I don't listen to commercial radio much, but I was with a friend today and he had the local "All Eighties" station on. Aside from the disturbing fact that there are now stations playing "my" music as a nostalgia format, and of course the designed-to-annoy commercials, it wasn't too bad. I enjoyed hearing some old favorites I hadn't listened to in a while. Except of course that the 1980s were almost as full of tediously lame pop music as the 2000s, and this station plays plenty of that crap. Michael Sembello's "Maniac", Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger", Deniece Williams' "Let's Hear It For The Boy", and the entire Ratt catalog were horrible even when they were new; for the love of all that's holy, let them die.

Then there are the songs that simply don't age well. Not because they wear out their welcome or sound "dated", but because you have to be young and naive (or held back intellectually) to think that they're any good. Case in point: They played "What About Me?" by Moving Pictures (a one-hit wonder from Australia who got some MTV play in the States), and the announcer follows it by saying what a "powerful" song it is. While I'm thinking, "Gosh, what a pile of self-pitying crap that song was." Back when it was new and I was still learning to drive, I thought it struck a few good chords. Which just goes to show that I was an emotionally immature whiner myself.

Since the lyrics to just about every song known to humanity have been unlawfully transcribed onto the World Wide Web, it's easy to pull them up for a little fair-use commentary:

Well there's a little boy waiting at the counter of the corner shop
He's been waiting down there, waiting half the day,
They never ever see him from the top
He gets pushed around, knocked to the ground,
He gets to his feet and he says...

CHORUS:
What about me? It isn't fair
I've had enough, now I want my share
Can't you see, I wanna live
But you just take more than you give

OK, people who "take more than they give" probably deserve to be slapped. But get over it. Why are you letting them make you miserable? Never mind the accidentally ironic phrasing of "I've had enough, now I want my share" (we get what you meant), if you're expecting that the world is just going to give it to you, you're obviously too accustomed to Mommy and Daddy taking care of you. Grown-ups get things for themselves. And they understand that they won't get everything they want. Or even what they "deserve". Because life isn't fair. Geez, that's like, Lesson One in life, kid.

Well, there's a pretty girl serving at the counter of the corner shop
She's been waiting back there, waiting for a dream,
Her dreams walk in and out, they never stop
Well, she's not too proud, to cry out loud
She runs to the street and she screams...

More of the same. Sorry, pretty girl, but "waiting for a dream" is never gonna work. Somebody read you too many "Prince Charming" fairy tales, and now you think that someone's going to come along and make your dreams come true. Well, what about him? Who's going to do all the work and fulfill his dreams? Ever think about that?

And there's another bit of unintentional irony about the boy and the girl here. The lyricist presumably did it for some parallel structure to the verses, but the girl is working at the same shop where the boy gets ignored and pushed around. She's so wrapped up in her pity party that she's contributing to his misery as well. Hey kids, you ever consider being nice to each other? Think you might make some friends that way?

Take a step back and see the little people
They might be young, but they're the ones that make the big people big

That line comes pretty damn close to being insightful... except that the "little" people it's talking about aren't the socioeconomically disadvantaged; they're just young. Yes, it's the people of the economic underclass who make it possible for the rich to be rich. But grown-ups don't gain their status on the backs of the young. If the poor disappeared, the rich would no longer be rich, but if the young disappeared, grown-ups would still be grown-ups. What "makes these big people big" (other than their actual size) is the fact that they understand that the world isn't fair, they work for the things they want, and (for the most part) they don't complain about how unhappy they are just to get attention. It feels better to blame someone else for your unhappiness, but accusing adults of being happy at the expense of their children is delusional.

I guess I'm lucky, I smile a lot
But sometimes I wish for more than I've got...

And this part just makes me want to kick the writers. You admit that you've got things pretty good. But you want it to be better (which I guess is OK), and you've got the audacity to wail about how horrible the world is to you, and to demand that it give you more. What a self-centered, taking-more-than-you-give attitude. What about you? Please shut up and grow up.

In the process of digging up these lyrics, I discovered that the winner of Australian Idol last year re-recorded this song and released it as a single which sold pretty well, proving that it's not an issue of the song being "too 80s". It's simply "too fourteen-year-old" for me to stomach.

