The downside of personal fetishes...

Man Wearing Collar Found Dead on Fence
NEW YORK -- A man wearing black leather clothing, a mask and a studded collar was found dead in the West Village in Manhattan Wednesday -- his body dangling by the collar from an iron fence.

It's like your mother's old admonition to always wear clean underwear in case you get in an accident. "If I ever catch sight of you in a leather mask, I'll have a heart attack, I swear. Even if I have to identify your dead body I'll pretend I don't know you."


The body has not yet been identified.

In the news...

NYC Chef Accused of Sex Harassment in Kitchen
NEW YORK -- A waitress filed a $20 million lawsuit Wednesday against a high-end Japanese restaurant in one of the city's trendiest areas, claiming its head cook groped her, molested her with kitchen utensils and sexually harassed her.

It's the phrase "molested her with kitchen utensils" that interests me here. Because if someone has discovered new uses for a ricer I'd like to know about it. And frankly, I have always thought the erotic possibilites of spatulas have never been truly exploited.

Experts find 'smoking gun' spinach
Whaddya call this? Oh yeah, I think it's an "heirloom varietal."

Men and boys

So I went to a bachelor party this past weekend. Going to a bachelor party is rare for me, I guess because I have only a handful of friends good enough to invite me, and most of them do not seem ever inclined to get married. And even if they did, they are not the type to have a bachelor party; this is the downside to being independent minded and out of the mainstream. It's for this same reason I think I have never been to Las Vegas or Atlantic City. I guess I am not so independent-minded and out of the mainstream to think that my life might be poorer for it. One notable thing is that it was a year to the day as the last (and first) bachelor part I went to. This one was quite as much fun, more exhausting, and less scandalous. I suppose the lack of scandal is something to be regretted.

The host of people, twenty men, were all about my age, or since most knew the groom from college, perhaps one or two years older than me. But they were all very similar in some ways. Most had "real" jobs in various corporate sectors (which they didn't spend time talking about); most were married with one or two kids or one on the way; most lived in somewhat suburban settings with one or two cars; the ones who weren't complaining jovially about the knocking they had taken that mnorning while hitting the ski slopes on mountain bikes were recounting their adventures, wins and losses, at the Foxwoods gambling tables the night before. Some lived quite near each other so that their wives and kids were spending the night together, the kids in bed while the wives cut loose; their own night out while the boys played. Many of them were "big" men, "loud" men, real "guys." Although I had little in common with them, a few beers and our common friendship with the groom made such differences vanish. Still, I felt like their kid brother, somehow excluded from the real life of the grown-ups.

There were drugs floating around, some x, some blow. We discovered that at the right hour you can hail a stretch limo in Manhattan. I forget how many beers I had but the evening stretched till after the bars closed in the city, and necessarily included a strip club. I was floating and restless, as I often am while drunk, unwilling to go home to my apartment. So I wandered the village for two hours, until the sun was well up; I was home by 7am, slept until 5 in the evening, watched tv in my underwear for a few hours and got a good night's sleep. Despite that I did not feel recovered until today; not a bad thing, I suppose. But the dissipation of the activities puts me in a strange mood always.

But a good thing. I am looking forward to the wedding.

A most wonderful front page today

All afternoon it seemed to me that CNN.com had the most wonderful array of headlines. Bad news, frightening news, stupid news, a perfect mix right before my eyes. To try and share it with you, I have copied most of it here in it's entirety. My comments are interspersed and the very speacial headlines are bolded.


An astronaut aboard space shuttle Atlantis tells Mission Control they saw a second piece of debris floating near the spacecraft, NASA officials say.

BREAKING NEWS

Thailand in chaos after coup
Thailand's army commander ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra in a military coup while he was in New York, circling his offices with tanks, declaring martial law and revoking the constitution. A televised announcement from the commander ordered all troops to report to duty.
Tanks roll into Bangkok Thai currency falls
Chronology of events Map Gallery Facts
I-Report: Thai coup attempt Send your emails

[this is what the internet is for; to catch those "holy shit!" moments as they happen. I think Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra might want to book his hotel room for a few more nights. Besides which, they've missed the best headline: 'Coup de Thai!' It'll probably be in the Post tomorrow.]

Mystery object delays shuttle landing Video
Iraq says judge ousted in Hussein trial
Bush: Fighting extremism our 'calling' Video

[note that our calling apparently is only fighting other people's extremism; and this is yet another example of the use of 'code words' that sound like reasonable language but have specific meaning among the extreme religious right]

Tests may give clues in E. coli outbreak Map

[this isn't itself a funny headline, but I never thought I'd see the day when the federal government warned the entire American populace against eating spinach. Frankly, I feel like I'm in the midst of a Popeye cartoon. You know the one , where Bluto uses DDT or something to kill the entire annual crop of spinach and Popeye gets absolutely pummeled, until in a brilliant example of breaking the third wall, the film cuts to a shot of a live action kid sitting in the movie theater audience, a kid who just so happens to have stopped by a grocery store and has a can of spinach in his bag, a kid who is somehow able to toss the spinach through the movie screen and into the waiting hands of Popeye, who then proceeds to save the day. Of course you know it.]

Leaders come to pope's defense Gallery

[a headline yeaterday stated "pope implicated in nun's death," which was infinitely funnier and more macabre. Just so you know, I will never, ever, feel sorry for the Pope...or the Catholic Church by and large.]

Race may be motive in abortion kidnap case Video

[So here's a story of parent's who kidnapped their teenage daughter to take her and force her to have an abortion, mainly because the kid's father was black. And to think there were so many other available coercive options that would've not broken the law.]

