The final nine lines of Virgil Suarez’s No Work Poem, found on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, spoke to me this morning. Money and intellect are very powerful things, but not so powreful as a father’s hands. The hands that hug us, hold the backs of our bikes and shake, just a bit, when we leave.

No Work Poem #1

but I saw how my father when he thought
he was alone would raise his hands and look
at them in the light, as though they were gifts,
and they were; with his hands he worked,
hard, with his hands, he beat the clock,
with his hands he provided for his family,
and proud, he looked at them, the way his
thin fingers now moved; with his hands
he clawed at life, what is given, what is taken.

My Soundtrack: Give Me Something by Doug Gillard on WOXY.

J.C. Penny beating out Wal Mart? Who would have thought it? Well, analysts who note that when you survive on the edge of margins, as Wal Mart does, it’s hard to absorb pesky little things like rising fuel prices, for one.

According to the Associated Press:

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. struggled in the second quarter and offered a disappointing third-quarter profit forecast, again blaming higher gasoline prices for cutting into spending plans by its low-income shoppers. In contrast, shoppers at moderate-price department store retailer J.C. Penney Co. Inc., focused on fashion rather than fuel, resulting in robust results and an upbeat outlook.

Maybe it’s time for the Waltons to just buy the Middle East. In one fell swoop they could solve not only their company’s fuel problems, but get the U.S. out of the war in Iraq at the same time.

My Soundtrack: Different Names For The Same Thing by Death Cab For Cutie on WOXY.

[It was enough for Noah, Moses and Jesus, but apparently not Plain Dealer Editor Doug Clifton. Forty days have passed since Clifton issued his stories-of-profound-importance whine. When I Googled +clifton +”plain dealer” +profound back on 13 July, I got 867 hits. The same search now returns only 648 hits as newspaper stories disappear behind archive walls.

Clifton belatedly dropped the first shoe on 20 July, the day after The Scene reported one of the profound stories.

Now, nearly a month later, there is no word of what the other story may be. At least one observer doubts that a second story ever existed and that Clifton, thinking perhaps that holding one story was not dramatic enough, doubled the count in a moment of bravado.

I think there is another story out there, but too much time has passed for us to be able to identify it if, and when, it is published, unless Clifton flags the story himself. And, I don’t think he’s going to want to call anymore attention to this period in his editorial history than he has to.

Having said that, I’m going to stop the count here at 40 days. If something breaks, I’ll blog about it, but I’m going to be focusing my energies elsewhere.]

On Thursday, 30 June 2005, Plain Dealer Editor Doug Clifton told his readers that: As I write this, two stories of profound importance languish in our hands. The public would be well served to know them, but both are based on documents leaked to us by people who would face deep trouble for having leaked them.

The editorial came to the attention of Editor & Publisher which published an interview with Clifton on Friday, 8 July 2005. In that interview, Clifton said:

Some people might argue that [I’m] being chicken-shit.

I’m one of those people. On Saturday, 9 July 2005, Cleveland bloggers weighed in on the story.

How many days will it take for the the Plain Dealer to come clean?

You’ll find the latest (1314, 30 July 05) updates to this continuing story inside.

Give President George Bush some props for his vacation reading list: Salt — A World History by Mark Kurlansky; Alexander II — The Last Great Tsar by Edvard Radzinsky; and The Great Influenza — The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History by John M. Barry. Total page count? A whopping 1,524. What are you reading?

What were they thinking? I got caught in a few of these kinds of mobs back when I worked discount retail for a now-defunct chain named Hart’s in Southeastern Ohio. On Christmas eve we’d have these insane mark downs and people would prowl the aisles watching where the guys with the pricing guns were going.

If people could go ferrel for a $3.99 toy, imagine what it was like when an organization in Richmond, Virginia put used Apple iBooks up for sale at $50 a piece. Via BuzzMachine comes this story from the Associated Press:

A rush to purchase $50 used laptops turned into a violent stampede Tuesday, with people getting thrown to the pavement, beaten with a folding chair and nearly driven over. One woman went so far as to wet herself rather than surrender her place in line.

This is total, total chaos, said Latoya Jones, 19, who lost one of her flip-flops in the ordeal and later limped around on the sizzling blacktop with one foot bare.

An estimated 5,500 people turned out at the Richmond International Raceway in hopes of getting their hands on one of the 4-year-old Apple iBooks. The Henrico County school system was selling 1,000 of the computers to county residents. New iBooks cost between $999 and $1,299.