There are songs from the 1980s that still resonate with me today, even in middle-age. Some of them are even about being young, a condition I can no longer relate to personally. (For example, Rod Stewart's "Young Turks" was on the radio half an hour earlier.) And I've heard a few new teen-angst songs in recent years that had something insightful to say. But "What About Me?" is just a load of hypocritical tripe.

A few days ago the Center for Public Integrity published a report that said that Dick and Betsy DeVos (the son and daughter-in-law of Amway co-founder Rich DeVos) were (as a couple) the largest individual contributors to political campaigns last year. Turns out the CPI was wrong, and they've now published a correction: nearly a million of that was actually contributed by Rich himself. Rich and Dick have the same legal name except for "Sr." and "Jr." and both CPI and the GOP itself attributed donations without a suffix to Junior, instead of Senior.

But this is really just a technicality, because Dick is little more than a clone of his father. They even use the same return address on their donations, which is part of how their checks got misattributed. And what's interesting is looking at the whole top five. Rich and wife Helen were #3, with over $1.5 million donated. Dick and Betsy actually rank at #5 with just shy of $1 million. And up at #2 is Rich's lifelong buddy and fellow Amway founder Jay VanAndel, who managed to donate $2 million before dying last year. Add up the donations of the Amway klan and you get a cool $4.5 million, doubling the supposed #1 donor (Arizona Democrat Jim Pederson). That's a lot of races - and representatives - paid for by a handful of obscenely rich white fundies.

I had my first colonoscopy today. To allay any suspense, the results were good. I'm healthy.

You could say that I didn't see it coming, because it all happened pretty quickly. I went in for my annual physical on Tuesday morning, which included a "digital" (as in "finger", the old-fashioned sense of the word) prostate exam. But he felt a tiny nodule of some kind in or on the rectum wall. It was probably just a harmless "thing" of some kind (our bodies are full of lumps and irregularities), but he figured it was better to be thorough and find out for sure. Especially since there's a history of colon cancer in my family, and at the age of 40, it's time to start taking all of those "as we get older" health risks seriously.

So my doc refers me to a gastroenterologist, who turns out to have an opening for a consult the next day due to a cancellation, and then happens to have an opening for the procedure itself a day and a half later, first thing Friday morning. Which turns out to be the minimum amount of prep time for a colonoscopy. That's because you need to completely clear out your large intestine first. Phase one is to stop eating nuts, raw veggies, and anything else that takes a few days to digest. Phase two is to stop eating solid food altogether, for a full day before the procedure. Phase three is taking some strong laxatives. All the while, you're encouraged to drink lots of clear fluids (especially sports energy drinks), because you'll be flushing a lot of fluid out through your bowel.

Here's a tip that I wish someone had suggested to me, rather than me thinking it up after I started having problems. Rather than wiping your ass with toilet paper after every squirt session - which is going to rub you raw even if you use the softest TP available - use your bathtub as a bidet. A proper bidet is a little fountain that squirts up from your seat to wash your butt clean. Lacking one of those, just turn on the water in your tub, adjust it to a comfy temperature, turn your back to the faucet, squat, and wipe yourself off. Don't fret about getting shit on your hand; just use soap and it's as sanitary as you could want. When you're done, blot yourself dry with a nice plush towel.

Believe it or not, the pre-exam shitting is the worst part of the whole experience. That's because they drug you up for the procedure itself, not enough to put you to sleep, but enough that you're relaxed and cooperative... and you won't remember a thing afterward. Kind of like taking a date rape drug, but with signed consent forms. I suppose for some people it's a little psychologically traumatic, but I'm neither the kind of person who'd punch a guy out for poking around in his ass, nor the kind who'd feel a need to send him flowers afterward. It's just an orifice, and I'd rather have them sticking a little camera through it than have them cut a new hole somewhere else to get an inside view of something else (like I had done with my knee a couple years ago). By comparison it's pretty non-invasive.

As I said, my results were good. The nodule by my prostate was harmless. They did find a little polyp in my ascending colon (that's the part that a mere sygmoidoscopy doesn't get to; demand the full colonoscopy), which they removed. If a biopsy indicates that it was pre-cancerous, I'll get another 'scope in 5 years; otherwise it's just another one of those harmless "things" and I'm good for another 10 before they'll want to check me again.

