OH YEAH?

I’ve been so busy over at Jesuit Watch. The good news is that the ability of the Roman Catholic Church to do harm is diminishing worldwide. It’s influence in US politics continues to astonish and disgust. The five RC supremes must be impeached!

I’ve begun to propound the tenets of the karass I’ve mentioned here before, FOME, Familiars of Mineral Existence.

I’ve also been installing a remodeled net-game in mostly beautiful weather. Today in Golden Gate Park we stopped playing for a few seconds to watch a red tail hawk on patrol around the tennis courts.

I’ve been observing local politics and it’s too depressing, but I have to comment about yesterday’s Board of Supervisors discussion of “incivility.”

Wimps! You want incivility! Check out this AFP story, though you don’t have to go much past the lead:

BERLIN (AFP) - German politicians on Wednesday condemned as "tasteless" a mocked-up photo on the cover of a Polish magazine of Poland's ruling twin brothers sucking German Chancellor Angela Merkel's bare breasts.

That would be like the Bay Guardian running a photoshopjob of Gavin Newsom sucking you-know-who’s ****.

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RACE CARD?

In an op-ed Chron piece this morning defender of Ed Jew asked why the rush to get him out of office.

There are allegations of election improprieties (felonies) and public corruption (extortion), but hey!, so what.

Allegations are allegations. That Louisiana guy. Jefferson, finally got arrested, but he spent months in the US Congress after $90k in cash was found in his deep freeze.

The op-ed writer suggests that the anti-Jew vehemence is rooted in racism. This is obvious poppycock. I'm sure there are plenty of corrupt Asian public officials who don’t get the kind of treatment afforded flower-boy Ed.

So why the drumbeat to throw Ed out? The answer to that question is more complicated and probably more nefarious than any garden-variety racism.

Image-googling I came across the above from edjew.net. Man! It cost’s a hundred bucks just to be his friend!

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MY BOB BARKER STORY

I was maybe eight years old so it was fifty years ago that I met Bob Barker. My family was living in North Hollywood and our next door neighbor, who was a some-time stunt man, was doing a gig for Truth or Consequences, hosted by Mr Barker.

It was at NBC in Burbank so it wasn’t far away. I think my brother and I might have gotten out of school for a couple of hours. My dad took off work and drove us plus the stunt-man’s wife and two girls to the morning taping.

We’d just gotten settled, the two boys and two girls, in one row, my dad and Mrs Benson in the row behind us, when the warm up started.

Announcing during the show (“Mrs Grunwald come on down!!!”) is the gravy part of the second-fiddle's job, his main responsiblity is to warm the audience up before the show. This one did a good job.

One of his jokes sticks in my mind:

Show of hands: how many men are here with their wives?

Ok, how many are here with other men’s wives?

Of course, I turned around and urged my dad to raise his hand. He didn’t.

After the show we went down to the stage and Mr Benson, the stunt man, introduced us to Bob Barker. I got to shake his hand. I was impressed at how personable he was, as if there was nothing in the world he’d rather be doing than greeting us strangers.

A few months later Mr Benson turned up with blond hair. He was stunt doubling for Fred Astaire in the car race scene in On the Beach.

Culturally, North Hollywood in the late 1950’s was a little more happenin’ than San Francisco’s outer Parkside district.

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PARROT-BRAIN v. BROWN

My favorite political commentator (local) was on TV today. h. brown spoke at a Budget/Oversight Committee meeting that had been called on short notice to ram through a four-year contract with the city’s police.

h. pays attention to SFPD issues and strongly advocates steroid testing for violence prone officers.

For a nutty, gadfly, city-hall watcher, the pols take him seriously. They all know him. And they’re all just slightly afraid of what h. might say about them in his next Fog City Journal article. See his latest article here.

We hear Board President Peskin interrupt h. brown in the middle of h.’s allotted two minutes. It was rude and designed to put h. off his stride.

I checked the official agenda on the Board’s website and sure enough, h. was correct. At issue is when the committee planned for the full Board of Supervisors to consider the motion (MOU).The listing of this agenda item includes this statement:

The Chair intends to entertain a motion to send this item (File 070721) to Board as a Committee Report for consideration on June 12, 2007.

