I feel sorry for Joe Biden when Jon Stewart makes so much fun of him and then he – Joe that is – says that Mubarak is not a dictator and I think What a clueless – and, in the end, dangerous – goofball. And we help keep him in power – Mubarak, that is – with our desire for stability, our money, and our tear gas grenades.

We say that we are on the side of the Egyptians, but – it seems to me – we really aren't.  We are for stability, for order, for maintaining the status quo. When we attacked Iraq in 2003, the Marine commander's call sign was chaos – because, he said, the more chaotic the situation, the better we do – but that turned out to be idle chatter. When the battlefield turned chaotic, we couldn't adjust for years, despite out huge military superiority. 

John Kennedy said Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. It seems to me that we – with our support of Arab dictators – are making peaceful  revolution very difficult.  When Jimmy Carter helps keep the Shah in power way past the Shah's due date, when the Palestiniann people vote in Hezbollah and we say we don't like your choice so we will not acknowledge it, when we say Mubarak is not a dictator after he has been in power for almost 30 years and is trying to put his son in power; we are not promoting peaceful change, we are not promoting democracy. 

It is sad and I wish my country were better at walking its talk.

As a Public Service…here are the EPA instructions on What to Do if a Compact Fluorescent Light (CFL) Bulb or Fluorescent Tube Light Bulb Breaks in Your Home. The instructions – and I love the passive voice as if the bulb broke on its own – make it seem that living with these bulbs is about as dangerous as living at Chernobyl.

Since I am not ready to live in the dark and firmly believe we have to start conserving energy , I am all for energy saving bulbs. But, unless the EPA is trying to unnecessarily scare us, these bulbs – with their mercury vapor – really are pretty scary and dangerous. Yuck!

When people – I'm talking about me, here – talk about guilty pleasures, we pretend that the  said pleasure is bad, but we are really trying to convince you that the said pleasure is good. When we say Oh! my guilty pleasure is watching Buffy The Vampire Slayer, we are really saying, If you don't like Buffy, either you haven't seen it or you are stupid. But:

when I watch NFL season – and game, and, even, team – promos, I love them and that is more than sort of embarrassing. I know that the ads are childish, almost prurient, complete bullshit: the low voice, the slo-mo, the hyper-dramatic music: (:again?) it is all so unbelievably sleazy. The promos are all sizzle and no steak. This ad? promo? video, for a – WTF – political candidate just fits in so well. In a way, it just seems so logical to selling a candidate as a commodity. >

Here is a 49er promo, but I don't think it is as good – maybe too many facts)

Saturday, I had the honor of installing three of my photographs in the lobby of the Oakland office of  AECOM. According to its website, AECOM is  a global provider of professional technical and management support services with 52,000 employees. I am thrilled.

It started for me when Courtney Gonzales saw some bookmakers that I had made and suggested that a couple of them would look good in the lobby of the company she works for. Eventually, we ended up with two bookmarkers blown up and re-formatted into a more conventional shape and a square shot of sunlight through water.

Here are the two shots formatted as bookmarks – but enlargeable by double clicking – and the square shot of dappled water.