But first, a little music...

Okay, so I haven't exactly gone out and done much exploring yet. I did go to Atkins Market and buy some cider donuts, and I'd like to tell you about Atkins - which I think of as the Wal-Mart of farm stands (but in a good way) - at some point, but not right now. First it needs to not be winter anymore so that they can get some produce that doesn't come from Central America and I can tell you how wonderful it is. I can tell you that the cider donuts are deadly (also in a good way), but I don't want to give too much away just yet.

In the meantime, then, I'd like to share with you one of my favorite finds of recent months. This is La Blogotheque. Do you know La Blogotheque? Don't feel bad: neither did I. It's a YouTube channel from France that has many, many videos of many, many great bands doing unusual live performances, most often in the streets and courtyards of Paris. It is, I gather, the most-subscribed YouTube channel in France, but most of the artists they feature are American or at least English-speaking, so there's no reason we can't join the fun as well. We did, after all, save their asses in WWII.

So when I say great bands doing unusual live performances, here's what I mean: Fleet Foxes (and their beards) doing acapella harmonies sitting in a park, Man Man (go Philly!) banging on railings and trash cans and the bicycle helmets of passersby, the boys from Beirut doing their thing on a street corner, Will Sheff of Okkervil River with his guitar in another park. Sufjan Stevens sings a song on a rooftop in Cincinatti, which isn't exactly France, but he is coaxed into it by a very persistent French videographer. Andrew Bird, Grizzly Bear, Arcade Fire, Architecture in Helsinki, Au Revoir Simone, I'm From Barcelona, Jose Gonzalez, Yeasayer, The Shins, Menomena... I could spend days here. And I probably will (it's so much easier than what I'm supposed to be doing).

My favorite videos so far, the ones I have deemed worthy of inclusion in the ToaPN Hall of Fame, if I ever get one built, are the following:

1. Bon Iver's stunning version of "Skinny Love" before a small, transfixed gathering in what appears to be a basement. The song is, as you know, one of the best songs written in this or any other century, and this performance nearly made me cry.



2. Herman Dune (which, I believe, is a band rather than a guy), armed only with a guitar and a strange plastic toy instrument thingy, singing "123 Apple Tree" in a laundromat (while people are trying to get their laundry done) before taking it to the streets with another song in the best-ever category, "I Wish that I Could See You Soon." The best part, as you will no doubt notice, is the bear costume that the principal Dune is wearing throughout the performance.



Among many other things, these videos have given me serious Parislust. When I was in grad school I threatened many times to drop out and move there (I have some dear Parisian friends whose willingness to provide me with shelter and food was a crucial presumption underlying the whole scheme), but clearly that didn't happen, and I haven't been back in years. I have, however, just written a paper proposal for a conference on colonial policing that's taking place at the Sorbonne in November, so maybe I'll find myself there again before long. And when I do, I plan to track down Mr Blogotheque and give him a big wet French kiss.

What I See

I've been reading a collection of stories by Joseph Roth in a book called What I Saw. Roth was an Austrian journalist and novelist living in Berlin in the 1920s - he moved to Paris in 1925 and stopped coming to Berlin in 1933, reasoning, correctly, that the life of a left-wing Jewish intellectual wouldn't be worth much under the new Nazi regime - and he wrote prolifically, churning out at least 19 books and innumerable newspaper pieces during a career that barely lasted two decades. The stories in What I Saw aren't really stories but rather vignettes (or feuilletons, as his translator calls them), short pieces describing tiny little corners of Berlin life: a seedy bar, a visit to a barbershop, a stroll through the Jewish quarter. At his best Roth uses these settings to sketch a tantalizing picture of the rough edges of Weimar-era Berlin - the outcasts and the dispossessed, barflies, call-girls, street sweepers, the same people who would later populate Joseph Mitchell stories and Tom Waits songs - and at his worst he comes across as a surly old curmudgeon, griping about the newfangled elevators in the department stores or the glowing fluorescent lights in a diner.

