Tuesday, December 10, 2002

Northern Californian writer Anne Lamott returns to writing a column for Salon.com. You gotta love someone with hair like that. Anne's back! OK, I am not into doing promos for Salon.com, perhaps especially because Salon hasn't recognized my weblog even once in its almost-three-month existence.  (Not one to hold a grudge, I do financially support Salon, however; recently I renewed my Salon Premium subscription.  My understanding is that they really could use the money...  And I guess that my weblog is dependent upon their staying afloat.) But I am a big fan of Anne's and I'm glad that she's writing regularly again for Salon.  (It makes me feel like I'm getting more of my money's worth.) Not too terribly long ago I saw Anne speak at the University of California, Davis.  She spoke mostly about writing and was witty and engaging.  And she's one of those writers about whom they write on the back flap of the dust jacket, "lives in Northern California."  I find that I love writers who live in Northern California. Anyway, check out Anne's new column, in which she talks about finding hope -- "If we survived one George Bush, we can survive them all" -- in times like these. 6:18:34 PM    Feedback []

'toontime (Click on cartoon to view full-sized version.) This is cartoonist and weblogger Mikhaela Blake Reid's latest 'toon. Every once in a while, a Republican gets caught up in the moment and lets the wolf's fur show from beneath the fleece. "President" Bush, for instance, once "joked":  "If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator." Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott had such a fur-showing moment last week at a ceremony for Sen. Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday.  The New York Times reported that Lott said this:  "I want to say this about my state [Mississippi]:  When Strom Thurmond ran for president [in 1948 on a pro-segregationist platform], we voted for him.  We're proud of it.  And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either." Lott's "defense," Salon reported, is that his comments "were not an endorsement of [Thurmond's] positions of more than 50 years ago, but of a man and his life." Yeah, right.  Lott's racist, stupid white male slip-up sounds a lot like Charlton Heston's in "Bowling for Columbine." As California Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who starts as House Democratic leader next month, said of Lott, "He can apologize all he wants.  It doesn't remove the sentiment that escaped his mouth that day." 12:18:42 PM    Feedback []