Category Archives: Current Affairs

Women’s Flat Track Roller Derby Time

Americana, Around home, Art, Current Affairs, Games, Sports,


We went to a Women’s Flat Track Roller Derby meet last Saturday night with almost no preconceived ideas. It was delightful.

I first heard about the revival of Roller Derby in an article titled Revolution on Eight Wheels by Diane “Lady Hulk” Williams – the Lady Hulk part is very important, it turns out – in which she talked about going to a match thinking it might be exploitation and falling in love with the sport and the team. After going to one game, it seems easy to do.

I am fascinated by the way our culture is changing – especially in regard to women and minorities – and I am fascinated by the way that change is reflected back into the culture by our public stories, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I know, technically, that Joss Whedon wrote Buffy so it could be called non-public, but Buffy ran for seven season because it resonated with society’s changing image of women. So going to a Women’s Flat Track Roller Derby match? game? roll-off? seemed right up my alley. It was in Oakland and we went with Courtney Gonzalez.

Courtney , Michele, and I met for dinner at a local pizzeria called Pizzaiolo – although calling Pizzaiolo a pizzeria is a little like calling a Bentley a car – and then went over to the Oakland Convention Center to see the B.A.D.’s – B.ay A.rea D.erby girls – All Star team, The Golden Girls, play the Austin Texecutioners _whose colors are black and blood – as part of a Roller Derby tournament. Dinner was slower than I expected and I was getting agitated that we would be too late but we ended up getting to the game just in time. I had expected that we would walk into a packed  house and not even be able to see the track.

 

It turns out that Flat Track Women’s Roller derby is not packing in the crowds…yet. But it will. It has everything, sexily dressed women, real hard-driving athletic competition, high scoring, and a warm family outing sort of atmosphere. Oh! and it is very casual: for example, each player, of course, has a number, but the numbers have no rhyme or reason. The San Francisco numbers are 11, 101, 666, 1619,16, Ohh, 170c, and so on. And each player has a stage name? porn name? Some of my favorites were Astronaughty, Ivy Profane, Huck Sinn, and Aunti Christ on the San Francisco team and Lucille Brawl, The Killa Sal Monella, Belle Starr – her number is 1889, the year of Belle Starr’s death – and Vicious Van GoGo on the Austin team.

The persona of Women’s Roller Derby – flat track, atleast – is of tough, maybe even nasty, women. It is anything but. Maybe because the teams are owned by the players, which means women, or maybe it is for some other reason, but the atmosphere is nonthreatening. Very nonthreatening in a counter culture way. It is as if they pretended to be  tough to hide their tender, vulnerable, welcoming selves. But the games are rough and tough. Women get knocked down, they get hurt, they get knocked out of the game.

Scoring is based on – very roughly – a jammer starting behind the scrum – for lack of a better name – fighting through the scrum, going around the track and catching up with the scrum, and then getting one point for each opposing player the jammer passes. Here are a few shots:

 

 

 

 

The Golden girls won by a landslide – the first time they have beaten the Austin Team.

 

 

 

 

 

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In defense of Obama or the advantage of being crazy

Americana, Current Affairs, Politics, Psychological Musings,

Yesterday – maybe the day before that, by now – James Fallows who is usually a voice of reason, answered his question about President Obama’s negotiating stance during the (unnecessary and abusive) debt-ceiling “showdown.” Was he thinking eight steps ahead of the opposition, playing multi-dimensional chess while they were playing tic-tac-toe? Or was he a fatal step or two behind, playing patty-cake while they were playing Mixed Martial Arts? Chess master? Or pawn?”

I think we know the answer, at least about this encounter. Pawn, and captured pawn at that.

It has been very discouraging, it just seems like Obama has been head faked out of his jock. My big complaint, I think most of my fellow lefty’s big complaint, is that he should have seen this coming. Additionally,  he seems to always start the negotiation by giving the Republicans half of what he thinks they want.  He is a little like Charlie Brown and Lucy with the football, except in this case, he is pulling the football out first to try and placate them.

In Obama’s defense, the Tea Party faction of the Republican Party just seems to be crazy. The advantage of being crazy is that the sane people have to do all the accommodating. Something like twenty five years ago – I remember it like it was only five years ago – I was waiting in the ten items or less line, when I realized the person two or three people in front of me had an over-full cart being pushed by a crazy looking teenager. Just then, her mother came running over very embarrassed saying something like Oh! no, dear; it is not nice to put a full cart in this line. The crazy teenager just looked at us like somebody yelling in the street and said They don’t care. She probably wasn’t drolling but I do remember as looking slightly dangerous in a ready to go berserk way.  We all looked at our feet, including the checker, and she went ahead.

If it looks like the other person is nuttier than a fruitcake and could do something really dangerous like shut the government down, then they have all the power. Especially with somebody like Obama whose persona is the cool, calm, sane, only adult in the room. That is great that he is the only adult in the room except he has no power. The Tea Party is getting its way by being crazy.

That actually doesn’t sound too crazy to me.