I had never heard of Roth until my brother and I stumbled into the Joseph Roth Cafe in Berlin last summer. Okay, we didn't exactly stumble into it - we collapsed into it after a long and very tiring search for a decent dinner spot near Potsdamer Platz, a search that only ended after we found the Joseph Roth in our guidebook and, giving up on Potsdamer Platz, hiked across town on aching legs in search of it. It was, under the circumstances, the best possible solution to our problem - a ragged, homey, divey sort of place with Roth quotes on the walls, a collection of his books, and the coldest beer and warmest Schnitzel I've ever tasted. It made for Roth, deservedly or not, a permanent warm spot in my heart, and it looked like this:



I bring up Roth because his Berlin vignettes are inspiring me to return to my original goal for this blog, or at least one of my original goals, which was to provide a glimpse of what life here in the Happy Valley looks and feels like. I'm aware that I've strayed from this goal a bit - I got a little distracted by the whole London thing, and then I keep finding fun stuff on the internet that I want to share, and now there's all this grody February weather, which has me a bit down and makes me not want to go outside or to take much interest in the things I encounter when I'm out there. But February's about to end, the gritty 3-month-old snow is about to melt, and, though the next several weeks will still be slushy and cold, the world will slowly begin to look alive again. And as it does, there are many, many things that I'm going to need to tell you about, from Calvin Coolidge and Sylvester Graham to butterfly gardens and french toast.

It's gonna be great. Like, obscure-Austrian-writer-who-died-alone-and-alcoholic-in-Paris- in-1939 great.

In the meantime, in this season of renewal, please allow your spirit to be transported by the following rendition of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy":

Notes from a Conference

I just came back from a two-day conference here in the Valley on violence. It was one of my fellowship duties to attend the conference and to provide a formal response to one of the papers presented, which I happily did. Unlike most other academic conferences I've attended, this was a small affair - about 15 people attended - and instead of standing at a podium reading papers to an audience, the presenters were asked to circulate their papers several weeks in advance and then to give short, informal overviews of their papers while sitting around a large conference table. To my way of thinking, this format is far preferable to the usual way of doing things, insofar as it not only provides everyone with a common textual foundation from which to start a discussion, but it also allows for a more intimate and unstructured exchange of ideas. I enjoyed all this very much, and the narrow thematic focus - we were all people who study violence in one form or another, albeit from different disciplinary perspectives - made it all the more engaging.

That said, there's one thing that perplexed me about the conference - the same thing, in fact, that has perplexed me about the many other conferences I've attended. This is the question of why I bother taking notes at these things. By this point in my career I've amassed a sizable pile of scribblings on all sorts of media - legal pads, post-its, napkins, the backs of printouts - created during conferences, seminars, and the like. Sometimes these represent ideas or themes that occur to me while listening to a speaker and that I may use during the ensuing discussion as prompts for a question I'd like to raise or an observation I'd like to make. More often, though, they're a collection of phrases or ideas that seemed worth jotting down at the time but whose coherence, even five minutes after the conference has ended, has completely vanished. I don't know why I keep these notes - it's not as though I'm ever going to look at them - but, more to the point, I don't know why I take them in the first place.

I suspect it has something to do with the note-taking training we receive in college - not only the notion that we're supposed to take notes when we're undertaking some sort of serious intellectual endeavor, but, perhaps more powerfully, the notion that we should be seen to be taking notes in order to look fully engaged or knowledgeable. Every college student will be familiar with the experience of sitting in class, daydreaming away, when suddenly the room erupts in a flurry of notetaking prompted by something the professor has said, something that the collective wisdom of the room has determined to be important or, at the very least, likely to appear on the exam. What do you do in such a situation? Of course you begin taking notes as well, even if you don't really know what's been said, so as not to look like you don't know what's going on. Notetaking becomes more about performance than about obtaining or retaining knowledge. It becomes a social activity rather than an intellectual one.

The tangible results of this activity are, as I say, completely worthless from an intellectual perspective, but I nevertheless believe that these strange, incomprehensible jottings do have some value. That value is, I believe, aesthetic. These notes are quite poetic, in their way, and they evoke all sorts of associations and images that often have nothing to do with whatever matter was actually being discussed at the time of their creation, but that seem to exist in their own dreamlike world. By way of illustrating this idea, I herewith present to you, gentle reader, a transcript of the notes I took during six hours of presentations and discussions:

- perlocutionary speech produces an effect - persuasive speech
- elocutionary - speech that's an effect in itself - apologizing, etc.
- focus of paper - this is the violent speech act
- simultaneity of physical & linguistic activity explodes agency
- anonymous speech - attempt to deny your own agency