Some people might be annoyed at going to all this trouble (missing most of last night's sleep getting up to shit, and a full day's pay for not being at work today) for "nothing". Plus the cramps and a slightly raw anus. To say nothing of the 25% of the cost that my lousy insurance will require me to contribute. But the peace of mind of knowing that there's nothing seriously amiss in that whole stretch between my appendix and my sphincter, is worth it. And if there is something wrong in there, it's definitely worth going through, because catching it early is the best way to stop it. My mom didn't catch hers until it was making her anemic and weak; she survived, but it cost her a foot of bowel and a bunch of chemo. No point in going through that, if all I have to do is this every 5-10 years.

I just read in the newspaper about a new book by an old acquaintance of mine. David Myers is a Psychology prof at religiously conservative Hope College, and the author of a long-running millions-selling college textbook on the subject, of which the college is very, very proud. They're not as proud of his latest book, however. It's a more mainstream bookstore-friendly - but still academically sound - analysis of gay marriage, from a Christian perspective. The surprise (at least to those who don't know him or his co-author Letha Scanzoni, or their previous scholarly work) is that the book comes down firmly in support of it. The book is entitled What God Has Joined Together? A Christian Case for Gay Marriage.

This is certain to lead to some controversy at Hope College. Especially given the timing. News recently broke about how James Bultman, the president, pounced hard on Miguel De La Torre, a Religion prof who dared to poke fun of fundie demigod James Dobson in an essay published in the local paper. (He ridiculed Dobson's recent rant about Spongebob Square Pants.) Bultman bit into him so hard that he quit. Even with tenure. Read this article in The Muskegon Chronicle for more background. The following quote from a letter Bultman wrote to De La Torre is significant:

"Hope is dependent on enrollment and gifts to drive the college financially," the president wrote. "When people are displeased with what we do, their only recourse is to exercise their options with regard to enrollment and gifting. Several have indicated their intention to do so."

Bultman is talking about people such as Rich DeVos, co-founder of Amway, and a political ally of Dobson. Bultman has since issued a statement that he wasn't talking about DeVos, who hadn't made any such threats (at least not yet), but it's obvious that DeVos was prominently on Bultman's mind when he wrote that. DeVos is, after all, the billionaire who extorted then-President Lubbers of Grand Valley State University - a decent man trying to do the right thing - into backing down from a promise to offer equal benefits to same-sex domestic partners of employees, by threatening to withdraw his millions of dollars in financial support for a major construction project in downtown Grand Rapids. DeVos is now bankrolling Hope's new basketball fieldhouse. Connect the dots.

Fortunately David Myers has something better than tenure to protect him. For one thing, he's famous. He's been on national TV (most recently for his book about... happiness.) People at lots of other colleges know him, and being able to boast about him is a big feather in Hope's cap. Also, he's not latino. The administration see him as "one of us", a longtime member of the family, contrasted with De La Torre, who's fairly new to the college, an "immigrant" if you will. David's also just a very nice person, the kind that's hard to hate. Not that this would protect him from the administration by itself, but it gives him some immunity because stomping on him would produce just the kind of money-threatening controversy that De La Torre's comments did. You see, there are also people in the Hope-funding community who like David personally. So the administration has tolerated Myers' open tolerance of gay students for a very long time already. They'll tolerate this.

But this whole intertwined combination of events is a great example of how - at its core - Hope College is a sham. They go on and on (and on and on) about their commitment to Christian values, but year after year, decade after decade, administration after administration, they betray that. It isn't even about homosexuality. Sure, the administration is packed with hysterical, bed-wetting homophobes. But what really sets their sheets to soaking is their devotion to money. Granted, they have to be concerned about finances. We all get that. But whenever it comes down to a question of money, or the basic Christian priniciple of compassion, money always wins. I've seen them go out of their way to willfully harm people, all in service to their true god, Mammon. Not just by stomping on innocent people who bring "bad publicity" to the college, but also by covering up the misdeeds of the guilty, brushing genuine scandals under the rug. They're amoral. This isn't coming from Myers, or even from De La Torre; I've heard this from a bunch of people I know who've worked there. Mostly past-tense. After some soul-searching, a straight, Dutch friend of mine - also a Hope alumn - declined a job there that he'd be perfect for... but he said he didn't want to work at such a racist institution.

