The Wood Shed and the General

General Stanley McChrystal. Suicide mission? Or balls of steel? Now has them pinned to the wall by a pissed off El Presidente. I like the reaction from the White House. Swift and with an injection of testosterone, the muscle flexing left no doubt who was in charge. I have to admit, though, in a sick perverse way, the General let it fly and said things that well, I have dreamed of (many, many times): unleashing, a virtual firestorm, on weak groundless leaders. Jaw dropping, yes. Brutally skewing in the kind of grunt level sarcasm learned from years of trench toiling under pie-in-the-sky civilian administrators who have unrealistic expectations and water cooler diplomacy. You betcha. How did we in the real world survive? By dodging orders and doing it our way. No big surprise. Unless you're in the military and 'only following orders,' or you are the four star general who publicly goes ape in Rolling Stone (I find that a misnomer) for the whole world to read. I get that the General is frustrated. Being on a leash is tough. It's a piss-pot of a war, and we should be outta there. Guys are dying and Washington wants restraint. Let the Afghans go back to their poppy fields. The Iraqs back to whatever. And bring the boys home. Interestingly, Stan and his buddies like Hillary (who knew?), leaving her unscathed in the article, because she supports his efforts on the front lines. On a jet bound for Washington, and 1. soon to be taken to the wood shed by our elected leader, or 2. dropping on his sword while the whole world watches, at this time next week the General could be pushing papers in the USA or sitting on his front porch staring off into the distance watching the dandelions grow.

Real Scatter Shots

1. So BP is getting slammed with 20 billion. Half a continent away, and 35 years later, the Agent orange fallout from the Vietnam war continues to leave a painful legacy. A panel of policymakers, Vietnamese and US, have urgently recommended that Washington pay 300 million (a mere drop in the proverbial slush fund) to clean up the chemical damage from the 20 million gallons of Agent orange/dioxin dumped on South Vietnam from the air between '62 and '71. Agent orange was used to defoliate the forest (better to detect guerrilla fighters) and to destroy crops. Dioxin not only seeped into the soil but defoliated 5 million acres of forest. More insidious however, Agent orange is under the microscope as being responsible for hideous birth defects and continual health problems in the population surrounding contaminated areas. Washington has been reluctant to address the issue claiming it needs more scientific proof.

2. Campbell's soup is recalling 15 million pounds of the popular Spaghetti Os with meatballs, Spaghetti Os A to Z with meatballs, and Spaghetti Os fun shapes with meatballs (cars). Car meatballs? This I want to see. Evidently a cooker in Paris, Texas malfunctioned, under cooking the meat in the balls. Linked to a batch bar coded circa 2008, most of which has unfortunately already been consumed, 35,000 cases are still roaming USA market aisles. At this point, Campbell execs just need to drop on their swords and hope that the 35,000 cases come home to Texas.

3. Utah. Mormie nation. Ronnie Lee Gardner learned early Friday morning that they still shoot murderers in 'BYoungland.' Death by firing squad. WTF? Is this the 1800's? Target pinned to the chest, 5 guys pulled the trigger. Four bullets, one blank.

4. Sarah never smoked, but she impaled herself once again by declaring that firing up a joint in one's residence is uh, no one's business, compared to society's other problems. Up in Humboldt,CA. there's laughter in the hills...

5. World Cup. Raised on NFL pablum, soccer is a bit tough to digest. However, where there is sport, there is action: a stab in the dark...predicted winner, Argentina or the Netherlands.

'Lazing on a sunny afternoon...'