Peskin apparently had agreed, possibly because of heat generated over the weekend by h. brown, to wait two weeks before the full BoS considers the package. So Peskin ambushed him.

Anyway, it's impolite to interrupt a speaker who's been waiting hours and has only two minutes to make his point.

At the end, after h. has accused the committee members of election-year largesse, Peskin does a parting nyah-nyah, reminding us that he, Peskin is termed-out from the board.

I hope Peskin tries the private sector. They'll teach him some manners.

The contract is over fifty pages long, see it here.

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ED JEW HUMOR

We in San Francisco’s District 4 are learning more and more about the real estate empire of our supervisor, Ed Jew. Soon we'll have a final tally of residences-owned and a designation of the “official” residence.

Presumably, behind the scenes, investigators are tallying the number of sets of books (financial records) supervisor Jew keeps, and, assuming the answer is an integer greater than one, which set of books is the “official” record.

Pathetically, it all boils down to tapioca. Such is the nature of local politics. It’s the bush leagues (baseball metaphor) of graft. Politicans are not allowed to participate in multi-million dollar military contracting bribes until they’ve proven they can handle little $40k tapioca deals.

It looks like Ed won’t be called up to the majors any time soon.

I found a great report on the $10k donation Ed is trying to make to a local playground-improvement group. The site is new to me, Crooked Street Press. The article, Ed Jew Finds $10,000 in Couch Cushion, is way amusing.

Sub-head and lead:

“I should really clean my couch more often.” -Ed Jew
by Fritz

Sunset, San Francisco- Ed Jew was busy doing spring cleaning in his house in the Sunset Wednesday after the FBI trashed the place when he reportedly found $10,000 under one of his couch cushions. No word yet from authorities on if the money found was part of the $40,000 that Jew took from the Quickly chain store.

Full story here.

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APOLOGETICS

My other blog, Jesuit Watch, has attracted the attention of a Catholic apologist who is commenting anonymously on current and some previous posts.

The job of an apologist is to defend his or her organization against any and all verbal charges and attacks.

Regarding the Inquisition, for instance, Catholic apologists say that the Church didn’t kill anyone—all executions were performed by civil authorities.

Commenting on my story of the little swindle a Jebbie tried to pull on me, Anonymous called me “a bit paranoid” and suggested that the facts as I presented them couldn’t be true. Check it out in Why the Jesuits?

Apologetics is a dull, thankless job, that draws the same disrespect afforded to lawyers and dieticians.

Some of us are old enough to remember the dis-flavor of CPUSA’s defense of Stalinism.

The other day we saw on the Tucker Carlson show, Medea Benjamin defending Hugo Chavez’ closure of the opposition press.

My best friend, Pud, is on his way back from Venezuela as we speak. Pud says he had a major project about to be inked with the now-closed TV station. The “documentary” was to have propounded Pud’s Yamomami Paradigm for Human Survival. [I’m pretty sure the “paradigm” involves lots of hammock-time and ethno-botanicals.]

“It was the world’s last, best chance,” Pud said over a crackly cell connection, “I’m coming home to get drunk.”

Catholic Answers Forum has an Ask an Apologist section. Check out this Q&A titled Can You Answer a Question About Masturbation?

In answering the sincere young male convert, Father Vincent Serpa, O.P., makes this remarkable statement:

Nowhere will you find a higher understanding of sexuality than in the Catholic Church.

Survivors of re-assigned priest sex abuse might beg to differ.

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THREE-MONTH FORECAST

The first week or so of June in San Francisco is as overcast and dreary as any stormy day in winter.

I remember playing baseball in the first week of summer vacation and having the balls get waterlogged from the fog-soaked grass.

Ironically, the best weather in San Francisco occurs during the first week back to school in September.

For June, July, and August, the weather forecast is:

Fog along the coast extending inland night and morning, little change in temperature.

The western half of the City experiences moderate seasonal affective disorder—in the summertime!

At 9:00am this June 2, the courts in Golden Gate Park were unplayably wet from the low fog.

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ANOTHER POLISH JOKE

According to this story in Catholic World News, two books have been added to Poland’s compulsory reading list for high school students. They are a biography of Pope John Paul II and a book by the same pope.

To make room for the Pope, Kafka and Goethe were removed from the list.

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