I spend a lot of my free time reading about religion. Most of that time is on the features that make one religion different from another. That's why G. Willow Wilson's article on why intelligent design doesn't work in Islam and Judaism riveted me.

"The God of the Bible is omniscient and all-powerful, but the God of the Torah and the Quran is omnipresent and omniparticipant. This essential difference has led some religious scholars to draw a distinction between monotheism, the belief in one God, and monism, the belief in One."

The crux of her article is that Islam and Judaism are monistic (believe in One essence), and Christianity is monotheistic (believe in one God). That is the God of Islam and Judaism is an omnipresent essence of the universe. The God of Christianity is omniscient but limited to one all-powerful being. This is why iconography is forbidden in Islam and Judaism (because God is not part of our world) but very present in Christianity (because a local God interacts directly with people's lives). These fundamental differences play a role in whether a religion endorses intelligent design (ID) or not.

I think Mormonism actually finesses this point a bit. They have a recursive notion of God that allows him to be one being that is a part of universe, but also omnipresent and apart from the universe. Perhaps that's why Mormons don't seem to be leading the charge for ID?

She goes into more detail about how these differences impact ID. There's some really good stuff in there. G. Willow Wilson is a woman of many talents. She's writing a new comic book series called Air that I really enjoyed.

David Byrne's March visit to Dallas (via Unfair Park) makes a point of mentioning the awe-inspiring High Five interchange.

I turned north on Highway 75 on what might be the mightiest and most awe-inspiring interchange I've ever seen. At least five levels of roads are stacked up, all swooping over, under and around each other as if in some mighty concrete mating dance.

Other writers have described it in more medieval terms as a bridge between castle Dallas and the fiefdoms that surround it. Regardless of the metaphor, it's hard to convey how impressive the High Five interchange to people who haven't ridden it. Even harder is to make people understand how miraculous the transformation from dysfunctional eyesore to utilitarian wonder.

This is too long to fit on twitter but I like it too much to forget about it. The word absurd was actually first used to describe irrational numbers.

I'm working my way through a book on all the people that helped or solved problems on David Hilbert's famous list of 23 great math problems.

Many times a solution only presents itself after cultural change. One of the cultural norms that had to be updated to push math forward was the idea that irrational numbers are actually useful.

There was a time when irrational numbers were avoided by mathematicians. This disdain was so strong that the word "absurd" was created to describe how useless people believed irrationals to be. From Yandell's book:

An irrational square root was called a "surd," meaning deaf, silent (expressing the attitude toward it). The word "absurd" was first used in English in 1557, according to Oxford English Dictionary, for the purpose of pronouncing the number 8 - 12 (or -4) absurd.

It's clear to us now how important the absurd numbers are for solving real problems. But for a while math stood still while the culture had to catch up.

As a kid I wanted my life to be different from the one I imagined ahead of me. I wanted to be a master jewel thief or president of a unified North and South America. As I got older the dreams got smaller. I wanted to monopolize America's garbage collection industry. Now they're more abstract. I wish I'd had a comic book like Kick-Ass to inspire me when I was younger.

It's about a high school student named Dave Lizewski who wonders why nobody wants to grow up to be a superhero. One day he decides to put on a scuba suit and fight crime. Mark Millar's writing comes across as authentic and a fresh take on what makes a superhero. The way he integrates ideas from his fans drives home the point that Kick-Ass is something that exists in our world. We should all ask ourselves why we didn't choose to be superheroes.

With every issue I've gotten a little choked up, or felt a rush of excitement. Nothing else, except All Star Superman, comes close to engaging me like this every month. Every issue so far has sold out. Issue 3 mentions that they've started hitting Spider-Man/X-Men numbers with 75,000 copies of the first issue sold. I think this could be big.

"Think peace and and you'll get it. It's up to the people...If we really wanna change it, we can change it." -John Lennon

That quote is copied from the press kit for the Oscar nominated animated short film I Met the Walrus and hits upon a trifecta of my current interests.

The first being that reality is manufactured by the words in our pens and the thoughts in our head. Take responsibility.

Second, the Oscar nominated short films, live action and animated, are top notch. I continue to believe that the French, and French Canadians, are doing the most innovative animation work (Triplets of Belleville, Renaissance, Madame Tutli-Putli and Even Pigeons Go to Heaven all come to mind). Now if they just had the writing of Pixar.

The third is this nonsense about Barack Obama plagiarizing his speeches. Change, or at least the promise of change, has been a major theme of many political leaders. I don't know how Senator Obama could speak about change in a clear and direct way without building on the tradition of leaders before him. A far more dangerous idea is to demand that political leaders constantly dance around their ideas and relinquish any ability to speak plainly and directly.

From Lewis Hyde in The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. [link goes to the free preview page that has the quote on Amazon]

Where someone manages to commercialize a tribe's gift relationships the social fabric of the group is invariably destroyed.

I have yet to read Lewis Hyde's book but I'm already hooked from the free pages on Amazon. He starts off illustrating one of the fundamental differences between the Native Americans and the Europeans that invaded: a gift culture. Native American tribes would exchange gifts of equal or greater value. The purpose being to continually gift the item to others. It created social bonds between tribes. Europeans followed a capitalist model where they warehoused those gifts and used them for production to enrich themselves.

I wonder how this fits in with Robert Putnam's research in Bowling Alone. On the surface it makes Putnam's phrase "social capital" sound like an odd match. But I realize the term social capital could refer to the gifts we exchange to build our bonds.

I really enjoy reading Grant Morrison. I can think of few writers who really grok the power of storytelling to change our reality like he does. I've learned a lot about the power of the written word from reading his comic books. What surprises me is when I come across those ideas in much older works, like the Bible.

Numbers 5:12-31 is about how husbands can force their wives to submit to an abortion if they merely suspect their wife has cheated on them. They go before a priest goes who has God curse some water before the wife drinks it. The cursed water causes her to miscarry and renders her barren if she cheated on him.

What fascinates me about this is the manner in which the priest creates the magic abortion potion.

The priest is to write these curses on a scroll and then wash them off into the bitter water. He shall have the woman drink the bitter water that brings a curse, and this water will enter her and cause bitter suffering.

The priest is literally writing out what he wants to happen. Then the ink from those words is mixed with water that the wife is to drink. The written word has magical properties here. The priest is able to alter reality by writing a new story.

To further my point about the power of perception imagine a different story with the same facts. A woman is pregnant, but not by her husband. However, in this story she tells it as immaculate conception.

Why are TV shows, network TV shows in particular, so mediocre? I think I've come across the answer in Vance Packards 1957 book The Hidden Persuaders. It's by design.

In 1955 I Love Lucy was the top-rated comedy show and Philip Morris was the money behind it. Philip Morris found their sales drop 17 percent and some believed a popular show doesn't sell products.

"...Is an advertiser better off with a less than top-rated show in order to get commercials across?" That observation was made in early 1955. [..] Were some of the resolutely mediocre shows on television that way by design, to increase the impact of the commercials?

Another TV show that was put together to sell Mogen David wine wasn't getting the job done.

[The show] was, admittedly, delighting the audience with its chilling, exciting who-dun-it mysteries. The show enjoyed a high rating but it wasn't selling wine.

The problem they decided was that audiences were too tense and that in their "emotional frenzy" they missed the wine message. It was replaced with a panel show. Wine sales increased 1000%.

Shows like The Wire on HBO obviously don't have the same problem.

I imagine Senator Dodd is feeling pretty great now. It's rare that politics provides an opportunity for one man to stand up and fight for a just cause, and win. Senator Dodd was able to filibuster retroactive immunity for the phone companies.

Despite retroactive immunity appearing to be a violation of the ex post facto clause in Article I of our Constitution most of the Senate was ready to pass it. Thanks to Senator Dodd's leadership on this we've won one battle in the war to preserve our nation's Constitution.

Something I regret not doing when I was younger is chasing after the things that I thought mattered. I either let my interest wane, or listened to the tut-tutting of others that said it was a waste of time.

I'm reading a book that examines the Interactive Fiction (IF) medium called Twisty Little Passages. Interactive Fiction is the dressed up word for text adventures. I feel as though hours of my youth spent playing these has been vindicated. I should have pushed for it to be considered Summer Reading.

...works of acknowledged literary quality, such as Robert Pinksky's Mindwheel and Brian Moriarty's Trinity...

It's neat to see a classic Infocom text adventure right alongside work created by a former US poet laureate. Moriarty's Trinity was the first time I ever came across a Klein bottle and the word perambulator.

The House of Representatives found time to give Jesus a shout out for bringing us Christmas. My two favorite parts of the resolution:

(1) recognizes the Christian faith as one of the great religions of the world;

I'm glad they cleared this up. They're a little late to the party though. I was sold on this years ago when I discovered Christianity gave us Ludwig Wittgenstein. Ludwig was a ninja with math and philosophy.

(4) acknowledges and supports the role played by Christians and Christianity in the founding of the United States and in the formation of the western civilization;

Let's get busy then and see this through. I want a resolution acknowledging the role played by the Renaissance in Western civilization. While we're at it lets give a shout out to the Golden Age of Islam since they preserved math and science for us during the dark ages. They even added new stuff like the Scientific Method and optics before they gave it back! How cool is that? I think that deserves a resolution.

I'm writing my letter to Congresswoman Johnson right now. I imagine she'll be receptive since she sponsored the resolution acknowledging the coolness of Islam and Ramadan

A friend of mine from Huntspatch is coincidentally staying at a hostel two blocks from my hotel in San Francisco. It's been years and she's still as beautiful and wonderful as ever. We shared sushi and walked around this glorious, crazy city. I'm still bathed in enthusiasm after we talked about the magic of words and manifesting your will and the rejuvenation of travel. I feel as though a fog has lifted off my spirit.

I wish Julie were here. I wish she could see me now as I see myself, in full bloom. Or maybe she already does and I refuse to believe it. I wish the darkness didn't build up inside me till my broken spirit limps into her arms looking for salvation. I wish she could've seen my friend tonight. My friend has that magic that rubs off on people who endure the South but learn to leave before that magic becomes a crushing burden. I wish I hadn't seen so much of the world alone. All that beauty and passion is an untranslatable phrase locked in my head. But if Julie had been with me she'd know it the way I do. Right now she's half a world away in Taiwan having her own adventures.

I did go through two bottles of wine with a couple co-workers at dinner earlier tonight. I blame the wine for my conversation with the exotic dancer on the street corner who told me how good I looked and that it's okay to take girls to her club. But the rest of the night was all real.

The Thoughtcrime bill that passed overwhelmingly in the House is going through committee in the Senate. The Senate bill is S. 1959.

Dahlia Lithwick writing in Slate points out "Harman's "thought crimes" bill [...] does no more than explore whether those thought crimes are a problem." She follows that up with some snark on the ineffectiveness of Democrats in Congress.

I am profoundly grateful that instead of criminalizing protected speech outright, Democrats merely form a commission that will do a study, which will in turn christen a Drive-Thru Center for Excellence, where they will someday consider criminalizing protected free speech.

I'm happy to see more media coverage for this. At best it's a waste of time and money, at worst it's a lever for rolling back protected speech. I'd much rather see Congress increase their oversight of the government agencies already studying these kinds of issues.

I'm really digging the Doctor Fate part of the eight issue Countdown to Mystery series. Steve Gerber's writing and Justiniano's art are my favorite comic book read right now. It reminds me of my enthusiasm in the early issues of Neil Gaiman's Sandman.

I came in with almost no familiarity with the helmet of fate. In this series Kent V. Nelson is a disgraced, divorced psychiatrist living in Las Vegas, NV. (Yeah, not Gotham, Metropolis, Central City, etc.) He's homeless and pulling in money from bum fights. After losing a fight he's thrown into a dumpster and discovers the helmet of fate. From that point the series has explored Nelson's past, through multiple planes of existence. The helmet allows him to alter his perception.

In issue three Nelson visits what appears to be an occult bookstore in the mundane world but is a stygian wasteland when the helmet alters his perception. Physically he never leaves the bookstore, he's only viewing it through a different set of symbols. The lady at the occult bookstore offers him a book to teach him how to use the helmet. The book is written in this Visual Basic like pseudocode. I really liked the explanation the lady at the occult bookstore offers about why that works for him:

Every era, every culture develops its own incantatory idiom, its own language for establishing contact with the unseen world. To anyone with any sensitiviy, it's obvious something has changed in the domain of magic, and the idiom is changing with it. The book I pulled for you proposes a programmatic paradigm for accessing the beyond — and the within.

I like the comparison between programmers working with an unseen world inside the computer to alchemists and magicians. Culturally Gerber is right on here. The old term Unix wizard fits this notion perfectly.

After he reads one of the subroutines, chosen by fate, he finds himself in the stygian wasteland. It's nothing but gray sludge as far as the eye can see, with a lazy river ambling by. (There is a viscious but funny commentary on consumerism as well) He sees a boy on a raft floating down the river.

The boys vernacular recalls Huck Finn. Nelson even addresses him as such, but also realizes that he's not a literal Huck Finn. He's really just a symbolic representation of Nelson's own guilty conscience about a patient of his that died. In fact it turns out this plane of existence is a symbolic representation of Nelson's conscience. The fact that Huck Finn is just a symbol is driven home by the artwork depicting Huck as an empty shell.

They float down river and Nelson struggles with the meaning of it all. In the midst of dreary grey spires they reach a crystalline complex that is built with perfect, clean angles and no curves. It's a bulwark of rationality against the dreary, crumbling spires everywhere else. Naturally it's where they are headed.

Inside he meets the King and Queen. Most likely they represent Nelson's anima and animus since Jung is explicitly mentioned earlier. They're dressed in clothes that look like Louis XIV meets Japanese Noh masks. The fact that everyone is wearing a mask or has no face isn't lost on me. The King introduces himself to Nelson:

We are the King. This is our Queen. That is our whipping boy. You will address us as "Your majesties." You will not address that at all, for that possesses no identity — no persona, no self-concept. That exists to be broken.

The whipping boy is a groveling lump of flesh on the floor that is vaguely human who jumps up and rips Nelson's face off. Nelson comes to the realization that the whipping boy is him. The King and Queen also represent him (his anima/animus). The gloomy underworld is his own creation because he's been beating himself up for mistakes he made. In lesser hands this whole sequence would have been pretentious but it's handled with a directness and a sincerity that makes it work.

You just don't find stuff like this in any other DC/Marvel comic books right now. For me this is a lot of what comic books are all about. They reflect our own world back at us with the symbols changed around. This gives us a new way of looking at ourselves and our society. Grant Morrison is particularly adept at doing this but this is different. Gerber is doing his own thing and it's excellent. I'm a little worried though. Gerber is ill and waiting for an organ transplant. I can't believe he's writing through that. I have to wonder if his writing for Doctor Fate is somehow informed by his illness. It can't be just coincidence that both of them live in Las Vegas, NV.

"Belief precedes action" is now added to the list of obvious truths I've completely missed until now.

I gleaned it from William James' speech on The Will to Believe. I'm missing something from the speech though. It felt like a fancier version of Pascal's Wager, not the clarion call to religious belief I was hoping for.

James' concludes with this quote from Fitz-James Stephen:

What do you think of yourself? What do you think of the world?...These are questions with which all must deal as it seems good to them. They are riddles of the Sphinx, and in some way or other we must deal with them...In all important transactions of life we have to take a leap in the dark...If we decide to leave the riddles unanswered, that is a choice; if we waver in our answer, that, too, is a choice: but whatever choice we make, we make it at our peril. If a man chooses to turn his back altogether on God and the future, no one can prevent him; no one can show beyond reasonable doubt that he is mistaken. If a man thinks otherwise and acts as he thinks, I do not see that any one can prove that he is mistaken. Each must act as he thinks best; and if he is wrong, so much the worse for him. We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive. If we stand still we shall be frozen to death. If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know whether there is any right one. What must we do? ' Be strong and of a good courage.' Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes...If death ends all, we cannot meet death better."

This is an even more dramatic restatement of Pascal's Wager. There's gotta be a good movie in there somewhere. I'm imagining Sophie's Choice meets The Screwtape Letters. Make it an action picture with a big Summer release.

H.R. 1955 seeks to criminalize thoughtcrimes

The term violent radicalization means the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence to advance political, religious, or social change.

The term ideologically based violence means the use, planned use, or threatened use of force or violence by a group or individual to promote the group or individual's political, religious, or social beliefs.

There is no definition for extremist belief system.

I wonder if civil rights marches in the 1960s would count as an extremist belief system attempting to facilitate political, religious or social change.

We already have laws against murder, assault, theft, etc. I don't understand why we need laws against speaking about those things. Punish the deed not the thought.

This is not how you stop terrorism.

This bill passed the House 404 to 6 and was created and sponsored mostly by Democrats.

Genius

I haven't seen the frustrations of designers summed up so amusingly before.

Over the past year I've spent a lot more time reading and studying comic books and cartooning. The history has been far more interesting than I ever expected.

Percy Crosby creates the Skippy cartoon in 1923 and builds it up into a $3 million business by 1932. He goes after FDR and the New Deal for being communist. Then his woes begin.

By 1964 he's dead in an insane asylum after a war with the IRS and their alleged corporate proxy, the Rosefield Packing Company. The Rosefield Packing Company takes the Skippy name and creates Skippy peanut butter.

The Savage Critic has the details

Some day I'll write a virus that does one thing. It finds the person's mail app, desktop or web, and disables the "Quote entire message every time I respond" functionality.

I noticed that SB 1119 was enrolled today. It aims to clean up the state laws around red light cameras. The first point it aims to fix is a big one:

Municipalities are currently installing photographic traffic signal enforcement systems (red light cameras) based on an attorney general opinion, but have no statutory authority to do so.

It mainly focuses on making sure municipalities don't exploit this as a revenue opportunity. They can't share revenue with companies that provide red light service. They can't report violations to a credit bureau. They must conduct a traffic engineering study of the intersection to make sure it has a legitimate safety purpose. I don't see anything about penalties if a municipality ignores the law.

It also addresses some of my gripes. The written request for a hearing can be sent in 30 days instead of the 2 weeks I think I had. You can request an affidavit that the equipment is in good working order. The current process in Dallas doesn't explicitly allow for that.

Nice to see good government at work.

America, stop listening to your preacher about politics and government. They're probably great at religion and explaining where you fit in God's plan, but 55% of you are misinformed about where our government comes from.

Programming Collective Intelligence has me excited about web development in a way I haven't been for a few years.

Even got me doing stuff in python.

Love animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble their joy, do not harass them, do not deprive them of their happiness, do not work against God's intent.

Man, do not pride yourself on your superiority to animals: they are without sin, and you, with your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it, and leave the traces of your foulness after you. Fydor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821 - 1881) THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV via Moscow Animals

50 years ago the USSR sent a dog into space to die in the hopes of scoring a propaganda coup. Laika was the first animal to orbit the planet. I have a hard time reconciling what should have been a great milestone in space travel, with the fact that it was created as a pointless exercise in marketing. Nick Abadzis' new book Laika covers the story in more detail than I'd seen before. Apparently he even researched the phases of the moon and angles of inclination to maintain fidelity to the story. The moon after all was the big prize in the space race.

His illustrations are wonderful. He captures a Russian character in the faces of the people. The energy and warmth of the dogs are expressed in their poses and lines. My only gripe is that I wanted more with Korolev, the Chief Designer of the Russian space program. The book starts off with Korolev being released from the Gulag and having to find his own way back to Moscow in 50 below weather. There is some nice character development here, but Korolev mostly disappears after that. It's too bad because the groundwork he lays is interesting but never really explored after that. I'd love to see a companion book go into more detail about Korolev.

I couldn't help myself. I knew the ending but it was still devastating when it came. Mankind's ability to sabotage our own greatness is a frustrating lesson of history. There is an interesting moment in Laika. Three pages carry a yellow background instead of white. They setup a key theme of the story that nothing lasts (Korolev's time in he Gulag, Laika's friendships, USSR's dominance in space). On the next page is a three quarter page panel highlighting the greatness of Korolev's achievement with Sputnik I. A moment that would be undercut by the tragedy of Sputnik II and designed by Korolev himself.

Every day, every moment is a frontier to a country that, once crossed, can never be returned to.

...But, once you understand that nothing lasts...everything's all right. Laika

The Asian Film Festival of Dallas 2007 had its opening night tonight. Justin Lin's new movie Finishing the Game was the opener. It is sort of a fake documentary about an attempt to finish Bruce Lee's last movie Game of Death. You can catch the Fist of Führer spoof from the movie on youtube. Sung Kang and Roger Fan are the stars but it has cameos from Ron Jeremy, George Takei, MC Hammer, and James Franco.

Beyond the reverence they have for Bruce Lee its clear that Eric Byler's movies or James Hou's documentary Masters of the Pillow are part of the subtext. Unlike those filmmakers who focus on subverting Asian stereotypes Lin chooses to leverage them as humor in the subtext. Sung Kang's character being cast in a "European" (porn) movie seems like a light jab at Dr. Darrell Hamamoto making porn movies with an Asian male lead to repair the Asian male's self-image. I had most recently seen Sung Kang in The Motel where he gives an outstanding performance.

I sprung for the VIP pass this year so I plan to hit a lot more movies. As usual the programming really looks top notch.

King of Kong came out this weekend and will be gradually hitting more cities. I saw this movie back in March at the AFI Dallas Film Festival and have been excited about its release ever since. It's about the fight between two guys to be Donkey Kong world champion. I have been trying my hardest to get people to make this one of the five movies they see in the theater this year.

I suppose there is a formula to documentary filmmaking where you find a subculture, look for some kind of competitive angle and then film it to its conclusion. Okie Noodling did this with people who catch catfish using their fists. Pucker Up! did this for competitive whistling. There are a number of them that involve word games: spelling, Scrabble, crossword puzzles, etc. But some of those documentaries ignore the path blazed by earlier subculture documentaries like Crumb. A lot of what makes Crumb work is the interpersonal dynamics, not any competitive drive to be the best underground comic creator. You can even see the same structure at work in a narrative movie like Little Miss Sunshine.

Which is why I so thoroughly enjoyed in King of Kong. It captures the competition and the interpersonal relationships. It covers Billy and Steve's relationships with the people around them, beyond just what they think of their gaming skills. The filmmaker does an excellent job getting these people to talk like the camera isn't there. While that might make a good documentary it wouldn't be half as entertaining without Billy's outsized persona. He wears ties with the US flag on them. He talks about himself in the third person. He frames the passion of competitive gaming in terms of the abortion debate. At times the feud is so big I felt like I was watching the Trojan War unfold. Billy is the unbeatable Achilles and Steve is the reluctant warrior Hector. It's also edited together very well to keep the story twisting and pumping along to the showdown.

Afterwards you can ruminate on the allegorical examination of American culture, aging male nostalgia for childhood, absolute truth and how to find happiness in a culture that says happiness is reserved for children. But while you're watching, and for the 10-15 minutes immediately after its over, you'll feel excited, amused, and charmed in a way that you haven't been most of the year.

I was watching Harakiri tonight when I got my million dollar TV series idea: "So You Think You're a Samurai Warrior?"

I've been trying since mid-July to find someone who will replace my water-sourced heat pump. It has a freon leak in the condenser coil. It no longer cools.

I used to leave it on anyways and pretend that moving hot air around the loft made it feel cooler. This August I just switched it off entirely. Now the 100+ degree weather has come and my willpower doesn't seem strong enough to make it feel cool anymore.

I've finally found someone willing to replace it, but it will be 7-10 weeks since it must be custom built. During that time I plan to lease my loft out to the CIA for terrorist interrogations. A week of the heat and any terrorist's willpower will evaporate too.

The Amiga computer was a dream given form: an inexpensive, fast, flexible multimedia computer that could do virtually anything.

Ars posted the first part of a history of the Amiga. The Amiga 1000 changed my life. I got it as a birthday present, a few months after my father died.

Since then I've learned that it is rare for something of excellence to persevere for very long. Evolution rewards the mediocre. The more average you are the more likely you are to breed.

Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, which I shared some love for earlier, won Best Reality-Based Work. Another title I was pulling for American Born Chinese won for Best Graphic Album - New. It's nice to see an industry award the great stuff unlike say the Oscars, Emmys and Grammys.

And my favorite writer, Grant Morrison, picked up an Eisner for Best Continuing Series for All Star Superman. I'm glad that Morrison and Brian Bendis keep things interesting at DC and Marvel.

2007 Eisner Winners

I'm back from a trip to Huntspatch for Emily's twelfth birthday. It was one of the best times I've ever had with her. One of the things I noticed is just how much more agile her creativity is.

Emily innovated her tactics in Hive and won despite my best efforts. Her use of the spider to isolate and pin my pieces was particularly novel. In Super Paper Mario she came up with a technique for flipping enemies into a new 2d orientation that I'd never thought of.

We each brought a camera to the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga. After looking over the pictures we took hers are so much better. She found much more interesting angles. She compensated better for the difficult lighting situations. Mine have a much more documentary and static feel.

I think some of it comes from the holistic school program she's been in, and the virtue of being young. Next year she starts at a Catholic school and I fear this may spark a decline since they have a different mission that is limited by what the Catholic Church allows. However, I sometimes wonder if the limits Emily has (financial resources, tools) actually stimulate the creativity.

I might do better with more limits.

I knew things were going well when a cabbie motioned me over and gave up his spot in front of city hall, and the meter had over an hour left on it. Dallas cabbies earned quite a bit of good karma with that movie.

I had prepared a bunch of notes for my hearing about a red light violation. I was looking forward to dazzling the hearing administrator with my defense.

• HB 922 had been made effective four days before my violation. It outlaws automated traffic control systems by municipalities at highways.
• I was ready to request a continuance while I sought calibration records for the red light camera to make sure it really was accurate down to 0.16 seconds.
• I was also going to get the details about traffic light height requirements in relation to road incline, I think mine may have been too low.

I had still more questions to present.

