Mmm, Fried Chicken

Every week I check the news to see if it will write this column for me. Usually it does. So far, the best example of that came with a report from New Zealand that a chicken there was suspected of being a suicide bomber. You can't NOT write a column when you're handed news like that!

Generally if the news fails me it's because it just isn't that interesting. Let's say it's a week where the only thing that happened was Jeff Renner said "Doppler" a record number of times. That would be a good week to write abstractly about the environmental cost of puppies, or efforts to legalize medicinal insane laughter, or the role of education, or the lack of it, in the employment of ceiling fans during winter.

This week, however, there is no shortage of interesting news. The problem is it's all too interesting. Six months ago I didn't think the Dow Jones could fascinate. Now it fascinates to the bone. It fascinates like a wild Bengal Tiger pawing through my innards, looking for the tasty bits.

Six months ago I thought the biggest danger we faced, economically, was that a lot more people would become homeless in America who have never been homeless before. Now I'm afraid the biggest danger we face is that plus riots, plus mass starvation, plus the people who have been homeless will get to be homeless again, plus our babies will all be two-headed, and the only thing on TV will be Donald Trump's Celebrity Apprentice, on all channels, in high def.

An indication of how bad things are: no one you know wants to take Mayor Nickels' job away from him. His current approval rating (33%) is lower than the approval rating of Single Parenthood (37%), but everyone who has a passing reputation as a leader wants to stick Nickels with the mayorship just one more term.

In 1997, I even offered my own self up as a write-in candidate for mayor of Seattle on the Pizza Party ticket. This time around, forget it. The salary would be great, and I'm sure the office has a fantastic view, but I don't want to be there when the villagers surround City Hall with the pitchforks and the torches, blaming me for their 20-cent grocery bags, their increasing pestilence and poverty, their consolation trolleys to nowhere they want to go, their two-headed babies.

So, anyway, what I'm trying to get at is, all I want to talk about this week is how much I like to cook my own food, and what I want people to understand about that.

When I tell folks I like to cook my own food, they invariably say, "Oh, so you're a good cook, huh?" That proves that their values are shot to hell. As long as human beings have crappy values like that, it will be necessary for people like me to set them straight. NO, I am not a particularly good cook, and that is NOT a proper reason to want to cook one's own food.

A proper reason to cook my own food (my reason) is that I get to be in control. My biscuits may end up tasting like burned sawdust and have the texture of modeling clay, but they will be MY biscuits.

It was precisely being homeless, too often and too long, which led to my need to be in control in matters of food. When you're homeless in the city you're eating other people's cooking day after day, meal after meal, because you don't have a kitchen and you can't set up a hibachi on the sidewalk. It's all part of the general powerlessness of the condition, going hand in hand with not being able to sleep under a roof or shower when you need to.

When I was homeless the burgers were always too salty, and you could never scrape off enough. Now, I want to enjoy my country, but it's been over-Bushed.

Read About Sex Here

If you're like me (and pray to your favorite power source you aren't) you like to sit all day. And when you sit all day staring at a computer, like I do, you get tired of it just sitting there staring back at you with the same cute kitty picture in the background, or whatever. So you push buttons and try to make the screen do stuff.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that one of the things I make my computer do is fetch news stories for me. This is how I, a man who hates to leave his chair even to collect free food, came to know a while back that a rooster in a town in New Zealand was suspected of carrying a bomb. I did not go to New Zealand. I simply read about it in a newspaper story, which I found on-line. I think I had googled "New Zealand terrorist chickens" during an extreme boredom fit. Or some such thing. ("To google" = "to use the Google internet search engine.")

This morning I did something similar. I tried to google "Downing St. Memo." I expected that a story of the magnitude of the Downing St. Memo story had been written up thousands of times, as would be revealed when I searched Google News from among their more than 4000 news sources. But only 27 stories popped up.

Let's put that into perspective. It has been less than a day since Russell Crowe threw a phone at some guy, and the story of his arrest has already appeared in over 300 news outlets.

So, I thought, maybe I'm asking for the wrong thing. The Downing St. Memo isn't really a memo at all, I thought. It's actually the official British Government minutes of a secret July 2002 British Government meeting called to discuss secret talks between a British representative and the Bush Administration in April of that year, concerning Bush war plans for Iraq, proving that he lied for months to the American people about his intentions, I thought. So I should drop the word "memo" and add the word "minutes", and google the phrase "Downing St. Minutes."

For just a few seconds it looked as though I was making progress! Instead of only 27 stories I found a whopping whole 49! A stunning improvement! Then I looked at what stories I really got and found that all of the new stories I had picked up were sports stories and one from something called "Boston's Weekly Dig" which had an article on 74 Things to Do This Summer. Number one: "Get drunk at Fenway Park." The word "downing" appeared in a passage that discussed the possibility of downing gallons of cocktails in the company of hairy gay men, the event described as "running with the bears." "Minutes" referred to minutes on a ferry boat ride, presumably also spent getting drunk.

OK, eventually Anitra "born to google" Freeman showed me that I needed to spell out "Street," finally getting me just under 500 hits. But, this is for a story that's had over a month to spread.