So, anyway... kudos to David Myers, for having the insight and the courage to write this new book. Condolences to Miguel De La Torre for learning the hard way the wages of speaking your mind with only tenure and an expectation of compassion to defend him. And a pox on the administration of Hope College, who deserve every shred of bad publicity that leaks out despite their best efforts, and who deserve precious little of the sweet nectar of money that their god rains down upon them.

There's a bill that's been introduced in the Mighigan legislature to lift the current ban on the sale of alcohol before noon on Sundays. All I can say is that it's about fucking time.

Actually, I can say more than that:

The current law is one without any justification whatsoever. It serves no secular purpose. None. Anyone who tries to argue that there is one, is so full of crap they'd have to flush ten times to send it all down the toilet.

They'll try to argue that it cuts down on alcohol abuse. It doesn't. The 2:00am cut-off probably does, but there's no reason it has to stay in effect until 12:00pm, just on Sundays. People drink just as heavily on Friday nights, but no one seems to mind opening the till of the party store again at 7:00am on Saturday. And it does nothing to actually stop people from drinking on Sunday mornings; they just have to stock up enough to last them those 10 hours. An experienced drunk can handle that.

The only reason for banning the sale of alcohol is religious. It serves to avoid upsetting people of a particular religion, who feel that people should be in church on Sunday mornings, and can't accept the idea of anyone using that time to instead buy liquor. That is the only difference between Saturday morning and Sunday morning: pressure to participate in Christian worship. Anyone with a shred of honesty will admit that.

On the other hand, the people who oppose this change in the law know better than to try to argue that actual reason for it. That's because even they know that "because it makes Baby Jesus cry" is a feeble justification for a law. The best they can come up with it is, "There are plenty of other times during the week to buy alcohol." I have two responses to that:

So what? There are plenty of other times during the week to worship God, but that doesn't mean it'd be harmless to ban that on Sunday mornings. We let people worship whenever they want to, because that's what it means to live in a free society: letting other people live their own lives, rather than having the government tell them what to do. You could make the same "there are other times" argument defending a ban on meat sales on Tuesday afternoons, or tobacco sales on Thursdays. But you'd still lack any actual basis for the ban in the first place. Using this argument is just another way of admitting, "I have no rational argument to make."

Says who? I'm a busy person. Let's look at the past few days: Friday morning and afternoon, I was at work. Friday evening I spent at the movies with a friend. Saturday morning and early afternoon I spent at my college's graduation ceremony. Late afternoon and evening, I spent going to a meeting (no, not AA) out of town. Sunday afternoon I spent with my family for Mother's Day. Sunday evening I did laundry. The only time during those three days when I had time to go grocery shopping (which is otherwise the most convenient opportunity to buy beer) was Sunday morning. Which meant that I had to leave one item on my shopping list unpurchased. I had to make an extra trip to the neighborhood party store Sunday evening to restock my fridge, so I could have a drink while I watched The Simpsons. All to satisfy some puritanical compulsion to keep me from doing my shopping while others worship. (And ending up with Sunday morning as my only convenient time for shopping isn't unusual; the fact that other people tend to schedule group activities to avoid it actually makes that a prime shopping time slot for me.)

The last debating tactic left in the puritans' bag of tricks is to question why anyone (such as I) cares so much about this. Why am I getting so emotional about it? That's easy to answer: Because I'm sick of them shoving their silly religious rules down the throat of people like me who don't share their superstitions. And they use each religion law on the books to justify the others: the "In God We Trust" on our coins is used to justify "one nation under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, which is used to justify putting the Ten Commandments on display in government buidings, which is used to justify writing laws about marriage to conform to Christian standards, and so on. I get angry about this because this particular seemingly-trivial imposition of religious rules on non-believers shows just how powerful the Christian theocrats are.

A year ago, I wrote about the fact that I was graduating from college (again, this time from art school), and how at first I was melancholy about that fact, but later it turned out to be not so bad, because I'd received an offer for a job on the tech support staff there.

Today was Graduation Day again... not for me, but for this year's seniors. I went to the ceremony, this time as a staff member. In part it was to support some of the students I'm aquainted with, to see them off as it were. Mostly it was for the shows.