But all for naught because after about 20 minutes of waiting in the hall the hearing administrator came out and said my violation was dismissed. The disposition is "OFFICER ERROR" and I'm not liable because I was already in the intersection when it turned red.

I'm excited it was dismissed but a little let down I didn't get my Hollywood courtroom showdown.

I just caught the pre-code Stanwyck film Baby Face (1933). Turner has put out a DVD with both the censored and uncensored versions on it. I am thoroughly impressed. It's a melodrama but with a good story that was hacked up by the Hayes code for the theatrical release. It's fascinating to watch both versions and see what changes the censors wanted.

Stanwyck plays a woman who has been prostituted by her father since she was 14. After her father is killed in an accident she decides to go to New York and use her feminine assets to climb the corporate ladder and exploit weakness in men for her own material gain. If you've seen the recent French film Secret Things you've seen a watered down version of this story that plays up the sexuality, and creates an overt sexual relationship between the two women.

First off I was completely taken by surprise with the Nietzsche quotes. Mention of Nietzsche is absent from the censored version. After her father dies she goes to a German friend of hers to tell him she's got some dead-end job prospects in Erie, PA. He is upset that she would ignore her potential and not go to a big city. He starts telling her about Nietzsche's "Will to Power" (the shot of the book is absent from the censored version). But the dialogue gets butchered even more.

The following lines are cut from the theatrical release

But you must use men, not let them use you.

Look. Here. Nietzsche says: All life, no matter how we idealize it is nothing more, nor less, than exploitation.

They changed this

Use men. Be Strong! Defiant! Use men to get the things you want!

into

Be clean, be strong, defiant and you will be a success.

The censored version completely cuts out the idea that she is the stronger sex and that men can be molded to her needs. In the censored version she's told to be virtuous and clean and that men will reward her as they see fit.

Later on after she has been very successful in New York he sends her another Nietzsche book "Thoughts Out of Season." He's marked the passage

Face life as you find it - defiantly and unafraid. Waste no energy yearning for the moon. Crush out all sentiment.

In the censored version this becomes a book called "Stanley's Christian Institutions" and there is no highlighted passage. Instead it contains a letter to Lilly by her German friend. He is very upset she has chosen the wrong way (exploiting her feminine assets) and calls her a coward. He tells her she needs to regain her self respect and hopes she'll allow the book to guide her.

The movie doesn't point this out but Stanwyck's character is named Lilly. The most famous Lilly I know is Adam's first wife Lilith. The one who was made his equal (Eve is beneath Adam because she is made from his rib), and maybe created before Adam depending on which bible story you read. Lilith gets kicked out of the garden of Eden for not submitting to the patriarchy. From what I remember she goes to the Red Sea and copulates with demons and this is where we get vampires and stuff. I don't think its a stretch to see Stanwyck's Lilly as following a similar path. I suppose it's little details like this that filmmakers used to get things past the censors.

Finally Lilly has a very close African-American friend named Chico. There are two scenes where men tell her Chico needs to go (one her father, the other a VP at the bank she works at) and she is very adamant she and Chico will never part. Considering Stanwyck's membership in "The Sewing Circle" with other lesbians like Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford and Katherine Hepburn I wonder if her character's relationship with Chico was more intimate. The movie doesn't clarify this. But Lilly has a warmth and affection with Chico that is missing from her relationships with men in the movie. Chico is played by Theresa Harris who is great in her small role. She sings Louis Armstrong's "St. Louis Blues" in the background in a few scenes which also forms the basis of the soundtrack. Apparently the Hayes code killed off her chances of getting good roles later in her career.

The movie isn't perfect. Most of the men are kind of stupid. The censored and uncensored versions both have endings that don't make much sense. Well, the censored one makes sense if you look at it through the eyes of the Hayes code. Stanwyck is pretty good at exploiting her sensuality but nowhere near her peak in Double Indemnity.

It also interesting to compare this to critically lauded and Academy Award nominated Mildred Pierce (1945) with Joan Crawford in her Academy Award winning performance. That movie also features a woman with career ambitions who doesn't want to settle for what men are willing to hand to her. Once she transitions from suburban house wife to independent business woman her life is portrayed in a dark light. Her decisions corrupt her daughter and lead her into financial disaster. The Hayes code had their fingerprints all over this one too, and it is clear that they wanted to further their pro-patriarchy ideals even 10 years later.

I picked up a copy of W. Somerset Maugham's book The Razor's Edge from the library this weekend. I really enjoyed it but this quote stood out as particularly wicked and clever:

D'you remember how Jesus was led into the wilderness and fasted forty days? Then, when he was a-hungered, the devil came to him and said: If thou be the son of God, command that these stones be made bread. But Jesus resisted the temptation. Then the devil set him on a pinnacle of the temple and said to him: If thou be the son of God, cast thyself down. For angels had charge of him and would bear him up. But again Jesus resisted. Then the devil took him into a high mountain and showed him the kingdoms of the world and said that he would give them to him if he would fall down and worship him. But Jesus said: Get thee hence, Satan. That's the end of the story according to the good simple Matthew. But it wasn't. The devil was sly and he came to Jesus once more and said: If thou wilt accept shame and disgrace, scourging, a crown of thorns and death on the cross thou shalt save the human race, for greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Jesus fell. The devil laughed till his sides ached, for he knew the evil men would commit in the name of their redeemer.

The author/narrator follows it up later with this explanation of why self-sacrifice is such a powerful temptation:

I only wanted to suggest to you that self-sacrifice is a passion so overwhelming that beside it even lust and hunger are trifling. It whirls its victim to destruction in the highest affirmation of his personality. The object doesn't matter; it may be worth while or it may be worthless. When he sacrifices himself man for a moment is greater than God, for how can God, infinite and omnipotent, sacrifice himself? At best he can only sacrifice his only begotten son.

I have to wonder if Ayn Rand ever summed up this idea as cleverly since it was one of her shibboleths.

I'm listening to the podcast of Bill Moyer's Journal from 5/11 when I hear these lines from recent Regent University grad Carly Gammill:

Part of the goal of many of us who are going out from this institution from here on to make it clear and accurate what it really means to be a Christian leader to change the world, which is not to indoctrinate anyone but to share the truth and to offer the truth and to rely on the truth in the way that we handle our lives as an example to others. (emphasis is mine)

I remember when it was just called "the good news" instead of truth. She also uttered this naive understanding of the law:

I intend to help further the administration of justice and to do justice. And I believe in absolute truth, and I believe in absolutes. Not grey, you know, not relative truth but absolute truth. And that's what God's word is. (emphasis is mine)

With all that truth I wonder how one can have any faith. Truth leaves no room for doubt. Faith does not exist without doubt. As the Christian philosopher Paul Tillich put it "Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith." I'm beginning to wonder if places like Regent and Liberty might be forking a new religion from the Protestant tree.

Their religion doesn't seem to require faith as much as fealty to a central leader like Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson. Perhaps they're growing into an American version of Catholicism?

Pilot Japan sells a 0.25mm gel pen. When I asked why it isn't sold in the US the gist of the response was this:

Due to our marketing agreement with our parent company, and in some cases patent restrictions, we are unable to either sell or stock this item.

I was encouraged to travel abroad if I wanted this pen. The closest I've found in the American market is Pentel's Sunburst which comes in at 0.30mm. The majority of gel pens in America are an obese 0.70mm, some with inferior gel inks that spread even wider depending on the paper. Practically like writing with a marker at that point.

If information about these pens can travel the world, why not the pen? If this is a patent or marketing limitation why is nobody else providing a 0.25mm gel pen in America? I'm galled that patent/marketing limitations create a desert where there could be a market.

After books like this I lament my lack of a silver-tongued gift for persuasion. I'm robbed of the secondary pleasures of waiting for a friend to read it and hoping they feel the exuberance and tenderness I felt as I reached the end. The book is a memoir of Alison Bechdel's youth in a rural Pennsylvania town and her father's death while she was away at college. It opens with her and her father playing airplane as she recalls the story of another father and child, Icarus and Daedalus.

She circles through her story repeatedly but peels away new insights each time. Each time through she finds a way to fit the details of her life into a literary or historical narrative. Sometimes she describes her family life with passages from Proust. Sometimes her story finds resonance in Nixon's resignation. But the larger narrative that all the stories fit into is one dealing with Homer's Odyssey and James Joyce's Ulysses. A device that could be pretentious but isn't because she carries the novice reader into those stories at the same time. It also makes practical sense that the daughter of an english teacher and actress would frame her narrative with those books.

Her illustrations carry on the same narrative. A snake devouring its own tale reminds us of the narrative circles. Book titles casually appear in the background to clue the reader in to what is happening. Pop-up Video style balloons call our attention to minute details that add color to the story (is this subtext?). The image that will stay with me the longest is her and her father silhouetted by a setting sun as they stand on the porch of the family's Gothic Revival style home. She is playfully hanging off a column, and he's standing in quiet reverie watching all the colors mix.

What charmed me the most is how honestly she comes at the story of her youth, which is apparently the story of her father. She chronicles the highs and the lows without melodrama. She doesn't hesitate to offer up her own conflicted understanding. The literary devices she does use she is almost apologetic for and reminds the reader that it isn't pretension but these are the tools she was brought up with for understanding her world.

After the strength of this and fellow Eisner nominee American Born Chinese I am sure to check out the other Best New Graphic Album nominees.

North Texas competitors continue to underperform. The Dallas Mavericks finished first in the regular season and were bounced out in the first round of the playoffs. The Dallas Stars ambled through the regular season and hit a first round playoff exit.

Now comes news that five time national spelling bee competitor, and favorite to win it all this year, Samir Patel is out. Bummer. North Texas seems to have hit a slump. I blame the rain.

In a little over six months Texas has gone from 77.4% of the state in some kind of drought to 29.5%. I remember driving past fires in North Texas last Summer because it was so dry. I don't think the state has been this well hydrated since I've lived here.

As I write this yet another thunderstorm is pounding Dallas. It's been maybe a decade or more since I've been around thunderstorms this strong, especially with this kind of daily regularity. I miss the stretches of no rain that spanned for months.

On the plus side Julie and I were caught out in a storm as we walked around downtown on Sunday. That was really kinda fun. One of those moments every relationship should probably have.

Bloom points out in The American Religion that Mormonism, in the early days especially, was driven by a dialectic between the need to create the new Kingdom on Earth, but to also remain outside the mainstream. This conflict powered the growth of Mormonism.

I'm seeing this same dialectic play out in the comments on Free Republic about Reverend Falwell. Here are some relevant comments:

Hatred of Falwell by those on the left illustrates just how effective he was. The darkness hates the light.

A man is sometimes honored by the number and passion of the enemies he makes.

This is exactly what the Bible warned would happen. Right[e]ous people WILL be persecuted, even after their death.

A large number, perhaps a majority, of the comments are concerned with how their political enemies are responding to the news. Every time an outsider to their world condemns their icon they post how it renews their faith and vindicates their beliefs. Their faith would apparently suffer if they were completely mainstream and did not have a political enemy to struggle against. Yet to be the mainstream is what they want! Apparently there is no condition where both parties can win, and they can sustain their beliefs.

What surprises me is how little they seem to be celebrating specific things that Falwell did. I really haven't seen any posts praising his segregationist views, anti-homosexual views, Christian Zionism, etc. There has been praise in general for his good works but really only in generalities. That may be a fault of the the Free Republic forums. Their forums tend to only contain short snarky or pious comments and don't reward more in-depth posts. A condition that is common across all forums on the Internet, not just Free Republic.

Harold Bloom in The American Religion (1992):

Fundamentalism, the great curse of all American religion, and of all religion in this American century. Fundamentalism [...] is an attempt to overcome the terror of death by a crude, literalization of the Christian intimation of immortality.

As Bloom puts it all religion comes from our apprehension of death. I guess this is why science is so lousy at explaining death. I wonder what comes from our celebration of life?

CIC*TRIPLE ADVANTAGE 877-4816825 may you rot in hell.

Recently I went to Experian's free credit report site to get my score. Despite my best efforts to the contrary I'm now subscribed to their $12.95/month credit monitoring service. Unsubscribing can only be done by calling an 877 number and sitting on hold apparently.

I would like to add that their credit monitoring service only exists because they do such a poor job of gathering accurate credit information. They want me to subsidize their poor credit reporting. Unbelievable.

Credit scoring is only useful for lenders. Let them pay to clean it up.

On the daily puppy they post pictures of cute puppies. They also have ratings and comments for each puppy. The ratings I've seen end up between 10 and 11 (the highest). The comments all use varying degrees of hyperbole to describe how cute the puppy is.

The ratings and comments seem redundant to me, yet I bet people wouldn't enjoy the site as much without them. (I always browse them) Why is that? I see the same kind of redundant chatter on many websites (digg comes to mind). I wonder if this fills the same role as small talk in the real world? I guess any web site looking for an audience needs to provide opportunities for this kind of chatter.

The first unfinished movie footage from the Golden Compass has been posted. I teared up a little bit with excitement. The scene of Iorek running without his armor looked really good.

The narration in the clip is a mess. It describes the story in only the blandest terms. Chris Weitz's mention of freewill is the only clue into the big journey the story takes. I wonder if they're still not sure how to pitch the story to American audiences.

Sometimes it seems like we're quick to forget the great engineers and scientists who make our world possible. More people know who Anna Nicole Smith is than say Jon Postel. I've been really pleased to see all ink spilled on the passing of John Backus. While I knew about Fortran and BNF I didn't realize how bright and forward thinking the guy behind them was.

Conventional programming languages are growing ever more enormous, but not stronger. Inherent defects at the most basic level cause them to be both fat and weak...

[via Scott Rosenberg]

That is from the opening of an ACM paper he wrote advocating for functional programming instead of conventional procedural programming. Functional programming took a back seat to Object Oriented programming, but in recent years it has seen a resurgence. I imagine part of this is because we've also seen a sort of return to the mainframe/dumb terminal model of computing with web servers/browsers. Of course it doesn't hurt to have Google championing functional programming with their map/reduce algorithms.

It's great to see someone willing to look beyond their own innovations (Fortran isn't functional) to find a better way. I hope I can see my own flaws as clearly.

I'm surprised I haven't seen more about OpenCongress in the sites I read. It is one of the better Congressional resource sites I've seen. I can't wait for the next release which will include the ability to tag bills, and follow the Congressional calendar.

It nicely bridges the gap between official government items (votes, bills, hearings) and public discourse about those items. Most sites like this play one side or the other.

They've got a Trac site for developers. Unsurprisingly it's written in Ruby on Rails.

What if we used a different currency for commodity items like toilet paper or Coke. So instead of paying $1 for a Coke you'd pay say 500 credits. Or think of it as 50 yen for a Coke.

Price is a crucial piece of information for the consumer. Commodity pricing in America loses detail because our currency doesn't work well for discriminating products at the low end. But if you could price two items as 2000 credits and 1800 credits, instead of each being $2, you're adding more detail back into the price. That detail just can't be reflected with our coarsely grained US currency.

I think what happens is that commodity prices have to be inflated because US currency can't go smaller. I think we could drive prices down if we had a new kind of currency to handle commodity pricing. Maybe this is one reason why prices go down when you buy in bulk? You're getting closer to a true price of an individual item because our currency is equipped to handle those kinds of prices.

Recently I've been fascinated by microcredit, and currency exchange. In the quest for more knowledge I was talking to someone who actually has a masters in finance. I threw out the analogy that banking is to microfinance as Newtonian physics is to Quantum physics. The idea being that the laws of finance change when the dollar amounts get small.

He wasn't fully sold on it because fundamentally risk modeling is the same for big and large. But he threw out the idea that Newtonian physics might be used to describe finances of $1m and up, whereas microcredit finance would be more like an electron cloud with probability describing the electron's movement.

I like that. The analogy also works if you think about how big an impact a $50 loan can have in a microfinance situation, whereas in traditional banking it's a nuisance.

I've been researching the PATRIOT Act which naturally leads me back through US history and similar cycles of radicalism. While pausing on the 1920 Wall Street Bombing and the later Palmer raids I came across this excellent quote. Then US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer had his eye on the Democratic presidential nomination and tried to fire up support for him with this gem:

Like a prairie-fire, the blaze of revolution was sweeping over every American institution of law and order … eating its way into the homes of the American workmen, its sharp tongues of revolutionary heat were licking the altars of the churches, leaping into the belfry of the school bell, crawling into the sacred corners of American homes, seeking to replace marriage vows with libertine laws, burning up the foundations of society.

From 9/16: Terrorists Bomb Wall Street

Attorney General Gonzalez doesn't seem to have the same fire in his belly.

AFI Dallas has a new website up with all the films, venue and ticket information. I've already got about 10 films on my "to see" list from just a cursory glance.

It's been a couple weeks since the Boston bomb scare. I'm staggered by the fact that nobody seems to be upset with Boston. They did a poor job assessing a threat. The idea that any kind of electronics not branded with the logo of a major consumer electronics company is an I.E.D. is an unworkable policy for assessing threats.

You won't find the needle in the haystack by making the haystack bigger. They've got to eliminate false positives and shrink the haystack. They need a procedure for scoring I.E.D. threats. Does it have some kind of antenna for remote detonation? What is the power source for detonation? Does it have a timer circuit for timed detonation? Are there explosives attached? Was the device concealed? (Presumably you want to hide your bomb so its not discovered prematurely) These details should be simple to assess either up close by someone, or by having a robot/remote controlled camera observe the device.

Heck if you can create a robot that follows sunlight or radio waves, why not make one that follows bomb scents (like bomb sniffing dogs)? They don't even have to be very sophisticated. You can use Ant Colony Optimization techniques to create swarms to sniff out bombs. I'm getting into science fiction here but I can imagine a day when large cities create swarms to roam the city looking for threats. Each robot would report back periodically through the municipal wifi network.

democamp Dallas is this Thursday (2/15/07) from 6:30-8pm at Sabre Labs in Southlake. All of the *camp events that I've been to have been a lot of fun, and frankly gotten me excited about tech again. If you can make it please sign up on the wiki.

From the written word to web 2.0, how ideas are finding new ways to spread and mutate. Web 2.0 in 5 minutes.

There are some books that have chased after me for years. They pop up in conversations with other people over and over. Details of the plot leak into my head and I start thinking about how they work. But I never read them. Then I yield, read the book and understand why the book chased me all those years.

I finally read Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card, and I wish I had read it when I was younger. I might have had the courage to make different choices. I found it comforting to find someone else who thought like me and wanted to love his friends and family but felt alienated because of his responsibilities. That closeness with the main character is what made me really appreciate the last few lines of Card's introduction to the book:

The story is one that you and I will construct together in your memory. If the story means anything to you at all, then when you remember it afterward, think of it, not as something I created, but rather as something that we made together.

Big news in the Perplex City ARG. The Receda Cube was found by astro_random. He wins the $200k prize. I have a feeling puzzles like billion to one and riemann may go unsolved.

Season two of Perplex City starts this March.

iTunes played She Wants Revenge followed by New Order. There is no way that was random. It's like iTunes thought "you just listened to the copy, now I'll play the original." I wish I understood the crazy AI they call Party Shuffle.

I picked up C.B. Cebulski's Wonderlost and I hope he puts out more issues and everyone buys one. In the first issue he tells six stories, each illustrated by someone different, about teenage love, relationships on the cusp between friends and lovers, and the moments after it all falls apart.

He writes with an authenticity that brings filmmaker David Gordon Green to mind. Although he might capture a bit more of life's humor than DGG. The stories are tight. The dialogue, narration and paneling don't have any wasted effort. Perhaps what impresses me most is I'm so caught up with the characters I don't have any time to go second guessing their behavior when they make bad decisions. I saw my own choices in life echoed in Wonderlost's characters. Sometimes that was a punch to the gut and sometimes it made me smile and get all nostalgic.

It's also the only comic book I've read that comes with a mix CD track list at the end.

You can read one of the stories, Make Up, online. Here are pages 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 .

I'm reading Rory Stewart's book The Places in Between about his walk across Afghanistan after the Taliban fell. I laughed out when I came across this entry from his stay in a small, remote village in the Ghor region.

A Bill Gates speech on American policy toward technology monopolies was being translated into Dari. The men listened intently. I wondered what these illiterate men without electricity thought of bundling Internet Explorer with Windows.

In reading it I must admit I'm jealous. In a different life I would have walked all over the world and been content.

Sometimes I think about all the time I spend reading this or writing that and wonder where did all that effort go. There must be some niche thing I'm pretty freaking good at by now.

If I only I knew what it is.

Stories like this one about hockey phenom Sidney Crosby get me teary eyed and nostalgic.

In successive games against Tampa Bay earlier this month, he scored while sliding on his side, controlling the puck while doing so, and from his knees.

I'm a sucker for movies like Miracle, The Natural, or Field of Dreams. In particular the moment in the movie where somebody transcends what people think is possible.

Youtube has some video on this. Watch Crosby pull the puck behind two defenders, dive between them, take control of the puck again and score. Then take a gander at another leaping goal that follows him into the boards. It's great to see any athlete put that much passion into the game.

There is a curious phenomenon running through the DVD market on Amazon these days. At the end of the long tail DVDs with meager popularity demand huge prices.

Matinee, that lovable coming of age story set during the Cuban Missile Crisis and chock full of movie palace nostalgia sells for between $50 and $110 these days.

But even it must bow before the pricing juggernaut that is Cinema Europe - The Other Hollywood a six hour documentary about silent film in Europe. It starts at $289 and only goes up. Of course even this is tiny before the titan of expensive DVDs the Criterion Edition of Salo. It starts around $400 and climbs into the $2500+ stratosphere.

I like to think that these prices reflect their cultural importance. Thus an Oscar nominated crowd pleaser, but culturally insignificant film, like Mannequin starts at $7. However I really don't think that's it. There's something about the passionate audience for these movies that drives up the price. I wonder if theatrical releases might see these kind of price fluctuations some day.

Almost twelve years ago I lost a drawing Kathy made. Times have come and gone since then where I've longed to look at it again and remember what it was like the first time I saw it.

The night I saw it for the first time was one of those moments that becomes a nexus point through which all memories before and after must flow. That night shines so bright in the memoryscape that other memories near it have faded. From that moment on our friendship was unhinged and a new wilder energy flowed through everything between us.

I've been schlepping decades of computer junk (RSX-11M+ manual anyone?) from city to city, and home to home. Tonight I began the effort of taking it all apart, sorting it and getting it ready for disposal. I can't believe I lucked upon an unlabeled floppy from March 27th, 1995 that had this image the whole time.

The iPhone looks great but why is Apple poisoning their brand by an association with Cingular? The Cingular CEO read his Cingular/AT&T ad from notecards during the keynote and was not enthused about being there and didn't appear to "get it." There is one more big innovation Apple could push with the iPhone.

Get the message out that American consumers don't have to buy phones from the major carriers. I recently bought an unlocked phone. While finding and buying the phone was a pain in the butt, moving my SIM card was easy. I would love to see Apple open up distribution channels for cell phones in America.

At the very least I hope they offer an unlocked version.

In an interview with the owner of the local comic book store Zeus Comics he offered the top five signs he knows a comic book reader is gay.

1. They touch my hand while exchanging cash.
2. Their pull-list consists solely of Aquaman and Green Lantern or conversely Strangers in Paradise and DC's 52.
3. They talk endless about their hero's outfit in City of Heroes.
4. They comment on the "bump" on the male action figures.
5. Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman.

That's me right there at number 2, just getting Strangers in Paradise and 52.

Now that I've added Garth Ennis' testosterone packed The Boys to my regular reads I'm charting new territory.

The Boys is a comic that in the first few issues has a female Christian conservative super hero, Starlight, being humiliated into performing oral sex on Homelander (Superman), Black Noir (Batman) and A-Train (Flash). As a credit to Ennis Starlight is also the most interesting character of The Seven (Justice League).

Finished The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan about the Great Dust Bowl and have come away humbled by the scope of the disaster and mankind's tenacity in the face of horrible conditions.

There are two parts that seem so cinematic I'd love to see them in a movie. The first is the great dust storm on Black Sunday. Something I hadn't realized before is these storms create static electricity. People would try to leave town only to have their cars short out. They could see the electricity sparking inside the car. If people touched each other they could be knocked to the ground by the static discharge. Blue electricity would sparkle off the barbed wire fences. Trees would be blackened by sparks of electricity. Of course, this is just the prelude to the big act when hundreds of tons of dust would blot out the sun and plunge the world into darkness. One dust storm dropped more tons of dirt in a day than all the dirt that was moved to create the Panama Canal.

The other scene would be with Big Hugh Bennett the soil expert that FDR would count on to find a way out of the disaster. Bennett plans a Senate hearing to plead his case that soil conservation is the only way to stop the dust storms and that they need to fund conservation programs. He comes in with charts, graphs and mountains of data but the ace up his sleeve is that he knows a giant dust storm has hit the Midwest and that this one is big enough to make it to D.C. If he times it right the storm will darken the windows of the room as he makes his case and leave D.C. covered in dust. Twice aides come in to update him on the status of the storm as he stretches for time. He pulls it off and finally Washington understands what is going on in the Plains.

Overall the book is a sober look at how unbridled capitalism and poor government planning can wreak unbelievable havoc. The end has a teaser that there may be another great story to tell about the depletion of the Ogallala aquifer by large corporate farms and poor water conservation policies. The Ogallala spreads out beneath eight states from South Dakota to Texas and is being emptied quicker than it is replenished.

Time for a little reflection on where I've been.

My creative interests have withered all over the place. New Songs, photos, blog posts, movies (theatrical and DVD) all dropped by about half between 2005 and 2006. I've written far less in my personal paper journal. Miles traveled went down. I've had less interesting ideas to jot down.

I think I've gone up on the number of books read, especially if you count comics. Thank you Brian K. Vaughan (Ex Machina, Y: The Last Man, Pride of Baghdad), Garth Ennis (The Boys), Grant Morrison (Doom Patrol, 52), and Terry Moore (Strangers in Paradise). I've stayed about the same on my fiction and non-fiction reading.