 

 

“60 Awesome Portraits Of Gay Couples Just Married In New York State”

Americana, Current Affairs, Psychological Musings

 

The title is ripped off the website  BuzzFeed and so are these two pictures. The full 60 -actually, 59 – pictures are there, also. Check it out! It is more than 59 wedding pictures, it is 59 pictures of people who have just been told they are as good as anybody else.

 

 

An aside about Cluster Bombs

Americana, Current Affairs, Uncategorized, War

I have never understood cluster bombs and why they are such a problem. Now, after a visit to the Hawthorn Ordnance Museum, I do understand.  That might not be the good news. Be warned, if you don’t understand, your ignorance might be bliss; once you do understand, you might not like our fellow Americans as much . While in the airplane, the bomb looks pretty much like a run of the mill people killing device. However, it is innocuously labeled Dispenser, Aircraft so as it will not to be confused with a regular bomb.

The dispenser is rigged to come apart after it is dropped.  Inside are hundreds of tennis ball size bomblets that are then spread across the countryside. They have little aerodynamic wing stubs that start the bomblets rotating once they leave the container.

This act of rotating arms the bomblet so, when it hits the ground, they will explode. Of course, they all go in slightly different directions to cover as wide an area as possible. Because most of the dispensers are dropped from low flying fighter aircraft, many of the bomblets don’t have a chance to arm themselves before they hit the ground. So, in Vietnam, in Laos, in Cambodia, there are just millions of these things still lying around on the ground, or in the grass, or in bushes, all unexploded. Waiting for a farmer to hit them with a plow or a child to pick them up and give them a good shake. Years later, many of them are still there. Waiting.

According to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in The Fog of War, after the firebombing of Tokyo, former Army Air Force General Curtis LeMay said to him, It is a good thing that we are going to win this war, otherwise we would be tried as war criminals. He was probably right. As far as I am concerned, the guys who dropped these all over Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, should also be tried as war criminals.

That is one of the problems with war, once in a war, people will do anything to win. The United States is really no exception. We don’t wear suicide vests or club people to death, we don’t have to, we have cluster bombs and drones.

Obama

Americana, Current Affairs, Politics

The first time I became cynical about my government was over the 1960 U2/Francis Powers incident. As we all found out later, we – we being the United States Government – had been flying planes over the – then – Soviet Union in order to take pictures of their missile facilities and other, even more – atleast in theory – dangerous, military installations. You know, a spy plane. Because the U2 flew at very high altitudes – 70,000 feet – it was thought to fly too high to shoot down.

When the plane was shot down by the Ruskies, our Government said that it was a weather plane that had strayed off course. Perhaps the pilot had passed out, or something. Whatever.It wasn’t a spy plane!

Of course it was a spy plane and the only players who didn’t know that were us. American citizens. The Russians knew, they had the U2 carcass and the the U2 pilot.Our Government knew, they had ordered the missions.

When Obama first ran for president, for the first time in maybe 40 years, I really felt hope. I thought the country, and the world, may be in so much trouble that we would wake up. And Obama – I hoped and thought – was aware of how much trouble we were in and would be part of the change that we need to get through this. Early on, I thought he was more like a Rockefeller Republican than a Liberal like Lydon Johnson or George McGovern, but he hit all my hot buttons.

Making Government transparent, rolling back the unConstitutional imperial presidency, winding down our foolish and hyper expensive wars.

When Michele and I started working on his primary campaign about 20 months ago, it seemed to us, that Obama would be a shoe-in . It was obvious, to us, that he was the change our country needed and that everybody would immediately see that. Our friends gently told us that we were being naïve and they were afraid we would be gravely disappointed when he got blown out of the water by Hillary.

Well, it turned out that Obama won. It turned out that we weren’t gravely disappointed until after he was elected.

I like Obama more than Bush; he seems like a very personable and thoughtful guy, but he is not change. He is just more of the same. He has not made the Government more transparent, he has enlarged the presidency, and we are now fighting additional, low grade, wars in Yemen and Somalia. He has continued the Bush plan of ignoring Kyoto. He has saved the banks who made shitty loans rather than the homeowners who were given the shitty loans, , and he has gone after whistle blowers with a vengeance. He has done nothing about our energy crisis, our growing water crisis, and almost nothing about our grumbling infrastructure.

Maybe the problem is that Obama came to the presidency as a true outsider. He is, after all, a mixed race kid who looks black and he was raised poor by a single mom and his grandparents. One of my favorite Obama quotes and one that I think is  revelatory is something like If you are black and don’t want to get in trouble, dress well and don’t make any sudden movements. He hasn’t made any sudden movements and it has hurt us. Like Clinton, he grew up poor and, like Clinton, he is too anxious to be liked, too anxious to get along. Like Clinton, that has stopped him from making big, risky moves like Roosevelt or Bush the Younger
It is sad. Really sad.

Pickpockets, salesmen and the actors performing
Official scenarios,
Turned a deaf ear, for they had contracted
American dreams….
All that grave weight of America
Canceled! Like Greece and Rome.
The future in ruins!
The castles, the prisons, the cathedrals
Unbuilding, and roses
Blossoming from the stones that are not there .
From Walt Whitman at Bear Mountain by Louis Simpson