12.07.06

The Trouble With The Universe

Posted in arrrrgh, domesticity, housekeeping at 10:01 am by Hanne Blank

The trouble with the universe is basically that entropy wins. Any one of us may triumph briefly, but ultimately, entropy can count on victory. Even after all that’s left are cockroaches and gonorrhea and huge plastic highway fast-food signs looming high over the decimated landscape on their gigantic aluminum poles like meaningless flags left on the battlefield after a massacre, entropy will still be on the job, nibbling away at the aluminum and injection-molded plastics and seeing to it that eventually the cockroaches die of gonorrhea and the gonorrhea dies of not having any more cockroaches to live in.

But somehow with houses, entropy seems to happen in bursts.

I have empathy for houses falling apart. I really do. For one thing, I have lived in old houses nearly all my life, so I’m well familiar with cracks in plaster and pipes that make weird noises and floorboards that squeal. But also, I realize that houses are nothing but big boxes that stand outside in the rain and the heat and the sunlight and the snow, and on the inside, people do horrible things like let water fall out of holes in the wall, and cook things, and knock holes in the walls to let the light in from outside (when there is plenty of perfectly good light outside, too, if they’d only go there instead), and breathe, producing endless quantities of water vapor that have to go somewhere.

I mean, if you were a big box and people did all those things to you while making you stand outside with no protection from the elements, you’d get a little out of sorts, too. Maybe sometimes you would have a little tantrum.

Like mine did yesterday morning, when I noticed a small but definite quantity of water dripping from out of the light fixture in the middle of my kitchen. This is not a place from which one likes water to drip, water and electricity being a potentially nasty mixture, but it is a place from which water, if trapped in a space between a ceiling and a floor, does indeed like to drip, since the thing about light fixtures in ceilings is that they represent the presence of at least one and possibly multiple holes already made in said ceiling. Easier to flow through a hole that already exists than it is to erode one, and all that. Very Taoist.

So I turned off the light, shoved a large bowl with a dishtowel in it under the (minor) leak, began the massive freakout process, and called the plumber. The massive freakout process is a thing that goes along with water-related house entropy events, because unlike some other classes of house entropy event — a nonfunctional doorknob, for instance, or peeling paint — I know very little about how to diagnose or fix them and because they are beyond my ken they are additionally beyond my personal immediate control, and thus I become easily convinced that anything that happens may very well truly be the tip of some multi-thousand-dollar iceberg of horrible that has already affected multiple areas of my home and will render me penniless and all but homeless during the extended duration of the period required to make the situation even nominally better.

Note that this is true even when the quantity of water is very small, as in this case, where there was a steady drip for about 3 minutes and a few intermittent kerplops for about five minutes after that and then nothing further.

At my plumber’s advice I tested to see whether it was really a pipe issue (filling the tub partway and letting it drain out, flushing the toilet a few times, running water in the sink). It was not. It was, as my plumber, Karnak the Great, successfully diagnosed over the telephone, a problem of caulk and grout.

So, armed with a charming houseguest who read to me from zir new book whilst I labored, I pulled out some really revolting old caulk, which proved to me that indeed it probably was a caulk issue, since a good foot and a half long section of caulk was not exactly adhered to anything, and was just kind of lying there in the gap between the top rim of the tub and the bottom edge of the tiles on the wall growing interesting slimy molds on it.

In my inspections, however, I also realized that there was an area of tile on the lower wall at the far end of the tub where the grout was cracked.

Well. Grout and tile I know from. I did not catastrophize one bit when it came to the grout and the tile. I went and got my utility knife to scrape out the cracked grout with, so that I could get rid of the bad grout and regrout it. Heck, I even have two different colors of polymerized sanded grout in my basement and a big old jug of acrylic admix. At last, something I could handle on my own! With some luck I could get the rest of the caulk out, recaulk, and fix the grouting all before lunchtime.

I was going to be the Home Repair Messiah. I was going to Save the Day. I was going to be the illicit love child of MacGyver and Bob Vila and get up in there and Fix Stuff. Best of all I was going to do it in front of a hot butch who digs capable femmes with tools.
So I went up to scrape out cracked grout. The grout came out easily, as cracked grout tends to do.

Then a 3×3 inch tile fell out of the wall entirely, into my hand. A cascade of crumbled drywall — not greenboard, not tile backer board, and certainly not concrete sheeting like Durock, which is what you ideally want to have behind wall tiles in any wetroom application — fell out after it. I tugged gently on the tile next to the open hole. It came out too. And the one next to that, and the one next to that, with more crumbled drywall falling out into the tub as I went.

I sighed and prodded the gap in the wall. There was some ugly old mildewy plywood. There was some foil insulation backing visible. There was some non-crumbled drywall if I reached up far enough behind the next course of tiles up. It was, in short, precisely the kind of completely shoddy, corners-cut, miserably patched-together home “improvement” job I have come to expect and despise from the people who previously owned this house.

