Ok, I called up the landlord today and gave him the lowdown on what happened last night with Frankie, and he confirmed that the place is being sold… and that he’s not evicting Frankie for some reason, but is instead moving him to another property of his. The mooch will never be able to honestly say folks didn’t give him another chance. He’s had more chances with the landlord and police than seems fair or just.

In other news, I feel hungrier lately… is it because winter is approaching? Is my body hearkening back to a storage phase? I notice I’m sleeping a bit longer lately, too, but I chalk that up to my healing phase.. my body always gets a bit more sleepy when it’s undergoing repairs. Perhaps the body’s craving more food as building material, too?

The archive link below reminded me that they’re currently reworking the galleria mall… the middle is gutted, and they’re redoing the facades out front a little at a time. It looks like a bomb hit it in the middle, but the outskirt-stores are still open and take customers.

Dr. Fate on Justice League… pretty keen. Teaming up with Aquaman and Solomon Grundy to banish Cthulhu. Not too shabby a job on Inza Nelson, either. I’m really impressed with the quality of writing and storylines with the run so far. It was a good message about faith, too. Something fairly strange… they really amped up Hawkgirl, and apparently Thanagarians get a lot of their energies (as well as agriculture and mathematics) from Cthulhu.. Up until now, I thought she was just the “Angry Warrior Gal” on the show… Hopefully they’ll play up her detective skills and other abilities over time later. It’s nice to see Grundy as a rampaging beast and sympathetic monster seeking the return of his soul, too. The closure there was well treated, too.

I’ve always had a real soft spot for Solomon Grundy. What’s not to like? He’s a reanimated corpse… strength and persistence a force of nature with the mind of a child. In the 60’s “Earth 2.1” game, we cured ol’ Cyrus, reuniting his soul to his body. The Dr. Mid-Nite / Green Lantern “Brave and the Bold” issues were certainly my favorite ones of that run.

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The NRA wants to stop the police form tracking pawned guns?

TALLAHASSEE – The National Rifle Association has an enemies list. One way or another, you’re probably on it.

By name? No. Fewer than 300 celebrities, national figures and journalists rate individual billing on its Web site. (Having failed to make Nixon’s list, I am chagrined at not being on the NRA’s either. Maybe this will fix that.)

But the likelihood is high that you, like me, belong to or support at least one of the 142 organizations that the NRA faults as “anti-gun.”

Among them: The AARP. The AFL-CIO. The American Medical Association. The American Bar Association. Common Cause. The League of Women Voters of the United States. The National Education Association. The National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. The National Council of La Raza. The National Council of Negro Women. The National Council of Jewish Women. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The Unitarian Universalist Association. The U.S. Catholic Conference. The YMCA of the U.S.A.

If you buy Hallmark Cards, shop at a 7-Eleven store, have Blue Cross health insurance, eat Ben & Jerry’s ice cream or Sara Lee cakes, wear Levi’s jeans or use a Sprint telephone, you’re favoring your business on one of 44 national corporations whose gun control politics significantly perturb the NRA.

The NRA is, of course, entirely within its rights to have its lists.

However, the organization’s attitude toward lists is somewhat inconsistent.

The NRA’s Florida arm is asking the Legislature for a law that would make a felon of anyone and everyone – private citizens as well as police or other government workers – who makes and keeps any list of privately owned firearms or their owners.

The bill (HB 155) provides for exceptions, such as the NRA’s own membership lists, the state’s list of people licensed to carry concealed weapons, and records pertaining to stolen guns – but for no more than 30 days after the weapon is recovered.

What’s left? Mainly, to stop local police from keeping records of guns that make their way through pawn shops. Everything else that goes through a pawn shop goes, by law, into a state database in Tallahassee. Two years ago, however, the gun lobby cowed the Florida Department of Law Enforcement into erasing guns from that database after 48 hours. Now they’re out to hobble local law enforcement as well.

When my colleague Steve Bousquet asked the NRA’s Marion Hammer two years ago why police should track pawned TV sets but not guns, she answered, “Televisions don’t have constitutional protections.”

I don’t recall ever hearing of a television set being used to rob, rape or kill someone, as firearms frequently are. But to the gun lobby, the greater danger lies in letting the government know which citizens own what guns. It harbors a paranoid fear of confiscation, one of the classic paranoias in American history.

A little touch of paranoia is not necessarily a bad thing. As James Madison put it,”It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties.” But I think the NRA is barking up the wrong tree. Gun confiscation would be such a fool’s errand as to be the most remote of dangers. The so-called Patriot Act is a very clear and very present “experiment on our liberties.” If John Ashcroft has his way there’s more to follow. (To their credit, many NRA members oppose the Patriot Act.)

Democracies aren’t subverted overnight. They die of the cumulative effect of a thousand cuts. Always, some external danger is the pretext for the destruction within.

What is most troubling about HB 155 is the phony history the “whereas” clauses cite as a pretext for criminalizing the keeping of lists. Supposedly, Fidel Castro and Adolf Hitler both used gun registration “to confiscate firearms and render the disarmed population helpless. . . .”

Historians whom I consulted scoff at this. According to Dr. Cristoph Strupp of the German Historical Institute in Washington, Hitler actually liberalized Germany’s gun laws, except for Jews and other “enemies of the state.” But, he added, it would be “basically naive” and “a-historical” to think that owning guns “would have made any difference in their fate.”

“There was virtually no resistance in Germany not because there weren’t guns but because there was no will to resist,” explained Dr. Nathan Stolzfus, an associate professor of history at Florida State University. “The clear majority in Germany received Hitler as he presented himself. . . .”

Dr. Louis A. Perez, a University of North Carolina professor of history who formerly taught at the University of South Florida, said that upon seizing power Castro actually distributed guns to the Cuban population, reversing course only when street crime became a problem.

If guns are ever confiscated in America, it will happen only long after we have surrendered other freedoms, as willingly as the Germans did, on some false altar of national security. And once again, it would be too late for guns to make a difference.

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a year ago – green banana moon, taho commercial, Trapezoid vs rhombus, other fun words.

2 years ago – caption picture poll, turtle-butt breathing, big brain’s 2nd incarnation

3 years ago – memories added to lj, strip mall of sin, mall of the dead (pompano fashion square), Hunter Thompson on ESPN (still writing), moment of Louis Armstrong