- Frame the everyday w/i the global

- how does violence become normal?
- innocents & guilty
- complicity in acceptance of wall as normal
- Bergeson

- radical right is central component of "mainstream" conservatism
- Alice in Wonderland

- how to read the body? How to tell who's a Muslim by visible signs
- Absence of standing languages
- aesthetic vs. political representation -
aesthetic assumes tacit consent by Muslims
- in colonial period, punishment for traitors is to deny religious rites on death
- doesn't want to stablize given Muslim subject
- consent & assimilation
- Brian Masumi on fear - post 9/11 - thru color coded system gvt invades bodies
- loss of words
- tendency to conflate perpetrators of violence w/ causes of violence
- in writing about violence, how much do we say? We know bad things happen, don't have to say everything
- Violence = essentially unstable object
- don't know how to connect external expression & inner life
- everything they're saying about violence could also be said about love*

- Abu Ghraib photos reinforce hierarchy

- Read Norman Mailer's Executioner's Song


Now I'm going to take these notes and put them in a folder somewhere, so that I'll always have them when I need them.

---
*This is my favorite note of the series. At a certain point I began imagining that every time someone said "violence" they were really saying "love", and it all fit perfectly - love is fundamentally unstable, unrepresentable, ultimately unknowable, we can't define it but we know it when we see it, etc. I thought about bringing this up, but decided against it.

Breathin Red White and Blue

I made two very big mistakes yesterday. The first was going to see Clint Eastwood's new movie, Gran Torino, about which I had read a pretty glowing review by Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. This is not the first time ol' Manohla has led me astray, but I have vowed that it will be the last - she now joins the Boston Globe's Wesley Morris and former LA Times critic Kevin Thomas on my small but growing list of Movie Critics Not To Trust. Not that all the blame is hers: I confess to being a bit too easily swayed by reviews, not just of movies, but also of albums, restaurants, and any other item of consumption that I take the time to research before experiencing myself. And I confess to a very strong tendency to frontload many of my activities with lots and lots of research, often to the point of excess, as one or two ex-girlfriends and travel companions will tell you. It's not that I'm incapable of forming my own opinions of these things once I experience them - again, often to the point of excess - but rather that in making the initial decision to commit time and resources to undertaking an activity, I tend to rely on the advice of others, and too often these others are reviewers, either professional or amateur, whose judgment and/or taste is simply unsound. It's quite a problem.

I won't say much about the movie itself, except to note that there were several scenes that were so poorly acted, or so toe-curlingly cloying, or so larded with ham-fisted symbolism (if I may be permitted to mix two meat-based metaphors), that, had I not been hemmed in on both sides by my fellow moviegoers, I would have fled the theater. Do you know the story of the movie? Clint Eastwood is a Korean War vet and retired auto worker who's just lost his wife, is estranged from his sons, and is steeped in a racist rage at the steady infiltration of his Detroit neighborhood by Asian immigrants, specifically people of the Hmong culture. After a series of misunderstandings between Clint and his new neighbors, which usually involve Clint sticking a gun in somebody's face, or growling racist epithets, or both, the two cultures gradually come to understand one another, primarily through Clint's relationship with the teenage boy next door, for whom he becomes a sort of surrogate father. I won't give away the ending, the symbolism of which is not only lardy and ham-fisty but postively carcinogenic, but accept it as a measure of the movie's overall badness when I say that its highlights, comedic and otherwise, consist entirely of the scenes when Clint is pointing guns and growling racist epithets. Partly, I suppose, to compensate for my inability to escape, I found myself chuckling and enjoying these scenes immensely, presented, as they were, with a knowing wink to the hard-bitten vigilante characters that he inhabited in the Dirty Harry and Spaghetti Western flicks. At least I hope the wink was knowing.