SI.com: Arrests made in Duquesne shootings

[essentially, someone shot the entire basketball team. I think it's a first.]

Pete Rose to sign, 'I'm sorry I bet on baseball'

[But he will never, ever, be sorry for making money off being sorry.]

Alistair Cooke's fate raises tissue industry issues

[Old story, still funny.]

Smuggled, gloved apes forced to box

[The above headline absolutely resists making sense of. I've been trying all day.]

Mickey Hargitay, Mariska's dad, dead

[Am I the last person to know that Mariska Hargitay is the daughter of Jayne Mansfield?]

Doped 600-pound cow pulled from bottom of well

[Have cattle legalized marijuana? Since when is the bovine world so far ahead of us?]

Gallery: Unjoined twins go home Video

[Not being joined, they're not sure why they were at the hospital in the first place.]

Gibson daughter weds Kenny Wayne Shepherd

[Because it's never been any secret that Mel likes a good shepherd.]

Senator compares Iran's president to Hitler

[Having known both, he is an apparent authority.]

Prolific molester convicted of abuse

[Was he declared innocent of molestation?]

Ex-DHS aide pleads no contest to online sex rap

[The DHS has, and this is not secret, become an apparent dumping ground for otherwise unemployable government workers. But it's still funny when they lose their trials.]

Why is 'me time' such a big deal?

[Just because.]

Scientists: We must return to the moon

[The moon, it calls to us, it neeeeeeds us.]

College Football Power Rankings

[The phrase power rankings reminds me of D&D, and frankly, there really isn't any difference between gamers and stat freaks.]

Famous athletes who spent time in prison

[Trivia one should never forget.]

There Will Be No More Beautiful Days, or, 9/11 on a Platter

I think that sounds like a diner breakfast order, two strips of crispy bacon and a side of (h)ash.

I was thinking I would write down my personal reflections of the event here, as it seems to be what everybody else is doing today. but I don't think I really want to take the time to narrate the complexities of my immediate reaction and activities nor my reflections since then on those events. So I'll bullet point it:

• I was in Boston. I had gotten to work a half hour early and was spending the time surfing the net. The last site I would visit before getting down to work was CNN. Right as I loaded the CNN homepage it was maybe 9:05 and the headline read: "Second Plane Hits World Trade Center". Such a statement really takes a moment to digest, you know what I mean? I remember reading the headline outloud to a coworker who had just walked in, kind of in a "get a load of this" tone. And then the internet froze and we turned on the radio.
• The towers fell while I was on the train ride home after they called for the voluntary evacuation of downtown Boston.
• I spent the rest of the day with my then-wife and my friend Jonathan. We ordered pizza in, drank beer, and watched tv for the rest of the day.
• Two weeks previous I had finished a small artists' book concerning Aberfan, Wales*. Afterwards the book was interpreted as a comment on 9/11, the Bush government, and the war in Aghanistan.
• Aberfan, a long standing interest of mine, reawakened my interest in plane crashes, and September 10th I had spent a few hours reading cockpit and control tower transcripts of air disasters.
• Thankfully, none of my friends or even seceondary or tertiary acquaintances were hurt or in the area that day, though many watched from their rooftops. My friend Chris, as always, had a similar emotional reaction to mine (though he works through those reactions in a different way.) The reaction was that despite the horror, it was also beautiful, though the horrific aspect would prevent us from ever describing it that way; it was the closest any of us might ever get to a thing truly sublime.

And that's all I will say on that. Except for this statement. Having lived in new York for seven years before going to Boston, I had lived through a few, a very few, perfect days like 9/11. Air that was crystaline clear, with a cool breeze and no clouds. All of Manhattan spread out with absolute clarity, devoid of atmospheric perspective. I don't know I have seen one since.

* Aberfan is a town in Wales that was the site of a mining disaster. The town was at the base of hills below the coal mine. Over decades of excavation, the mine had produced a gigantic amount of slag which had also been heaped above the town. One day, the slag fell down, buried a goodly part of the town including, most horrendously, a grammar school where many of the miners' children went. See: Aberfan

For me, Aberfan is emblematic of situations where our most noble and well-intentioned efforts (in this case making a living and supporting our families) backfire in the worst way, inflicting pain and suffering on ourselves and those we strove to protect or support. The secondary irony is that the rescuers were the town's miners, people trained and experienced in digging and excavating, yet when a moment came when their own children were buried beneath rubble, they were shown to be utterly powerless. The book I made, Angels to Aberfan, was a continuation of a line of thought and mode of representing Aberfan I had begun in college and had only just returned to in 2001. It utilized images of spaceships ("angels") that I had first drawn in kindergarten and first grade.

Two days after 9/11 and back at work, I went to a public church memorial on my lunch break. There, the pastor quoted the same Biblical text as was used in the main memorial service at Aberfan. I can't find the citation now, I believe it was the words of Paul.

In the news, or, The Heart is a Lonely Crocodile Hunter

Hunters warned about manhunt area
What a perfect set up fo a horror movie:

"Don't go in the woods....or else, the hunter may become the hunted!"

Pictures show thinner Castro
I think some of the party apparatchiks just got busy with PhotoShop, ala Katie Couric

U.S. voters are angry, poll finds
These results were recovered off the bodies of pollsters dumped at the local precinct.

Europe's spacecraft hits the moon
Which is a shame, as it was aiming for Venus. "We don't really know whatt happened, it's like the moon came out of nowhere" one supervisor reported.