Clearly the day still needed to be saved, but it was not going to be saved by me. Not when the question had now gone from “can I remove and replace the caulk throughout the tub/shower aread, and the grout around a handful of tiles,” to “I wonder how much of this wall needs to be torn out and rebuilt and retiled?” I lack the experience to know how to assess the level of damage to drywall (see above about having lived mostly in old houses), as well as not knowing how to adequately patch a hole of this kind where it had in the past been filled with a mixture of materials.

So I called one of our neighbors, who conveniently happens to be a shaman in the discipline of combatting house-related entropy, or, as they are also known, an experienced interior contractor. His name amongst his people, I believe, is Dances With Drywall. He is a terrifically sweet and kind guy. He has come to look at it. He was suitably chagrinned at the level of crap construction I unearthed, and happy to do the work for us, whatever it ends up taking to fix it. He will come back and work on fixing it later today.

So. No MacGyver points for me. Minus several million Bob Vila points for the jackasses who did the home “improvement” the last time. But three cheers, and more, for Mr. Nels “Dances With Drywall” Shumacher. And, it must be said, for my psychic plumber.

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11.17.06

It’s becoming a tradition…

Posted in arrrrgh, outrage, patriotism, politics, women at 12:34 pm by Hanne Blank

… in the Bu$h administration, it seems, to hand-pick for administrative appointment the precise kind of people who will be the biggest prickliest possible burrs under the saddle of reasonable egalitarianism. The harder they are for anyone else to remove from their hand-picked posts, the better, too, so that the burrs will stay in place as long as possible, and for the remainder of the Shrubidency at the very least.

The latest in this long and infuriating list is a guy named Eric Keroac. You’ve probably never heard of him before. (That’s another Bush hallmark: if you pick people no one knows, it’s less likely that people will have reasons to complain about them. Except, er, not in this case, that’s for sure.) Here’s a little bit of what the WaPo has to say about Eric Keroack [Link]:

The Bush administration has appointed a new chief of family-planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services who worked at a Christian pregnancy-counseling organization that regards the distribution of contraceptives as “demeaning to women.”

Eric Keroack, medical director for A Woman’s Concern, a nonprofit group based in Dorchester, Mass., will become deputy assistant secretary for population affairs in the next two weeks, department spokeswoman Christina Pearson said yesterday.

Keroack, an obstetrician-gynecologist, will advise Secretary Mike Leavitt on matters such as reproductive health and adolescent pregnancy. He will oversee $283 million in annual family-planning grants that, according to HHS, are “designed to provide access to contraceptive supplies and information to all who want and need them with priority given to low-income persons.”

The appointment, which does not require Senate confirmation, was the latest provocative personnel move by the White House since Democrats won control of Congress in this month’s midterm elections. President Bush last week pushed the Senate to confirm John R. Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations and this week renominated six candidates for appellate court judgeships who have previously been blocked by lawmakers. Democrats said the moves belie Bush’s post-election promises of bipartisanship.

The Keroack appointment angered many family-planning advocates, who noted that A Woman’s Concern supports sexual abstinence until marriage, opposes contraception and does not distribute information promoting birth control at its six centers in eastern Massachusetts.

“A Woman’s Concern is persuaded that the crass commercialization and distribution of birth control is demeaning to women, degrading of human sexuality and adverse to human health and happiness,” the group’s Web site says.

You know what’s really demeaning to women? Assuming that not having any voluntary control whatsoever over their fertility ennobles them.
You know the address to write to about this, right? 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, D.C., 20500.

I always have the feeling I should be using really short words when I send nastygrams to Shrub, but have yet to actually give in to the temptation. You do as you will on that score. But do be a good patriot and write and tell Mr. Bush that he’s making a wrong choice, won’t you? The wellbeing of your fellow countrywomen is on the line.

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11.15.06

Catholic Church Opposed To The Gay, Film At 11

Posted in arrrrgh, culture, politics, relationships, sexuality at 9:12 am by Hanne Blank

I confess that I was somewhat surprised to see, as I opened my morning e-mail of the day’s headlines from the Washington Post, that “3 Christian Groups Move To Condemn Gay Sex” was, for some reason, considered to be news. [Link]

Naturally, because I am apparently a well-trained little monkey who cannot physically prevent myself from clicking on any link in which the words “gay sex” appear, I decided to go look at the article. Whereupon I discovered that, in a stunning volte-face, the Catholic Church has decided to (yawn) reaffirm its institutional condemnation of same-sex nookie, yet apparently feels that this is not in any way contradictory to the spirit of inclusivity. “The truth is always welcoming,” quoth Bishop Arthur J. Serratelli of New Jersey.

Well, when the truth is that homosexual liaisons — particularly between men — have been an unspoken staple of Church life in and out of the monastery for oh, at least a millennium and a half now, I guess I can see how it might be welcoming in a sorta secret handshake kind of way. (From what I understand from the few folks I know who’ve spent long periods within the resolutely homosocial Catholic clerical establishment, that’s not necessarily too far off.)