Sufis spinning to
quanun, ud, nay, riqq and god;
in dark fueled by neisim

I’m liking Walter Kirn. It’s too bad that at the end of the week he’ll go back to being a writer in Montana. This morning he posts about the lack of dinner-tablesque conversation. I think that if he got away from the A-Lists, he’d find what he’s looking for. Here’s what he had to say about Senator Hillary Clinton (D-New York):

I do have some insight into Hillary and it makes me dislike her. A couple of years ago I had an office over a clothing store in my small town and the woman in the office next door was ghostwriting Hillary’s memoir, of all things. She started out all excited and impressed. Hillary’s sodown to earth and so on. (She took an immediate dislike to Bill, who struck her as a narcissistic snake.) Then she went to Washington.

Oddly, my friend, a deep-down liberal, considered Hillary a conservative, basically, with a lot of goody-goody suburban attitudes and pretty conventional good-government views. Another class president type, in other words.

We keep buying the packaging and then being disappointed when what’s inside the box is crap. When was the last time you liked what you bought?

My Soundtrack: Taste of Monday by The Purrs on WOXY.

George Nemeth, et al, talk a lot about open source [insert noun here] and I’ve followed his discussions concerning events in Cleveland with interest. From The Business Experiment comes someone who seems ready to take open sourcing to the next level by building a real business using the open-source philosophy.

The results of the recent school levy are a perfect example of the frigid creative environment in Cleveland. That’s how I read Will Kessel’s Cold As Ice at Collision Bend. Will is another example of a creative and talented individual who would have been out of here three years ago if it were not for a spouse’s good job. He writes:

The problem begins with experts in high positions that, when presented with an innovative idea, think, What”s in it for me? and their short-term thinking replies, not much for the foreseeable future. The so-called expert, steeped in what is possible, what is probable, will generally dismiss innovation because of the above reason, or – worse yet – because it is perceived as a threat to his (or her) job.

People in Cleveland are fired – or vice versa, not hired – in Cleveland every day because of this very attitude.

Will offers a seven-whacks-upside-the-head prescription to warm up our city’s creative pool.

1. Just as there is someone (or something) more powerful than Bill Gates, George Bush or Donald Trump, there is a power greater than ourselves;

7. Serving another doesn”t mean you lose yourself in the process – in fact, it”s quite the opposite.

Now, instead of bitching about how Cleveland’s leadership — and those who allow them to lead — are perfect examples of Will’s list, what are we doing to change things? What difference will you make today?

My Soundtrack: Trouble Will Find You by Koufax on WOXY.

Back in the day (when giants walked the Earth) we used to create ASCII art using typewriters. When computer nerds started doing it on CRTs it seemed like cheating. Now, the Lycette Brothers, have made the art live in these four office vignettes. The site is packed with cool stuff. I think my favorites are the steam-powered nanobots.

Tom Evslin wants to create an open-source novel about a murder during the Internet bubble. The publishing industry is flopping all over the place trying to figure out how to deal with this whole electronic publishing thing. If I wanted to, I could publish my entire novel — Cold Silence — here in about 30 seconds. I’m not sure why I don’t.

At Fractals Of Change, Evslin writes:

My Novel is going to appear first on the web. I”ve been in software so long that I”m gonna start with a beta release version 0.91 published on a blog engine. It”ll be free; you can subscribe to it; you can visit it online; you can file bug reports and feature requests; you can roast it in comments; and there”ll be other ways to interact online as well. The fictional company in the book will have a real website. That SHOULD all start in a month or two (hey, this IS like software).

My Soundtrack: Darts Of Pleasure by Franz Ferdinand on WOXY.

My Soundtrack: Wheels On Fire by The Magic Numbers on WOXY.

My writer”s rock lies
beneath dust; with staff strike!
As mayim flow my words

I can just hear the screaming metal of teeth flying off of the gears on the Support Cindy Sheehan Machine as it double clutches in a futile attempt to down shift and keep from crashing through the guardrail and over the cliff. What am I talking about? Sheehan has received the heart -felt endorsement of David Duke.

For the record, I still think Sheehan deserves all the support I can give her. Regardless of her underlying reasons, her basic premise remains the same: President George Bush has lied and lied again to the American People about every aspect of our war in Iraq and our young men and women are dying for those lies.

Duke’s support hinges on a letter that Sheehan is reported to have written to the producers of Nightline shortly after the death of her son. I have not yet been able to ascertain the authenticity of the letter nor its provenance. The letter, dated 15 April 2005, reads in part:

Am I emotional? Yes, my first born was murdered. Am I angry? Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC [Project for the New American Century] Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel.

We were told that we were attacked on 9/11 because the terrorists hate our freedoms and democracy…not for the real reason, becuase the Arab-Muslims who attacked us hate our middle-eastern foreign policy. That hasn”t changed since America invaded and occupied Iraq…in fact it has gotten worse.

How will this play out? My money is on the following.