On the professional front I've done great. I've finished out the year with a 4.0 GPA. I've got a great job.

In the last half of the year I've been trying to get into more hobbies. Most of them revolve around building projects that interest me from Make magazine.

One of my Christmas gifts was a book on Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithms. I'm hoping this gets me back on track with building a collection of BEAM bots to solve Sudoku puzzles using ACO. My other BEAM bot building projects have been an exercise in frustration. Soldering together BEAM bots without any kind of circuit board has proven to be extremely difficult for me.

I did get a cordless Dremel for Christmas which I think will be exceptionally handy for fixing up some clay sculptures I made with Emily. One got messed up in a kiln accident, and the other needs some surgery. I'm also thinking about creating a chess set with theme fruits and vegetables using Sculpey and will probably Dremel out mistakes.

Most frustrating was the lack of emotional connection to the people around me. I drifted away more this year. I'm hoping that changes in 2007 but I'm not sure how to make that happen.

Vast landscapes can have much the same anxiety-reducing effect on us as ruins, for they are the representatives of infinite space, as ruins are the representatives of infinite time. Against them, or within them, our weak, short-lived bodies must seem of no greater consequence than those of moths or spiders.

Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety

A timely reminder that my present struggles would do well to be set aside, and that perhaps a trip to a vast landscape would do much to rejuvenate me.

The NY Times has a good story about Netflix and their rental patterns.

Netflix sends and receives 700 million DVDs a year. Out of their 60,000 titles 35,000 to 40,000 are out every day. That number is surprisingly diverse. I would have expected Netflix's 5 million subscribers to be more homogeneous. I guess the movie interests of Netflix subscribers are far more diverse than the mainstream movie theater crowd.

I wonder what the difference is between an average Netflix subscriber and an average theatergoer. My guess is that ticket costs make the theatergoer less likely to take risks. I'd love to see some of the art house theaters offer up a subscription program like Netflix that encourages people to take more chances.

Yahoo launched a new TV site and then got repeatedly bashed in the comments by users. I was surprised to see the normally snarky Techcrunch comment on how this is a good thing for Yahoo. The idea being that Yahoo is soliciting feedback and acting on it.

It reminded me of my own recent woes trying to figure out a useful way to translate an email message into a blog post or comment. The problem was that what may be useful in an email message (quoting every message in the thread, signatures, etc) are mostly noise once you structure them in a web site. Recent events have reminded me of the importance of feedback. I've started trying to think of a way to collect feedback inside the web app as to what's noise and what's signal in a posting.

I also noticed that others have problems gatewaying HTML emails out of mailing lists as well.

I run a mailing list for local movie buffs. I've always been frustrated by the web based archives that the list software creates. Basically I want to be able to use it the way I use a blog. I want to tag posts, search by author, full text search, permalink, 2 level message threading (instead of the n level of threading it currently does).

I quickly wrote something to pull new emails out of a pop3 account and post new messages via the MetaWeblog API to a Wordpress blog, and then followup emails as comments to the post. While this was a little tricky because of broken Microsoft mail clients and Wordpress comment throttling threading it more or less works.

The big problem is that emails on a mailing list are not blog posts. People have giant signatures, Microsoft adds garbage markup, people will reply to a message and start a completely new thread, some email responses contain copies of every message in the thread. What might be considered a feature in email is noise in a blog post or comment.

I can't figure out how to handle all the noise in each email. I'm beginning to think the whole experiment is misguided because people use the mailing list more like an instant message chat, than a place for discussions needing to be archived.

I'm a little drunk from the tequila shots so my typing might be slippy. Tonight we had the big live event for the Yahoo Time Capsule. As the Jemez indians performed sacred dances and music the red rock canyon walls in the Jemez Pueblo lit up with images and words from the time capsule. Four images side by side each almost filled the 175 feet high canyon walls.

It was beautiful. All these pictures of people with their families, pets, babies, sunsets, love, love lost, anger, fun and hopes from all over the world in multiple languages left me awed. I wish all the people that uploaded stuff could have seen their pictures on the canyon walls. I felt so proud of the human race.

I teared up watching it. I did an uncharacteristic thing and spontaneously hugged a co-worker in my jubilation and awe. We'd only met in person the day before. All these every day slices of life from people all over the world with the same hope and anger that I know in Dallas, TX. I hope in 2020 we still have the same unity.

I've been working on this time capsule for the last five or six weeks. Well me and another guy work on the backend. I didn't really have a good idea if it would work when people started contributing to it. I mean technically I knew, but I didn't realize I'd get choked up when people throw in something really good.

I wish it wasn't a temporary thing and that we could keep working on the interface, the backend and adding different features to make it better.

I was browsing the Texas Old English Sheepdog Rescue site. I cried like I haven't cried in a long time reading about the ones that died. I remember being a lot more emotionally open when I had my dogs to comfort me if things did not go well.

Work has been very busy. I really like the people I'm working with. I wish I had pushed my way into Yahoo earlier.

I wish my electrical components would arrive I want to get to work on my BEAM bot.

The new Zune player from Microsoft can't play old Windows DRM protected files. So Microsoft has suggested that people violatate the DMCA to make them playable.

Thanks to a link on Jim Gilliam's blog I read a Psychology Today article about Post Traumatic Growth. I'd never heard of this term before. I checked with my sister and apparently some folks in the APA started pushing for "positive psychology" in the 1990s. They want psychology to also study the growth from trauma instead of just the problems. I think the hope might be that you end up with a science where you have something to work towards, instead of just trying to get away from problems.

Isn't positive psychology just a more palatable way to describe transpersonal psychology? Consider this definition of spiritual emergence and tell me how this is different from Post Traumatic Growth:

This has also been called transpersonal crisis, acute psychosis with a positive outcome, positive disintegration and an extreme state.

It would be an impressive feat to see the APA make transpersonal psychology mainstream by calling it positive psychology.

A Pew Research study finds Americans are uneasy with mix of religion and politics. However, there is one group that is totally comfortable with religion and politics mixing: White Evangelicals. 60% of White Evangelicals believe the bible should have more influence on U.S. Laws than the will of the American people. This contrasts with 16% of White mainline respondents and 7% of Secular respondents. These numbers coincide with a Rasmussen study stating 75% of Alabama and Arkansas believe the bible is literally true.

As a white male from Alabama I fit into those groups above but I believe in democracy and at best see Jesus as a philosopher on morality and ethics. I've been reading a book on Southern Identity and was surprised to learn that the in the early 19th century the North looked down on the South for a lack of piety and a certain hedonism. In the 1820s only one in ten people in the South attended church. By the 1860s that had almost completely flipped as Southerners flocked to Southern Baptist and Methodist churches. Religious leaders provided a moral sanctuary from the degradations of the South's "peculiar institution" in exchange for substantial tithes from the South's wealthy plantation owners. Those same religions were used to preach a different message about slavery in the churches of the North.

Religion's ability to salve one's emotional and mental wounds is amazing on a personal level, but its effects on groups can turn toxic.

The invention of text broke the monopoly that priests had on the collective story. Armed with a 22-letter alphabet, a ragtag bunch of Hebrew slaves went out into the desert and rewrote their reality from the beginning...

Douglas Rushkoff

I was browsing through the comic book store when I came across a new series written by Douglas Rushkoff called Testament. He's using stories from Old Testament as a mythological basis for stories in a near future where everyone has RFID tags, the US is always at war, and the draft is about to be reinstated to preserve our freedom.

The narrative in the book moves back and forth between the future and the Old Testament past. The first volume brings in the story of Akedah where Abraham almost sacrifices his son Isaac and then retells it in the near future as a scientist who works for the government and has to make his son eligible for the draft.

They do some neat things with the panels. Gods exist outside the panels, and the humans only exist inside them. When the gods do break through the panels to interact with people their finger might transform into a pillar of fire.

The book definitely has some Grant Morrison type flourishes in the writing and the art. I could easily see The Invisibles working in the near future story line. I'm really excited to see where this series goes.

Dreamhost posted audio of a couple voicemails from a guy complaining about spam. It's like a redneck Al Swearengen from Deadwood if he was upset about spam.

William Saletan's article in Slate about the liquid world makes some thoughtful points about our current woes in fighting terrorism. The idea of treating a threat with a 1% chance of success the same as a 95% chance of success is an unworkable solution and at some point we as a nation will have to face that.

...some of us die. And the rest of us grieve, but we go on, doing our best to fight the bad guys and heal the world. The grieving and fighting and healing never end the dying.

He's saying the above about terrorism but he could just as well be saying it about our healthcare situation, or any number of other national policy issues.

He closes with a quote from Charles Darwin that carries an elevated poignancy since it not only applies to our struggle with terrorism but the seemingly eternal struggle between the scientist who struggles to understand the world on his own terms and the zealot who will only look at the world in someone else's terms.

It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.

A closed room has a refrigerator with the door open. What happens to the temperature in the room?

The temperature goes up because more energy is added to the room while the refrigerator is plugged in. When Julie quizzed me on this oh so long ago I hesitated, but the real answer made complete sense.

I kept thinking about that as I read William Saletan's article in Slate about our need to refrigerate contributes to our global warming problems. I can't remember the last time an article made me feel this unpleasant.

I start work at Yahoo doing web development August 21st. No other job has left me as excited by what it could be, and as unsure of what it will be.

Emily had her eleventh birthday at the end of July. While I was there she asked me if I believed we go to Heaven when we die. She said she doesn't believe in Hell and she's not sure about Heaven or God. I was quietly beaming inside. I was so proud. She was grappling with faith and reason and finding a role for those ideas in her life. I think I gave her a frustrating answer when I said what I know is that we don't know what happens next.

Someday I'll nudge her towards Ursula K. Le Guin's novel "The Left Hand of Darkness" with that great section between Faxe and Genry:

The unknown, the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there were no God there would be no religion ... But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion ... Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, predictable, inevitable—the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?

That we shall die.

Yes. There's really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer ... The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.

My rep Eddie Bernice Johnson voted against Network Neutrality by supporting HR5252. I'm pretty disappointed with her.

This bill was sponsored by Commerce Committee Chairman Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), Rep. Charles Pickering (R-Miss.) and Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.). I bet you can guess who their top campaign contributors are: AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon.

Us Dallasites really need to create an interest group that is saavy about Internet issues. Is there a group here that already does that? We need to go out to other groups in town and educate them about IP issues like Fair Use, DMCA, Network Neutrality, etc. It won't take that many people to make a big impact on these issues.

I've been reading about mathematical geniuses the past few weeks. I read Simon Singh's book "The Code Book" and that sort of got me started. I owned an unread book on Kurt Gödel called Incompleteness that I started reading after that. That's lead me to G.H. Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology and a book on the Indian math genius Ramanujan called The Man Who Knew Infinity. All illustrate (1) how hard it is to be a genius (2) that even other geniuses will misunderstand you and (3) how ordinary and unimportant everyone else is.

In Hardy's case he tried to commit suicide when he realized he didn't have the mathematical creativity of his youth. (It's an old rule that nobody over 40 discovers anything significant in math) His friend C.P. Snow encouraged him to write a book explaining why he loved math, which he did. After it was published he succeeded at killing himself.

All of them had it easy. Try going to a jobby job 40 hours a week and being aware of your own mediocrity. I'll trade all of that for the cushy life of an Oxford prof who was only the fifth best mathematician in the world, or an intellectual in the Vienna Circle.

Still it is exciting to read about their struggles to refine their big ideas, or the enormous ramifications of something like Gödel's Incompleteness proof. I only wish we spent as much time on mathematicians and scientists in history class as we spent on politicians and generals. The mathematicians and scientists have a bigger, longer term impact on how the world works. I can't believe I came out of high school knowing more about Eli Whitney than Wittgenstein, Gödel or Euclid. Learn about Kissinger or Nash equilibriums? Hands down I'll take Nash equilibriums. They offer me a model for understanding foreign policy. Kissinger's realpolitik is just another vocab word.

One semester of school down, some number > 4 to go.

Julie is borrowing my copies of The Invisibles. I find this incredibly cool.

I got all excited when I read that The Golden Compass is shooting for a 2007 release date.

Read about Metatron on wikipedia. That took me to an enjoyable review of Donnie Darko that posits the idea that Frank the bunny is Metatron, the face of God. The article also included the idea that some believe it was Metatron who stopped Abraham from killing his son Isaac, not God. That wrapped me back around to a blog entry about theophany and seeing the divine in popular culture.

Which has brought me back to the need to clean my place.

I received a response to the email I sent to Senator Cornyn's office respectfully asking him to clarify his views on elimination of income tax, institution of slavery, and application of the death penalty for blasphemy, homosexuality, idolatry, heresy, evil sorcery, etc. This email was sent in regards to his visit to an event put together by Christian Reconstructionalists. The prior points being goals of the Christian Reconstructionalist movement that strives to enshrine Old Testament law in a sort of Christian version of the Taliban.

His office responded with boilerplate about the importance of allowing the free exercise of religion and protecting religious freedom. I plan on pressing to see what limits he feels apply to the free exercise of one's religious beliefs. I wonder if he draws a distinction between the freedom to believe, and the freedom to act.

In general, I'd feel a lot better about some of our Republican leaders if they clarified where they believe those limits are. I imagine he supports limits like the Supreme Court outlawing polygamy in the Mormon church, or not protecting the use of peyote in Native American rituals. It's probably just fringe Christian groups that enjoy his unequivocal support for the free exercise of religion.

I'd just like to say, we had 101 degrees here today and my loft is still pleasant without turning on the a/c.

The home team took home another Pulitzer in Breaking News for photography. The Dallas Morning News has posted the photos that won [some are graphic].

YouTube video of a news cast about a Leprachaun in Mobile, Alabama, or it could be a crackhead.

All of those little white dots are people marching up Ross Ave. in downtown Dallas. The NYTimes has an article on the march. The Dallas Morning News has great photos of the event, a couple of them by 2004 Pulitzer prize winner Cheryl Diaz Meyer.

I'm really proud of Dallas right now, in particular the hispanic community. I knew about the march but I never expected 350,000 to 500,000 people to show up. It would have been really cool to be downtown to see this. I'd love to see everyone in this country participate more in politics like this.

I learned that Maria died from injuries in a car accident on Monday. Michael was in the accident as well but was discharged from the hospital today. Their wedding in 2003 was one of the best times of my life. Rarely have I seen two lives come together and so profoundly change each other.

She had a great smile, and she always made you feel included. Maybe that's why their relationship felt so great. I felt included in whatever life changing energy they had between each other. She was fiery and forthright. I always admired how we could disagree and still be friends.

I remember her last words to me were her singing Happy Birthday in Spanish over the phone. The way she sang the word cumpleanos has stuck in my head since then. In the weeks since I'd found it repeating in my head and it'd always give me a little smile.

I will miss you Maria. And to Michael, my good friend, whatever it takes.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force Movie Film for Theaters comes out this September. Guest stars include Bruce Campbell and Neil Peart of the Canadian power rock trio Rush!

The recent "War on Christianty" conference in Washington D.C. featured some prominent Christian Reconstructionalists. I wasn't fully aware of their agenda. Basically the goal is to institute a new government built around the Old Testament. Things that would be different:

• Balanced budget
• No income tax
• Legalization of slavery
• Elimination of the prison system
• Death penalty for blasphemy, homosexuality, idolatry, heresy, evil sorcery, etc.
• Women become property of father until marriage, then property of husband
• Hawaii would be given back to natives

While I don't believe these topics were on the agenda. They are the agenda of some of the organizers. My senator, John Cornyn, attended this conference. I've emailed his office curious as to whether he supports any of these initiatives.

A sort of shared todo list except tasks are called prayers. people2pray.com

50% of refunds are due to bad design.

We can America a better place if we make Design part of the public school curriculum. We teach art and we teach math and science. We don't teach anything that helps you to apply form and function in the real world.

Julie and I made the trek down to Austin for SXSW Film. Small Town Gay Bar, Shadow Company, LOL, Inner Circle Line and Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon all stand out. But TV Junkie is the one that I've been thinking about over and over. This guy, Rick Kerkham, kept a regular video diary from the age of 14. He documented his rise from TV news reporter in Wichita Falls, to Las Vegas to Inside Edition, and then his fall as he struggles with drug addiction. Over 3000 hours of footage edited down to 98 minutes. You watch him smoking crack, being arrested by the cops, he and his wife fighting in front of his kids, and even attempting suicide in his truck. He has a journalist's detachment from the situation no matter how horrible it is as he describes what he's going through. This experience, the capturing of a narrative in someone's life is one reason why I go to movies.

During the Q&A the directors revealed that Rick was in the audience. Then Rick revealed that his ex-wife, who is featured prominently in the movie, was also in the audience. I can't begin to describe how odd it was for me to have movie life intrude into my real life. I use the word intrude because Rick wasn't playing a character in the movie, it was him. So it's not like when you ask actors about the character they play. Rick was taping the audience for one of his video diaries. This only compounded the the strangeness of what was happening. I am disappointed the movie didn't garner more buzz. The filmmakers are from Dallas so I'm hoping it gets a screening here because I'd like to see it with an audience again.

For the record I saw The Last Western, Small Town Gay Bar, Reel Shorts 1, Jumping Off Bridges, AMERICANese, TV Junkie, KZ, Shadow Company, Eve and the Fire Horse, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, Live Free or Die, Autumn's Eyes, LOL, Heavens Fall, Population/436, Dance Party USA, Inner Circle Line, and Maxed Out

Emily and I have one particular playground at Randolph School that we like to visit. This time she found a leaf she really liked and she was showing it off to me. This is one of my favorite pictures that I've taken of her.

• Dallas.rb Wiki
  (tags: dallas ruby)

• Find Similar Sites
  (tags: search)
• Ruby Quiz
  (tags: ruby programming)
• JRuby Home
  (tags: ruby java)

• Gig Guide: How to Make an Origami CD Case - by Matthew Toledo - 2/13/2005
  (tags: howto dvd case)

I'm feeling much better now. Sorry about all the rubbish before. I was pretty tore up.

My wellness is just in time for Apple to open a third Dallas Apple store in NorthPark. Then next week its SXSW 2006 and 20x2!

I think if I understood linear algebra better I could solve America's healthcare problems, or at least tame the healthcare claims we process at work.

Tristram Shandy finally came out in theaters here in Dallas. It was pretty damn funny the second time too. I just can't get enough of that scene with the hot chestnut down the pants.

On the horizon for gnucasa is new paint on the walls. Sometime before, during and after that I'm hoping to have a new site put together for podcasting stories about Dallas, the Big D, home of Pegasus, the silicon prairie, 7-11, the credit card, and premiere gentlemen's clubs.

I've been hit by some kind of virus. I'm not sure how long I've got. I don't know who did it. I think they planted some kind of visual cortex activated virus in a document about Operation Northwoods using some kind of steganographic technique. Normally I use a text to speech reader to circumvent such a visual viral vector. Except this time. They must administer an anti-viral to people with clearance to read such documents while everyone else who reads it is infected.

I don' t know how long I'll be able to fight this virus. I've had to drop my "cover job" since Wednesday afternoon. I've been frantically trying to find someone that can help get this out of me. I've been in touch with an agent that claims to have an ansible and contacts at alpha centauri who may be able to help.

I'm so sore, and my head has so much pressure in it. The goal isn't to kill me, I imagine it would have done that already, I'm wondering what it is trying to do to me. I'm preparing a pilgrimage to Dublin, TX as they may have an elixir to purge this thing.

Look deeper.

Long live the dolphin underground!

• RailsHelp
  (tags: rails)
• Getting Started With ActiveRecord Migrations
  (tags: development rails database)

• Rails Best Practices, Tips and Tricks
  (tags: rails ruby)

• Finitec Acoustic Membrane Floor Insulation
  (tags: sound insulation)

• RailFrog / CMS Ridin’ on Rails
  (tags: cms rails ruby)

• MODx CMS - Content Management System | CMS and PHP Application Framework
  (tags: blog development php software)

• OpenQRM - Open Resource Manager - Home
  (tags: linux cluster)
• Dojo - DojoToolkit.org
  (tags: ajax javascript web)

Ever wondered what happens when a fireworks factory explodes?

• FreeNAS: The Free NAS Server
  (tags: software storage NAS)

It's about freaking time for a new Built to Spill album. Album comes out April 11th and it's called "You in Reverse". They've posted the first song Goin' Against Your Mind on myspace and I really enjoy it. It sounds more like something from "Perfect From Now On" than "Ancient Melodies of the Future".

Here's the tracklist:

1. Goin' Against Your Mind
2. Traces
3. Liar
4. Saturday
5. Wherever You Go
6. Conventional Wisdom
7. Gone
8. Mess With Time
9. Just A Habit
10. The Wait

I'm frustrated that an overpriced school book for a computer class is written using a crappy monospaced font for the programming examples. The lowercase L looks the same as the number 1.

I'm no designer but I do like it when things actually work. I've found Andale Mono on Windows or Monaco on OS X seem to be good monospace alternatives. Sometimes I wish I lived in the Netherlands or Sweden where good design seems to be a national point of pride. We Americans waste a lot of time on poorly designed crap.

Bush Presidency: the interactive text adventure. [via Amanda]

I'm very much looking forward to Bar Camp Dallas. I've been playing around with ideas for a presentation.

Go read Ex Machina if you haven't. Well read the first page, if that doesn't grab you then the rest probably won't.

I had lost interest in Grant Morrison's recent work and finally jumped into Brian K. Vaughan's Y the Last Man. While I enjoy Y I've really gotten into Ex Machina. Basically the series revolves around the mayor of New York who has the power to talk to machines. There is a potent story arc that involves him stopping one of the planes on 9/11 and saving the second tower. It also has a Vaughan trademark, little tidbits of historical details sprinkled throughout. These give the series a certain heft because it anchors it in the real world.

The artwork is nice. It's done like those animated Richard Linklater movies, where he shoots live footage and animates on top of it. They do the same thing with the panels. They position people in a scene and then take a picture and use that for the illustration.

Here's a little secret about me. Ever since I was a kid I've wished I could draw.

• Developer | Slider | Measure Map
  (tags: ajax javascript rails xml)

Back in Dallas after spending a week in Huntspatch with the folks, my sister and Emily. It was also nice to see old friends. Sorry for the ones I missed. I am impressed by Emily's creativity. She will go much further than I ever did.

After I got back to Dallas I caught a midnight screening of Robocop and was surprised to see my parking garage served as the parking garage for Old Detroit's police. That movie was even funnier than I remembered.

The weather is amazing. I wish it could be sunny with highs in the 80s and lows in the 40s every day. While I was able to smell the wildfires on the way in Friday, I don't notice them at all while I'm in Dallas.

I bought a starter set and some booster packs for Dungeons and Dragons Miniatures while I was in Huntsville. A 20 sided die rolled out of the box and into my hand and I felt brand new. That was unexpected. I've got to find some folks around here who skirmish.

I miss my friends from the CSB days.

• The Paranoid Style in American Politics by Richard Hofstadter
  (tags: politics history)
• The 29 Healthiest Foods on the Planet
  (tags: food nutrition diet)

• The Comment API | 2003-01-17 | The Well-Formed Web
  (tags: web xml rss blog)

A friend of mine had a print of Michael Winterbottom's new movie, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story so he screened it at the theater after the other movies finished. It was the funniest movie I've seen in a long time.

Steve Coogan plays the actor Steve Coogan who is starring in a movie as Tristram Shandy, as well as Tristram's father Walter, in an adaptation of the novel Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne. Rob Brydon is playing the character of uncle Toby, a man obsessed with recreating the battle where he was wounded in the groin. The funniest moments of the film come from Coogan trying to avoid being upstaged by Brydon. (Make sure to sit through the closing credits where Brydon and Coogan do dueling impressions of Al Pacino.)

It's a movie about making a movie of an unfilmable book. One reviewer used this mash-up to describe it: "Think Being John Malkovich meets Adaptation as a period piece, and you're nearly there." It pays homage to the classics that have tread this path before with cues to Fellini's 8 1/2, Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, and Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract. It even features a film fanatic, Steve Coogan's assistant, that goes on ad nauseum boring the cast and crew with paeans to German filmmakers like Fassbinder.

There are many other layers in the narrative to explore but I'll have to wait for the movie to be released in theaters in January, and ultimately make it out on DVD. In the movie they promise extra scenes and interviews on the DVD when it comes out. Of course, this could be as empty as the promise that this movie is about the life of Tristram Shandy. Try as it might the story of Tristram Shandy only makes it up to the point shortly before he is born. Although that's probably the point, that one's life is a glorious unplanned mess from beginning to end and no book, or movie could ever capture that. Revel in it while you can.

I was walking to the grocery store this morning when I realized there was a Christmas parade one block over. I've never lived anywhere before where I could walk to the grocery store and see a parade.

Julie and I came out to see it, but by then it was wrapping up. I enjoyed being there a lot more than I ever have watching them on TV. I suppose you could say that about most things though.

After reading Josh's entry about Google book search I wondered if the name Matt Midboe was ever used in a book. I was surprised to see a book personally mention me in the acknowledgments.

It turns out I had corresponded via email with the books author/editor, Victoria Brooks, about Paul Bowles and to my surprise this warranted a mention. She had been a delight to correspond with and her enthusiasm about the project really came through. The book is called Literary Trips and is about great authors and the places they lived or found inspiration in. After Paul Bowles death in 1999 she published a shortened version about her trip to Tangier to meet Paul Bowles.

I never made the trek to see my literary/cultural hero Paul Bowles. It was nice to be a small part of the trip of someone who did.

I'm back from Glenn Mitchell's public memorial. Hearing stories about him from his friends only deepened my appreciation for the tremendous energy he put into the community and into chasing and sharing great ideas.