Googling "Michael Jackson trial" netted 13,300 hits! Even a story as recent as the coming out of Deep Throat got me over 5000 hits, and that's after googling "Mark Felt Deep Throat," rather than just "Deep Throat."

What does it take to get the world's press to take a story seriously? Evidently only six things matter: Sex, booze, sex, celebrities, drugs, and sex. Michael Jackson's trial has at least five of them. The Russell Crowe story has two of them (if he wasn't drunk that would be news), while writing about the Deep Throat story confers license to write "Deep Throat" over and over again, so there's your sex, sex, sex.

Question: Why does everybody know about Abu Graib and almost nobody knows about the Downing St. Memo? Answer: No one was naked at the Downing St. meeting.

Letting Time Go

Let's talk about Edward T. Hall, why White People can't dance, and panhandling!

Why does panhandling seem wrong to so many of us? I'm going to go out on a limb here and propose that it feels wrong for the same reason that moving more than the feet to music feels wrong to straight White men over fifty: our parents never taught us to do things like that.

My parents said there's a time and place for everything, and they were very specific. Edward T. Hall, a cultural anthropologist, came up with a pair of words to describe the results of these kinds of teachings. He identifies two broad categories of styles of cultures, the monochronic and polychronic, arising from two ways of relating to time. White American/Northern European cultures express monochronic styles. The rest of the world, pre-MacDonalds, have generally been polychronic.

Monochronic styles require one-thing-at-a-time. Polychronic styles allow and expect lots-of-things-at-once. In monochronic cultures there's only one time. Your watch has your time. In polychronic cultures they may not even have a word for time. Talking about when something will or should happen may be wildly inappropriate.

How can this affect our panhandling behavior? (Note: By panhandling behavior we are talking not just about panhandlers but also panhandlees!) Let's say you're White, your name is Chris, you're walking to work, and as you pass the MacDonalds another White Person holds up a cardboard sign saying "Hungry/homeless, please help" and sticks out a Styrofoam cup. What might you think, Chris?

Well if you're like me, Chris, you think, "Hey, this is my walking time!" You think, "I didn't come out here to give my money away. I do that at the appropriately designated times. I give to United Way at the office. I pay my taxes every April." You think, "This person isn't supposed to get money now. They haven't just completed work. That's the time you're supposed to get money. Don't they know that?"

It's just like when White People first saw Chuck Berry dancing on a stage. "You can't move that body part like that now! You have to wait until you're in bed alone with a woman!" So over the years it has been necessary for African-American musicians to slowly, step by step, introduce White People to more and more movement, a project that began with the Twist and gradually proceeded through the Funky Chicken, Disco, culminating to date in whatever it is that Britney Spears does.

Now let's imagine someone from an unspecified polychronic culture. Still walking to work, let's say his name is Rongo Diego Yoko M!fumi, and another representative of his same culture appears, panhandling. Same sign, same Styrofoam cup. What does Rongo think?

The answer can vary from one polychronic culture to another -- Mr. Hall's categories are very broad -- but here are some possibilities: "Sure why not? My money came from everyone and so it belongs to everyone." Or, "I'm sure that if this fine person had money, and I needed some, he/she would help me. People have always helped me." "Maybe we could go have a coffee and sandwiches somewhere and talk. I can go to work tomorrow." "I feel like dancing." "Whoa, look at all those stiff White People staring at us."

To Chris, we work and THEN we deserve pay. To Rongo, we can always be deserving. "Work? Sure we do that. We give, we take, we work, we rest. What's the problem?"

Do you know for a fact that the panhandler HASN'T worked? What if the panhandler worked years for an exploitative employer who paid him less than what his work was worth? Now you have extra change in your pocket. Could that mean you've been paid too much lately? You could help to even things out. Or you could hurry to work, letting the universe run by itself, like a clock that never has to be wound, even though there are people stuck in it.

Whites Priced At Five Dollars Each

Let's talk about religion!

No, let's not talk about religion! I don't want the headaches! Let's talk about religious authorities instead. Don't religious authorities do the darndest things? I guess it's because they're authorities.

Take your imams, for example. With all the war and misery going on in highly Islamic quarters of the world these days, I would be very surprised if the world's imams weren't making pronouncements right and left. But the other day when I went looking on Islam.com for a pronouncement or two to get the flavor of them, I didn't expect to see a fatwa on the importance of men tucking their shirts in. (Just so you know, the imam issuing the fatwa basically says tucking the shirt in isn't necessarily evil, although he personally would never do it.)

With that kind of focus on gender-specific grooming tips vis a vis fiery hell, you can all imagine for yourselves how the fatwa on homosexuality read on the very same page. Likewise re the archived fatwa on the same site concerning surgical hymen restoration. Hint from me on that one: "If you break it -- you pay for it." OK, that hint sucked. Let's try this one: "Every time you masturbate, God kills a kitten. Now go publicly bury this bucket of kittens in your front yard, you harlot."

Speaking of homosexuality, I want to take time out to say that, although I am not myself a homosexual so far as I am aware of, I am deeply grateful that the Supreme court has now recognized my right to practice sodomy in the privacy of my own bedroom with consenting adults, because I've been doing it anyway.