When President Bush is airlifted out on Marine One at the end of his vacation he’ll return to Washington and Sheehan will decamp with her supporters. The Democratic Nation Committee and traditional leadership of the Democratic Party, as well as all sitting members of the party (with the possible exception of Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-10)), will avoid all contact or mention of Sheehan and hope that her story goes away just as much as our president will.

And that’s too bad. Do I agree with Sheehan that we’re dealing with some kind of New World Order/Zionist conspiracy? No. I prefer to applies Occams Razor and focus on the simpler motivation of greed for wealth and power. But if she makes the Theo/Neo-cons uncomfortable. More power to her.

[Update — 1500, 15 August 05 — uber liberal Move On says:

On Saturday, President Bush went on a bike ride. According to news reports, his schedule also included “a nap, some fishing, and some reading.”1 But President Bush refused to meet with Cindy Sheehan, the grieving mother who lost her son in Iraq. Cindy is fast becoming an international spokeswoman against the war. But now, it’s up to all of us to show that she’s not alone in demanding answers from the president.

Cindy has asked supporters to start candlelight vigils in our communities to remind people of the terrible price of war. So, MoveOn, TrueMajority and Democracy for America have teamed up to organize nationwide “Vigils for Cindy Sheehan” (and for all military and gold star families) on this coming Wednesday, August 17th, starting at 7:30 PM local time.]

My Soundtrack: Where Do I Go by The Free Design on WOXY.

Walter Kirn is the third guest writer at Andrew Sullivan’s blog. I’m liking Andrew’s selections a lot better than the tag-team from the last time. Kirn starts out by putting a Montana-spin on things. I’ve always thought that if the 11 September attack had been somewhere other than New York, our reaction would have been very different.

I’ll start with something that’s been bugging me but that I haven’t had a forum to write about: this idea, almost universally agreed upon, that Americans mustn’t let terrorism change our way of life. I disagree. Our way of life had its problems before Osama appeared, and we probably could have stood to change it then, but now that we have the added impetus of being collectively attacked in ways that we never dreamed about in past years, I think it’s high time that we did a few thing differently that maybe we should have done already.

Welcome to the blogosphere, Walter.

My Soundtrack: Continuation by John Vanderslice on WOXY.

Nero fiddled (not really, but it’s a convenient myth); President George Bush rides his bike. Over the weekend our vacationer-in-chief was about to go off on another two-hour bike ride when a reporter asked him why he had time to ride, but not time to speak with the mother of a soldeir who gave his life for his country in Iraq. He replied:

I think the people want the president to be in a position to make good, crisp decisions and to stay healthy. And part of my being is to be outside exercising.

But those decisions appear less and less crisp as President Bush’s administration scrambles to lower the bar on expectations in Iraq. According to yesterday’s Washington Post:

The Bush administration is significantly lowering expectations of what can be achieved in Iraq, recognizing that the United States will have to settle for far less progress than originally envisioned during the transition due to end in four months, according to U.S. officials in Washington and Baghdad.

The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society in which the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges, U.S. officials say.

What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground, said a senior official involved in policy since the 2003 invasion. We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we’re in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning.

And what are we going to get for the hundreds of billions of dollars and nearly 2,000 lives of American service personnel?

We set out to establish a democracy, but we’re slowly realizing we will have some form of Islamic republic, said another U.S. official familiar with policymaking from the beginning, who like some others interviewed would speak candidly only on the condition of anonymity. That process is being repeated all over.

Read that very slowly: some form of Islamic republic.

Do you feel safer now?

My Soundtrack: Ex-Completist by Kimone on WOXY.

Black Box Voting will sponsore a nine-day online think tank to brainstorm fresh solutions for election reform beginning Saturday, 27 August through Monday, 5 September. On tap are discussions on paper ballots, particpation and delaying the implementation of the Help America Vote Act of 2002.

Here’s another shot from the New York magazine story on Wal Mart that could be aimed at us. Does Bloomberg know something Campbell doesn’t?

Even Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose initial comments about Wal-Mart”s impending arrival were vaguely positive (“The public votes with their feet”), suddenly began to backtrack. As Pat Purcell, organizing director of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 1500, put it later, What politician is going to be the one to let Wal-Mart in in an election year?

Uh, Pat, you talkin’ to Cleveland?

My Soundtrack: Chasing Heather Crazy by Guided By Voices on WOXY.

One two three four, five
Six sev’ eight nine, ten ‘lev” twelve…
thirt” fourt” fiftht”sixt” sev”t” chai

Via Pharyngula comes this link to the National Weather Service Forecast Office of an airliner being struck by lightning as it makes it’s approach for landing. The sequence was captured by Zen Kawasaki, from the Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Osaka University, Japan. Engineers are cool.