The week between the end of classes and graudation, is the Student Exhibition. Every graduating senior gets a spot in the building to present a sample of their work. The illustrators show off their cartoons and portraits, the interior design students pin up a punch of floor plans and swatches, the industrial designers and furniture designers display their plans and models, the digital media people run their DVDs and web sites, the graphic designers put up their posters and packages, and the painters and sculptors and photographers present their paintings and sculptures and photographs. There's always a lot of great art to see, and I've always tried to see it all. Even though I was in the building all last week, I didn't have time to see much of, because I was busy with other things. So I went down early before the commencement ceremony to give myself a tour.

The other show is the commencement ceremony itself. The college has a wonderful tradition of allowing (requiring, actually) each graduating senior to submit an image of their work to be projected on a huge screen at the front of the church auditorium as they receive their diploma. It's even harder on the students than their exhibition space is, because they have to pick just one. But it means that the bulk of the ceremony (an hour and a half total) is devoted to a slide show of really good art.

In some ways, this year it was a bit more hectic than last, because I was responsible for providing all of the technological gear and making it work, for the Student Exhibition. (They hire professionals to handle the display at the ceremony.) So it wasn't just one multimedia presentation (my own) like last year, but a few dozen. But I enjoyed it more, because this time my "day job" was one that I actually like, and my boss, several faculty, and even a couple students had told me how much they appreciated what I was doing.

my rating:

Kingdom of Heaven is a movie that invites you to believe in miracles. You pretty much have to, to accept any of what it shows you.

It's about this blacksmith (Orlando Bloom) living in the not-even-a-speck-on-the-map of Nowheresburgh, somewhere between England and Jerusalem, who is compelled by the suicide of his wife (a mortal sin, you know), the appearance of his father (a veteran of the Crusades), and a mortal sin of his own, to go to the Holy Land and become a Good Knight. He picks up swordsmanship as if he were studying with Qui-Gon Jinn (played in both this movie and Star Wars by Liam Neeson) and military strategy as if he'd fought at Helm's Deep in a previous life (as an elf, of course), and manages to learn irrigation and the seduction of noblewomen with equal ease.

Equally difficult to buy is the enlightened nobility of the then-current Christian King of Jerusalem and his Muslim Saracen counterpart Saladin (whose name is prounced more correctly here as "Salah al-Din"). The king just wants a Jerusalem where Muslim and Jew and Christian can live together in peace, like some modern-day Secretary General of the United Nations, and Salah has just the kind of respect for his enemies and for the fate of innocent women and children (and even men) that your garden variety modern-day extremist Muslim terrorist does not. Gosh, it almost makes one pine for the good old days of the Crusades, doesn't it?

Of course with such nobility on both sides, you also need some bad guys, and the Knights Templar and some of Salah's lieutenants served that purpose, demonstrating the psychotic religious fervor of those who either believe that "God wills it" or use that as their rallying cry to get the aid of those stupid enough to fall for it. It's clear that the producers were going for a kind of sociopolitical statement about all the "holy" conflicts in the Middle East, but it was undercut by just how forced it was.

Then there's this "good knight" character Balian. He's just oh so fucking noble, to the point that he refuses to accept the hand of the dying king's hottie sister and become king, because it will require someone killing the war-hungry toad she's currently married to, and so the toad (or frog, rather; he's French) becomes king and to no one's surprise picks a war with the greatest military leader the Arabs have ever seen. That was just stupid, not noble. And this same "perfect" man didn't hesitate to have sex with the future queen when she was still married to the aforementioned toad, and has no qualms about conducting a defense of Jerusalem that involves pouring flaming oil on advancing soldiers and otherwise hacking them to bits. Sure, it's defensive, but it's still barbaric brutality. And at least by God's standards, fucking whatshername was adultery. Call that consistency... because I don't.

It all ends up being quite pointless. Sin is called virtue, defeat is called victory... and not just by the characters, but by moviemakers. At least they got one over-arching point right, which is shown by the opening and closing scenes: this chapter of the Crusades - like the whole saga - was itself quite pointless.

Last night an old friend and I drove to Ann Arbor to see a double bill of Joe Jackson and Todd Rundgren perform at the Michigan Theater. It was pretty cool, and a fun time.