My second mistake yesterday was arriving at the movie theater about five minutes early. I hadn't been to this theater before - it's the big multiplex in the area, in the mall out on Route 9 - and I'd forgotten that when going to movies at multiplexes one has to expect to have one's senses assaulted for about 5-10 minutes with loud, long, heavily-produced commercials that begin playing before the trailers, and sometimes well before the advertised showtime. This is how I encountered the new Kid Rock / Dale Earnhardt Jr. ad for the National Guard. Now don't get me wrong, I love militarism, and NASCAR, and cock-rock, any of which can enhance the moviegoing experience just as much as a big carton of Junior Mints and a bucket of popcorn. But I can't take all three of them together, particularly when they're deployed in the following manner:



Now, if you're wondering what driving fast cars around in circles has to do with the National Guard, then clearly you're not paying enough attention to what the US military has been up to over the last few years. Amidst all the talk about spreading democracy, destroying the enemies of freedom, and defending civilization from the barbarians, one aspect of our foreign policy that has received relatively little attention in the liberal media is our construction, in association with the Big Three automakers, of world-class NASCAR arenas all over the Middle East and central Asia. Hey, the British Empire introduced cricket to all sorts of places, from Trinidad to Malaysia - why shouldn't we use our imperial might to spread our own, much less faggoty sports around the globe? Especially if it helps out the troubled domestic auto industry? What?

My favorite part of the video, though, is when the little brown kid with the big Aryan eyes and feminine locks runs in front of the tank to retrieve an errant ball and, though initially trembling before the big, virile American soldier, smiles appreciatively when he gets his ball back. The message? Don't worry, world, we may look scary, but we're only here to give you back your balls.

The strange thing about all this is that it happened in the Valley, where I've grown accustomed to being insulated from the sort of nationalist propaganda embodied in the National Guard ad, if not from the sentimental multiculturalism of the Clint Eastwood film. Indeed, I'd be surprised if the multiplex isn't bombarded with angry letters from offended Valleyites as a consequence of this ad. Or maybe they're only showing it before mainstream films like Gran Torino, which are unlikely to draw the same sort of crowd as, say, Milk or W. In any case, nobody in my theater raised so much as a murmur after viewing the ad, and, what's more, everybody seemed to enjoy the movie as well (I assume all the crying I witnessed after the closing credits was induced by sorrow at the movie's downbeat ending, rather than at the horrifying travesty of filmmaking that we'd all just witnessed). Oh Valley, Valley, Valley... I'm very disappointed in you.

This is What Happens When You Call Your Store "Target"

I woke up this morning to news that a rare Februrary tornado had touched down in northwest Oklahoma City yesterday, about two miles east of my father's house and two miles west of my mother's. It struck the busiest thoroughfare in that part of the city, the misleadingly named Northwest Expressway, a six-lane behemoth that cuts a gash across the otherwise orderly grid of OKC's secondary roads. Anyone who has heard me describe OKC as one giant Wal-Mart parking lot stitched together by a bunch of fast-food parking lots will have a pretty good idea of what this "expressway" looks like.

Here's a video showing the damage. Dig the slightly inappropriate horror-movie soundtrack that shows up about halfway through:



Luckily, no one appears to have been injured by this tornado. My family's fine - they didn't even lose power - and I believe we can credit the city's ridiculously low population density for creating a situation in which a tornado could touch down near a very busy intersection and only damage a few signs, buildings, and cars. Urban sprawl saves the day!

The same, however, cannot be said about the tornado that tore through the small town of Lone Grove, about 100 miles south of OKC, where some 8 people were killed. And there's nothing funny about that, so I'll move on.

Now, I know this part of OKC very, very well - what might look to you like a bland collection of prefabricated buildings surrounded by a sea of parking lots is, to me, a repository of many of my strongest childhood memories. The Chuck E. Cheese that was damaged used to be a ShowBiz Pizza, and I attended many, many birthday parties with my little friends there. I can still picture the large animatronic gorilla who sat in front and played the piano (what was his name? anyone?), the surfing polar bear (ditto), and the guy with the puppet whose specialty was singing happy birthday songs (ditto ditto). When I visited ShowBiz with my older cousins, the birthday guy would invariably find himself singing happy birthday songs to me whether it was my birthday or not - my cousins having amused themselves by telling the staff that it was my birthday and that, moreover, my name was Eugene.

My principal memory of the El Chico Mexican restaurant next door to Chuck E. Cheese is that it was the first place that I realized there was a difference between chain-restaurant Mexican and real Mexican. El Chico is an example of the former.

Across the street and down a little bit, the Target was also damaged by the tornado - this Target was once an ill-fated Wal-Mart knockoff called Venture, where my friend Maggie worked for a few months in high school. This was during the period when Maggie was making the rounds of all the establishments along Northwest Expressway - the McDonald's, the Buy For Less, Burger King - and seemingly unable to hold down a job at any of them for more than a month. Venture itself was kind of a dump, but that wasn't really Maggie's fault.

