Judy Fenton, your one-issue candidate!

Judy Fenton is running for Seattle City Council, and she's running for one reason and one reason only. She hates a piece of public art, and wants to use her authority as a member of the city council to pressure the Seattle Art Museum to have it removed. The art in question is the sculpture Father and Son, which features two nudes, one an adult male, the other a young boy both reaching out one to another, surrounded by fountains. The pumps run on a schedule that causes the fountains to rise up, obscuring one figure or the other most of the time. The artist, Louise Bourgeois, is famous for her sculptures on sexuality, trauma, childhood, and alienation-- not always all at once in the same piece, mind you. The most common interpretation of Father and Son is one of alienation, of the inability of the two figures to succesfully reach out to one another, or even to clearly see one another through the emotional mist and rain created by the social impositions of masculinity.

I went to the Seattle Art Museum's sculpture park earlier this year with a bunch of fourth-graders. They didn't find anything difficult about the statue. They thought it was a bit strange, but neither shocking nor particularly memorable. What was much more cool, to them at least, were the watercarved benches that looked too much like staring eyeballs from behind, or the hanging indoor art inside the park's visitor center.

Fenton claims that after all we've done to try and teach kids to be safe, the sculpture sends the wrong message. She's not sure how, but if she were on the city council she might have the power to have the statue removed. She's been endorsed by the Republicans, and we should probably take their word on whether or not her position is right: after all, Republicans totally know how to identify sexual deviants among us.

Personally, I think Ms. Fenton needs to get a life. There is zero lewd about that sculpture, and no "sexual predator" is going to use it as a way to convince his victime of, well, of anything. What's next? Preventing kids from viewing Michelangelo's David, or Boticelli's Venus, or demanding that Disney stop distributing the uncut edition of My Neighbor Totoro because there's a scene where the father bathes with his kids? I mean, come on, she's taking the whole "Men are predators, we must keep them in cages, we can't even begin to suggest that they can be healthy caregivers without keeping a sharp eye on them." Ms. Fenton is pushing a line of thought that's destructive to both fathers and children. Don't buy.

At least in the Oral Roberts University scandal, it's Mrs. Roberts who's accused of having an adulterous affair with a college boy-toy.

"My diagnosis is... you're forty. And you've got no butt."

I do not love driving in the rain at 6:45 in the morning to reach my physiotherapist by 7:00. The physio's close, less than three blocks away, but the schedule meant that I'd have to drive into work, thus killing another writing day. This was my first appointment, and the physio proceeded to work me through a series of poses and exercises, and her diagnosis was more or less what I described in the subject. "You're forty. And you've got no butt."

Apparently, my problem is exceptionally common in men my age. I just walk wrong. I use the inner thigh muscles to climb stairs, rather than the whole leg, and the outer muscles, including the ones in my buttocks, have begun to atrophy with age. Eventually, this catches up and starts to pull the kneecap out of line. So now I have a new set of exercises to do on a daily basis to pull the outer muscles in line with the inners.

Joy. Six weeks of daily exercises and weekly physio, then another trip to the doctor's see if I'm improving.

She did say she was pleased to see me come in when my pain was low and intermittent. Most guys, she said, wouldn't come in until it was constant and unignorable. I said that it was new, it wasn't getting better, and I wasn't going to let it get that bad. From age 40 to 60, men who don't exercise regularly lose 1% of their muscle mass every year-- and with it, 1% of the body structure that uses food energy rather than convert it to fat. Our major task during these years is to exercise to retain as much muscle as possible, as much functionality. Knee dysfunction would seriously hamper that project. She was pleased with both my appreciation of the task ahead of me and my apparent determination to be up to it.

Remedial programming!

It has totally been remedial programming week for me. Between the work I'm doing for lib_oauth_signature(), in which I'm completely relearning the ins and outs of C (even before I start to get to the elegance phase), and the audit I've been doing for Omaha on her company, in which I'm finally teaching myself how to code in PHP (and have you seen PHP on Trax? Not the language I would choose, but totally an idiom to rock my world), it feels like I'm cramming for an exam in a class I didn't really sign up for.

And after these projects pop off the stack, there's still the image seam algorithm to re-implement for NetPBM.

And I'm still managing 500 words a day of story, whether I like it or not. I'm still managing to read some. My Japanese has slacked off a bit, and I've totally given up on television, video games, and smut.

The trade-offs we all make.