• MacTechNotes: Mac OS X as an NFS Server
  (tags: osx nfs)

I went to Palo Duro Canyon for Thanksgiving. The sunset was spectacular but I didn't get a picture. I promised myself to get one the next day. Unfortunately the one I captured wasn't as captivating as the previous one. This sunset was from a backroad in west Texas where the foothills meet the high plains.

I've also begun to reflect on all the changes I've had for 2005. Julie. IMaCS. Home Ownership.

I took off for Palo Duro Canyon during Thanksgiving. I find a profound enjoyment in the enormous space and variation of the national and state parks. It feels good to confront a physical challenge and really feel the world around me. My everday cubicle life feels fake and repetitive. I always wonder how I could make that rough and majestic world a regular part of my life.

I learned the word Hoodoo and took some pictures. Boy oh boy do I need to get into shape.

The local talk show host Glenn Mitchell passed away in his sleep yesterday morning. He was one of my favorite interviewers and my day will be emptier without him.

He had great guests and commanded a breadth and depth of knowledge that enabled him to have a discussion with his guests rather than be a hapless wanderer only gleaning the surface of a topic. He did this with great humility and was always eager to learn something new. I think this anecdote from wikipedia captures these qualities best:

Shortly before his death he was praised by interviewee CBS veteran reporter Mike Wallace as being widely known for being an extraordinary interviewer. Mitchell responded, modestly as was his wont, calling himself "the man who did his homework."

I bought a portable FM tuner just so I could listen to his show in my cube. Dallas really lost a great citizen. His show was set to go national on XM this February and I would have loved for the rest of the country to be able to listen to him.

• Folkstreams » The Best of American Folklore Films
  (tags: film history)

• Telegraph | Arts | A very singular vision
  (tags: davidgordongreen eggleston)

• mailr - web based email in ror
  (tags: email web rails)
• Modular Architectures with Ruby
  (tags: ruby)

• DUB - DENIM
  (tags: design software)
• Ruby on Rails i18n revisited
  (tags: web rails i18n)
• .c( whytheluckystiff )o.—Bumpspark Library-less Minigraphs
  (tags: rails design)
• The R Project for Statistical Computing
  (tags: statistics software)

• Distributed development with SVK
  (tags: development scm subversion)

• Locomotive
  (tags: osx development ruby rails)

• McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Although I Like a Good George W. Bush Joke as Much as the Next Guy, Some of Them Seem Gratuitous and Mean-Spirited.
  (tags: politics humor)
• David Seah - Better Living Through New Media » The Printable CEO
  (tags: development gtd)

Today I picked up the keys for my new place in downtown Dallas. Very soon I should have a washer and dryer and will once again luxuriate in the domestic bliss that is a personal washer and dryer. I haven't had that privilege since July of 2003.

In other news work doesn't suck. I found a place to get Peach Nehi locally. I'm itching to get projects going once I move my stuff from Huntsville to Dallas. Julie and I will be in Huntsville at the end of the month to see Emily, empty my storage unit and see some old friends.

• Susan Sontag's love for film
  (tags: film)

I've consumed a lot of Asian films since last Friday. I had stopped really caring about movies since I'd been on a steady diet of weak AFI 100 films and lackluster theatrical releases most of this year. Wong Kar Wai's Days of Being Wild, Cavite, Kamikaze Girls, Infernal Affairs II, Kim Ki-Duk's Bad Guy, Last Life in the Universe, Takeshi Kitano's Dolls, Takashi Miike's Gozu, and tonight's documentary about controversial Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki called Arakimentari have all inspired me.

A couple of them, Dolls, and Last Life, required an empathy on my part that I'm not used to. Movie watching had been such a passive thing for me this year, it was difficult at first to engage the movies on their own terms. Both movies have so little dialogue that I really had to throw myself into the characters on the screen and not just watch the film as a neutral third-party.

Seeing Wong Kar Wai on the big screen for the first time helped me to finally connect with him. While I enjoyed Chungking Express I think I lost a lot of it on the small screen because he packs so much visual detail in every frame. I'm very much looking forward to the release of 2046 this weekend.

I'd like to single out Kamikaze Girls as the one movie just about anyone should be able to enjoy. It follows two girls in high school. One is obsessed with 18th century Rococo French fashion, and the other is a tough biker chick. The look of the movie is a mix of reality, surrealism, animation, actor's asides, and uses a color palette I don't think I've ever seen in a movie before. The movie focuses on the friendship between the two girls as they prepare for life after high school, and discover real friendship. If that doesn't clinch the deal then watch it for the Yôko Kanno soundtrack. It's different from her work on Cowboy Bebop and Escaflowne but still full of all the energy and passion she brought to those soundtracks.

Tomorrow the festival ends and I'll see the movie that I picked out earlier this year as one of the ones I wanted to see: Save the Green Planet.

My hats off to the good folks at AFFD because I've enjoyed everything I've seen, and had I more time I would have seen more.

• Dee Zsombor's blog: How to build an AJAX-ed spellchecker with Ruby On Rails
  (tags: ajax javascript rails ruby web)

• Emotion & Design: Attractive things work better
  (tags: design usability)

I go to work. I write scripts to transfer and validate healthcare claims. On Fridays I can wear jeans.

Today was a little different since I put in an offer on a loft in downtown Dallas. I find it amusing that they call the lofts and surrounding area SoCo, for South of Commerce St. I've never seen that phrase used any where else. Maybe I should use my own name for that part of town: Eliteland. Tomorrow I should know if they like it, or have a counter. This wasn't how I expected my home purchasing to go.

I passed the Zend certification exam so in some vague distant future I might use this to get a new job that cross-pollinates with my personal interests in web development. My current job does nothing to fertilize my wild animal lust for web applications.

I've made some progress on my rails app to clone Yahoo/Google groups functionality and integrate that with GNU mailman for my dallasmoviegeek mailing list. The hardest part for me has been learning the Ruby/Rails way to do things.

And most importantly The Asian Film Festival of Dallas runs this week and into next so after that's over I should get more time with happy, relaxed Julie. She's been busy getting the AFFD film festival together this year.

Emily turned ten this year. One thing that brings a smile to my face is how she will still name off her favorite dinosaurs and sort them by the type of food they eat. This morning at work it dawned on me that she's probably going to stop that some day.

That made me sad.

• MogileFS
  (tags: filesystem distributed)

• script.aculo.us - web 2.0 javascript
  (tags: dhtml javascript ajax css)
• My Yahoo!
  (tags: rails ruby video tutorial)

Yesterday my contract job said they are happy with me and want to know if I am interested in coming on full-time. It's a very grown-up, responsible person type job. It's not very sexy, and it doesn't have an audience I can play to. I write stuff to transfer and validate healthcare claims. I will never be a rockstar working at this company. After thinking about it, and what I want to do here in Dallas I decided that I would like to go full-time with them.

I also moved further in house acquisition. I'll meet with my realtor to write up a contract offer, and I'm shoring up money for some mythical closing day.

One thing that hasn't gone my way is my plan to use plone on a personal project of mine. The shared hosting environment at Dreamhost really isn't suited to the requirements of plone, and I don't want to buy new hosting until I see if there is interest. So I've decided to try the Ruby on Rails approach. I'm going to find or build a RFC2822 parser, and start building a RoR app that integrates in with the GNU mailman mailing software I use for the dallas movie geek list. I'm planning on throwing up a subversion repository with a trac website for release planning and bug tracking.

These are all things that I didn't think I'd be able to do, as recently as June, as I endeavored to recover from the personal and financial hole I had dug myself into shortly after coming back to Dallas.

Mississippi adoption agency won't place babies in Catholic homes because they aren't Christian.

• HumaneText.service
  (tags: osx software xhtml)

I'm doing something that is unheard of for me. I've prequalified myself for a home mortgage and I'm actively searching with a real estate agent now. I'm going to need a little bit of luck to find something inside Dallas that's affordable.

It's not too long ago that the very notion of anchoring myself to some place so tightly would have sent me into hyperbolic fits. But this was the plan when I came back to Dallas and now I have a job that will let me continue that plan.

I was pleased to hear architect Doug Newby talking on a local talk show about how Dallas has some of the best neighborhoods, architecturally speaking, in the country. He was practically rhapsodic about Dallas architecture along Turtle Creek, Old East Dallas (where I live), Lakewood and Swiss Ave.

This weekend I should wrap up the last of my freelance projects. This will be a marked difference from how I've been living for the last five years. Prior to this I've always had professional responsibilities to other people in addition to a regular job. It's the end of an era for me and I'm planning on focusing my free time on DVDs from the various AFI lists, the 2002 Sight and Sound list and writing two applications in Objective-C/Cocoa on OS X.

I'm not giving up on the web stuff though. I passed the MySQL 4.1 Core Certification this week. I'm taking Zend and MySQL 4.1 Pro in a few weeks. I have a Dallas movie related site to build out with Plone, and another blog search/discovery related website in Ruby on Rails.

I will only be posting technical/professional on csbgroup.org from now on. gnumatt.org will exist solely as a personal outlet, one that hopefully be updated more often.

• Web Only News
  (tags: hardware dvd diy)

• OpenID: an actually distributed identity system
  (tags: ajax web movabletype development authentication)
• P.O.V. - Brother Outsider | PBS
  (tags: gay civilrights)

• Christian Alliance for Progress Blog: Christian Alliance for Progress Update
  (tags: christian politics)

• perl.com: Perl Design Patterns
  (tags: perl designpattern)
• perl.com: Perl Design Patterns, Part 2
  (tags: perl designpattern)

• Gothamist: John Vanco, IFC Center
  David Gordon Green will be presenting two movies at IFC Center in August 2005
  (tags: davidgordongreen movie)

I miss Em. While I had more free time than usual I was trying to squeeze in some time back in Huntsville with Emily but Em's mom didn't come up with anything. I think things are extra hectic over there since Emily is going to have a new brother or sister real soon now.

My unofficial vacation is about to come to an end. I start a 4 month contract-to-hire position doing perl development either this Monday or a week later. I have a plone/python project, a php/mysql and a unix admin project to wrap up. The company I'm going to work for is up in North Dallas right near where I lived when I first moved here in '99. Apparently insurance companies rarely pay all of their bills to hospitals and doctors. This company uncovers the difference in what the insurance companies owe and what they paid and gets the rest of the money. So it's nice to stick it to the insurance companies for once. :)

This is the first job I've gotten that wasn't based on referrals from friends, although Tina did refer me to the recruiters that found the job. I had always wondered if I have the skills to do it on my own.

Now that the basics are taken care of, it's time to play and have fun with life.

It looks like Dallas has a good technical bookstore now, and has had for the last 10 months. Nerdbooks made the move from Sacramento, California to Richardson, Texas and brought 20,000 technical books with them. When I asked about the Pragmatic Programmer books they knew right where they were. They even had the more academic books like say Donald Knuth's Art of Programming series.

What particularly stood out, aside from selection, is that you pay the online store price, without the shipping. Previously I'd been hanging out in the poorly organized, but decent selection at the Micro Center. Nerdbooks is much more competitive on price compared to the other brick and mortar places.

I got this in my mailbox this morning:

Let me know if you are interested in a Developer position in Downtown Dallas right in the New Development arena. This position is for someone who enjoys the Developer environment, thinks way outside the Box, and enjoys hostility.

The emphasis is mine. I wonder who finds hostility an enticement to work somewhere. I'm also amused to see the Box has become a proper noun.

• Mooning Amtrak Trains, Southern California USA
  (tags: calendar train)

Once when I worked at BroadbandNow!™© back in 2000 I had to go out and get some office supplies. It was like a school field trip because I was out of the office during office hours. Only it was better since it was unsupervised. When I was out and about I was amazed by how busy everything was. It seemed just as busy as any other time I'd ever been out. I wondered if these people had jobs. They couldn't all be on a field trip like me. It really surprised me and has stuck with me over the years.

As someone who is among the unemployed, although frequently busy with contract jobs, I have had time to witness the phenemenon with great regularity recently. Are these people employed and just have liberal use of field trips? Some of them probably have spouses that make enough for one to stay at home. Some of them work non-9-6 hours. Still it can't be that half of Dallas doesn't work between 9 and 6. I think I've figured it out.

The ones without wealthy spouses, and non-9-6 jobs have all found the magic money tree and they refresh their savings accounts as needed. Really, it's the only answer for all the people I see hanging out at Panera all day with their laptops, shopping for clothes, sitting in the aisles reading books at Half-Price. I must devote my life to finding the magic money tree, and once I find it I'll share the secret.

After a couple interviews, and an untold number of conversations with recruiters I've come to a new conclusion. I need to take over the skills assessment and I need to be far more prepared about the character/work ethic questions.

I can short-circuit the skills questions from less prepared/skilled interviewers by presenting samples of my work and explaining how it works. Although for the most part I've found that skills have not been the stumbling block.

The harder questions for me have been "What kind of company do you want to work for?", "Why did you leave your last company?" For the latter I didn't want to go, they just left me with no alternative. For the former, I don't know. I tend to view companies as antagonistic towards their employees. They have the ability to fire me at any time, and are only going to keep me around as long as they need me. I don't really have a problem with that as it seems the most efficient way of doing things. So when I look at a new job I look at it solely from the standpoint of what I am going to get out of it. I want to develop my skills and portfolio, and I want financial remuneration. I've already assessed that your company can do that or I wouldn't be interviewing, so I tend to feel the question is redundant.

However, in the great dance that is the interview I have a feeling this is not what a company wants to hear. I don't even know that it's the right way to look at the situation. That's what makes those questions so hard to answer.

Re-reading what I wrote I'm stunned by how cold and selfish it is.

At 31 I didn't really expect to be unemployed and wanting to find regular work. I thought at this point I would have it all figured out. I would have transcended the need to take care of mundane bills and be free to focus on more interesting things. Instead I find myself fighting others for jobs just to be mediocre.

I've discovered that I spent way too much time educating myself. Nobody cares about a clean Model-View-Controller design with RESTful URIs behind a nice XHTML/CSS interface, with Ajax sprinkled through to improve UI response time. Yes, I also know how to build that for application for you in Perl, PHP, Java or even Tcl. I'd love to take a stab at it in Python or my beloved Ruby if you like. No system administrator, that's fine because I know apache inside and out and Unix/Linux systems are my bitch. No database administrator, that's fine because I know a lot about normalization, entity-relationship diagrams, indexing options of various databases, replication and high availability. No network administrator, that's fine because I can order the line, setup the router, and configure HSRP and BGP to make sure we never lose connectivity to the Internet. Above it all I know there is a business to run so I'll chart and diagram the hell out of this to prove that it saves/makes money.

I've spent all this time not only reading about that stuff, but creating opportunities to implement it. Yet time and time again I find that nobody who might hire me really cares. Do you have a degree? Do you look pretty next to the sales guy in front of clients? Can you confuse the client with marketing nonsense just enough to intimidate them into giving us more money? Can you do something crappy that works some of the time so we can get it out the door faster and cheaper?

Why have I tried at all? I'll admit that I've failed to be the best at what I do, and I find it a constant struggle. Yet, why even try that when the world rewards the cheap and fast. Why be Howard Roark when you can make your life so much simpler by just being Peter Keating?

• Google Sitemap Protocol
  (tags: google xml sitemap)
• JoBlo.com Movie News: INT: Emile Hirsh
  Interview with Emile Hirsh that mentions upcoming movie Goat directed by David Gordon Green
  (tags: davidgordongreen movie)

• MTV.com - Movies - News - Movie File: Ewan McGregor, Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, Gabrielle Union & More
  Emile Hirsch is excited about working with DGG in the movie Goat based on the book about college hazing
  (tags: davidgordongreen movie)

• PunBB.org
  Lightweight forum software
  (tags: web php mysql forum)

• The Nine-Act Structure Home Page
  (tags: movie writing screenwriting film)

• Oranged.net Software : Studiometry
  (tags: osx windows accounting billing)
• Pimp My Safari
  (tags: osx safari)

I do not remember authorizing Summer weather in late May. I do enjoy a nice hot day, but hot days have a time and a place.

I probably wouldn't have noticed if I had a regular job to go to. This 4-plex is almost 100 years old and isn't the easiest thing to cool with a single window unit. I've spent most of the day writing copy, and sketching out a new website to focus on my professional life. VoodooPad has been an indispensable assistant there. A quick Cmd-Ctrl-Shift-4 and I get the image capture crosshairs and it copies my selection to the clipboard. I've been grabbing parts of websites that I found inspiring, grabbing a snippet and then pasting that straight into VoodooPad.

I've begun wondering about renting a new place with Julie. It'd be nice to have someone to split costs with, and the two of us could easily afford a house with a yard. It probably delays my buying a house for another year, but not having full-time employment makes a reasonable home loan pretty hard. Julie and I would spend a lot less time coordinating our schedules to be together. I wonder what kind of stress living together would put on our relationship though.

RD2 and I parted ways yesterday. It will be nice to have some time to take care of the parts of my life I neglected while I was working for RD2. Right now I'm torn between sticking with just contract work, or going full bore for a full-time position. I have some ideas about web based applications that I want to flesh out and if I go back to full-time that complicates that ambition. Also I've got enough contract opportunities right now to take care of me.

• Developing Dashboard Widgets
  This is an overview / tutorial of Dashboard widgets
  (tags: osx dashboard javascript widget)
• Austin City Limits - 2005 Festival
  (tags: music festival austin)

• Dashboard Programming Guide
  (tags: web osx dashboard javascript)

• Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide
  (tags: development ruby book)
• Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everythingby Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner - William Morrow, 2005
  (tags: book economics)
• Love at First Bite [The Publisher’s Ring]
  (tags: bodymod)

• The Entourage Help Page
  (tags: entourage support software osx)

Some of my most vivid dreams involve airplanes. Usually it's a scary or weird dream. Last night's airplane dream had us flying over a city somewhat low and then the plane just exploded into a fireball. In the dream I felt relieved to have the plane explode instead of falling out of the sky.

I wonder if this is a sign that I'm on the road to recovery about flying?

• To-Done
  (tags: gtd)
• Ajaxian Blog
  (tags: web ajax)
• Validating an entire site - Standards-schmandards
  (tags: web css design validation standards)
• The Hivelogic Narrative by Dan Benjamin
  (tags: web ruby rails osx mysql apache)

• TNWoU Apple Macintosh Users Group
  (tags: apple usergroup)

In a few hours I'm going to be getting on an airplane with Julie that will fly to Chicago. I do not enjoy flying as it comes with this intense fear of falling to my death. It wasn't always like that for me. I think getting to spend the weekend with Julie and her friends in Chicago will help make up for the nightmare that is flying. I'll be flying back alone on Sunday night.

Maybe someday they'll have a camel route between Dallas and Chicago. I could totally do that.

• Drag & Drop Sortable Lists with JavaScript and CSS
  (tags: web javascript css dhtml)

Apparently unload events have a hard time firing in Safari unless you use the one method that none of the other browser's fully support, addEventListener(). I wrote a blog entry about how to get Safari, Mozilla/Firefox and Internet Explorer to work with unload events in our work blog.

I've found something that greatly eases the burning and itching that appears after I'm exposed to sunlight. When I was a kid they called it Hutchinson's Summer Prurigo but the common name now is Actinic Prurigo. Thank you Internet for coughing up an abstract on treatment of actinic prurigo in Chimila indians. I didn't have access to Thalidomide but vitamin E was easy enough.

I figured if 100 IU of vitamin E a day worked for them I would take 1000 IU. It has shortened healing time from a week to about 24 hours. I've been taking them for a few weeks now and even carelessly stood in the sun to see what would happen, with only minor after effects.

I think I've been a more pleasant person since the healthier skin has made my appearance more palatable. I don't labor under as much guilt from inflicting an unpleasant appearance on those near me.

• xTime Project Management software
  (tags: osx project)

• QuickSilver
  Powerful application launcher and search utility
  (tags: osx)
• FEED Magazine
• Sparkline PHP Graphing Library
  (tags: web php design)

FEED: returning soon. It appears that my favorite web based magazine is "returning soon" after going on ice in 2000. Hopefully Steven Johnson, a former editor, will comment on his blog.

• Vector Search engine in Perl
  (tags: perl)

My PowerBook woes have been diagnosed by the mighty Tiger. I formatted the hard drive and dropped Tiger on my PowerBook. Then what to my wondering eyes should appear but a red disk and S.M.A.R.T. Status: failing when I fired up Disk Utility.

Apple's been a bit behind the curve on adding IDE S.M.A.R.T. status information where the user can see it.

• The Big Easel

• Aardvark Firefox Extension
  (tags: web firefox)

• Philip Pullman essay about His Dark Materials adaptation to film
  (tags: book movie hisdarkmaterials)
• Apple - Trailers - Serenity - index
  Trailer for the movie Serenity based on the Firefly television series
  (tags: movie)

I made it past tax day. I'm caught up at work. I have time to read books, watch movies and see Julie.

Save the Green Planet looks more inventive and interesting than the vast majority of Hollywood fare coming out this year...What happened to the Hollywood of the 1930s or the early to mid 1970s?

That is except for Universal's Serenity, based on one of the finest gorram Fox shows in the 'verse, Firefly. The trailer has me excited.

I'm finally watching filmed entertainment and enjoying it again. Thank You Oldboy, Millions, Deadwood and others.

Julie and I continue to revel in the simple, happy days.

But the US still has asshats running around, as I was reminded in these remarks from the recently approved Justice Janice Rogers Brown:

...California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown told an audience Sunday that people of faith were embroiled in a "war" against secular humanists who threatened to divorce America from its religious roots... From the LA Times

Nobody has said religion is going to be stamped out from America, in fact the very first amendment guarantees its free exercise. As Philip Pullman bluntly states in the children's series, His Dark Materials, the universe is divided into those who would struggle for wisdom, and those who fight for ignorance.

Oh, and the web development framework Ruby on Rails is as amazing as everyone says it is.

• Introducing JSON
  JavaScript Object Notation
  (tags: ajax javascript)
• NeoOffice - OpenOffice.org for MacOSX
  (tags: osx)
• Jumsoft | Process
  The sublime outlining application
  (tags: osx)
• Rogue Amoeba - Airfoil for Mac OS X
  Send any audio out your Airport Express connected speakers, not just iTunes
  (tags: osx)
• Cocoalicious: A Cocoa del.icio.us Client for Mac OS X
  (tags: osx)
• The non-typographer’s guide to practical typeface selection ~ Authentic Boredom
  (tags: design css)
• getluky.net » Freetag - an Open Source Tagging / Folksonomy module for PHP/MySQL applications
  (tags: web php mysql taxonomy)
• Cake PHP framework: Home
  (tags: web php ajax framework)
• Tinyfly Studios | Standards-Based Web Design
  (tags: web dfw)
• GarrettDimmon.com
  (tags: dfw)
• Dev-News: Web Standards in the eyes of Drew Decker
  (tags: dfw)
• IEtoW3C.js Documentation
  Add W3C DOM support to IE through Javascript
  (tags: web javascript)
• myConlon.com
  (tags: dfw design)

• Rixstep
  A repository for every keyboard secret in OS X
  (tags: osx)

• Catalyst
  perl MVC framework
  (tags: perl framework)
• What fonts should we use in the meantime? (Screenfont.ca)
  Joe Clark gets his rant on about Arial and recommends alternatives
• How to destroy the earth
• Research Systems Unix Group: radmind
  A suite of Unix command-line tools and a server designed to remotely administer the file systems of multiple Unix machines.
  (tags: osx)
• Robin Dunbar and the Magic Number of 150

• m o v i e l e n s
  (tags: movies)
• perl.com: Building Good CPAN Modules
  (tags: perl)

• Joshuaink
  (tags: web design dfw)
• Accessible Information Solutions - Web Accessibility Toolbar Functions
  A web developer toolbar that works in IE
  (tags: web ie)

• CSS Beauty | CSS Design Showcase
  (tags: web css design)
• Stylegala ★ design | css | standards
  (tags: web css design)
• cssdesign.se | inspiration på svenska | xhtml | css | design
  (tags: web css design)
• H.G. Chissell
  (tags: fengshui)
• PIXELGANGSTER :: the daily DesignBlog
  (tags: web design)
• Andy Rutledge // Male Designer
  (tags: web design css dfw)

• Del.icio.us daily blog posting | archives | how now, brownpau?
  (tags: faq)
• Follow-up: Designing a web app's "Blank Slate" state (Signal vs. Noise)
  (tags: web design)

Consider this a public announcement. A number of friends have made the jump to WordPress in recent weeks. Unfortunately this has broken their RSS and Atom feeds. The feeds return a 404 file not found error code when you try to load the pages. So livejournal, bloglines, netnewswire, pulp fiction and any number of other RSS aggregators can no longer follow the sites.

Only one of the WordPress sites I read managed to avoid the problem. Not only did he avoid it but he even sets Last-Modified and ETag headers. Be still my beating heart!

At any rate, this is a known bug and downloading a newer version of wp-blog-header.php should fix the error. This has made me start thinking about creating a webtest script for testing my own sites after software upgrades.

This is the first post on gnumatt.org from my new host DreamHost.

I feel weird about this because this is the first time I've ever hosted somewhere I didn't run the servers. Ever since I started working at ISPs in 1994 I've always been the sysadmin for the servers that I hosted my stuff on. In 2000 I started buying my own rackspace and bandwidth since I couldn't host at the place I worked.

I'm sort of happy to be making the day to day running of the servers someone else's problem. Whenever I've traveled I've always had to make arrangements to take care of the servers. Now I don't have to. Overall I'm feeling sort of down about it. I once had hopes of doing something more with the hosting setup.

I've been snapping up Pirates card packs like they're going out of style. I finally got a fort. The experience of putting it together was somewhat underwhelming. It does add some nice variety to the game. I've also got a couple five mast ships.

One of my co-workers asked us to grab a t-shirt for him as part of some social clothing experiment. The shirts came in today. I grabbed Consumable for Bryan and Flowers in the Attic for myself.