Also damaged was the Chick-fil-A, which I haven't ever visited but which stands on the site of the late lamented Village Inn pancake house, which burned down a few years ago. The Village Inn was one of the all-night breakfast places where I and my now not-so-little friends hung out once we were old enough to drive, but before we were old enough to buy cigarettes. Not that that stopped us. It was here that a waiter was once heard - mistakenly, as it turned out - to say "The answer is, Dutch Apple Pie," (I think what he really said was, "The dessert is Dutch Apple Pie"). This prompted us guessing what the question might be, and the phrase became a running inside joke for the rest of high school and beyond. To this day, when I hear somebody ask, "What's the answer?" my first impulse is to respond, "Dutch Apple Pie." And sometimes that's just what I do.

While I was thinking about all this it dawned on me that at least two of the places targeted by the tornado were explicitly Christian franchises. Chick-fil-A is run by a fellow with the improbable name of S. Truett Cathy, a former Baptist minister who has sought to infuse his operation with Christian principles by, among other things, closing the stores on Sundays and sending employees to seminars on how to maintain healthy marriages. The company's statement of purpose is: "That we might glorify God by being a faithful steward in all that is entrusted to our care, and that we might have a positive influence on all the people that we might come in contact with." According to Cathy, "miraculous" things began happening to his chicken restaurants shortly after the fateful 1982 meeting at which the board adopted this statement of purpose, and he hasn't looked back since.

The other Christian business in the area is Hobby Lobby, an OKC-based hobby store whose NW Expressway location happens to be in a former Wal-Mart (the rampant repurposing of these prefab buildings is an urban-studies dissertation waiting to happen). Hobby Lobby is also closed on Sundays and it has a more exhaustively righteous statement of purpose. It is as follows:

In order to effectively serve our owners, employees, and customers the Board of Directors is committed to:

Honoring the Lord in all we do by operating the company in a manner consistent with Biblical principles.

Offering our customers an exceptional selection and value.

Serving our employees and their families by establishing a work environment and company policies that build character, strengthen individuals, and nurture families.

Providing a return on the owners' investment, sharing the Lord's blessings with our employees, and investing in our community.

We believe that it is by God's grace and provision that Hobby Lobby has endured. He has been faithful in the past, we trust Him for our future.

Both Chick-fil-A and Hobby Lobby, then, attribute their success to God's divine assistance. And who's to say they're not right? If God's spending all His time ensuring shoppers experience "exceptional selection and value" in their quests for dried flowers and multicolored yarn, then that explains an awful lot about the mess the rest of the world finds itself in. Maybe, just maybe, this tornado means He's finally turning His attention to more pressing matters.

All snarkiness aside, however, here's hoping the folks back home pick up the pieces and get back to work soon. Now is not the time to find oneself out of a job, even if that job is scraping crusty cheese off the festive Pier One plates at El Chico.

Sunday Timewasters

I have recently been bombarded with all sorts of wonderful things from all four corners of the internet, and, in the interests of helping you have a happy and relaxing Sunday, I want to share them with you.

The first comes from my old pal Harvey Pew, who shared this stunning (and stunningly expensive) artifact of the security state: the Playmobile Security Checkpoint. Be the first on your block to train your children to comply with authority and to disregard the integrity of their persons for the sake of enabling the state to create and perpetuate an illusion of efficacy against allegedly omnipresent threats! Also be sure to check out the customer reviews.

Next comes an item from my rival and sometime friend-with-benefits Dr D, who forwards this little gem from the Captain Planet series. If ever you've wondered about the roots of the Catholic-Protestant divide in Northern Ireland, and the relatively simple steps that can be taken to rectify it, then wonder no more. I was completely ignorant of this program until a few days ago, so you can imagine my surprise when I discovered that my own role in mediating the conflict had not only been dramatized in this way, but also that I had myself been rendered into cartoon form. That laser-ring sure did come in handy, too.