And not in any way to equate homosexuality and pederasty, but, er, doesn’t it strike anyone else as being just a wee tiny bit disingenuous for the Church to come out waggling its big cartoon finger (hi, Anne!) at The Gay when it continues to protect its own altar-boy-buggerers? Are we to assume that what they really mean is that consensual homosexual sex between adults is capital-W Wrong, but sex between an ordained member of the Catholic clergy and a child below the legal age of consent is A-OK?

(There’s a transubstantiation joke in there somewhere, but damned if I’ve had enough caffeine yet to be able to make it.)

Oh, also, it seems that Baptists from North Carolina are down on sodomy, and the Presbyterians in Pittsburgh are about to go after one of their ministers for marrying a lesbian couple. You know how the Presbyterians get. (Scottish. Which explains a great deal. As a friend recently explained, in Scotland you can’t go encouraging fornication. Because that might lead to dancing.)

Methinks the clergy doth protest too much, really. Not necessarily that they’re all secretly queer, though some of them probably are. But these sorts of “we’re still against The Gay, you know” statements surely do smack of the rantings of a discomfited old codger shaking his fist at those dang young people, out there hooting and hollering and wearing tight trousers and doing God knows what all… that no one else is finding in the slightest bit remarkable any more.

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10.31.06

Imagine Rick Santorum or Bill Frist hiding under your bed when you’re having sex…

Posted in arrrrgh, outrage, patriotism, politics, sexuality, women at 11:59 am by Hanne Blank

… because that day is creeping closer and closer.

I wanted it to just be some crazy Hallowe’en stunt, but it seems not. Courtesy of the Kaiser Daily Women’s Health Policy Report:

Newly revised federal guidelines have expanded the scope of the $50 million Title V abstinence education grant program to include unmarried adults up to age 29, USA Today reports (Jayson, USA Today, 10/31). …According to Wade Horn, HHS assistant secretary for children and families, the revised guidelines for 2007 are aimed at people ages 19 to 29 because recent data show that more unmarried women in that age group are having children. “We wanted to remind states they could use these funds not only to target adolescents,” Horn said. The revised guidelines stipulate that states applying for the grants are “to identify groups … most likely to bear children out of wedlock, targeting adolescents and/or adults within the 12- through 29-year-old age range.” (Kaiser Daily Women’s Health Policy Report, 10/27).

Yes, that’s right. Abstinence-only sex education is being encouraged not only for public-school-aged students (no, I will not say “public-school-aged children” because for a bunch of reasons, I do not think that’s an appropriate term to use when referring to adolescents — and neither does the U.S. government, apparently, since they think high school is old enough to expect students to sign up as part of the Junior ROTC and learn how to be good little soldiers for the Shrubbian jihad) but for people who are legal adults, technically entitled to the freedoms of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

The official rationale is that single women under the age of 30 are having more children out of wedlock.

(Shock, horror, general alarum. General failure to notice that everywhere else in the industrialized world, women are increasingly choosing to bear at least their first child as unmarried women. This is particularly true in northern Europe. In Sweden, for example, 70% of cohabiting couples who have a child have the child first, then marry within five years of the child’s birth. I note that Sweden is still trundling along just fine, churning out those cunning little flat-pack Ikea dining room sets just like anything. And interestingly enough, Sweden is officially a Protestant country.)

The real rationale is that the Shrubbian jihad isn’t only being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, folks, it’s being fought right here at home and one of its goals is to bring your lives in line with someone else’s patriarchal repressive fundamentalist Christian version of where, how, and with whom you should be having a sex life.

If you live in one of the states that accepts Title V, Section 510b funding — and unless you live in California, Maine, New Hampshire, or Pennsylvania, you do — get off your duff and start writing some snarly letters to your congresscritters. I would, personally, suggest that when you do, you call for the firing of HHS assistant secretary Wade Horn, who may be only a figurehead but still needs a swift Doc Marten to the buttcheek for form’s sake if nothing else. Regardless of where you live, letters to your congresscritters and to Mike Leavitt, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services are definitely in order (the HHS address is: U.S. Department of Health & Human Services · 200 Independence Avenue, S.W. · Washington, D.C. 20201).

I have never been a fan of abstinence-only “sex education.” It is one of the few things for which I will never forgive Bill Clinton (the legislation that provides funding for it was first enacted during his administration, in 1996). But there is a big honking line between directing your tiresome (and ineffective, and inaccurate, and po-faced, and hypocritical, and farfetched, and…) propaganda at minors in public schools, where state governments do indeed have the right to require whatever curricula they deem appropriate are taught, and deciding that it is appropriate to go out and flail the same tiresome bullshit at legal adults.

The federal government has no business telling you what you can and cannot do with your consenting adult genitals. They want very badly to change this. This is how they’re getting their foot into your bedroom door.

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