At work I wrote a small entry about making php pages cacheable. I put it together because I used that code on the new rd2inc.com. Once you hit a page on that site your browser should never touch the webserver again until you either close your browser, or force a reload. The site is also entirely XHTML 1.1 valid. I think it could be better. I wish it handled text resizing more elegantly. I wish we used a screen font like Verdana instead of Arial.

I went to the third Conspirator's Ball last night with Andrew and his friend Christina. The event is there to survey folks about Dallas' cultural life, and provide an open venue for venting. The venting is mostly of the liberal political nature. The evening was filled with poetry from Clebo Rainey and various others from the audience.

I found the most provocative speakers were Dean from alt7.com and Chris from keep Dallas plastic. Both of them understood the need to build up an audience for Dallas' existing cultural creatives. Or maybe I'm just hearing what I want to hear from what they said since that's one of my personal goals now that I'm back in Dallas.

I think I've finally found a card game I can get addicted to, screw Texas Hold 'Em or Magic. I picked up two packs yesterday: Pirates of the Crimson Coast and Pirates of the Spanish Main. You actually construct the ships from the cards. The ships have historical details about the ships from the Age of Sails. You also get cards with forts, people, cargo and reefs and islands. Each pack is $4 and includes at least two ships.

I've realized that Adium is much better than iChat. I can login with multiple accounts to AIM and a number of other networks. It also does Rendezvous which was the main thing I wanted from iChat.

A friend took this picture of me at the end of July in 2004. It's from a field of kudzu near the Sock Capital of the World, Fort Payne, Alabama.

I feel like I've grown a lot already this year.

[ edited 3/18/05 10:14am ]

I came down to Austin for SXSW 2005 Interactive. It's the first time I've been in a couple of years. I'm always surprised when people remember who I am from year to year.

This time someone said hello that I hadn't really talked to since I was like 18. It was Jon Lebkowsky. I met him, along with a bunch of other folks, in Atlanta to talk about EFF. Seeing him again reminded me of how high a priority political activism once was in my life.

Then today I went to a panel on how to create activist technology. It was exciting. Political change seems so doable.

Despite my interest in activism and the opportunities for change it offers I've never been effective at it. That realization stung a bit.

I've found religion with del.icio.us. I keep my bookmarks there.

It's a shame Kula Shaker is no more. They had a great pop sensibility that fused Indian rhythms and instruments with rock. I've always wondered what he was singing in those songs. The site has pictures, Sanskrit and explanations of the lyrics.

Watchmen in 2006 [ via korvac ]

I snagged this picture back in Huntsville one afternoon. I'm really surprised by how well the camera captured what I was looking at. I was looking through the small group of photos I made to use for headline images and this one grabbed me. The clouds are parting, the sun is coming out and I'm heading in the right direction. It really captured the spirit of how my life is going right now.

I am happy where I work now but I thought it'd be fun to make a goofy application for a job at A9 traveling cities in the US taking pictures.

I am interested in the block view driver position. I find myself having to calm a down a bit as I write this because I have spent the last ten years of my life practicing for this job. As you weren't there for the last ten years of my life, allow me to catch you up. I have done solo drives to every state, except Rhode Island. That includes a trip to Alaska to just a smidgen south of the Arctic Circle. I've driven and hiked through remote Bureau of Land Management areas or the dense streets of Boston. I have camped, slept in bus stations or stayed in hotels all across the country. Each night in a new place I would meticulously record my routes in personal journals and my thoughts about where I'd been. I've faced down snow storms with white-out conditions, tornados, flat tires, being locked out of my car, washed out roads all with nary a scratch on my car (quite a feat as one travels through the Yukon wilderness). While my passion for travel contiues to this day, particularly by car, I've made a map of the highlights of my travel between 1997 and 2002 at http://gnumatt.org/greencar.html.

I'm familiar with digital cameras and GPS technology. I still remember the day I won my first GPS in a giveaway years ago. I immediately bought batteries and proceeded to run around in the parking lot measuring my speed and tracking my route with the GPS. While I'm no William Eggleston when it comes to documenting the colorful ephemera that drifts through my life, I continue to work on my photography skills and feel comfortable troubleshooting any digital camera problems. As far as my technical skills I started with an Amiga 1000 in 1986 and have built a career of sorts for myself around the Internet and in particular the web. As you can tell from my resume I've been working with the Internet since 1993. While I began doing Unix system administration and networking I've tried to focus more on backend development the last few years.

I sincerely welcome the opportunity to discuss the block view driver six month contract position.

Where have I been? I feel like this space has become a stranger to me. I started this entry back in January. I've been wanting to write about Julie but I've been so busy spending time with her I've not had a moment to put pen to vellum, so to speak. I've also wondered what to write. Things with her are still changing and as soon as you describe something you start to put limits on it.

We met back in November at the Angelika Roundtable, this group where folks meet to discuss films every week. She dazzled me by correcting the group experts on Oscar trivia. She had a warm smile and a friendly demeanor. I asked my friends how I could get to know her better. Over the next couple of months I did my best to be around her and create opportunities to get to know her.

Things changed when she accidentally forwarded part of an email to the Dallas movie geek mailing list. The main part of the email was about the music in The Phantom of the Opera but forgotten at the bottom was a line from a friend encouraging Julie to suss out some details about this Matt fellow. At the time I was celebrating Christmas in Huntsville and was happy that serendipity had tipped her hand. I was elated to know that my curiosity was mutual.

What has happened since is more a blur of emotions rather than discrete moments. I do remember some moments like meeting her friends for the first time, or the first kiss. The strongest memories are the feelings. Feeling like I'd said all the wrong things, feeling like I'd found a partner to chase down great adventures with, or feeling an ease with her like we'd already been together for years.

It's been odd trying to shake off the solitary, nomad mindset I had been cultivating. I've felt a tad jaded about relationships in the not so distant past. It's been a while since I met somebody new and felt like this. Julie is so free from cynicism. I enjoy her ambition and the way she sees opportunity all around her. I'm really looking forward to spending time with her for a long time to come.

In some sense, I consider marriage a laboratory for going down there into the scary bad places. [...] To me, there is no more vivid arena in which our frailties are revealed and our foibles enacted.

Salon's advice columnist, Cary Tennis, put together a soul baring essay on his personal experiences with alcoholism, and a ragged life frayed at the edges before he married at 40. Most importantly he talks about how these experiences inform his advice to to people who ask The sex is gone — Why should I stay?

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
The Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot

The Amiga is still fighting the good fight with the release of Amiga OS4.0.

February 17th, 1986 changed the course of my life. I received an Amiga 1000 for my birthday. From early December to my birthday in February my father died, my mother remarried and I began living in my step-father's house. I was lost and had no idea what was happening around me. I had never heard of the Amiga before and didn't really know what to do with it, but it promised so much.

The Amiga had funny names for the chips inside: Agnus, Denise, and Paula. It had signatures from the engineers etched inside the case. GUI functionality was captured in Gadgets. Screens where handled by the Intuition library. It had color, preemptive multitasking, good sound, and most importantly an invitation to tinker with it. Not many chip designers achieve the celebrity that the "Father of the Amiga", Jay Miner, attained.

The Amiga gave me an anchor when I was adrift. I threw so much time into that machine. I learned csh on it. I messed around with animation in Disney Animation Studio and Deluxe Paint. I played many, many, excellent games. I first began downloading music back then, MOD files, and taking control of what went in my ears rather than just passively listening to the radio. I forged the friendships over the modem that I never found in real life until the 12th grade. I edited videos for school with that Amiga. I learned the basics of programming on it. I had a very dog-eared copy of the Amiga ROM Kernel Reference manual and the Abacus books 68000 Assembly Language book.

The Amiga saved a life that felt lost. Now coming back to it again as I read that review about OS4.0 I see that first time with new eyes.

I'm a latecomer to the Grant Morrison oeuvre. I enjoyed Arkham Asylum when it came out. However, I didn't get around to reading The Invisibles until last year. That one blew my mind apart. Today I read through his latest The Filth and what a hoot. The opening pages of the book start out with a sort of Patient Information warning like you see on medicine.

What is The Filth? The Filth contains the active ingredient metaphor.
The rectangular, multicolored comic books marked "The Filth" contain 500 mg of active visual and thematic metaphor per issue. Comic books also contain the inactive ingredients paper and ink.

From there the book goes ten different directions at once. You have the story of one sad and lonely guy who likes his porn and his cat. Although he may or may not be the parapersona of a special agent working for a secret society that maintains the Status: Q. The authorship of the book comes into question many times as different characters write their own sections, or leave the confines of 2-d space entirely. One character develops "A consciousness so focused and disciplined, it can actually manifest words in a cloud above my head." These words appear as thought bubbles above his head in the panels. Which gets back to the bigger theme of the struggle between the self and society for control of one's life.

The playful meta-narrative and traditional plot lines would have left me amused but ultimately empty if I didn't dig out a deeper meaning that made it relevant to my life. I really came away touched by this guys love for his pet cat, and his struggle to find meaning in loving and taking care of his cat. I've had that crappy job. I've had those moments of wondering why am I here? I never had a communist chimpanzee assassin, bio-engineered porn stars with black semen, person/anti-person complexes, pissed off robo-dolphins, superheros like ultra humanitarian, or i-life to help explain it though.

My touchy-feely reading about "meaning" is a bit misleading. The book is infused with a great deal of violence and bizarre sex. The pages fly by at a hectic pace. There is also a near constant need to reorient yourself between realties as you try to keep your head wrapped around the Filth. This is definitely one I'll have to read a few times. That's one thing I really like about Grant Morrison's work. It promises and then delivers layers of meaning and humor.

I'll mention one more patient warning:

When must The Filth not be used?

• If your doctor has advised you to avoid the use of metaphor.
• If you refuse to acknowledge the mocking laughter of the Abyss.
• If you cannot face the fact that your entire immediate environment is a seething battlefield of microscopic predators, prey and excreta and, simultaneously, a rich and complex metaphor.
• If, without understanding how it happened, you have found yourself in a dark room breastfeeding two elderly men you hardly know.
• If you are taking certain "dumb" antibiotics present in most media.
• if you are allergic to comic books or any of the ingredients they contain.
• If you take high-dose vitamin A supplements or have high levels of cholesterol or triglycerides (a fat-like substance) in your blood.

GovTrack.us provides RSS feeds of your house and senate representatives. All told you can track People, Subjects and Bills. They also have a General tab that lets you mark other events for tracking that don't fit under the other three headings. GovTrack also uses the Technorati API to tell you what bloggers are saying about bills as they snake through Congress.

I realize that all this information has been out there before but it's spread out across so many resources. I've just setup a feed for my reps.

Okay, all my non-Mac owning friends you have no excuses. The new Mac Mini starts at $499 and you can use your old Windows monitor, keyboard and mouse on them. Oh and quit yer bitchin' 'bout how much Word sucks and start using Pages. Apple's forward thinking is a stark contrast to the siege mentality at Microsoft that Bill Gates alluded to by declaring Internet users are communists.

He said some Christians found his study of Hebrew objectionable and his searching attitude heretical. Some ministers, he said, warned other Christians to stay away from him.

From a Salon piece on Reggie White's uses of the NFL to promote Christianity. Thoughtful piece on how sports can be used to productize Christianity into soundbites and sometimes the deeper meaning is lost.

Excerpts from journal entries while in the Sahara:

2-19-04 (large tent of nomad family) 4:21pm
...Currently I'm excited by the sand storm raging outside. It built up slowly at first and then all at once it kicked off. I keep having to wipe sand off these pages. I'm in a nice, large, camel fur tent. It keeps the wind out but the not sand. Too much sand, write later.

2-20-04 (large tent in nomad house) 8:41am
...The sand storm was "very strong" according to Ahmed. The wind was hard and fast by any standard I know. Sand coated everything. It was in our food, our clothes and the crevices of our skin. When I woke up I had to wipe a layer off my eyes and face. I had many dreams through the night.

[...]

I think the dreams may have been brought on by the surreal experience of going into the storm at night. The tent was pitch black inside. I lifted up the wall to go outside and it was another world. The wind was screaming past my ears and tearing at my clothes. The sand stung my skin. All I could see was greyness with blurry black spots where the nearby nomad buildings were. It was like I was floating because there was no ground and no sky. Nothing was near and nothing was far. I walked into the desert to go pee. Even though I walked about 30 feet it still felt like someone could pull me right back into the tent. I'd lost a great deal of my ability to judge distance by sight. All I knew was how many steps I'd taken. It was an unforgettable moment.

I've been reminiscing and wanting to feel like that again. I think it's time to plan the next desert trip. I had been thinking about the Gobi in August but a 30 hour plane trip sounds like my idea of Hell. I think I'll do the Gobi and Siberia at the same time after 2005. I'm looking at September 2005 then for the Atacama desert in Chile, the driest desert in the world. The 7-10 hour flight into Santiago and bus ride to San Pedro is a lot more appealing.

I wonder if anyone else would go?

As my guide, Ahmed, and I trekked through the Sahara along the Algerian border I was really taken in by the beauty. I love the clean, mathematical lines that trail into noise where animals have tread on them. The wind, rain and gravity effect the sand in very specific ways. The math behind them is so enormous that we have problems modeling their behavior with supercomputers, and yet you can see that mathematical precision in the sand. No matter how elegant those macro forces are the animals come plodding through leaving a noisy wake in the sand.

Buy Blue and save the world. Buyblue.org keeps track of where corporate money goes in politics. I never would have guessed 92% of Yahoo goes to Red politicos. [via Leia]

Your father made fetuses with flesh-licking ladies while you and your mother were a- sleep in the trailer park thunderous sparks from the dark of the stadium the music and medicine you needed for comfort

Neutral Milk Hotel welcome to the Plastic Classic Album hall of fame.

So things with DF reached a point some months ago where I realized that I'm just never going to have the relationship with her that I wanted and it was an impediment to building other relationships.

It had been pushed in different directions. At times close and intimate, and at other times light friendly contact. None of them worked out quite right despite some amazing peaks. This is something that involved years of investigation. Tired of the anger, and heartache I said "That's it. No more communication." DF was not pleased. Neither was I but I saw no other way.

I stuck to it. Over the next few months I received a few emails from DF but just read and filed them. Each time I wanted to respond and answer the questions but I stuck to my guns. Then I broke and answered DF last night. DF responded today.

Remember this my friend, this feeling right now. This shitty, kicked in the chest, cold sweat, trembling, shallow breathing, nothing will ever be right about that relationship feeling. That's what happens when you fuck with the rules you've setup.

Moved into the new place and took pictures.

A pretty good list of essential OS X apps.

Apple writes about World of Warcraft and includes tips for my new addiction.

Metafilter uncovers links on the major and minor real life folks that make up the HBO series Deadwood.

Step 1. Get a job Step 2. Find a temporary place to live.

Todo Step 3. Buy a house

Amanda left today to move to Baltimore. Dallas is going to be a lot lonelier without her. I miss her. I've never really come clean with how much I count on her to connect me to the world because I'm all aloof and shit. The past two days I've been very angry and irritable. I had a lot of stuff welling up inside but no idea how to say it. This has been a very rough setback to my ten year plan to live in Dallas.

A Salon piece about Sylvia Plath's therapist, Ruth Barnhouse. Devastating and deflating article with insights into psychoanalysis, Plath's relationship with Barnhouse, and the crippling depression that chased Plath to an early grave.

I recently began work on a small project that involves displaying a weekly view of a calendar. I want to use a url like /index.php/weekview/2004/04 where 04 is the week number. There are many standards for calculating which week of the year one is in. Microsoft even has their own ideas about calculating weeks.

The W3 recognizes ISO 8601 as the standard for most date and time formats but not the 8601 Week format specifically. Still 8601 is as good a standard to use as any. It turns out that working with the 8601 week can be quite involved. J R Stockton's page about calendar weeks is hands down the best online resource about the topic I found.

So, how can I work with the YYYY/WW dates and the MySQL database I'm planning on pulling this data from? php and MySQL are both happy to work with unix time, and for my purposes that is fine. This means converting the YYYY/WW dates, but thankfully most of the heavy lifting can be done by php's date command.

or the tighter version

Sadly, this solution wasn't quite so obvious to me before I started this. Also it took me a ridiculous amount of time to figure out and test the day adjustment constants.

Amusing date trivia: At some point Alaska lost 11 dates after we purchased it from the Russians and changed them from the Julian to Gregorian calendar and moved the International Date Line. There's gotta be some kind of clever historical thriller in that somewhere.

I wonder what friend's only posts Rachelle Waterman made before she had her mom murdered. Hooray LJ! More details in the AK police press release.

I finally got around to seeing Seed of Chucky. While it's no Bride of Chucky it is a worthy addition to the Chucky series. Seed of Chucky fails at exactly what Bride of Chucky did so well. BoC is an examination of the slasher genre using the conventions of the slasher genre to explain itself, while at the same time advancing the Chucky story a great deal. One can watch BoC as a deconstruction of the very genre that it's part of. Seed of Chucky doesn't have the same coherence of purpose and falls back to the more pedestrian slasher/Hollywood satire of say the Scream trilogy.

I'm sure Billy Boyd and Brad Dourif had some nice LOTR reminiscing between scenes. The Academy Award nominated (Supporting Actress for Bullets Over Broadway) Jennifer Tilly is the proverbial glue around which the movie is built since she plays herself and the Tiffany doll and most of the best jokes involve her or Tiffany making fun of Jennifer Tilly's career. This movie and P.S. also co-exist in a short list of movies this year that address addiction and recovery in the main plot. (Tiffany wants to end her addiction to murder)

It's chock full of movie references. The best one is hands down the Shining moment where Chucky breaks through a door with an axe and with the audience waiting for "Heeere's Chucky" after a pause he says "I can't imagine what I could possibly say right now." The new spawn of Tiffany and Chucky is of indeterminate sex and lives through it's own Glen or Glenda complex in the movie. Glen has a hilarious breakdown and captures James Dean's rebel yell "You're tearing me apart!" so accurately I wonder if it was sampled. The Child's Play franchise also had it's first bit of human nudity which the director insists was done as a reference to the Hammer horror films since he chose a British actress with the "Hammer look" to do it.

I couldn't help but laugh at Glen's belief that his family is Japanese because of the "Made in Japan" label the Chucky family bears. He even speaks in Japanese hoping for a deeper family bond. I was reminded of The Eighth Day where Georges thinks he's Mongolian and fantasizes about riding through the countryside on small horses because people referred to him as a mongoloid baby.

Probably only worth a rental, and even then only if you're a movie buff or Chucky fan. I'm still trying to figure out what those two families with the eight kids were doing at the showing I was at. They stayed through the whole thing.

I spent last Thanksgiving with a friend's family. I came into this Thanksgiving holiday with no plans. This Thanksgiving, in typical Matt fashion, I decided I'd just be alone and go somewhere else till the holiday was over. (I've never liked the seemingly unnecessary interruption in productivity that holidays bring) Camping became a non-option because of most Texas campgrounds being closed due to flooding and freezing temperatures at other nearby spots. I kept thinking about one miserable Thanksgiving that involved eating at McDonalds. But this one won't be like that.

Two different people called me out of the blue to eat with their families on Thanksgiving. I'm genuinely stunned, the kind of stunned that maybe includes a few tears, by their spontaneous offers.

Sweet sweet nectar! I've reintroduced my body to the White Rock YMCA, and conveniently all my workouts were still in the system. I picked up right where I left off. Sadly my body wasn't right were I left off.

I can't hold the cell phone to my head too long without my arm really hurting. Rock on! I gave up World of Warcraft for this tonight.

Oh happy memories, the Fitlinxx website still measures my workout in VW Beetles lifted, gummy bears burned and FitPoints.

I think I will be very, very sore at work tomorrow. I'm trying to find a campsite in Texas that isn't flooded for the Thanksgiving holiday.

It costs about $5k to get from Baghdad airport to city center. This includes four well armed Western ex-military bodyguards and two cars. The passenger travels at an average of 100 mph with a "gun car" nearby to deal with hostiles. If you're caught then Islamist militant groups will pay up to $300k for you.

I saw a trailer for The Take before P.S.. It's Naomi Klein so I expected a movie with a radical new take on globalization and megacorps. This seems like the latest escalation in leftist documentaries.

I've never seen a trailer beseech action of the audience in such strong terms. Phrases like "Stop Asking", "Take on the System", "Take Over the Machines", "Take Out the Boss" and "Take Back Your Country" filled the screen. The next to last shot is a scene of the Argentinian police shooting into a crowd of protestors.

I wonder what effect these documentaries have on our country. Most of them only play in blue areas (large urban areas) and will never play in red strongholds. They tend to be a powerful call to action for the converted. It's one thing to watch them alone at home on DVD, and something entirely different to sit in a theater of like-minded people and realize you're not alone.

Just got back from seeing TV on the Radio (TV's blog) open up for The Faint. TV was solid, but not great. I hope the Young Liars EP doesn't end up being their peak. On their opener they were channeling Mogwai with this distorted guitar that slowly built over the course of a few minutes. I was really surprised when they sampled themselves playing and started looping it. I've never heard anyone else use that technique for their kind of music.

The Faint brought down the house. I had always relegated them to the upper echelon of B-List indie acts. I was wrong. Their live show is second to none. I've seen Modest Mouse, Yume Bitsu, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Death Cab for Cutie, Dismemberment Plan and a few others perform in the same venue and none have sounded as good as The Faint did tonight. I had thought it was a limitation of the venue, but apparently not. They also had the best visual and light show of any of the bands I've seen play there. A number of video sequences were synchronized to the music and didn't slip at all. They were tight. Todd Baechle, the lead singer, had a really strong presence on stage that I didn't expect him to have.

The highlights of the show for me were "Agenda Suicide", "Paranoiattack", "Birth", "Phone Call", "Worked up so Sexual", "Call Call" and "Your Retro Career Melted". The live performances had all the energy of the studio cuts and more. The video and light presentation with each looked far beyond what any indie band should be able to afford.

For me The Faint has nicely filled the void left by the Dismemberment Plan when they disbanded. The Plan never really excelled on their studio albums, but their live shows were excellent. I'm looking forward to more Faint shows.

On another note, it's been about a year since I last experienced live music from a band. The last show I'd seen was Mogwai in Atlanta, which was excellent in that cerebral, sit-down and melt into the music kinda way. It's good to have opportunities like this again, and at $17 total you'll hear no complaints from me. I was surprised to see some folks in DC paying $30 to $60 for the same show.

This is a house in eastern Montana on a dirt road on the way between Pompey's Pillar and the Little Bighorn battleground. One of the reasons that I travel is because I want to find a place that is home. I take lots of pictures of empty homes when I'm traveling. I'd never really thought about why. I think I take those pictures because I wonder if this home might be the one.

Just who is worried about indecency on television, and what has brought on the FCC's latest chilling effect on TV programming? A FOIA request about Fox's $1.2 million fine uncovered three righteously indignant people with a Xerox.

It took me about a week to get my bearings once I landed in Dallas. The near constant excitement of the previous month had settled in and given me a different way of being. I felt really lost and confused during my first week in Dallas.

Oddly, I finally felt normal again when I jumped in the car and took off for Austin to see 20x2 v4.5. Amanda was a great traveling companion down and back up.

That trip marked the first time I'd stayed at Thon's place just me and him. It's also the first time I didn't feel apprehensive around him. That apprehension came from feeling that I'd never delivered on the promise I showed when he hired me to work at BroadbandNow five years ago. This time it was gone and I found it really easy to talk with him.

The rest of my time in Dallas has marked a renewal of friendships and routines. I'm staying with my friend Dave. I'm back into the Angelika movie roundtable. I've seen a number of the dfw bloggers.

I need to find a good job, and buy a house to finish phase two of this project. I know more than ever before what I want to do. I just don't know how to make money at it.

Dallas has joined civilization. We now have a 24 hour Krystal. No news on the first five folks who won a year's supply of the stuff.

Abortions up under Bush after a decade of decline.

I'm dubious about the authenticity but it's one more way to slice up the electorate. A list of state IQ / electoral vote correlation.

Despite the grim picture for progressive politics across the country my new home in Dallas County bucked the trend. Three new Democrat judges, and a new lesbian, Latina, Democrat sheriff. The trend seems to be based on demographics rather than thoughtful Democrat strategies. Apparently Dallas County's hispanic population has doubled recently and they go 2-to-1 Democrat.

Electing to Leave has some funny and frustrating advice for those looking to renounce their US citizenship in light of the recent election.

Marry an American is a site where Canadians can pledge to marry a non-Bush voter and rescue them from four more years of Bush.

This was one of the last pictures I took before moving out of Dallas and back to Huntsville a little over a year ago. It's overlooking Mockingbird station at the Angelika theater. While I was in Huntsville I sought refuge at the theater there and came to refer to my weekly visits as going to church. Well, I am happy to be back where I can really dig into "church" with both feet. I never found the movie community that I'd hoped to find in Huntsville and for whatever reason a solid movie community seems to bring me the peace, understanding and enlightenment that church brings others.

I'm surprised that the country turned out for Bush. I really thought his failures would be clear to the majority of Americans. I'm not clear what's next.

When I talk to my mother, who voted for Bush, we see the same things from opposite sides. She talks about voter's rejecting "legislating morality" and I counter with the fact that 11 states added new legislation to ban gay marriage and civil unions.

My step-father, who voted for Bush, complains about "activist judges" and I ask him what that means and I get this buzz phrase "Judges shouldn't legislate from the bench." Should Plessy vs. Ferguson have never been overturned by Brown ending separate but equal facilities? Isn't the whole concept of judicial review anathema to "activist judges."

My mother talks about voter's rejecting "big government" and I point out that Bush has presided over one of the largest increases in a decade and that government shrunk under Clinton much more.

I hear other Republicans complain about cuts in military spending and I retort with "How would the military have stopped guys with box cutters?"

Republicans defend Bush's excesses, even by their standards, with the idea that everything changed on 9/11 and I remind them that Clinton presided over not one, but two, homeland terrorists attacks and captured and tried all people involved in those. He didn't resort to the wrong-headed approach Bush has decided on which have not resulted in bringing the perpetrators to justice.