There was an opening act in addition to the two headliners, a quartet named Ethel. A string quartet: two violins, a viola, and a cello. But they rocked. Hard enough to burn through the hairs on their bows. And they fiddled as well, and they veered off into post-contemporary classical (or whatever it's called this week) compositions of their own.

Next up was Joe Jackson, the slightly younger of the two 50-something stars. He opened with a couple of his crooning tunes, and I was a bit worried, because it was clear he was having trouble with the upper range of his voice, and he was just getting started. He also fumbled a piano cascade, causing the audience to think he'd finished playing. But whether it was from warming up, or switching to his more shouty songs, his voice held out well enough for the rest of the show. He played a mixture of crowd-pleasing oldies ("Is She Really Goin' Out With Him?", "It's Different For Girls", "Steppin' Out", "Hometown") and some more recent songs from his reunion-with-the-band album Volume 4. He's had a fairly eclectic recording career, and he sampled it nicely. At one point he paused to decide which of several songs-he-didn't-write he was going to perform that night. I shouted a suggestion; he looked up from his notes and asked incredulously, "Did someone say 'Freebird'?" {wicked grin} Instead he played a couple verses from a bawdy ditty from the early 1900s.

After a brief intermission, Todd Rundgren took the stage. His recording career has been pretty diverse as well, including some pop-friendly ballads, loopy prog rock, and technological experimentation. He too indulged the audience with a few fan favorites, but couldn't bring himself to play them straight. He clearly gets tired of repetition and prefers to experiment, so he did "Can We Still Be Friends" with bossa nova syncopation (like on his fuck-with-the-listeners album With a Twist), performed "Bang on the Drum" on the ukelele, and a fairly straight rendition of "Hello, It's Me" went all jazzy toward the end. To be honest, some of his performances didn't quite work for me, such as when he used a hollow-body acoustic guitar with electric pick-ups on a rocker that really begged for a hard-edged metal sound. Still, a good show. (My friend also let me listen to Todd's latest album, which is quite good, and a return to straightforward songsmithing rather than another adventure in modern recording.)

Easily my favorite part of the show came during the encore set. First, Joe and Ethel returned to the stage to do one of his numbers. Then Todd joined them, for a cover of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" (a song he'd recorded for a George Harrison tribute album): Todd on guitar, trading off lead vocals with Joe on piano, and Ethel covering Clapton's guitar solos... the two violinists taking turns with it, and ripping their bows to shreds in the process. The sextet closed with one of Todd's tunes, which... was unfortunately a bit of a let-down after "Weeps".

I haven't been to many concerts in recent years, just a couple that I got dragged to regardless of my wishes (e.g. Van Hagar). I've gotten way past the point in my life where I'd think nothing of driving across the state to see a band, but the combination of Joe and Todd was enough to entice me to take this trip. I've seen Todd a couple times before, once when he and Utopia opened for the Tubes (in connection with POV for the former band, and Love Bomb for the latter), and about ten years ago with the same friend and my since-lost boyfriend Andy in a small venue in Grand Rapids, in which Todd did a whole set playing the keyboard... of a Macintosh computer acting as sequencer. I think I enjoyed those performances of his more than this one. But Joe didn't disappoint, Ethel was a pleasant surprise, and Todd was some nice icing on the cake.

It's been a month since God half-smote my web server, rendering the original site un-update-able, at least not without a lot of manual hacking. But "God's ex-Boyfriend" is back now, better than ever. Or something.

I've overlaid a live WordPress-based site on top of the now-fully-static Movable-Type-based site. I'm going to link them together as best as I can, but ultimately they'll be two distinct sets of articles. I'm using one of WordPress' default appearance templates for now, but I'll fix that soon, taking advantage of this opportunity to freshen the look of the blog, which is a kind of Son of God's ex-Boyfriend.

Be careful how you parse and interpret that, though. It's not (Son of God)'s ex-Boyfriend. (That'd be James, the "disciple Jesus loved" but who got left behind when He ascended into heaven). It's not Son of (God's ex-Boyfriend), referring to me, the person. (I'm quite certain that I have no offspring out there.) It's Son of "God's ex-Boyfriend", referring to the blog.

I don't plan any radical changes in the nature of the blog, though. Just a return to what I was doing before. So thanks for coming back (or visiting for the first time, if that's the case).

For earlier articles on this topic, see God's ex-Boyfriend, volume one.