Dr D is also to be credited for bringing to my attention the existence of a bus-ad generator based on those London atheist bus ads I've been obsessing over. Make your own and post them in my comments section! Here's mine:



Chris Jordan is a photographer obsessed with documenting the scale of American consumption. In a series called "Intolerable Beauty," he created stunning photographs from junkyards, recycling centers, etc, that show the detritus of consumer society in all its mind-boggling volume: thousands of cell-phone chargers twisted around each other like snakes, towering mountains of sawdust, shimmering strips of steel from shredded automobiles. Lately, he's been messing around with statistics and Photoshop, taking pictures of prison uniforms, say, or plastic bags, and copying and pasting them hundreds and thousands of times to create massive, sometimes beautiful images that attempt to give concrete, visual form to abstract statistics. So, for instance, in "Cans Seurat", he reinterprets Georges Seurat's famous "Sunday Afternoon..." using 106,000 soda cans, the amount consumed by Americans every 30 seconds, in place of Seurat's pointilist dots. It looks like this:







Here's an 18-minute video of Jordan showing and explaining his work.

Finally, I'd like to call your attention to my new favorite t-shirt. Just the other day I was complaining to Kate that, for all the Obama merchandise out there in the world right now, it's nearly impossible to find anything celebrating vice-presidential cutie-pie Joe Biden. There are Obama bobbleheads, action figures, sandwiches, buttons, ice cream flavors, and hot sauces, but poor Joe hardly merits so much as a toothpaste. Now, however, the balance is beginning to be righted, thanks to the enterprising folks over at (the Happy Valley's own) Diesel Sweeties, who have begun selling Joe Biden Fan Club t-shirts. I saw one the other day being worn by one of the baristas over at the Haymarket, and was so excited I almost spilled my fair-trade organic Columbia roast all over the cafe. They look like this, and are available in a variety of sizes:



Get yours today!

Apres Moi, Le Deluge

[cheers, Dr D]

As expected, London appears to have completely fallen apart in my absence. You've no doubt heard about the snowstorm that paralyzed the city earlier this week. Something like 5-8 inches fell on Sunday and Monday, forcing schools and businesses to close, shutting down service on all but one of the Tube lines, and playing havoc with Heathrow Airport (an airport which, I might add, tends to teeter on the brink of havoc even on good days). As I stare at the several feet of snow piled up outside my Massachusetts apartment, it's difficult not to feel a little amused by the complete inability of the British to handle a snowstorm that would hardly even merit the name in this part of the world. But, as Anne Applebaum points out, it's all about what you're used to. It makes no sense to own a snow shovel in London if it only snows like this once every 18 years.

If you ask me, this snowstorm is God's punishment for all those atheist buses that have been rumbling through London's streets lately. I'm happy to report, however, that the balance is soon to be righted. The Guardian reports today that several Christian groups have begun running counter-adverts refuting the atheists' arguments. With ads claiming "There definitely is a God. So join the Christian Party and enjoy your life," "There IS a God, BELIEVE. Don't worry and enjoy your life," and "The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God," these groups are also buying up real estate on the sides of London buses and elsewhere around the city. And I say good for them. It's been a long, long time since Britain has been the scene of any serious religious disputes. In the good old days these disputes were between people convinced that theirs was the one true faith and that their opponents were a bunch of anti-Christian, superstitious savages. They'd hold forth in public parks and streets denouncing the pope or the king or what have you, revelling in lurid, slightly pornographic tales about what supposedly went on in the Catholic confessional or in convents, thrilling their audiences with horror-show tales of the inquisition or the Counterreformation. Sometimes, in the really really old days, they'd even fight wars about these things. A king would get it into his head that he would decide whom he could sleep with and not some fat old fart over in Rome, and that'd provoke a series of crises that would culimnate in the execution of another king some hundred years later. Monasteries would be looted and burned. The Irish would get involved and start throwing bricks and burning Protestants in barns. Angry, hairy Highlanders would come down from the hills and sack villages. France or Holland or Spain would try to invade. Crazy radical fundamentalists would flee the country in rickety boats and sail west until they hit a green patch and make friends with Indians and eat turkey with cranberry sauce while wearing buckles on their shoes.

These religious disputes, in short, were productive of a great many things, and I'm glad to see them reemerging - albeit in a slightly modified form - in this new century. No longer is the argument "My God is better than your God, No he's not, Yes he is, No he's not," but rather "There is no God, Yes there is, No there isn't, Yes there is, No there isn't," but it's heartening all the same. It confirms my calculation, made several years ago, that religious conflict was and would remain a growth industry, and that if I was going to succeed financially and professionally I'd do well to hop on that bus.