Republicans call Kerry a "tax and spend liberal" and don't blink at the Bush "tax cut and spend conservative" missing the obvious fiscal problems that creates.

My mother is the same person who used the tortured phrase of cognitive dissonance "It's okay, but it's not right" to describe gay marriage. How do these people hold this doublethink in their head?

I love my parents and I do not mean to pick on them exclusively. They are just the few Republican voters I encounter and I take their stance to be emblematic of the larger Republican base. I genuinely believe that Republican or Democrat everyone wants to make America greater. I just don't understand how Republican voters, by even their own measurements of success, fail to see improvements but continue voting the same way.

So the presidential election was just one more battle lost in the war. What's the next battle? How do I go about untwisting the mental contortions and buzzword heavy rhetoric of the Republican voters? I'm a lot more optimistic about 2008 than I was about 2004. I think Democrats are really just now building the infrastructure needed after the Democrat/Republican realignment where the parties seemed to swap sides on major issues. (Remember when the South used to only vote for racist Democrats?) I think the failure of the DLC and moderate Democrats to deliver this election will hopefully mark the end of the Republican-lite agenda that Clinton and crew have been pushing.

I got into San Francisco yesterday around noon. I've now completely adjusted to sleeping on the bus and can do it at will. When I got here I wasn't tired at all. I took off to see the Castro Theater and the Civic Center. San Fran's public library doesn't match up to the excellence that is the SLC public library. San Fran also doesn't seem to have as many active iPod users as DC. Maybe the DC folks are still listening to the 9-11 Report. Still San Francisco can throw down with any city in North America. I think we need a new reality series built around city vs. city grudge matches.

Except for an overnight in Albuquerque this is the end of the trip. I'll just be passing through LA, Las Vegas and other places as I race back across the country before my bus pass runs out. I think I could live like this, for a little while at least. I feel so much more relaxed floating from place to place. The only hard moments are right after I get to a new city and I have to figure out where I'm sleeping and how to get there. I feel nervous and scared. Once that's solved it's easy. The rest of it I've done hundreds of times before. I think I like it because it's okay to be alone.

While traveling I don't feel the pressure to be with friends that I have once I settle down. The pressure is something that comes from inside me, not my friends. I don't want to be alone. I want to see them. I want to hear new thoughts and ideas. I want people that I can love and share things with. When I'm travelling those pressures go away, at least they aren't as high a priority as figuring out food and shelter. I'm just so spectacularly bad at maintaining friendships, and certainly girlfriends.

But put all that aside, it's time to revel in San Francisco. Many kudos to Chris and Jennifer for putting me up for the night and being great company. Oh and mucho thanks to Chris for hooking Andy and I up when I was in Seattle. It turns out Andy was like four blocks up the street from where I was staying in Seattle and was there the same two days I was. It felt like deja vu all over again because Chris did the same thing when we were both in Dallas and didn't know it.

Helpful tips learned on the bus ride from Salt Lake City to Boise.

• When you see the police approaching and you have illegal drugs, put them in a babies diaper. They never look there.
• When you want to cover up the smell of pot sprinkle Old Spice in the air and on your person. "Covers that shit right up."
• Bring a bible with you. Not only is it "that book full of knowledge" but you can rip out the thin pages to roll a joint in a pinch.

Salt Lake City to Boise has been the most amusing and annoying bus trip so far. I ended up in the back next to four other guys desperate to be as fucked up as possible for the entire ride. Four guys, Stephen Baldwin, the Loan Officer, Chatty and Stoner have pot, beer and this nasty sounding concoction of vodka/cough syrup/ghb to achieve this. They start off by smoking at the first stop the bus makes. They get back on the bus quite happy, flirting with these two girls, talking about how they've done time and how they've beaten drug cases against them. At one point I have to assure them I'm not law enforcement. It's all in good fun.

Chatty talks often and quickly but Stephen Baldwin is the leader that sets the topics. Stoner is always stuck packing the pipe. Loan Officer listens for the most part, or tells the story of how he was busted for possession that very morning before getting on the bus. Apparently he and a friend had walked right in front of the Salt Lake county sheriff's office and lit up in front of the camera. His medical marijuana exemption didn't work in Utah. His summons was in seven days and he said he had no plans to be there. He just marks Utah off the list of states he'll visit. This trip hadn't been all bad, he was the first person to ski in America this ski season at Loveland, CO. This is a guy that only needs two loans a month to subsidize his lifestyle. Stephen Baldwin was just coming back from Texas where he'd had a special package sent to his PO box in Boise. The only serious discussion they had was him and Chatty negotiating a price for a pound.

Enough talk, more drug use. Going an hour or two between tokes isn't working out. They start going into the bathroom one by one and exhaling through a vent. They start sneaking beer from convenience stores at the stops. Although Chatty was busted once and had to leave it in the parking lot. Most of the time they made it back on. This is still taking too long. So they start smoking in their seats and blowing the smoke into the headrests. This is the nastiest thing I've seen on the bus so far. I will never rest my head again. Even this was too much of an incovenience so Chatty exhales right into the cabin. Stoner is freaking out because he's the one with all the supplies and he doesn't want to get arrested. But he's a funny kind of freaked out.

At this point the bus driver smells smoke and coincidentally this is when Stephen Baldwin comes out of the bathroom after legitimately using it. Then in this growling, angry voice the bus driver comes over the PA system Hey SCUMBAG! The SCUMBAG in the last row. and on and on about what a bad person he is and how he'd better not do it again and that SCUMBAGS (yes, he really said it in all caps) will be thrown off the bus if they are caught again. But we're 11 miles from Boise so it doesn't matter. At this point Stoner is freaking out and has curled up into the fetal position in his seat. He's laughing and telling us he's having a heart attack and that he doesn't want to be busted.

All in all amusing, but annoying because I leave the bus smelling like I've been at an Air concert in Atlanta.

I meandered into the high plains in the rental car I got in Pittsburgh. This area is the geographic embodiment of America. The enormous, lush, rolling plains are there and ready to be cultivated by anyone that's willing to make the effort. Their size is another key part of what strikes me as American. They skies and fields go on and on seemingly forever. My main wish is that the cities of northern Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming and so forth were walkable. They are just big enough to require a car to get around and don't have much in the way of public transportation.

One city that is walkable is Denver. I drove in on Saturday and stayed with Jason and Julie. Even though I haven't seen them since they left Dallas and got married I found that things eased into the same friendship that I'd had when we were roommates in Dallas. After spending the night with them, I left them behind to return the car and head to downtown Denver. What a great city. It's modern and classical buildings keep the ambulatory visitor occupied wondering what's next. The weather was great. Like all walkable cities the streets have a nice, simple grid layout that makes it practically impossible to get lost. In my opinion Denver is the model city for every other city in the Southwest and Rocky Mountain states.

It was nice to get back into the Greyhound stream of things. I'd found the car travel to be a tad annoying, and way too expensive with the current gas prices.

Just a few more days and I get to see Andy in Portland, and then after that the San Francisco folks. I need to give Chris a call since I think I know when I'll be getting into SF. I am very much looking forward to that.

I'm in the main Salt Lake City public library. This is one of the slickest libraries I've ever seen. The building is very striking from the outside, and the inside has a mix of library and commercial kiosks that I've never seen before.

I've been getting up to speed on the LDS church. You don't have to walk very far in the temple square before running into someone that's eager to help teach you about the place and the religion. They have great reason to be proud. While I'm not allowed to see the temple it is very impressive from the outside. The various other offices, administrative buildings and support buildings are enormous, ornate and welcoming.

I couldn't help but laugh at lunch time as all the well dressed church staff flowed out of the square and into a mall food court across the street. I wish I had thought to get a picture of all these white guys in business suits chowing down on McDonalds, Long John Silver and other mall food. It's then that I noticed how effective the homeless people are.

They positioned themselves right at the mall egress points, perched at the parking garage exits right in the middle of the street, and crouched in the shadow of the religious buildings. They were impossible to miss and showed a resourcefulness I've rarely seen in panhandlers, without being especially overt or aggressive. I learned today that the LDS church has a huge community service program I wonder how they address homelessness.

As neat as the LDS church has been I find myself surprised by their terminology. Listening to sermons appears to be referred to as "receiving instruction." The highest council underneath the president is the twelve apostles. It's odd thinking of the term apostle referring to a constantly changing, living person. The idea that the third, or highest level, or priesthood is called a "high priest" sounds vaguely cultish. Overall though it's been educational learning about wards, stakes and areas and the structure of the church.

Best moment: Across from the temple square is the the food court area and IT HAS AN ORANGE JULIUS. This may be the last one in existence.

In February of 2004 I took a trip to Morocco to fulfill a promise that had been a long time in coming. Ever since reading Paul Bowles' 1949 classic "The Sheltering Sky" I had longed to visit the Sahara and North Africa. The wish began at 19 and was fulfilled as turned 30. It was riveting and overwhelming.

Omar, the Berber guide, and I spent five days camping in the desert. In that time I sought refuge from a sand storm with a nomad family in their enormous tent. I had my tent torn to pieces in a rain storm one night. I trekked through high, sandy winds for a couple of days. Omar and I spent a lot of time talking when he'd prepare meals or while we'd pitched tents or packed up. I don't think the experience would have been anywhere near as rich without his insights and friendship.

When I look at this picture now I can't help but wish I had some kind of guide for my own life at this moment.

I'm up in Bismarck, ND today. I rented a car from Pittsburgh because I'm too sick to take the rigors of Greyhound at the moment. Although I already miss riding the bus. The other reason is that I wanted to see some of the parks, specifically all the Lewis and Clark stuff, that's around here.

While this sickness is frustrating and disappointing I think the biggest disappointment so far has been the National World War II memorial. After finding myself unexpectedly moved by the Vietnam War memorial I walked over to the WWII memorial. It's an oval with semi-circles of tall pillars representing the states on either end. The two ends represent the "Atlantic" and Pacific theaters of war. In the middle is a pool with fountains.

It feels like it was built by a committee. It has trite words from famous leaders about the sacrifices made etched around the monument. I found myself filling with anger as I read those lines. Who are these people of privilege that are talking about making sacrifice? I want to hear from the real people that fought in the war. In order to make the war fit thematically into the monument they use the term "Atlantic." I've always heard the non-Pacific theater referred to as the European theater. The monument does not imbue one with the sense of reverence and awe that it should.

The WWII monument is derivative of a Civil War monument at Gettysburg done with a similar theme, the semi-circle of pillars representing the states. Right here in Bismarck, ND they have a wonderful veterans monument. It's an open domed structure with a dais in the middle with a globe of the earth on it. Radiating from the center are bronze plaques of the names of every veteran of ND from every war. On the 11th day, of the 11th month at the 11th hour the monument is built so the sun illuminates the globe to remind us of the sacrifices made at the last possible moment to turn the tide.

Also one can head West into Montana and visit the Battle of Little Bighorn battlefield, Custer's last stand. It's the only US battlefield monument to leave the soldiers were they fell and put up markers. Hundreds of these fill the six mile long field, and it's powerful. They also have an effective indian memorial there.

I've stayed in Knoxville, TN, Asheville, NC, Washington, DC, Portland, ME, Boston, MA and Toronto, ON. Each stop has been really great and full of fun, enriching local moments. I've been keeping sporadic updates in a separate area.

After having a good time with James and Brooke in Toronto I've weaseled my way into my sister's place in Pittsburgh. She's out of town till 11pm so I'm soaking up the Internet access while I recover from some illness and lack of sleep. Plus it's overcast so I think I deserve a little rest.

How the hell do these people travel without any money? -Subway employee at bus station in Rochester, NY (or some upstate stop)

Who are these people that travel around without any apparent means to support themselves? Again and again I've run into people who are stuck between places. They've run out of money, they've had it stolen or they're just drifting from town to town looking for work. They represent some kind of vagabond diaspora. It's particular to bus stations. I've never seen it centered around any other transportation. Bus travel seems uniquely generous in what you can cajole yourself into and inexpensive as well.

I talk with these people and some are homeless and stuck in a city. They sleep at the bus station because the shelters are full. They plan their day around the 7am, 12pm, and 5:30pm meals they can get for free. Some work in one place for a week or longer and then buy a bus ticket to the next town they can afford to travel to and start all over. Some travel the country selling their belongings to keep the wandering going and find friends and family in towns to take care of them. Some people seem to make busses and bus stations their office. They're working deals on their cell phone while they live out of their luggage and clean up in the bathroom.

I'm no closer to understanding what it means to be American. So much of being American seems to be tied to living somewhere in America. That's not me right now. I'm just floating through addresses like so many others. Being American seems to mean in part experiencing the same current events. I have no idea what's going on in the world unless it's above the fold on a USA Today or local newspaper. I'm totally out of sync with the vast majority of the 8-5 working crowd. Every day I've got different waking hours subject to the whims of hostels, friends, bus schedules or public transportation.

I can happily say that no other problems in my life matter at this moment. The friendship lost with Rebecca, the awkwardness of staying with people I haven't seen in years, where I'll live in Dallas, what job I'll find...they all vanish. In fact I don't have any anxieties or worries right now. I just keep moving, finding places to eat and stay, and filling my head with all the great things this country has built up over the years.

Michael and Maria take advantage of their remote location to burn large piles of trash from time to time. One a cold, winter night I had the privilege of participating. I was surprised by how high the flames went at times and that nothing else caught fire.

Now the image has become iconic to me. Out with the old, in with the new. As my friend Dave Gallman used to say "Before every act of creation is an act of destruction." I think about it when I'm contemplating changes in my life.

It's hard to believe I've only been traveling a little over a week. Knoxville feels like a month ago. Even D.C. feels like a few weeks ago and that was just Tuesday. I have little notion of what day it is anymore. Part of that is the lack of sleep as I try to pack in as much as possible.

I wonder how your mind/body know what a day's worth of memories is supposed to be. If I keep up this pace will my mind adjust and I'll have a more natural sense of how much time has passed, or is that feeling of time passing a constant?

Paper lined bathroom walls This was brilliant. I saw it at Beanstreets Cafe in Asheville, NC. People had filled up the walls with writing. The discourse was above and beyond the usual "bj wanted" I see in rest areas and included spirited debate about the merits of Kerry and Bush campaigns.

Attraction oriented metro guides Washington D.C. wins hands down for easiest to use subway. It doesn't have the flexibility of say Boston's T or the simplicity of Toronto's trains but they publish a three page pamphlet that tells you what attractions are at what stop. Someone should come up with their own versions of those guides and get them down in the train stations.

Showing Turner Classic Movie ads at repertory theater The Brattle Theater while not at the vaunted heights of prestige of NYC's Film Forum it is no slouch. I caught the The Phantom Lady and was impressed by how they'd put together the trailers before the feature. They included one of TCM's always excellently produced ads reminding folks it's a month of musicals. (Those TCM ads are such high quality and a tad long they should bundle them together on a Shorts DVD) Shockingly they had like 30 people at the showing I went to.

Blogger hostelling Wouldn't it be nice if you could announce to the world "Hey I've got room at my place if you're in town." Apparently someone else was five years ahead of me on this one. Thanks to James for pointing out Couch Surfing.

Waiting for a bus to Boston in the freaking enormous NYC bus terminal:

Random ranting bus guy: "Charles Manson is the son of butterball Satan. See you can spell the word Roman from his name because they served Satan and killed Jesus."

Passenger: "What do you mean butterball? What's turkey got to do with Satan?"

RRBG: "Well I tell you why he's butterball Satan. One time I was in Mississippi waiting to get a haircut. I was reading a magazine. It was a white man's magazine. That's when I saw it. It filled up the whole page. It was a giant butterball turkey. It was Satan."

As I passed in front of a McDonalds near Boston Commons at Park Street a thug and his girlfriend brushed by on the sidewalk. I overheard this, "I don't want to hear it. We ate at McDonalds last night, bitch."

Asheville, NC -> Washington D.C. -> Portland, ME

I've made it up to Portland, Maine. I'm skipping NYC because I just don't want the hassle right now. Sleeping through the night on Greyhound has been a semi-acceptable way to cut down on costs finding places to sleep. It gives me the maximum amount of time to spend during the day in each city. Also I lose a day of sleep since I don't really sleep on the bus and I go straight into the next day.

The biggest surprise so far is that I haven't really had to carry my big 30 lb. backpack everywhere. I've got a Timbuktu 2 messenger bag for the essentials when I'm in town. I usually park the big bag in lockers at the bus/train station I'm at. I've also found the two hotels I've stayed at to be amenable to letting me stow it with them whether I'm staying there that day or not. Those are the nicest as they are free. I just don't have the security of knowing it's locked away.

The bus stations have generally been located near where I wanted to be. I don't think I've had more than a mile and a half walk to get any place I've wanted to be. If I wanted to go somewhere far I've always had public transportation handy.

Important navigational tip: 1st and K Street NE in Washington D.C. is not at all the same as 1st and K Street NW. One is in a run down neighborhood with lots of boarded up buildings, overgrown yards and a curious absence of people. The other is near the bustling metropolis of Washington D.C. and it's many, many free attractions.

Haven't had much time to reflect on anything at this point. I hustle from place to place. I have started to wonder if I'd like a life like that. A life where every moment is full and even simple things like eating involve many more decisions. My gut reaction is not at all, and that it's easier to live with the regret of wasting time than to be this engaged all the time.

Thanks to Malaprop's Bookstore for the Internet access here in Asheville.

I was wondering about the difference between tourism and adventure as I rode the bus and hussled between stations. I think it's a matter of planning. Adventure seems to require a lack of it, and I've got plenty of that to spare.

"Transmission fell off." Those were the words shortly into the bus trip to Nashville. It rolled across the interstate into the median. The bus had a spare for some reason. Met a real estate magnate bumming around the square last night. He's friends with the Schlitterbaun folks. Stayed with the inestimably jovial, friendly and smart Plaid Ninja in Knoxville.

It's hard to imagine what 27 more days of this will be like. I'm beginning to fear the cold weather up North.

What does President Bush have to say to this mom who lost her child in Iraq? A devastating new ad.

Policy decisions at the organizational, corporate, and governmental levels should be more heavily influenced by issues related to well-being — people's evaluations and feelings about their lives.

Beyond Money: Towards an Economy of Well-Being from American Psychological Society.

Gael Garcia Bernal, star of Motorcycle Diaries, vents some frustration in an article in the Detroit Free Press.

What does that mean, 'art house hit?' Nothing. It still means that most people in your country will never even consider seeing them. These films do not get the chance to compete with the Hollywood films. They get tossed off as foreign and independent films like they are somehow not ready to compete with all that crap that Hollywood produces. Hey, where's my action figure?

That's how I will know we are taken seriously, when I get an action figure.

Jim Gilliam has an extract from a recent Bill Moyers speech. He quotes a huge chunk about the power Dispensationalists have been able to amass. Bill Moyers doesn't use that term in his speech but he's talking about Dispensationalism. It's a way of looking at Christianity from the back-end. Start at the Rapture and work your way backwards to figure out what you're supposed to be doing now. Based on hermeneutic study this means supporting the state of Israel so it can be destroyed and thus bring about the Second Coming, the Rapture, the Tribulation and so forth.

I don't understand how an apocalyptic cult counts House Majority Leader Tom Delay, Senator James Inhofe and others as members. These people want to sacrifice Israel to the Anti-Christ in order to bring about the Second Coming. All personal religious beliefs aside, because there is certainly wackier stuff out there, this is a disregard for the majority of Americans that don't believe in this stuff. They build policy based on their dispensational beliefs.

Tom Delay has no room for non-Christians as he has previously stated:

Only Christianity offers a way to live in response to the realities that we find in this world—only Christianity.

Inhofe characterized the battle for the end times with these words:

This is not a political battle at all. It is a contest over whether or not the word of God is true.

If you were unclear as to why we went to war in Iraq President Bush has said

God told me to strike at al-Qaida and I struck them, and then He instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me, I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them.

Apparently he misheard God about solving the problem in the Middle East because he backed out of the road map when it angered Dispensationalists according to Pentecostal minister Robert G. Upton:

Within a two-week period, getting 50,000 postcards saying the exact same thing from places all over the country, that resonated with the White House. That really caused [President Bush] to backpedal on the Road Map.

I don't think President Bush is a Dispensationalist since he's a Methodist. I personally disagree with his overt mixing of religion and politics but I don't think he wants to destroy the world for God. The two Congressmen I mentioned do believe in it. It's fine to believe this on your own time, but they create foreign and domestic policy based on these doomsday beliefs. Moyers is right "the delusional is no longer marginal."

Picture taken in February 2004.

The Place dJemaa el-Fna is one of the most amazing places I've ever been. I had always heard about the medinas of Morocco but this is the place that blew me away. At night the square fills with vendors, story tellers, snake charmers, pick pockets, drug dealers, acrobats and all sorts of other folk. The atmosphere was intoxicating and I meandered in open-mouthed awe around the square. I was lucky to be there right after the Moroccan soccer team had won second place in the Africa's Cup. The whole country was going nuts, and especially in that square.

This picture was taken by a snake charmer. I have a small snake in my hand and they have numerous cobras spread out around them. Shortly after this he wrapped a cobra around my neck and showed me off to the crowd. I was left clutching at the snake's head wondering if it was poisonous. They took more pictures of me with the cobra on. Shortly after that he clandestinely hit me up for 200 dirham, or about $20. This was still early on in my trip and I hadn't really grasped that everything has a price, or the importance of setting that price beforehand. I didn't feel in a position to bargain with him so I quietly dropped some money down for him and walked away.

I've been trying to come up with a way to solve two problems to this bus adventure. Where can I keep my backpack, and where can I sleep? I haven't been able to find places to store stuff, especially big things like backpacks. I haven't been able to find urban campgrounds either. I don't want to hide out in hotels.

It looks like I'm getting an Hostelling International card.

I have a feeling I'm not being creative enough. At any rate the hostelling thing is new to me, and it should afford opportunities to get more perspectives on the country.

Charles has a nice summation, cribbed from elsewhere, comparing and contrasting the handling of intelligence by President George W. Bush and CBS News anchor Dan Rather.

Does Netflix penalize frequent renters?

I went up to Nashville tonight and caught a showing of the latest anime, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. As the story lines in anime are not very diverse you can probably guess what the movie is about by imagining a movie with a mix sci-fi/cyberpunk/police/megacorp elements. Like many anime series and movies, most notably Lain, it provides a philosophical look at humanity by building stories and observations around humans replacing body parts with mechanical enhancements. I was not a big fan of the original and was quite surprised by the huge following it developed. While the visual look was a stunning blend of 2D/3D techniques the story was obtuse and full of the overplotting so prevalent in the genre.

I found the sequel to be the rare offspring that outshines it's predecessor. The story is a relatively straightforward investigation of a series of violent murders by broken robots. The dialogue is full of quotes from the Bible, Milton, Confucious, Shakespeare, and other luminaries intermixed with exposition to explain what's happening. It can be tough to keep up with because they'll throw out some pretty complicated concepts in the quotes and race ahead. I congratulate the translators on tackling some of these concepts in a two line sentence. Also I am grateful to Go Fish (Dreamworks anime division) for having the guts to release this with subtitles instead of dubbing. I enojy the Miyazaki stuff but Disney/Miramax manages to always find an actor that makes me cringe when they dub.

Where the movie truly shines is again the visualization and the animation. The world is amazing to behold. The scene with the detectives flying into the northern region gave me goosebumps. It's been the better part of a year since I've had a moment like that in a movie. I was drawn in and felt as though I was gazing at an enormous monument to human ingenuity, both in the city conceived in the movie and the computer effects. The environment, animals, buildings and vehicles were rendered with that special brand of realism that is at once compelling and believable but only in the future world depicted in the movie. I have no doubt that if I lived in that world it would look just like that. The people are mostly 2D and I still find that 2D conveys human emotion better than most 3D attempts I've seen.

Visuals alone don't do it for me. What sold me on the visuals was the animation. In particular the scene where the cyborg, Bateau, is at home playing with his basset hound. It's a remarkably tender, honest scene that could stand on it's own as a short film. It's the little things like the way the dog falls out of the chair when he hears Bateau, or the way Bateau keeps the dog's ears from falling into the food bowl when he's eating. They create a warmth and sincerity that's typically sacrified to cute and funny in most animated features with animals. The use of the dog in the trailer and poster had me cringing going in with the expectation that I was going to be manipulated, but that was not the case at all.

I will have to see it again some time. Also it's made me want to watch the original again, maybe I was too harsh on it. The ideas about human souls, mechanization, dolls and golems, reality vs. illusion were too much to absorb during the movie. It has some really neat ideas about hacking reality that I'd never really thought about. The way viruses could be transmitted wirelessly into people's minds to override perception and alter their actions in the real world is something I'd never really thought about before. Overall, a very enjoyable experience. Also the story represents a maturation that I hope takes hold in the genre. It's about time the story caught up to the visuals.

The Rapture Index tracks all the signs that precede the Rapture. An index over 145 means Rapture is rapidly approaching. We're at 151 - fasten your seat belts.

wow. Planned Parenthood's "I had an abortion" t-shirt.

I hate life.

I'm talking about love. You know it probably started out as this great idea in someone's garage. You know God was outsourcing that shit in the beginning. The little angel/architect/whatever put it out there and people couldn't get enough of it.

At first it was this underground thing that the cool people knew about. Then there was the backlash and someone came up with hate. Then God's little bureaucracy came along and unleashed a committee on love. Only a committee could fuck it up and add jealousy, longing, a watered-down version called like, unrequited love and all the other little baroque accoutrements that have come with love ever since.

And I hate love.

Began building out a new section on the site for the Greyhound bus trip across America.

I don't have dates yet, but each city is roughly a day in the 30 day trip. Right now I think I have 5 days of play to use when I want to stay somewhere longer. This is just a tentative route.

