Category: Misc

Just discovered this vast archive at Salon called Brilliant Careers . Tons of very well-written profiles of lots of people I admire… or at least dig. Like this one on Robert Crumb. There’s a good one on David Lynch too.

I really should buy a subscription to Salon. I admire what they do.

One person I don’t admire anymore is Ellen Degeneres because she came out at the Emmies wearing a swan dress like the one Bjork wore at the Oscars and pretended to be all awkward and uncomfortable in it, and basically incited the audience to laugh at her, but at Bjork’s expense. Not that anyone is beyond teasing, but that dress was so incredible and Bjork rocked in it. Of all the people to make fun of… why not J-Lo?

Oh, hey, Salon has a BC piece on Bjork, too.

Also worth checking out is the piece Beck wrote for Vanity Fair, talking about his 50 favorite album covers of all time. It’s in the November issue. He tries to talk about them as purely visual, divorced from the music and the eras of his life that music marked. Which is of course impossible. I miss album covers.

Last few days before work starts, trying to get lots of things checked off my list. Paperwork, phone calls…

Finally built a search engine for The Archive of Misheard Lyrics. Starting to realize what Mac heads mean when they complain that things look great on their Macs, shitty when viewed through Windows.

    

Starting to love working in BBEdit rather than HomeSite. But this whole type/creator bullshit on the Mac is driving me crazy. I railed on it in the BeOS Bible, and now I’m living it. All I want is for any text file to open in BBEdit when double-clicked. It’s just not possible. It bums me out – Apple solved so many of the old Mac problems when they created OSX. Why didn’t they break with the past and give users a real filetype panel, with complete association control. Keep the filetype attribute, dump the creator attribute. It’s not only useless, it’s counterproductive and ridiculous. The app that created a file has no right to claim ownership of it, unless it’s a proprietary file format. Am I the only Mac user who sees this as a serious impediment to workflow?

Had to laugh when this ad showed up on kissthisguy. How about “Red Cross Under Attack?”

Pulled good old Wensleydale (a 30GB drive full of MP3s that was a wedding gift to Amy and I from a bunch of people in the Be community, instigated by ) out of the Linux server and into the G4. Spent most of its life as a BFS drive, the last three months as a FAT32 volume mounted in a Linux machine, now it’s HFS+. Was impressed that OSX recognized and mounted it immediately, even though it was FAT32. Reinitialized it as HFS+ anyway, and copied all the same music over to it. That frees up the 60GB “Havarti” for digital video work.

Engaged in a bunch of conversations with people on the American Liberty mailing list. Very articulate people, but I just don’t get what makes them tick. Turns out they’re anarcho-capitalists, rather than libertarians. I think the reason I’m always at odds with people like that is that they believe completely in this dog-eat-dog, Darwinian, strongest survive thing, even as applied to society and economy. I know that’s the way the universe works, but I have higher hopes for humanity, and think we can do better. I believe our government is screwed up in a lot of ways, but I strongly believe that government *is* the people and vice versa, and that we are trying to do best for ourselves. I believe we build protections into the system to shield ourselves from predators. The anarcho-capitalists believe that if the predators swallow up the people, then, well, that’s just the way the universe works. It makes me sad that extreme libertarianism seems to be gaining, rather than losing currency these days.

At the hardware store, looking for a pull-chain switch for the overhead light in the pantry. The first one lasted 40 years. The second one lasted six months. They don’t make ’em like they used to. An old man working there commented on my Ben Davis work shirt. He could relate to it.

Tennis with Mike and Chris. Three-way. Good sweat.

Patched a hole in bicycle tire tube. Replaced in wheel. Pumped it up. Hisss… dammit. Remove wheel. Remove tube. Find another hole in the tire itself. Patched it too. No more hiss.

Downloaded a zillion faces for Audion .

InfoArchy ran a follow-up to my bootloader piece.

