2000-08-15 - 4:01pm

On the internal soundtrack: "Gesu Bambino", a classical Christmas choral piece.

Confession time: I read Star magazine. Every week. I love it.

People make fun of me for doing this. But every time I turn around, one of those same people has pilfered my copy and is reading it himself. I don't want to hear it.

Anyway, once someone asked me why I read the magazine. My reply was that I just like reading about people. I said, "If somebody made a magazine about the people around me, as opposed to celebrities, I'd read that too."

They may not come in magazine form, but I think online journals are the closest thing to a "non-Star" magazine that I'm going to get.

SATURDAY AFTERNOON 8/12

B and S were there when I arrived. K, S's 5-year-old daughter, was already down in the rec room happily exploring the new toys. She seemed to like the old jewelry and the dominoes the best.

S was very tired, since she had been working nights the past week. B also works nights, but he always does so he's a little more used to it, plus he was wound up from the drive down. We chatted a bit about the 300+ protesters who were arrested in Philly last week. Many refused to give their names, and others would strip naked to make it difficult for officers to get ahold of them, or swap clothes to make identification difficult. And of course, none of them had bathed for several weeks, which I hear is a deliberate technique to cause great olfactory discomfort for authority figures.

Now, I am not opposed to a good protest or two. It's what makes America great. I marched with Poindexter and his mom in the Armed Informed Mother's March last May (the counter-march to the Million Mom March, and NO, we were NOT advocating gun violence). I also spoke with some protesters in Vancouver a year ago to hear what they had to say and they had a fairly peaceable (if somewhat stoned) protest about Canada needing to get out of NATO or something like that. That one was particularly entertaining because they had a big huge papier-mache puppet (about 12 feet tall) of the Grim Reaper, who was following tourists as they crossed the street, great big skeleton hands dangling almost directly over their heads. Some of the tourists were Not Amused by this, but I sure was.

However, I am vehemently opposed to so-called protesters (many who don't even know what they're protesting, based on what they say when they're on TV) who deliberately block traffic and destroy things that don't belong to them. Besides being just plain inconsiderate, rude, and trampling on others' civil rights, it renders any genuine message they might have to make completely ineffective.

So anyway. We sat out in front of the house after dinner and chatted and watched K ride her bike. S was so tired she was nearly falling off her chair, so we kept telling her to go to bed. Finally we all packed up to go inside, and she grabbed my arm and held me there and threw her head back to feel the cool night breeze. And she said, "I'm protesting. I'm protesting going to bed!" Once I managed to stop laughing (perhaps you had to be there) I called the cop, and we dragged her up the stairs while I read her her Miranda rights. I knew all those cop shows I watch would come in handy someday.

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