Interesting/peculiar item here on Ida Amin's obsession with Scotland, now the basis of a novel.

I have a Scottish obsession as well, though I have not fed it in ages. Never interested me much until I got there. Magical place.

I grew up stir crazy in the Midwest (Chicago suburbs) and finals week of my junior year in college I just lost it. Went straight from my penultimate final to the study abroad office to see how the hell I get myself out of the country for my last year. South America sounded good.

They practically laughed in my face when I said I had just a year of Spanish, mostly Cs and Ds. No way, not negotiable. But they had this Work In Britain program that would get me a work permit which would be almost impossible otherwise. I could be there by the weekend.

Fuck that. I already lived in an English-speaking country. I slunk out, procrastinated studying for my last final. Then I was back. I'll take it. I was there by the weekend.

I decided I wanted to work on the oil rigs, in the North Sea, off the coast of Aberdeen, way up in the north of Scotland. It was about a ten-hour trainride from London to Aberdeen, uneventful until we approached the Scottish boarder. Every stop, new people got on, and they grew progressively harder to understand. By the time we passed Edinburgh (pronounced edin-bur-uh, which gives you an idea), I could only make out half of it. By Aberdeen they appeared to be speaking a different language. And the world was different. The air was a different color, cast a pall over everything. I had never been that far north, and twilight lasted about two hours: it was still light at nine when I arrived, but dingy and cool and the haze and the stone seemed to age everything two to three hundred years.

I was all alone and suddenly felt cut off and vulnerable. And I liked it.

But there were no jobs. It was the heart of the ugly Thatcher period and Scotland was facing its worst econominc crisis since the Depression. Half the population seemed to have already fled north to Aberdeen to grab a share of the oil boom. I was about two years late.

So I slithered back to Blackpool, a nasty little workingclass tourist-trap town, home of Blackpool Pleasure Beach, a poor Englishman's Disneyland. My one contact in the country was a friend's parents, and they offered to put me up for the summer. I had always wanted to be a carny, but there were no openings for ride operators, so I took what felt like a prissy deskjob as a cashier, selling tickets in little booths in front of the rides (they rotated us every day to try to keep us from getting too cozy with the ride operators and scheming ways to resell tickets).

I found I didn't care for the English that much. Hmmmmm. That's not fair. They just suffered by comparison. I liked the English about as much as I liked Americans, but I was out to escape American and I was stunned by the similarity. (That was the end of my delusion about the whole melting pot myth. I had always thought we were a unique country, a fusion of all the different cultures of the world. It only takes one trip to England to discover we're English. A little twist on English, with a lot of influences thrown in, but we're English now, regardless of our ancestry.)

But the Scottish. They are not English. Amazing they can share the island with those anglos and remain so much more different from them than we do, an ocean away. I fell in love immediately. The Pleasure Beach clientele was 100% working class: half from the Midlands (the Industrial Midwest of England), half from Scotland. And the staff mirrored that: all the high school grads who had come there as kids came back to work through the summer, and some kept at it into retirement. I hung entirely with the Scots--except for a few English women who I dated, oddly. I never dated a Scottish woman, must have been too intimidating or something.

They were rough and coarse and a million laughs, and I understood immediately why Hadrian had given up and built a wall. (He was the Roman emperor who finally decided the Scots were not worth conquering, and built a wall across the island to keep them out instead.) We got just one day off a week, but we took trips up there several times, called in sick a second and third day together until our boss told us one more trip and we were out. I stayed with their families in Hamilton and Port Glasgow and my favorite town name ever East Killbride. It might have only had one l, but I'd like to get back there someday and hear the story of how that place got on the map. We'd go to pubs where everyone would get hammered and sing this rousing songs dissing the English, and I liked to stand up and sing America, The Beautiful, which shocked them more than pissing them off, because they didn't attract Yankee tourists into there grungy little hovels and were tickled to find one lurking in their midst. There were occasional exceptions. A bitter young guy with Popeye forearms and scars all over his face grabbed me from behind, laid a knife across my throat and tried to pin Margaret Thatchers sins on me. Thank God for my Scottish buddies. They spoke to him in the local tongue and got me out of there, told me to keep my patriotism to myself for awhile.

Blah blah blah. I was just going to reference that post. But then I got thinking about Scotland and I don't know when to stop. When the hell am I getting back there? So many places to go.

As the threat of gay marriage continues unhinge the spines of many a traditionalist, gay "marriage" is making significant headway. So far just one state recognizes gay "civil unions," and it's one of the smallest and least influential, and it was forced to do it by the court.

Now the largest and most influential is close to joining them, of its own free will.

From today's SF Chronicle:

Gov. Gray Davis pledged Saturday to sign a domestic-partners bill that would give thousands of same-sex couples many of the same rights as married couples -- including community property, child support and access to divorce court -- and would thrust California to the forefront of the national debate over gay rights.

The bill would put registered domestic partners in California on a par with members of civil unions in Vermont, the only other state with a comparable law ... the bill by Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg, D-Los Angeles, passed the Assembly in June on a 41-32 vote, the bare majority needed, and is pending in the Democratic-controlled state Senate, where passage is likely.

It doesn't say whether the likely passage is likely to come before Davis is likely thrown out, but Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante has also endorsed it and Conan has generally supported gay rights.

The law could not provide important federal benefits, like filing joint tax returns, collecting a spouse's Social Security benefits, or equal health insurance coverage (though the last one is gradually taking hold in companies voluntarily).

Hopefully other states would follow CA's lead, as they tend to. It would be very nice to see movement down this parallel track toward gay marriage, where straight people can get used to the idea, see us "married" without freaking out over it and gradually realize the different name is kinda silly. If I had my druthers we would have gotten further down this road before we scared the shit out of them with the whole thing, so it's nice to see movement in such a key state.

This could be the shortest brilliant political future on record.

Ahnuld may still come back, but odds are not in his favor. I shudder to quote conventional wisdom, but celebrity candidates like him typically have their best day on their first day. They better start way out front, because the novelty fades, hard questions get asked and they start slipping--and others rise as the supremacy of advance name-recognition fades.

Schwarzenegger started with just a ten-point lead--though in percentage terms it seemed huge: 25 to 15--but he has already blown it. Just about a week later, the Field Poll is out and he has dropped to second place: 22% vs. 25% for Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante.

I have yet to hear one good notice about him answering any kind of question effectively. Did he not plan for this? Doesn't seem to have said much of anything.  If he doesn't correct that fast, it will be a fast and furious slide, with him losing and looking like a jackass. Then his career will really be a joke.

Meanwhile, Davis continues to drop precipitously, as Arianna languishes at four percent. You can watch a video just released by her campaign here.

The Denver Post published a magazine-length (4,200-word) would-be expose on its front page today:

A culture of hostility
For 27 years the Air Force Academy has allowed female cadets in its ranks. The roots of the current sexual-assault problem are deeper still, a tangle of abused power and misplaced loyalties.

I'm just making my way through it and will have more later.