The harpies always started circling at the end of May. It was the same refrain every summer: get a job, or enlist in 6 weeks of summer school. The one significant upside to my adolescent allergies was that it saved my bacon from toiling in the Dole pineapple cannery; once an employment beacon, every kid searching for a summer job could count on being hired by the cannery. Today, the rubber gloved assembly line and the rolling pineapples are a relic of the past. Dole has moved on to cheaper labor in the Philippines and Thailand, but keeps a working plantation on the North Shore of Oahu primarily for tourism purposes. Looking back on all of those high school summers, the math classes were insignificant. Typing 101 was 'user friendly.' Etiquette classes. WTF? And so it went. Kept by daylight. Howling at night. The classic summer cocktail for juvenile shenanigans. Youth has given way to wisdom and treachery. The boys of summer are on the diamond. The Indy 500 has come and gone. World Cup is about to descend. The tomatoes are flowering. The beans are massing. The faaavas have been eaten with Chianti. And the summer reading list has fruited:

1. Any volume of the cult phenomenon Steig Larsson trilogy. The last volume 'Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest' has just been released in hard cover. Soft cover order from the UK for about the same price. The writing might not be exceptional. However, this trilogy is the ultimate summer read.

2. Abraham Verghese's, 'Cutting for Stone.' A great work of fiction by the senior associate chair for theory and practice of medicine at the Stanford school of Medicine.

3. 'Wolf Hall' by Hilary Mantel. What's not to like? It's the two Tom's...Cromwell vs More; Henry vs the Pope. The Boleyn's vs everyone. And the Seymour's in waiting at Wolf Hall.

4. Any work of fiction by Jennifer Egan. A brilliant short story writer...a favorite of the NY Yorker. As good as or maybe better than Ann Beattie.

5. If you can find it...used: 'Foxfire' by Joyce Carol Oates. Written in the style of an adolescent. A bit dated, about a girl gang (!), really not that kind of gang, but interesting; hey, when was the last time anyone read a book about hard scrabble adolescent girls? Here's some trivia...the book was made into a movie and became the first 'real' film that starred Angie Jolie as the character 'Legs' Sadovsky. The movie was filmed in Portland which gave it a poignant quality. Good coming of age fare.

6. 'The Nasty Bits,' a salty, entertaining read by jaded rogue chef, Anthony Bourdain. We love his candor and his outrageous flair.

7. 'War' by Sebastian Junger.

Scatter shots

1. Louisiana just can't catch a break. New Orleans fresh off a super bowl win, and the city in the middle of a revitalization push, got jobbed again. 5,000 feet down, and blowing oil, BP's titanic blunder has sunk the gulf coast shrimp, and oyster industry. Even though, oysters and shrimps have not yet shown any residual effects, who is going to harvest the marine beds when all the boats in the gulf are being used for the clean-up of the disaster, and who exactly in omnivore nation is going to be ordering Gulf coast anything after this debacle? Floridians are growing nervous as blobs of oil begin to wash up on their shoreline. The latest poll shows that 68% of the public are pointing the finger at BP and the Obama administration. The spewing oil poisoning the ecosystem should be a a fucking wake up for proponents of off shore oil drilling. Where are the federal regulations? This is a man-made catastrophe and stands alone in it's disturbing uncontainment.

2. Bud Selig. He ruled today that umpire, Jim Joyce's 'safe' call would remain on record in Armando Galarraga's quest for baseball's 21st perfect game. This was a golden opportunity for Selig to step up to the plate and set the record straight. But, Selig could not pull the trigger and reverse the call. Baseball purists like to think that their game is the perfect sport. And geometrically it is. There is beauty in the dimensions; 90 feet between bases, and 60 feet from mound to home plate. It's a sport controlled by a very subjective high or low strike zone. In Wednesday's game, perfection was denied by human error and ultimately the next day by a poor judgment call.

3. Andre Voznesensky. A popular poet and a sometime pain in the ass to the Soviet Union circa 1960-70's, post Stalin era died this past week. He was 77. Voznesensky and Yevgeny Yevtushenko were 2 of the most charismatic Russians poets of their day; both could fill stadiums when they read. In 1972, Voznesensky toured the USA and gave a reading sponsored by Ferlinghetti's, City Lights, at the Project Artuad in San Francisco. My sister and I on a run of City Lights readings (the photo was taken by Beth Bagby who was at the reading and worked as a photojournalist for the City Lights poetry series) which included Ginsburg, McClure, and others, sat slack jawed as Voznesensky regaled the jammed Artaud in blustering Slavic lyrics. There wasn't a translator. We were mesmerized by his recitations.

4. Tipper and Al. Splitting up? Really? Notification officially sent out as an email. Really, Al? An email?