1. Knoxville, TN
2. Asheville, NC
3. Washington, DC
4. New York, NY
5. Bar Harbor, ME
6. Boston, MA
7. Toronto, ON
8. Pittsburgh, PA
9. Ann Arbor, MI
10. Chicago, IL
11. Des Moines, IA
12. Minneapolis, MN
13. Bismarck, ND
14. Billings, MT
15. Denver, CO
16. Salt Lake City, UT
17. Boise, ID
18. Seattle, WA
19. Portland, OR
20. San Francisco, CA
21. Los Angeles, CA [via Amtrak]
22. Las Vegas, NV
23. Albuquerque, NM
24. Oklahoma City, OK
25. Memphis, TN
26. Huntsville, AL

I'm still working on public transportation information for the places that have it so I can get around. I'm also building a list of places I need to see on my tour of America. I'm disappointed the bus doesn't stop in Moab, UT. This is more planning than I think I've ever done for a trip.

This picture was taken 9/11/2004. I'd gone downtown to read in the park. As the sun was setting I ran up a municipal parking garage to get to the top and take the picture.

I've found Big Spring Park to be one of Huntsville's greatest assets. It's one of the few parts of the city that betrays the "cheaper and ugly is best" ethos. When I say that I'm talking about the over abundance of engineers in Huntsville. Engineers want to spend as little money as possible, and do not see asthetics or culture as worth paying extra for. Huntsville has paid the price as things have been maintained at just the base level.

Big Spring park was a lot more of a cesspool when I was growing up but it's improved a lot while I've been gone. The city has an ambitious plan to revamp the whole downtown area. If there's any hope for Huntsville I think it starts in this park. It's a powerful testament to the importance of beauty, public commons, and utility.

This picture was taken on a 8/12/2003 during a trip through North Dakota and Montana. I'd gone up there to take pictures of locations used in the movie Northfork. I found this field when I was driving a backroad between Pompey's Pillar and the Battle of Little Bighorn Monument.

I wish I could have captured the fields swaying in the wind. It looked like waves on an ocean. This enormous, empty field is full of so much promise. Anything can happen there. That's one of the things I really like about the West. No matter how messed up things get I always feel like there's a fresh start waiting just in case I need it.

The Great Sand Dunes have joined the A-List of the National Park system by dropping the Monument designation and becoming the newest National Park. The Interior Secretary had a ceremony for it September 13th, 2004. President Clinton had signed the bill in November of 2000 authorizing the designation.

The Great Sand Dunes now stand alongside Colorado's other National Parks Mesa Verde (1906), Rocky Mountain (1915), and Black Canyon of the Gunnison (1999). Since 1980 only nine areas have received the National Park designation. Cuyahoga Valley NP in Ohio is the only other designee from 2000.

The National Park Service (and I'm including their excellent battlefield monuments) is one of America's great accomplishments. I've been to many of the National Parks outside of Alaska and Hawaii and the Great Sand Dunes deserve their elite designation. I still remember the last time I was at the Great Sand Dunes when I finally climbed the big dune.

Salon has created a new award for the most unjustly ignored TV show...The Buffy. Unsurprisingly the first award goes to The Wire. Thankfully a new companion guide to the show has been published for those lost in the dense material. Also the episode guide can be critical if you get a little lost.

The article cites the scene that got me watching the series. Bunk and McNulty investigate a crime scene. It has no dialogue except for the word "Fuck" repeated in various ways. (At the time this was about the only dialogue I understood!) The story elements are revealed through different camera angles and movement. I was surprised that the series would take a risk on losing the audience like that. It's a complex scene and turns out to be pretty crucial to the series. Six episodes later they provide the conclusion for the scene during an interrogation of D'Angelo. The detectives utter the word "Refrigerator" and everything clicks into place for the audience.

The Kazakhstan Embassy press secretary clears up some misconceptions created by Da Ali G Show.

Women are not kept in cages. Wine is not made from fermented horse urine.

DART to begin free concerts at rail stations every Thursday with a national and local band. Sloan and Chris Megert are kicking it off.

An angry father of a soldier in Iraq vents his rage and pain at the man who put him there. The picture of the Bush supporter covering the father's mouth really captures the essence of the Bush presidency for me.

Ebert saw filmmaker David Gordon Green at the Toronto film fest and had this to say And then he showed us "Undertow," and this film is a masterpiece.

'I reckon you're fired. You could either work for him or John Kerry.' Moulton, Alabama woman fired for Kerry bumper sticker on her car.

You're soaking in it. -Palmolive Ads

I've been missing some functionality in gnumatt.org for awhile. I've wanted to hold more posts on a page. I've wanted a separate area for quick notes. I've wanted a place to post pictures I take without having to build some photo gallery since I rarely have more than one worth keeping.

I've been inspired by all the pretty sites on cssvault to redo gnumatt.org. I spent time working on a redesign this weekend instead of helping other people out. I feel sorta guilty about not helping, but I'll get to them.

There is still much to do. I want sub-navigation items for the archives. I need to link the new category archives to real pages. I need to fill out the projects and about me pages. I need to build a headline image archive (I've got about 20 more to add). I need to get trackbacks up and working 100%.

Oh and this page validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict last time I checked! As porovaara would say UNH!

Sorry for dumping all that crap into the RSS feed that Livejournal picked up.

I took that picture at a graveyard in the Battle of the Little Bighorn battlefield. The story seems to have a special resonance with me on this anniversary of 9/11.

An engagement between the non-treaty Indians, the Lakota-Cheyenne, and the 7th U.S. Calvary occurred there June 25th, 1876. General [a breveted rank from the Civil War] Custer, who had lived among the Cheyenne and considered them the finest light calvary in the world, died fighting along with 210 other men under his command. It was the high watermark of Indian resistance to American expansion. During the fighting Custer's body was guarded by Cheyenne warriors from scalping and looting as he had been considered a friend to the indians.

I find some comfort in the idea that 9/11 will be a high watermark of Muslim fanaticism. Like Custer's Last Stand, 9/11 has galvanized popular support against a group of people. Unfortunately I wonder what role the Sykes-Picot agreement, Open Door policy, the CIA backed Shah of Iran, American support for Saddam Hussein, American support for Israel, and so forth had in fomenting fundamentalist anger at the American government. I hope someday that we, the citizens of the world, find some other way to settle our differences.

Third season of The Wire starts 9/19. This excerpt from the show bio is music to my ears.

In its third season, the drama will continue to expand its sociopolitical desciption of a fictional Baltimore by examining the city's political component and its relevance to the problems confronting a post-industrial city.

That picture with Kima and McNulty looking out a car window, with Stringer and some new guy in the reflection is a classic moment from the series. The two warriors are getting ready to face down again.

But why aren't people watching it? It's written by top selling crime authors (recently added the author of Mystic River). It's won some important awards. It has HBO's endorsement. It has a very compelling and relevant story. While the show transcends genres it has plenty of police procedural elements, and those series own the network ratings. What stops it from being an HBO powerhouse?

It does not simplify the dialogue, and sometimes an episode ends without any resolution. These are points that I think are outside the mainstream and I wonder if that hurts the series.

I continue to be amazed at the uses people keep finding for the Internet. Right now I'm listening to an mp3 stream of live coverage of protests at RNC-NYC put together by anoise.

People call in by cell phone live from rallies to give updates on what's happening. The show hosts coordinate all the information together to give a bird's eye view of what's going on. The segment I've been listening to has a lawyer making sure the callers are taking the right legal precautions. The whole thing seems to be put together with commodity technology.

"The meaning of life is that it ends."- Franz Kafka

Fear Itself is an article about how terrorism creates fear. The author intentionally put himself in situations that where terrorists have struck or threatened to strike.

Salon has an interview with their recently rescued correspondent. Phillip Robertson and photographer Thorne Anderson are the journalists who were trapped in the Imam Ali shrine as the American army geared up for an attack on the Mahdi army.

I suppose it's not surprising that Robertson found himself in the middle of a difficult situation. His articles in Salon, including last week's diary of his journeys through battles in Najaf and Sadr, paint a picture of a skilled war correspondent who can anticipate the story.

Poll shows Americans still uninformed about Iraq.

[a new poll] finds that a large majority perceives the Bush administration making assertions about pre-war Iraq in sharp contrast to the conclusions of the 9/11 Commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee. Eighty percent perceive the administration as "currently saying that Iraq, just before the war, had actual weapons of mass destruction" (60%) or that it had a major WMD program (20%). Similarly, 70% perceive the administration as currently saying Iraq "gave substantial support to al-Qaeda" (43%) or was directly involved in the September 11 attacks (27%).

These numbers are an improvement but indicate that misinformation has a longer half-life than one would like.

The NY Times explains Bush family funding of the anti-Kerry group "Swift Boat Veterns for Truth"

Dick van Dyke does CG animation

Journalists head into the fray to rescue cohorts from Imam Ali Shrine in Najaf. Makes one wish our domestic political reporters had the same kind of guts.

Despite Kerry holding a substantial electoral advantage for the last six weeks the press continue reporting "It's a tie."

A staunch liberal from the Northeast went looking for the 45% that want Bush. That meant touring the South. The folks he talked to don't like Bush but they'll stick by the girl they brought to the dance.

Am I the only one creeped out by the Bush campagin requirement that you sign a pledge of allegiance to Bush if you want to attend one of his rallies? I suppose Bush forgot these words from his first campaign: "...I'm a uniter, not a divider. I refuse to play the politics of putting people into groups and pitting one group against another" [From a link to a Salon (!) interview with Bush by David Horowitz (!). What a different world it was in 1999!]

Been wandering around the city barefoot in pajama bottoms and a t-shirt. I'm having a hard time focusing on my life. Things to do and yet I'm not getting them done. Crazy. I know. Lots of staring into space though. Supposing someone interrupted my staring after I told them I'm a practicing catatonic they might say something like this:

You know Mr. Midboe I wouldn't be surprised if there was a girl or two at the center of this discombobulation.

"You'd be right," I'd say to my imaginary, but oddly formal, friend. "It's not the usual though. No Kathy this time. Been wondering about Jessica Cutler, R, and this girl at work."

What makes them do what they do? One day you're feeling exalted and the next you're road kill twitching on the highway before the rigor sets in.

I'd strike a classic Gallman pose and craftily declare "Yeah, but that's the price for admission to the great adventure! An adventure that will have a cool soundtrack thanks to Audioscrobbler."

Keep these verses in mind my brother: "He has made my teeth grind on gravel, and made me cower in ashes; my soul is bereft of peace; I have forgotten what happiness is;" Just substitute She for He. Those prophets back then swung the other way.

That'd be all we'd talk about and I'd feel better at the end, just like I do now.

Head out to the middle of nowhere. Take that road as far as it takes us....This is a beautiful country Monty. It's beautiful out there, looks like a different world. Mountains, hills, cows, farms and white churches.

Every man woman and child alive should see the desert one time before they die. Nothing at all for miles around. Nothing but sand and rocks and cactus and blue sky. Not a soul in sight. Silence. No car alarms. Nobody honking at you. No madmen cursing or pissing on the streets. You find the silence out there. You find the peace. You can find God.

So we drive West. Keep driving till we find a nice little town. These towns out in the desert you know why they got there? People wanted to get away from somewhere else. The deserts for starting over.

-James Brogan (Brian Cox) in 25th Hour

I've figured out my plan for September and October. I am traveling all across the country for at least 30 days. I bought a 30 day Discovery Pass from Greyhound, a new travel backpack and I will be getting some new shoes. I've never done something like this without my "safety blanket", my car. I'll be at the mercy of strangers more than ever before. While I don't have an itinerary I am trying to line up places to stay in a few cities: Knoxville, Toronto, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Denver, Portland, and San Francisco. I'm hoping I'll find people before I go and along the way who want help me out. Once I get out West I'm hoping to hike across the land. Just walk out the station and keep walking till I find the next station.

I want to reconnect with the country. I feel so isolated here. Forget the red state, blue state bullshit. I want to see the places and people that make this such a great nation. I want to remember why I'm going to vote this November. I hope I hear some great stories from the people I meet. I get such a thrill hearing someone who was a stranger 15 minutes ago talk about when their mother died, the time they hiked the Grand Canyon rim to rim or ranting about long haired hippies who didn't fight alongside them in Vietnam. I want my wanderlust quenched.

I'm tired of never being filled and always having to move. The urge to wander grows inside until it's all I can think about. Push it out of my head and it pops back in like a chronic pain. I find myself wanting to take bigger and bigger risks each time hoping that I'll cross some line and be done with this. I don't think this will be that time. I'm already thinking about a Eurail pass in some vague future.

Thinking about getting a 30 Day Discovery Pass from Greyhound. See the country in a new way. Amtrack has a 30 day rail pass too but they don't hit as many places as Greyhound.

This month, I'm moving out of the house I rent and putting everything into storage. After that the plan is to leave at some point in September take a circuit around the country and then go to Dallas.

I'm having a hard time with that. Despite the clarity of the decision a month ago push back from the locals has soured me on the idea somewhat. Also I'm feeling a little nervous leaving behind the mother's milk of America, money. My prospects for more are fuzzy. Conversations with Emily for the past month and a half, a talk with her mom, and not living in the same city as Emily since she was two till last August haven't made changing things again as easy as I'd like.

But staying means stagnation, defeat, isolation.

The Christian Science Monitor has really done a great job with it's coverage surrounding the war in Iraq. Right now, they are the only Western reporters reporting on fighting in Najaf this week. They've had great, solid reporting for the most part. Their editor stood by his reporter when the Pentagon kicked a reporter out of a Marine unit.

While they had missteps with their coverage going into the war they owned up to them. Although their missteps weren't quite as big as their well known compatriots, the Times and the Washington Post. Some blame Judith Miller at the New York Times for selling the war to America. The Times mistakes in coverage eventually lead to this mea culpa from the editors. The Washington Post made a similar confession.

Here is the track listing for Take What You Like: July 2004. As always if anyone is interested in a copy, and doesn't already receive one, email me your address and I'll mail one.

1. Chick a Boom Boom Boom - Mocean Worker
2. Guardian Angel - Juno Reactor
3. Sweep Down Early - Innocence Mission
4. I Would for You - Jane's Addiction
5. Monument - Carina Round
6. At Least That's What You Said - Wilco
7. The Past and Pending - The Shins
8. The Slow Drug - PJ Harvey
9. Chiaruscuro - Tulsa Drone
10. The Tain (Parts I, II, III, IV, V) - The Decemberists

I was reading the forums for The Wire when I caught this tidbit. Someone else was complaining about the dialogue in the show and the grammar of the phrase "He be late". That garnered this response:

Ok, Let me explain. In Black English, there is a separate tense called "invariant be." This form is only used to express a continuous state of being, as in the following: "He be stupid" means he is stupid now, he always was stupid, and he always will be stupid. "That be the exit" means that is and always was the exit. The "invariant be" does not exist in standard English. This form is never used to express temporary states, like "he be late" unless the person is continuosly late. In BE, a temporary state would be expressed as "he late," because contractions are deleted in BE, as they are in most dialects.

It's details like this about The Wire that continue to impress me.

Since reading a May New Yorker article about Barack Obama my ears perk up whenever I see or hear his name. I was excited when I heard he'd be speaking at the Democratic Convention. Last night he delivered a speech that he wrote. The speech is a stirring narrative that weaves together elements from the bedrock of our nation. Elements from the Declaration of Independence and the stories of people doing the best the can. He pushes aside the Blue State/Red State cynicism and talks about one United States of America. He even mentions God and faith in a sincere and direct way that most Democrats, and Republicans, trip over. People are already talking about him "being our first black president." It's people like him that have me excited about this country's political future.

Here is the track listing for Take What You Like: June 2004. As always if anyone is interested in a copy, and doesn't already receive one, email me your address and I'll mail one.

1. [Trailer Audio] - Searching for the Wrong Eyed Jesus
2. Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying - Belle & Sebastian
3. 88 Ways - Mia Doi Todd
4. Spoiled - Sebadoh
5. March of the Fire Ants - Mastodon
6. Ruin - Three Mile Pilot
7. Victorious D - Pinback
8. The Truth - Handsome Boy Modeling School
9. The Last Three Minutes - Ten Seconds
10. Part 8 - Yume Bitsu
11. Unspoken - Four Tet
12. Robot - t.A.T.u.
13. Move to the Groove - Lolita Ritmanis
14. Loom - Trlok Gurtu & Robert Miles
15. Boys, You Won't - The Wrens
16. Unknown - Tortoise

I'm having trouble coming up with enough music to put into a CD. Aside from the first piece none of these get five stars in my iTunes. This is despite an even broader list of sources to cull for new music in the past month or two. Unfortunately some of my favorite stuff just doesn't sound good as a single, you have to hear it in the context of the album.

I still struggle with my relationship with the American South. I was born in Memphis and grew up in Huntsville, Alabama. I lived in Birmingham for a few years too. Most of that time has been a mixture of awe and revulsion at what happens here. I've railed against the megachurches hawking their monopoly on the keys to Heaven. I've sung the praises of Southern writers.

I've lamented the lack of a Southern voice in movies. David Gordon Green is the only modern example I can really think of. Although if you have just one voice his is a pretty good one to have. I finally saw a trailer for a movie that actually has me incredibly excited. Searching For the Wrong Eyed Jesus is the first trailer I've seen this year that has me chomping at the bit to see this movie. It looks like it might be something outside the indie/foreign/Hollywood hit parade.

During the 1980s I grew from 6 to 16. Remembering them now I felt oppressed by the world around me. I followed presidential politics but did not go much beyond that for many of those years. I remember my shock at the S&L scandals, Iran-Contra, Libya bombing, the assassination attempt, book burnings, the fantasy of SDI, Pat Roberts presidential bid, and the stock market crash. I remember excitement about the Berlin Wall coming down but disappointment at Gorbachev being ejected and Yeltsin taking over. It was deeper than just domestic/foreign policy. I felt like American culture took a big hit as movies, music and books were recycled pabulum for the most part. As a result of that I've felt lost in the Reagan hagiography of the past week.

It was nice to see my rememberances somewhat echoed in a letter to Salon. Even if the majority of media was tripping over themselves with unabashed praise.

What Reagan did give me was cynicism toward my government. At 14, I watched the Iran-Contra hearings with a creeping sense of mortification: What if you had a national scandal and nobody came? How could Americans forgive Reagan's obdurate shredding of the Constitution—no matter how much they adored his "aw shucks" attitude liberally smeared with "give 'em hell" impulses? It made me sick to see this goofball get softball treatment from everyone, especially the media. His "I can't recall" mantra, repeated an astounding 340 times regarding his actions in Iran-Contra, sliced though the faith I had in America as a philanthropic, altruistic entity. — Sarah Kelleher

A girl came bouncing out of her house with a cigarette in her hand as Emily and I walked by yesterday. Emily quietly informed me that "I think people who smoke have bad instincts." She tried wrapping her brain around why anyone would do something that would eventually kill them. I tried reminding her that it's not that simple for smokers and that we all do things that aren't good for us. She settled on being happy that nobody in her family smokes. I was happy with that too.

Later she surprised me by telling me she sometimes wonders if she's supposed to be a boy. When I asked her why she thought that she said "I like cool things. I like violence." I was surprised by the violence remark. She clarified it by reiterating her abhorrence for violence in real life but her enjoyment of fantasy violence in books, movies, or TV. I reminded her that not all girls are the same and she shouldn't feel like she's less of a girl because she doesn't like the same things as one or two that she knows.

Here is the track listing for Take What You Like: May 2004. As always if anyone is interested in a copy, and doesn't already receive one, email me your address and I'll mail one. I must get started on June's immediately since I don't want to get any further behind.

1. No Need to Argue - The Cranberries
2. Each Coming Night - Iron and Wine
3. Alone in Kyoto - Air
4. Tiny Vessels - Death Cab for Cutie
5. Jacqueline - Franz Ferdinand
6. Hysteria - Muse
7. Tarfur - Quarashi
8. Duende - Bozzio Levin Stevens
9. Pretty Close to the Edge - Trans Am
10. High - Skalpel
11. Trying to Find a Balance - Atmosphere
12. Excursions - A Tribe Called Quest
13. Women's Prison - Loretta Lynn
14. Movie Song - Trailer Theme - Halley
15. Bine - Autechre

This batch went in the mail today.

The Digital Photography Blog has linked some nice tips on taking better pictures with a digital camera.

Now here's a blog with refreshing honesty about why they're drawn to public service. I have a "glamour job" on the Hill. That is, I could not care less about gov or politics, but working for a Senator looks good on my resume. She is, or rather was till today, an aide for Republican Senator Mike DeWine from Ohio.

It's mostly about all the sex she had or wanted to have. This includes apparently getting $400 for a "long lunch." I thought this entry was a gem:

I am done with W, for real this time. A man who tries to fuck you in the ass when you are sober does not love you. He should at least take you out for a few drinks to spare you the pain. Now I know that W does not care about me, only my asshole.

See it works on two levels. One is the literal about her date with some guy. Then you have the second symbolic level of George W. Bush and the American people. :)

After a particularly pusillanimous, groveling letter from the leadership of Atlanta to stop destroying their city Sherman sent back what must have been a devastating reply. His response to the people of Atlanta seems to capture a much more complex person than I ever came to understand in my US History classes.

You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I had no hand in making this, and I know I will make more sacrifices to-day than any of you to secure peace. But you cannot have peace and a division of our country...

You deprecate [war's] horrors, but did not feel them when you sent car-loads of soldiers and ammunition, and moulded shells and shot, to carry war into Kentucky and Tennessee, to desolate the homes of hundreds of thousands of good people who only asked to live in peace at their old homes, and under the Governor of their inheritance. But these comparisons are idle. I want peace, and believe it can only be reached through union and war, and I will ever conduct war with a view to perfect an early success.

He then closes with this passage:

But, my dear sirs, when peace does come, you may call on me for any thing. Then will I share with you the last cracker, and watch with you to shield your homes and families against danger from every quarter.

I watched Sherman's March (1986) tonight. I have no idea how this ended up in my queue. I think it was mentioned in a green cine newsletter. A documentary filmmaker sets out to explore William Tecumseh Sherman, the Union general who waged total war on the South's civilian population.

Instead he spends a lot more time documenting his ailing love life, talking to a number of Southern women, his fear of nuclear holocaust, and trying to get Burt Reynolds on film. At two and a half hours I was a little concerned that this foray into his mostly trivial and mundane life would be tedious. I quite enjoyed it. Luckily he gets some really good characters like his sister (who's getting plastic surgery), a flirtatious, exercise fanatic wanna-be actor named Pat and an old teacher who desperately wants him to get married. Along the way he takes little breaks to talk about Sherman.

It should have been awful, a tedious exercise by a self-indulgent documentarian. A Michael Moore without any grand ambition or humor but I was pleasantly entertained the whole time. I think part of it is laughing at trends from the late 70s and early 80s. Another part is how things are the same now as they were in the movie, or even during Sherman's time.

Had great fun in the 2004 24 Hour Video Race. We got our short in 9 minutes before the midnight deadline. We had to build a 5 minute or less short film around the following four things: (1) Location: Playground (2) Prop: Ladder (3) Theme: Easy Money and (4) Line of Dialogue: "You can have it."

I found out last night our video made the finals.

You can download the video [15MB] or the outtakes [15MB]. You may need the 3ivx codec to view it.

Keep in mind that none of us do this for a living, and that 24 hours is not very much time. :)

Today David and I head to Dallas for the 24 Hour Video Race. I am very much looking forward to seeing old friends. While I'm there I'm adding a new server to my co-located servers.

Have fun graduating this weekend .

Grabbed a new 802.11g wireless router for the house hoping it would make the new powerbook happier. I have to configure the Internet connection w/new router.

Crap. It didn't work the first time.

Call up earthlink support to make sure I've got the basics right (username, password, pppoe/dhcp/etc.). Wade through the phone tree till I get the choice "1 for Windows, 2 for Mac, 3 for Other."

Hit 3 hoping I'll get the more "advanced" support people. I end up talking to "Monica." (Seems like an odd name for someone with such a strong Indian accent.) I can't get her to stop reading her support scripts to jump to the basic config info. While she's stumbling through script I realize I plugged a cable into the wrong port on the router. It works now.

Try to gracefully end the conversation at this point but she is still going through support scripts. Perhaps I was talking to a machine? It felt that way. Maybe it's Earthlink's contribution to performance art? Like some kind of in-game character from the movie eXistenZ.

I'd always been thrilled with earthlink support before. I guess this is what happens when they outsource their support.

I was a bit foolish this week and didn't really take any precautions from the sunlight. I even spent about 45 minutes underneath a cloudy sky eating lunch on Friday. It caught up with me.

Yesterday afternoon on into the evening left my forearms and neck broken out in that old familiar rash. My lips have gotten in on the action too. Although since moving back to Huntsville one part of them seems to be in permablister mode any way. Another new twist is the right side of my face around my eye. This showed up after enduring sandstorms in the Moroccan Sahara. I guess the sand blasting removed some protective layer of skin around my eye. My hands aren't having any problems. I guess they've completed their Spring "molting" from the semi-constant exposure to sunlight.

It's all so embarrassing not looking like everyone else. Thankfully right now it's not that bad. I can venture out into public without too much anxiety. It just burns and itches and irritates as my clothes rub against my skin.

I get up at seven, yeah. Go to work at eight*. I got no time for living yeah. I'm working all the time. They call me the Working Man.

I think this is just a fact of my body. Getting up at 7 in the am has never worked for me. I slept through school. I sleep through work. I just can't get the amount of rest I need by 7am. I need that extra hour of sleep in the morning. I can go to sleep at 10pm or 1am and still not feel rested with this 7am wake-up time.

I can unequivocally state that my most productive years have come when the work day began at 9am.

Are late sleepers a protected class in discrimination cases? Can I point to an institutionalized bias that has deprived me the full benefits of my citizenship because they left me tired?