Of course, there is one other religious fault line in contemporary Britain. I'm speaking, of course, of the nation's large and growing number of Muslims and the alienation that has grown up between some of them and "mainstream" British society. I wonder what they think about this whole atheist bus fracas. For that matter, I wonder what they think about all the snow.

The Shadow Knows

I don't know about you, but Groundhog Day always sneaks up on me. This is probably because it has the misfortune of falling in early February, which is objectively the worst month of the year, and so I spend most of the end of January making plans not to leave the house (I'm convinced that when I die it will be in February, and I reason that I'm more likely to survive the month if I stay at home. This may or may not be sound reasoning.) and completely forget that this most deplorable month actually begins with a fabulously ridiculous (and therefore simply fabulous) celebration of the predictive powers of furry rodents.

I'm not going to dwell on the ridiculousness of Groundhog Day - Timothy Noah, in a 2004 article for Slate, covered that ground quite thoroughly - nor do I feel much need to explain its background in pagan nature cults, its association with German immigrants to Pennsylvania, or the clearly absurd premise - that is, the idea that we have any way of knowing whether the groundhog sees his shadow or not - on which it's based. I do want to give a brief nod to Bill Murray for immortalizing the holiday in one of his finest pre-Lost-In-Translation performances, but only a brief nod. Instead, I'd like to take this opportunity to celebrate Groundhog Day as a glimmering example of Great American Kitsch.

I've never been to Punxsutawney, PA, on Groundhog Day, but I have been to Punxsutawney, PA. Last spring I went on a driving tour of Pennsylvania and, after playing around in Amish country and eating some nearly lethal sandwiches in Pittsburgh (Go Steelers!, BTW), I popped up to Punxsutawney for an afternoon. It was April, I believe, but it was cold and snowy, making the signs proclaiming Punxsutawney to be "The Weather Capital of the World" seem, on this day at least, only slightly hyperbolic. The town was nearly deserted - not only were there very few people on the streets, but many of the storefronts were empty or boarded up - and it soon became clear that Groundhog Day was pretty much the only game in town. It seemed a shame that the regional economy should be tied to something that only happens once a year, but you ride the star you're hitched to, I suppose.

You've no doubt seen the Cow Parade statues, or some variation of them, that have appeared in different cities over the last few years. These are large fiberglass statues that are posted in different spots around the city, each in different colors, often boasting unique outfits or designs created by local children or corporate sponsors. Boston had fish several years ago, Oklahoma City had buffaloes, etc. Well, Punxsutaney has groundhogs - human-size, waving and friendly groundhogs. They were, apart from the McDonald's downtown, the only splashes of color on a very grey day.



On the main square in town you'll find the Groundhog Zoo, which is actually a window on the outside of the town library, on the other side of which resides Phil, the meteorological groundhog, on the days when he's not being hauled out into the cold by some tophatted buffoon. At least that's what they say - when I was there Phil was sleeping somewhere offstage, so I had to be content with his humongous fiberglass cousins.



By far the best - and warmest - part of my visit was the time I spent in Phil's Official Souvenir Shop. In addition to the expected t-shirts, keyrings, beanie babies, and Groundhog Day DVDs, the shop had a dizzying array of commonplace items made less commonplace by the presence of a smiling groundhog. These included: pens, ashtrays, paper napkins, paper plates, water bottles, and (I'm pretty sure) toothbrushes. Indeed, if one were so inclined one could equip a small apartment entirely with items purchased at Phil's Official Souvenir Shop, assuming one wanted an apartment full of smiling groundhog faces. My arms were full of these things - in fact, I was rapidly checking off the names on my Christmas list - when I had a last-minute change of heart and put them all back. All, that is, except for a "Weather Capital of the World" water bottle, which today enjoys a prominent spot in the water-bottle-holder on my bicycle (although I am a little worried that it might get stolen some day). Do I regret not having bought more groundhog kitsch when I had the chance? I do, sometimes. I do.

My purchase made, I bid a fond adieu to Punxsutawney, but not before passing by the Groundhog Car Wash and the Groundhog Plaza strip mall. And I thought to myself: wow, if I lived here, I would be so goddamn sick of goddamn groundhogs.