Hattie's Web

Good old Glenn

No one says it better than Glenn Greenwald. Oh boo hoo you poor picked on folks!

"They're treated very unfairly everywhere -- by the press, by colleges, by political elites, by other countries, by the U.N., by minorities. There is no more besieged and victimized group anywhere on the planet than white, Christian, American conservative males (except, perhaps, right-wing Jews, the only worthy competitor for the glorious mantle of Most Persecuted). Among other things, they must battle "the unholy alliance of leftists, Islamists and multiculturalist racial pressure groups."

"Every institution treats them unfairly; every sector poses a threat to their Goodness; they are surrounded by soul-less Enemies who wish to do them harm. Nobody deserves the slightest sympathy -- nobody's plight merits the slightest concern -- except for theirs. They are the best people on Earth -- actually, the best people ever in all of human history. And everyone is against them. Everyone is waging war on them. Enemies everywhere work together to threaten and harm them. It's all deeply unfair. And they must wage vicious war -- against all the Enemies, Everywhere -- if they have any hope of being protected.

This and that

There is one good side to being stuck with dialup: I am reading a lot of books. Also the daily newpaper. I finished the Brian Aldiss autobiography, The Twinkling of an Eye, or My Life as an Englishman and am now halfway through Walter Kempowski's novel in German, Alles Umsonst (All for Naught), which I hope someone translates. Here is a review of it from Dialog International.

Hattie blows a fuse

My damned dialup threw me off when I attempted to post. I am so fed up. Well, try again tomorrow.

Barefoot, of course.

Just wasting time with my homies Professor Zero and Jennifer:

You are Barefoot!

You're a total free spirit, go with the flow girl You can't be restricted by shoes for very long And unsuprisingly, the same goes for men Your match is out there - and he's as carefree as you are

What Kind Of Women's Shoe Are You?

However, it's a look they dress up on Maui. Here's a nice Maui Sandal treatment:

Short people

This is from a 2004 New Yorker article on the shrinking American.  It seems to be true. I spent some time in the U of Washington Undergraduate Library today and saw a fair sampling of young college students. About half or more were Asian, but what interested me was not only that they were short, as one would expect, but also that the non-Asians were no taller. And I would have expected to see taller Asians as well, since so many of them have grown up here.
Of course boys want to be tall, so I don't think calorie restriction can explain their short stature. It has to be the junk food and the additives. The girls, of course, get into calorie restriction in their early teenage growing years,  so that would explain why girls are getting shorter faster relative to the boys.
Strange that although my parents were poor I was well fed and am  almost 5' 9," less than an inch above the average height for Dutch women! Most of my friends of my generation are tall by today's standards, too.
Looking at the groups of Japanese tourists I've been seeing lately in Hawaii, it does not seem to me that they are increasing in size either, at any rate the girls aren't. And they are as thin as rails.
Makes me feel like a giant!

Yes, and that's just how I'd look!

Who Should Paint You: Roy Lichtenstein

Larger than life, your personality overshadows everyone in the room A painter would tend to portray you with a bit of added flair!

What Artist Should Paint Your Portrait?

A visit to Portland

We spent a couple of days in Portland visiting friends and relatives. As we always do when we go there, we went to Powell's. So I have been staying indoors back in cold Seattle doing a lot of reading. A couple of Carol Shields novels, a Brian Aldiss entertainment called Super-State (he is still writing in his middle 80's and I find his take on life strangely cheering even though he is so pessimistic*), stories and novels by  Gloria Naylor and  Jamaica Kincaid. I finished Kempowski's Letzte Gruesse and marvelled at the way he missed the main point about America, that main point being that America is not Europe!  I reflect that I probably misunderstand Germany on a deep level, too. Though maybe not so much, because I lived there for a while. The novel is very funny in places, but Kempowski can't  resist making almost every American his protagonist meets clownish and stupid,  and the ex-pat Germans come across as smug and self serving. I am aware that I am not the ideal audience for this work. I can't imagine it ever appearing in English. I was intrigued that he dedicated it to Carla Damiano, a person I knew slightly, as I knew Kempowski slightly. I did my Master's thesis on Kempowski and was not very flattering. There is a revised version of a portion of the thesis about his autobiographical novel, Tadellöser & Wolff, on the sidebar, along with a later apologia.
* An expedition to Jupiter's moon Europa discover complex animal life forms which they eat because they are starving. The Europaeans taste somewhat like mushrooms.

Goldberg vs. Stewart

Jon Stewart takes down the Pantload:

Lee Siegel is god

The only thing Siegel has done wrong is to apologize for his pranks. This Salon article is typical of the mediocrity Siegel excoriates.

Gosh, Apple is so cool. What brought about this change of heart in the fickle heart of Aunty Hattie? I'm in Seattle now  using their free and speedy open Wi Fi service. As long as they provide free stuff I am theirs.

In San Francisco

Now dealing with the WiFi in our fancy overpriced hotel. It's almost as bad as our connection at home, and everyone is complaining. I can't get over how expensive everything is here. We spent $40.00 the other night for two hamburgers and a couple of beers at a sports bar.

What I dislike most are the ubiquitous TV monitors. They are very  distracting when you are trying to socialize. The huge TV in our room is wide format, but since the stations don't transmit in the wide format, everything and everyone just looks really wide. We stoically accept such ridiculousness;  at least we real people look thinner by comparison.

I have heard so much hype about Apple in this town that I know payola must be involved. Like I'm supposed to care. Terry says a good thing is that since Steve Jobs always wears jeans, he can too.

Poor people are getting shoved out (nothing new there).  But now it's also people of modest income who have worked all their lives and owned their own homes. They took out reverse mortgages and ran up credit card debt in order to deal with the soaring cost of living here, and now they are losing their homes and having to move to Sonoma and other places farther out.

The sea lions don't care. They just say, "Arf, arf, arf, throw me a fish."