I don’t play computer games, but my former boss is a real Sim City addict, so I know a little about how that works.
An article posted at Bloomberg.com yesterday reports:
The U.S. military plans a worldwide on-line futures market to help it predict events in the Middle East. Traders could bet on the likelihood of events ranging from the overthrow of a government to the collapse of an economy or the assassination of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
[snip]
The market is to be managed by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. DARPA spokesman John Jennings wasn’t immediately available for comment. The senators said their information came from the market’s Web site.
The site doesn’t make clear the extent to which traders, geopolitical analysts or ordinary citizens actually “bet,” the mechanics of payment if any, and how the Pentagon plans to use the information.
Somwhere along the line these guys and their Dumbya leader have gotten pretend game-playing and real-life confused. (Although certainly this tendency among men hungry for power is not new. I just finished Poisonwood Bible, which reflects all too painfully how most of us have to live our lives staying out of the range of influence of those kinds of evil male-dominated machinations.)
It’s time to hook these infantile guys up to a VR Sim Planet game and let them play out their fantasies of power and persecution to their dark hearts’ content. Then maybe the rest of us can find a way to work together to make the real world the kind of place in which our grandchildren can thrive. Feh on them all!

Sisterhood and wisecracks: That’s how Joanne Weintraub of Milwaukee’s Journal Sentinal describes my favorite sitcom of all times, Designing Women. (Well, maybe after Northern Exposure, which made me laugh out loud too, but for different reasons.)
I couldn’t resist tuning into parts of the Designing Women reunion show that aired tonight, and I hooted and hollered at the old clips all over again and cheered on Dixie Carter as her character launched into her clever and clipped diatribes about the nonsense that women not-so-patiently put up with, particularly from men.
Its characters talked about things real women talk about, from politics to pantyhose. There’s a clip from an episode where Mary Jo (Potts) deliberates getting implants that may be both the funniest and most honest discussion a TV character has ever had about breasts. (from Weintraub’s article)
Small-chested Mary Jo carries on about how powerful she feels with bigger (temporary) breasts. If she were a “D,” she muses, she’d probably punch someone out. And her descriptions of how differently men treat her and her bigger breasts are as hilarious as they are unfortunately realistically accurate.
I think I’ve seen every episode more than twice since they started airing in 1986 and moved into re-runs in the early 90s. The characters are feisty and fallible, smart and sexy. They are not girls. They are women. They like themselves, they like each other, they like men, and they like to laugh at their own human foibles.
Hot, sexy, strong, femine, feminist W-O-M-E-N.

Every so often, I start seeing the numbers 11:11. What’s really spooky is that I’m not the only one.

It started several years ago, and I wrote about it somewhere on my old weblog but I can’t seem to locate the post. It started with purchases that totaled $11.11. Or change from purchases. Then, it seemed like every time I looked at a digital clock, it said 11:11. I go through spurts like that every once in a while.

It’s happening again. At least with the clocks — in my car, my bedroom, the VCR. I understand that it’s likely that somewhere in my subconscious I’m telling myself to look at a clock when I sense it’s that time. But that doesn’t explain why it only happens every so often, with no logical reason why it should start again.

I’m an irreverent non-believer, which you might not believe because I love to conjure rituals and am fascinated by synchronicities — especially because everything in life really happens so randomly.

Some people are born into poverty and ignorance and some into affluence and privilege. Some get cancer and some depressed and some breeze through life full of joy and energy.

Yesterday, I relaxed for a couple of hours at a friend’s pool — gossiping, reading, book-reviewing, keeping cool and privileged in a manicured back yard of the lovely home that she got in her divorce settlement. And across the city and across the world, others sweltered, suffered, starved. It’s a crapshoot that we begin where we begin.

One one one one. The beginning number. 11:11. Supposedly it means that I’m on the right track. I sure don’t feel like it.

It’s spooky.

My newspaper today had a column by Andy Rooney bemoaning the fact that his “voice” had been stolen by someone who was circulating something (racist and vitriolic) on the Internet that claimed to have been written by Rooney. It was written in his unique staccato style, and while many readers emailed Rooney to say that they know he couldn’t have written something like that, others were taken in by the accurate stylistic parody. I don

— Drive back and forth to Boston twice in six days.
— Decorate with an

Word is out that Ann Craig (once a blogger, always a blogger) needs our good wishes, good thoughts, good vibes.
And so I conjure mine — a healing blue bindrune for skin diseases (coincidentally configured like an “M”) contained by a conch shell whose center radiates harmony and healing and whose root grows life-affirming green.

a full moon on the 13th
and magic from the sea
signs life to sisters
under the skin
Meditate on this and be well, Ann.

I’m getting ready for my one and only grandchild’s vist this week to celebrate his first birthday, and I can’t imagine loving any grandchild any more than I love him.
At the same time, I’m having this odd thought: the female lineage of my family ends with my daughter. Her one and only child is a boy. The generations of my family’s genes that have been passed down from mother to daughter for centuries ends with her. She is past forty and will be having no more children. No daughters.
Our last photo of four generations of women was taken when my daughter was about six months old and I was in my twenties and my mother was in her forties and my grandmother was in her sixties. No more passing down of family genes and secrets and stories and myths from daughter to daughter to daughter….. Something I’ve always taken for granted is gone.
Well, I might not someday be watching Alexander bounce around in a tu-tu, but I sure will pass along to him our family secrets and stories and myths, and I’m sure even a few of my wayward genes. Maybe he’ll even let me teach him to ballroom dance.
In the real world, the end of this female line doesn’t really make much difference. But in my mythic one, it feels somehow important, and I’m sure that there is a poem to be written about this after I let the feeling simmer for a while.

Outgoing Oregon Symphony conductor gave a graduation speech recently that all Americans need to hear.
Artists are truth-tellers, and, as an artist, James DePreist began his address with the painful truth of today:
Graduates, the world in which we live is a mess. Myth masquerading as truth, our beloved United States in crisis, many of its fundamental principles under assault. And yet, a goodly number of your fellow Americans seem oblivious…sleepwalking through these alarming times, heedless and gullible beyond belief. Our country simply cannot afford this and our hard won freedoms cannot long bear the weight of an unenlightened citizenry. This has nothing whatsoever to do with the unspeakable horror of September 11th or the very real menace of world terrorism. History has clearly shown that the ultimate weapon of mass destruction for any society is ignorance.
His poetic and passionate plea to confront “the tragic bittersweet chasm between dream and reality, between a nation’s words and its deeds…beauty in the wings” urges us to accept our Constitutional responsibilities as American citizens:
You must find the ideas that our society needs to hear and make your country heed your words. At the 1964 Republican convention Sen. Barry Goldwater let fly this provocative clarion reaffirmation: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Could the senator have been thinking of the Declaration of Independence and our revolutionary war led by that ragtag band of left-wing extremists like Washington, Jefferson, and Patrick Henry? Just imagine the list of those who today could rally ’round the banner emblazoned with Goldwater’s words. Over here