Very good essay by R.U. Sirius on the difficult position traditional leftists are in… torn between knowing how evil the Taliban is and how important it is that they be removed on one hand, and a deep distrust for the Bush regime and bombing campaigns in general on the other. I can’t say, as he does, that I feel stuck in neutral. I support the anti-Taliban effort whole-heartedly (though I pray for sanity and care). But I have been doing battle with my own emotions over all of this. I think a lot of people I know have been. Slowly, though, I am realizing that my complaints are basically irrelevant to the situation at hand. Sure, the U.S. has had problematic involvements overseas. Yes we’re responsbile for the death of innocents all over the world. That’s all important stuff and needs to be addressed at some point. But right now, we have more important things to do, like preserving freedom. Who cares if that sounds corny and jingoistic? It’s important, it’s real, and it’s here now.

The word “assassin” derives from “hashishim” — Arabic men who led, short, opulent lives and served as mercenaries for Jihad. They considered their lives already over, and so lived every day like it was a freebie, a gift, giving themselves permission to consort with loose women, get high, drink, etc. Basically a way to circumvent the laws of the Quoran in exchange for their fore-ordained commitment to die for the cause. Sound familiar?

Why is that right-wingers often use the phrase “Educate yourself” when in arguments with left wingers, as if the right has some kind of grasp of the facts that the left does not. Everywhere in life, people come to different conclusions from the same set of facts. I think Rush Limbaugh started this meme. People call in with leftist ideas, he lays his version of the facts on them, doesn’t let them interject or respond, then says “Get informed” and hangs up. I’ve had this meme layed on me by right wingers about half a dozen times in the past year, and it’s getting tiresome. Then when I give them my version of the facts, they say “I never heard that” or “Prove it” or “Check your sources.” It’s so arrogant.

Sprinkle my ass… got the firewood in and the sky broke open. Lightning cracking right over the house, everything rumbling. TREMENDOUS! Amy was afraid that Plato got caught out there and was cowering somewhere, getting drenched. Then we found him in the closet, curled up. He never goes in there. Scared shitless, poor guy.

I miss the east coast sometimes. Miss the weather. Living in Australia, too – we had thunderstorms there like none I’ve experienced anywhere else.

Seldom see thunder and lightning around here, but we’re seeing it tonight.  Brought in firewood as it began to sprinkle. Saw a face in the clouds as big as 1/4 sky. It had one eye squinting shut and the other wide open, laughing at me.

There’s a light on the dashboard of our car that just won’t go out no matter how many times we visit the mechanic. Last night Amy dreamed that a new light suddenly came on. The one that alerts the driver that the body of the car has become detached from the chassis and is hurtling forward off its axles.

My five-year-old, 8-inch plecostamus died recently. I put it in the freezer so Amy could photograph it if she gets a wild hair. Yesterday bought a new one, a young one, just three inches. Will grow it up from a “pup.” This will be the last fish I buy from the old Chinese lady at the dank, smelly aquarium shop across the street. She’s going out of business and retiring. Most of her tanks were empty when I went in yesterday. It’s the worst aquarium shop ever, but I like going there because it’s fun trying to communicate about fish with someone who speaks almost no English at all. Goodbye, old pleco. Goodbye, dank, smelly aquarium lady.

Amy said:

“If we go to war I’ll take pictures of it. Then I’ll have something to focus on besides my navel lint.”

Doesn’t that kind of sum it up? Suddenly everything has focus. After how many years of peace time, we have grown complacent. Sitcoms, books, music, all ending up with nothing to say, recycling the same old tropes endlessly, and it’s all been spreading out into brownian motion, losing focus, intensity fading. Now suddenly there’s nothing but focus. It may be coming from the spirit of revenge, it may be less justified than people think (given the degree of our hypocrisy), but it’s undeniable that the country is feeling united more than most people alive today can remember. Everyone has something to think about now. Whether that thinking will amount to anything, whether people will come to realize just how responsible the U.S. is for world anger, is another question.

It is all about anger disguised as righteousness. Think about the last time you had a real knock-down drag-out fight with someone, how your ability to see clearly became clouded. How winning became the only important thing — more important even than being correct. The entire fucking human race is now standing face to face in exactly that kind of argument. One of us is going to have to sleep on the couch.