Of course Islamic imams do not hold the monopoly on fatwas. The Vatican just issued one of their own on gay marriages. Having once been a card-carrying member of the Catholic Church (in my impetuous youth I favored the classics) I find its decrees delightful and fascinating. In much the same way that I find forced live oyster eating riveting. This particular decree compares especially well with the shirt tucking decree in its decreeness, or decree-osity.

Will someone please explain to me how exactly does allowing at least civil homosexual marriages undermine heterosexual marriages? What exactly do people think is going to happen? Do they think all the straight guys are going to wake up one morning and think, "Hey, I could have married one of my buds!" and immediately divorce the wife and ditch the kids and elope with Steve in accounting?

The Vatican decree whinges on and on about the blessed sanctity of procreation, as if allowing gay marriage is going to make one iota of difference to the frequency of condom failures during straight sex.

But enough of that nonsense. What I really want to talk about here isn't a fatwa or decree, but it's still coming from a religious authority. I want to talk about Bishop Fred Caldwell's decision to pay white people to come and diversify his overwhelmingly Black-attended church in Shreveport, Louisiana. Five dollars for Sunday masses, fifteen for Thursdays.

Whoa! Can you say "spiritual ho's?" My first reaction was to recall that when an impoverished homeless guy I was often bribed with food to attend meals. I thought: this just cuts through the BS. They pay the money; I can spend it the way I want. Maybe I don't want turkey tetrazinni. Maybe I'm in the mood for chicken diablo. It's my choice.

But then I thought, wait a minute, what's all this saying? I mean, first of all, how white do you have to be to collect your fee? Does a Quarter-white get $1.25 on Sundays? Does Michael Jackson get anything; does effort count? How about comportment?

You know, if it were me, in Louisiana, I'd pay more for an Asian than a white person, out of supply considerations.

When someone suggested that Bishop Fred might give the money to the poor instead, he said that that was the sort of thing Judas Iscariot would have proposed. I'm wondering: if Judas Iscariot were to tell Bishop Fred not to jump off a bridge, would he do it?

Non-Exploding Chickens

From time to time, as the terror alert level creeps closer to blood red, as Homeland Security threatens to review all my past reading material, and as strange acronymic law enforcement groups discuss good and bad protesters and what to do about them at secret meetings in my city, I fantasize about getting away from it all. Then, when I'm done doing that, I think about bagging it all and moving to New Zealand.

You all know about New Zealand. That's the country at the lower right-hand corner of the Mercator map of the world that looks closer to Australia than it is, is proud of its flightless birds, and is now the place everybody imagines when they think of Hobbits and Middle Earth, thanks to the movies. Why wouldn't I want to go there? That's the question I've been asking myself ever since Ronald Reagan got his way with the electorate and my ex won the house.

Well, now I am getting answers to that question, thanks to the internet.

First of all, they have non-exploding roosters there. That's right, they have roosters that run around and look as if they are exploding roosters, but they are only fooling you and they don't actually explode.

What happened was a rooster was seen in Christchurch near Sydenham, New Zealand, running around with canisters with protruding wires strapped to its legs. That, as we all know, is a clear and unmistakable indication that a rooster will probably explode. Then the police chased the rooster into an alley, killed it, and called in an army bomb disposal unit to deal with the canisters, which were determined by them to be non-exploding.

My point being that the whole terror alert thing has gone too far. It's gone so far it's reached the lower right-hand corner of the world. Think of it this way: if you have to spend three hours chasing down non-exploding roosters for fear that they will explode, EVEN IN CHRIST-for-God-saken-clear-off-the-map-CHURCH, NEW ZEALAND, you can't be safe anywhere.

But I discovered that story by accident. I wasn't looking for information on non-exploding roosters, I was looking up SkunkShot gel.

I wanted to know what SkunkShot gel was and why it was being used by the police in Los Angeles to keep homeless people out of potential squats. My search led me to Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Motto: Te Whare Wananga o te Upoko o te Ika a Maui (Translation: We Wish We Were on a Beach in Maui.) It turns out that SkunkShot gel began with the realization, by scientists at Victoria U, that North American skunks stink.

That is a more impressive discovery than it sounds, since, after all, North American skunks are not native to New Zealand. I imagine many trips back and forth between New Zealand and North America to get the exact stinkiness worked out in scientific detail.

Really, that last paragraph was just me being abusive. What the scientists actually did was create a gel with skunk-smell ingredients, now available in the form of SkunkShot. You can use it to make anything you want smell like a skunk. The Los Angeles police have been using SkunkShot to stink up potential squats. They are so creative. No doubt the subject came up at the LEIU conference.

My own thinking is that SkunkShot has a lot more potential than that. For example, Metro has been concerned for years that homeless people have gotten in out of the rain under bus shelters. So much so that they've torn them down. No more! Just apply SkunkShot to those shelters and those people will keep away for good!

Problems with panhandlers, Seattle? SkunkShot your sidewalks! They won't be back!

Yes, New Zealand is all right. They only make the stuff there. And the roosters don't really explode.