers petition the government to enforce laws protecting organizing rights, they are forced to go before the National Labor Relations Board, which is both run by anti-union presidential appointees, and chronically understaffed so as to slow down proceedings. When Democrats have tried to expand workers' union rights by introducing the Employee Free Choice Act, the GOP has prevented a vote on the legislation.

So when GOP lawmakers pledge their commitment to workers at Labor Day celebrations today, remember -- Republicans are waging a war on the very workers they purport to care about.

David Sirota is the author of "Hostile Takeover" (Crown, 2006). He is the co-chair of the Progressive States Network (www.progressivestates.org).

Happy Labor Day

Oregon is finally a red state.

Spam, spam, spam

Today's Telegraph has this story about Monty Python:

Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam... and garlic?
By Nigel Reynolds, Arts Correspondent
(Filed: 04/09/2006)

Showbusiness merchandising, such as Harry Potter jigsaw puzzles and James Bond water pistols, may sometimes seem to be the curse of our age. But, for sheer absurdity, the latest commercial spin-off may never be beaten.

The makers of Spam, the processed pink slab of tinned meat that has long been a national joke, announced yesterday that they are to produce a "collector's edition" flavour, Stinky French Garlic, to cash in on the West End opening of Spamalot, the Monty Python musical fresh from Broadway, at the end of the month.

If life can be said to imitate art, this is chopped pork and ham, salt, water and sugar masquerading as humour.

Spam, a wartime staple in the United States and Britain, changed from being a mere foodstuff into a target for derision in 1970 thanks to one of the most memorable sketches – a satire on Anglo-Saxon eating habits – from the Monty Python's Flying Circus series.

In a cafe packed with singing Vikings, Terry Jones, playing the waitress, recites a menu on which every single dish contains Spam, usually several times over...