I've given up on Huntsville having the movies or DVDs I'm interested in. I've accepted the lack of a decent movie theater. (Although the Film Coop's new monday movie thing is exciting) Half the time I can find the book I'm looking for, but Barnes and Noble is quite expensive. I miss having a quality used book store like Half Price in Dallas.

I've accepted Huntsville's modest offering of locally owned non-BBQ/soul food restaurants. The ones it does have I quite enjoy. I'm resigned to driving/flying to other cities to see the exhibits, artists, or cultural events that interest me since they annoyingly shun Huntsville, AL.

What I am currently finding absolutely ridiculous is that I can't find a place that sells archival quality storage boxes. Does nobody store things here?

Perhaps I'm just lazy in this instance. Do people here cut down a tree, strip the bark, pulp the wood, put together a box and treat it with special buffering agents to neutralize migrant acid and atmospheric pollutants?

I'm trying something new here and listing out the mix cd contents. If anyone is interested in a copy, and doesn't already receive one, email me your address and I'll mail one.

1. Tokyo - The Books
2. Sermon on the Mount - Europa String Choir
3. Lazy - David Byrne
4. Ekova - Starflight in Daden: Aurora Remix
5. White Flag - Grails
6. Stars - Hum
7. The World at Large - Modest Mouse
8. Jane - Elf Power
9. Great Ghosts - Microphones
10. Jerusalem - Mirah
11. Pretty Girls - Neko Case
12. Something Bigger, Something Brighter - Pretty Girls Make Graves
13. Kid You'll Move Mountains - Manitoba
14. Crank Heart - Xiu Xiu
15. No More Mosquitos - Four Tet

For those I already send them out to this batch goes in the mail Monday.

I've been unpacking the personal history stuff that's filled up my living room since October. I break it down by person and then file it away. This included keys to two different girlfriend's places. Both have since moved at least twice.

I guess they aren't really "keys" anymore, just key shaped pieces of metal that don't do anything. What is a key that doesn't unlock anything?

With all the stuff I've saved from people over the years the things that have thrown me for the biggest loop today are a couple of notes and cards from Leia. Reading them now they come across as sincerely loving and heart warming. I wish I could have recognized them as such back then. I read them today, practically for the first time, and was genuinely touched. Just two years to late.

I was, and still am, stingy with my affection. I tend to lavish it on either people that aren't around or nature and the arts. It's as though my life would be too harsh in real-time so I experience it with a nice safe, tape delay.

I'd forgotten the thrill of posting a comment on some completely new person's website and getting a personal response back from them.

Got some past due sysadmin stuff done tonight. New toys coming in. A 1u rackmount server on Wednesday, and a 15" powerbook on Monday. I'm surprised Mac Resource is giving me $550 for my g3/500 dual usb ibook.

I spend a ridiculous amount of time working on my servers and playing with net widgets. It's hard for me to imagine a life where I didn't have servers to take care of that other people count on 24/7/365.

Somethingawful.com has posted a pitchfork parody that is quite funny. It overdoes it with the Radiohead humor but I liked this snippet from a "review":

Discovering a new Radiohead release is like staring into the eyes of Jesus Christ and feeling the eternal stream of love and awe that flows from Him.

Pitchfork has funny stuff on their own like their review of Metallica's St. Anger.

I've been on a hot streak with music purchases recently. The Unicorns, Halley, The Books, Modest Mouse, songs from Xiu Xiu and Four Tet and the new Mirah have all kept me enthused about music.

Today it's the new Mirah that's put a smile on my face. Five songs in and they all match Cold Cold Water in production, lyrics and the raw anthem like power. The simple, solitary quiet and playful lyrics that dominated her past two albums seem gone.

Talked to a friend about her guy problems today. I wonder what purpose the great dance plays. "I want you." "I don't." " I want you again."

I was put on the spot during lunch to come up with an embarrassing date/ask-out moment. The two anecdotes I shared revealed more about the other person than myself. I feel so aloof sometimes.

I want to write with the same charm, candidness and brevity that manages on a regular basis. (To use a word I learned today) I feel that my thoughts come out like some shrill, hebephrenic harpy. Reading her two most recent entries left me thrilled that I'd had the opportunity to read them.

My friendship with her while I was in Dallas left me frustrated and terrified at times. Frustrated because I could see shades of the fascinating and complex person within but I didn't know how to reach it. This is despite her openness and being one of the most honest and forthcoming people I've known. Terrified because I've found myself coming up short when the opportunity was there.

I must be getting soft since my favorite movies this year have been love stories: Show Me Love, Mansfield Park and now Millennium Actress directed by Satoshi Kon.

I had enjoyed his previous film Perfect Blue with it's clever story about celebrity and obsession but it lapsed into silly thriller cliches far too often. It was sort of Se7en meets Being John Malkovich inside Internet chat rooms. Then nothing from him for five or six years till Millennium Actress. Again he is tackling the simulacrum of celebrity and the physical world to say it's all part of the same story of human endeavor. Film it or live it but the story that lives on after you is even bigger. Like the cult classic "The Stunt Man" this movie is full of trap-doors between the movie within a movie and the reality within a movie. The film deftly weaves between Chiyoko's movie roles, her real past and her present to tell a great story about her search for one love. Along the way you get a sort of Cliff's Notes of Japanese history, lovingly animated as apparently only the Japanese and Pixar still remember how to do.

It has an emotional heft to it that I had been missing from animated films since the Iron Giant said "Superman."

I talked with this homeless guy for an hour a couple weeks ago. He's never been married and has nobody now. For the first time ever I saw a future where I floated from city to city alone.

I missed the ark but I could have sworn you'd wait for me. I was born a unicorn. I could have sworn you believed in me. Then how come all the other unicorns are dead?

I'm loving me some of The Unicorns. I was pleased to see on their news page that they've hit the big time as a music sensation. How do they know this? Well has started writing fanfic porn about them.

I just got back from seeing the last show of Godspell at the VBC Playhouse. I went in not knowing anything about the story. I was invited by a friend that performed in it.

I suppose there is some cosmic irony in me, an unbeliever, watching a musical about the Gospel of St. Matthew (my namesake even) on a Sunday. I wasn't the only unbeliever. I saw a "Who is John Galt?" bumper sticker on a car in the parking lot.

One more cosmic joke is that I was seated front row center with only a railing between me and the performers. As someone who relishes the quiet moments of pious reverie that I find in a good movie theater this was quiet the opposite.

The final joke is that at the end of the second act I'm pulled onto the floor to join in the dancing. A terrifying, but exhilarating, moment that I shall try to not reflect on too often should the silliness of my whirling dervish routine cause me to die of embarrassment. Thankfully Christina rescued me and danced me about till the song ended. I made little cartoons of my anxiety in the program between acts.

The performers obviously were enjoying themselves a great deal. A few of them had really great voices. None of the pop culture references fell flat. A testament to the performer's good delivery. It was wonderful to see people doing what they wanted to be doing and see the community show up to support it.

It turns out I'd seen it before. Memories of bible camp immediately returned when I saw the set and the colorful hippie Jesus. I'm pretty sure this time it won't fade from memory like that one.

I saw Dawn of the Dead tonight. Not quite the fun ride I got from 28 Days Later, and in fact many shots in Dawn of the Dead felt copied from that film. Still it had some funny moments. Sort of a Canadian version of 28 Days Later.

Afterwards David and I went to Krystals since I hadn't eaten and they were open. I finally brought up Kathy. I'd wanted to from the first time I saw him but I was afraid of his reaction. Nothing bad happened. I'm glad I didn't cry. I kinda feel he'd look down on me for that.

I was surprised to hear him say that things happened the only way they could, that it had a certain inevitability to it. I hope I didn't infect him with my guilt or frustration. We both agreed that she set the bar very high as far as personal relationships go.

If I've gotten one thing right in my life it is that I have surrounded myself with people better than me.

After the struggle to get through the MRI I got the results today. Apparently I have a bone abnormality in one of my vertebra since it is block shaped. That combined with the osteo-arthritis appears to explain the back difficulties.

As the doctor told me "This could be normal for your body. Don't worry." before setting up an appointment with a spinal specialist. Considering the fact that my father had scoliosis I wonder if this came down the old genetic pipeline from him. If so it's kind of sad that my memories of him are alcoholism, suicide and a bad back.

I think I've fallen under the sway of Philip Pullman after reading about him for years in Kiad's journal. I was swayed by a discussion on plastic about Pullman's "His Dark Materials" series. The discussion was sadly lacking except it pointed me to this great discussion between him and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Their discussion has a nice exchange towards the end with the Archbishop talking about the Christian religion as a great story:

Yes, I think there's a lot of truth in that, that you can't communicate Christianity simply as a set of ideas. At some point you're going to have to sit down and tell a story. And tell a story which, because it's a story, is bound to have some loose ends, some awkwardnesses.

One of the most riveting personal sagas that has played out over the last few years has got to be Michael Newdow's fight to right a wrong. As an Atheist he is looked upon unfavorably by almost 60% of the US population. He has endured a great deal of abuse in the public discourse. After the 9th Circuit Court opinion all 99 members of the Senate stood on the steps and pledged to keep "under God" right where it is.

He has been savaged for bringing the case on behalf of his daughter. There he stands as alone as anyone has ever been, not even a faith in god to stand by him in the darkest hours. That's what makes this story so great. I'd call it Quixotic if it weren't such an American tale.

The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case and Michael Newdow chose to represent himself. Against him are Bush and Kerry, majorities in both houses of Congress, and attorneys general from all 50 states. Filing briefs against him are the National Education Association, American Jewish Congress, American Legion, Knights of Columbus, and a number of others.

The few that were on his side such as American United for Separation of Church and State didn't even trust him enough to be able to present his arguments alone. They petitioned the court to be given some of Newdow's argument time but were rejected.

He even asked for, and got, Scalia to recuse himself thus removing one sure vote against him and one of the Supreme Court's toughest questioners. It's a gutsy move that could have left him with an even more irritated justice.

With so many forces arrayed against him, including the fact that he's not a practicing attorney, he seems to have nothing going for him except his belief that he's right. As conservative columnist William Safire put it:

The only thing this time-wasting pest Newdow has going for him is that he's right. Those of us who believe in God don't need to inject our faith into a patriotic affirmation and coerce all schoolchildren into going along. The key word in the pledge is the last one. Of God and the Flag by William Safire

He had his day in court and by all accounts he not only didn't screw up but did an excellent job. The mother of his daughter, Sandra Banning, despite filing a brief against his case, said "Michael did very well." The superintendent of the school district, David Gordon, he took to court had this to say:

While Gordon opposed Newdow's case, he said the rookie attorney did "an excellent job" and complimented Newdow afterward. "I may not agree with him ... but all of this has been a powerful process that shows that one individual can bring an unpopular view forward," Gordon said. Newdow reflects on his day in court by Jennifer Garza

After his day in court a NY Times columnist uttered his name with such greats as Jefferson and Madison:

The Supreme Court may embrace Dr. Newdow's passionate plea, side with "under God" or split 4-4 and leave the lower court ruling alone, and it won't pick our pockets or break our legs. But the sight of one man standing up to challenge God and country is something that Madison, Jefferson and Franklin would cheer, and every American can celebrate. Jefferson, Madison, Newdow? by Kenneth Davis

From the moment comes the man, and I have no doubt that whatever petty zealotry may have driven Michael Newdow when he began this case has been transformed by the process. He has stood his ground on principle and the institutions of American government have responded with the weighty majesty instilled in them by the Constitution.

Let me tell you about the time I was buried alive...

I went to the imaging center in the Medical Mall to get my first ever MRI done. You see the warranty on my back had expired (turning 30 and all that) so naturally it stopped working. Then my right leg said "If he don't work then I don't either." So two important pieces of the system went wonko for a couple days till I got the nice prescription NSAIDs to make it better for the time being. All in all, a very lame thing to have happen.

I go to get the MRI done and have to fill out this form making sure I have absolutely no metal bits in my body, or even tattoos on my eyelids. The fire extinguishers even have signs above them saying "Non-metallic Fire Extinguishers Only." It all creates a sort of creepy mood. I wonder if anyone could have inserted metal into my body without my knowledge. I go into the big room to lay down on the table and be sucked into the machine. A nice lady put headphones on me (heavily insulated of course) and slowly fed me to the machine. I immediately get uncomfortable as I realize how small the hole is that I'll be in. I won't be able to move till they pull me back out. I hold my hand up and say "Whoa, uh can I slide in feet first from the other end. This doesn't feel good." The nice lady says "No." Then she tells me that other people cover their eyes with a washcloth to make it easier and I agree to that. The insertion begins in earnest.

My heart is beating very fast because I feel how tight the chamber is even though I can't see it. I force myself to think of good things. Rebecca. Emily. However my brain always zooms in on a piece of metal in the image and tears everything to shreds.

I try to think about the nice lady and how I can hug her when this is all over. The headphones had just aired a short report about how hugs reduce stress and help you live longer. It doesn't work because I can't wait for relief.

I try to focus on the music but it's very quiet and the machine is thunking very loudly. I can feel my hands heating up. (Is that were they clandestinely inserted the metal?) I'm trying to stay still but my heart is beating so fast and hard.

The technician speaks to me through the headphones telling me when the next test will begin and how long it will be. The first three are around a minute and a half. Then he says this one should be the last one and it's FOUR AND A HALF minutes. I'm half way through the test and I'm getting dizzy and it feels like I'm falling.

I open my eyes and stare at the washcloth to make the feeling go away. Only now I feel how cramped the space is so I close my eyes till the vertigo is too much.

Open. Close. Open. Close.

How much longer? I'm on the brink of yelling and pulling myself out of the maw. When it stops and I anxiously say "OK?" and he says he's done and slowly retracts the table from the machine I've come to affectionately refer to as Grendel. That my friend is the time I learned I am uncomfortable in small places I can't escape.

I've been slow to get the mix CD out this month since my time been abbreviated by the trip. I finally finished my music research for March's mix CD. I'm picking the songs and laying down the track order today. I've already settled on the cover art. The first CDs should be on their way tomorrow.

Again anyone is invited to receive one. Just send your name and address to twyl@gnumatt.org.

Somebody was schooled on Face the Nation.

I love the part where Rumsfeld says that nobody said Iraq was an immediate threat, show me where someone said that and then Friedman starts in. He reads out part of a quote from Rumsfeld and stops. Rumsfeld sees a hole since it didn't have that exact wording and tries to weasel out of it, then Friedman finishes the quote where it has the exact phrase. Ouch. That's too bad too. I always thought Rummy was one of the more honest ones in the administration.

I made it back safely. I took a few pictures with the digital camera. I have some other pictures from the film camera that I'll scan in once the scanner comes in. I'd like to write in much more detail but probably won't do it on lj.

Gone for a couple weeks to compete in the world champion snipe hunting competition.

"Once you've fallen victim to this vast, luminous country, you will go back, whatever the cost, for the Absolute has no price." —Paul Bowles.

I just learned about the C2C Route that Andy Skurka is taking. It's a sea-to-sea hiking route across the Northern US and SE Canada and it's approximately 7,700 miles. Right now I don't think I could maintain a 27 mile a day average in order to complete it in the required 9 months. But I think this is the next trip I'd like to take. I'd gotten a little tired of the limitations of interstate and highway travel. This will be a new way to see the country. This also postpones plans to go to Iran next. This means making plans to start this a year from now, paying off debts (I was already on track to have everything but my car paid for by August), plans for Emily, unloading my junk, and finding a storage unit.

The transcontinental trail reminds me of one of America's original long distance hikers, John Ledyard. He almost circumambulated the globe, and was one of America's great explorers. This line "Though a born explorer, little resulted from his immense but ill-directed activities" is how I tend to picture myself or who I want to be.

I found the job I want. I read an article on the difficulties of IT with UNAMSIL. It's about Jason Mayordomo's efforts to keep all the UN's information technology working in Sierra Leone. The challenges and rewards from being in the field for the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations sound like what I've been looking for.

So tonight was dinner date with Emily. She has this new thing she does when she doesn't like something. She says "Evil." That's it. Not "Oh that's evil" or "Broccoli is evil" just the word "Evil." She'll even repeat it till it makes her laugh.

I've been reading about Lukas Moodysson for a few months now. I skipped my chance to see Lilya4-Ever in the theater despite the critical acclaim. I went ahead and grabbed the first thing Netflix had from him. A Swedish film called Fucking Åmål or Show Me Love in it's American release. It won four Guldbagge Awards (Swedish Oscars who knew?) including Best Picture, Director, Screenplay and two Best Actress awards for the two female leads. The story is universal but the movie would not be made in America. At least not without substantial changes. It would certainly never win at the Oscars. I love finding movies like this.

It's the story of two teenage girls in small-town Sweden (The Åmål from the title). Elin is the beautiful, popular girl that's frustrated with her life. Agnes is alone with only her parents and a pretend friend to console her. She's also secretly in love with Elin. It's a story that could easily fall apart with overblown messages, campy lesbian affection and high school clichés. The movie manages to avoid those problems with a great script, great acting by the two leads and an even, subdued tone that the Swedish godfather of film himself, Ingmar Bergman, would have been proud of. The ending left me a little frustrated with it's overt symbolism, but the final scene with the chocolate milk pulled it out. In some ways it's the teenage/high-school version of All the Real Girls. It has that emotional authenticity. The dialogue is sincere. It's two people fighting against themselves and the world around them to find their way.

One of the reviews, or rather unrepentant worship, talks about the director's commentary track on the DVD they saw. Sadly the American DVD is lacking in anything useful. You can read excerpts from the commentary in their review.

According to the link above, the actress who plays Agnes, Rebecka Liljeberg, owns a PowerMac 7500/250Mhz G3, a PC, does web design, programming and knows C, Unix, and Linux (self taught). Her favorite game is Zelda 64, she drives a 74 Ford Mustang and embroiders to relax. The info is obviously a few years old. She's 23 now. Why don't more women like this live in the US?

I just had a funny thought. What if the Hajj was in America? It would be so much more consumer driven. I can see entrepreneurs selling pre-collected pebbles for throwing at the devil...and t-shirt vendors with shirts that say "I hit the devil with pebbles and all I got was this lousy t-shirt." Of course, they'd have book and video sales "Greatest Moments in Hajj History" or "The Lazy Person's Guide to Hiking Mt. Ararat."

Channel 4 has a site about the Hajj. It's one of the five required duties of Islam if I remember right. The massive size of the crowd is pretty awesome.

I can't think of anything in Christianity or Judaism that is like this. I guess there really aren't many five day events that pack in three million people. On day three you get to stone the devil, how cool is that?

Rock on, Fernando Meirelles was nominated for a Best Director Oscar for "City of God." One of the three movies I saw in 2003 that I plan to own.

I saw my friend Roy last night for the first time in years. When I was young we spent so much time wandering through drainage ditches and having adventures. I went traveling with him and his family during many summers. Some of my favorite stories come from my time with him. He left his staff position with Representative Cramer to go work at NASA as the Strategic Outreach Planner in the Government Community Relations Department. I felt my enthusiasm for adventure and exploration welling up in me as we talked over dinner. Hopefully soon I'll get to see Yancey, the person who truly helped usher me into a lifelong love for movies. I was 11 or 12 and he was pushing Chinatown, Taxi Driver, The Exorcist, Serpico, The Godfather I & II, Once Upon a Time in America and so much more on me. Roy has kept in touch with Yancey regularly as the decades have flown by.

In this dream I had to get to a movie. I was waiting on someone, I don't remember who. In the dream I knew who it was though. I was in the kitchen of some fast food place in the mall. Then I went out the back to a small plane. I could feel the tension building in me as I realized I was going to have to fly to be on time. The plane didn't have any overhead storage and the ceiling was so low that people had to lean forward over the seat in front of them to fit. I put the seat belt on, wondered if it really mattered if we crashed, and the plane began to taxi. I was nervous but not overly so. Then I woke up to my alarm going off.

I was frustrated. I wanted to be on the plane when it took off. This is a dream I remembered. I wonder how many times I've had dreams where the plane took off that I don't remember.

I was surprised by how caught up I was in the story. The battle sequences are some of the best this year. I was thankful to be spared from the heavy cutting that has hurt other action moments, Cold Mountain and Master and Commander come to mind. The production design is stunning. I felt transported to the modern and agrarian worlds of Japan in 1876. The movie has fundamental flaws in its romanticized vision of samurai, and demonization of technology.

It comes off as a bit of a polemic against technology. Modern living means living without honor. I wish the train building capitalist Omura had been able to give voice for what trains would mean for all the people of Japan. In fact, I was surprised by how the samurai come off as terrorists. Their absolute dedication to one way of life comes off as religious zealotry at times. No thought is given to compromise between the samurai life and Western progress. The Japanese army was just as willing to die for their cause as the samurai, and in greater numbers. Why should democracy be subverted? The emperor says as much himself when he tells Katsumoto that his power comes from the will of the people.

The movie connects the plight of the samurai with that of Native Americans. Besides the commonality of the end of a way of life the contrasts are far stronger. The samurai were the warrior elite of the country. They were part of the government, in ways Native Americans never were. The fact that the samurai have taken up arms against their former friends comes off as capricious. Native Americans however were oppressed and brutalized by a regime they had no part in creating. The samurai insurgency does not have the same nobility of cause. They had a voice in the council and chose to forsake it, and could offer up no other solutions than warfare. Native Americans never had that same political standing, and saw treaties repeatedly broken by the US Government.

Perhaps the comparison to terrorism doesn't seem quite right since all we see are battles between professional armies. There are no attacks on civilian infrastructure in the movie. But then what is hampering the building of the railroad if they are not attacking the workers and destroying track? What threat do the samurai pose if they just retreat to their mountain Shangri-La to live their old way of life?

Nothing raises my ire quicker than righteous Christians. I can find myself foaming at the mouth with anger in mere moments. In my mid twenties, thanks to the writing of C.S. Lewis, I developed a more nuanced understanding of Christians. They aren't all Fred Phelps. I spend more time reading about Christians and Christianity than any other religion. Why do I spend so much time reacting to Christians? Doesn't that make me Christian in some sense, despite the fact that I would tell people not only do I not believe in the divine origins of the bible but have no belief in a benevolent divine presence concerning itself with the day to day lives of humanity on Earth.

Imagine if you will a vase on a pedestal. The space surrounding the vase is called the negative space. If you take away the vase you remove that negative space created by the vase. I seem to be in the Christian negative space. If Christianity were gone I don't know what would happen to that part of me. I just want to voice my dissent to Christans. Even in Jesus' time he had doubters. Heck, Jesus himself disputed with the Christian Right of his day, the Pharisees, over honoring the Sabbath and associating with sinners.

I admire people like Delay, Inhofe, and Armey and so on to a degree for putting their beliefs into action. However, I find their dispensationalist beliefs to be completely unacceptable. Why are some Christians so ready to selectively enforce Levitical rules? Why isn't a more progressive Christian voice prominent?

Why do I anchor myself to Christianity, even if just in the negative space around it, when it doesn't provide any guidance, solace or refuge for me.

While T.E. Lawrence wrote about Arabs in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, this quote seems applicable to some Christians as well.

Semites had no half-tones in their register of vision. They were a people of primary colours, or rather of black and white, who saw the world always in contour. They were a dogmatic people, despising doubt, our modern crown of thorns. They did not understand our metaphysical difficulties, our introspective questionings. They knew only truth and untruth, belief and unbelief, without our hesitating retinue of finer shades.

The quote is from one of my favorite chapters.

Thank you Apple for iLife 04, specifically Garage Band. My complete lack of musical talent is more evident than ever. I'm very impressed with what you get for $49. However, changing the instrument, generator, effects, etc for a loop is kind of clunky. The loop library management is pretty nicely done.

They weren't kidding about iPhoto being faster. I now understand the look of shock on Frodo's face when they are showing it off to him.

I can't wait to see what Emily does with something like Garage Band.

I swear sometimes reading plastic feels like I'm auditing a college course on whatever the topic may be. A recent discussion had a thread on the Arab development of the printing press that enlightened me on: where their cursive script comes from, the origin of the word Byzantine, why Latin has no U or J character, a brief history of Turkish graphic arts, a more detailed history of written Arabic, briefly how Chinese pictographs developed and the origins of the word Allah from the original Aramaic term Alleh that Jesus would also have used to refer to God.

That's just from one single thread in a broader discussion. What a rush. Why can't my everyday life at work be filled with all these ideas and history? Are our policy makers this informed about the development of mass communication in the Arabic world? What matters I suppose is what I do with this knowledge. Ideas are great, but action is what counts. At this point all this reading just gave me more useless trivia.

What's even better is I could probably hit google and find scholars to contradict all the things I just "learned." Wow.

I worked for some kind of military testing firm. Diane Keaton worked there too. Daniel and the actor Dylan Baker were in the main building with me when a test of a plane started. They were both dressed in military uniforms. As we watched the monitors the plane suddenly malfunctioned and took a nosedive into the building where we were. We were really calm as we watched it come down nose first on the monitor. I wasn't sure where it was landing. It crashed through the ceiling very near us and people began fleeing the building. We all took off running.

Somehow we ended up in the air parachuting down. Diane Keaton and someone else (Chalrton Heston?) had lost an arm, although the other Chalrton Heston guy had lost both. I could see the bones sticking out. Daniel was fine. We checked in after we landed on the ground again and had some kind of party. Some kind of 40's USO type deal. Alarm went off.

I was surprised I didn't have any anxiety over a plane crashing.

Passages from the end of the book:

Next year he did not come to her. She waited in a new frock because the old one simply would not meet; but he never came. "Perhaps he is ill," Michael said "You know he is never ill." Michael came close to her and whispered, with a shiver, "Perhaps there is no such person, Wendy!" and Wendy would have cried if Michael had not been crying.'

'You see that judge in a wig coming out at the iron door? That used to be Toodles. The bearded man who doesn't know any stories to tell his children was once John.

Today finds me in a much better mood and that's due to some late movie catch-up. I saw Bad Santa and Peter Pan today. Enjoyed both. More on Bad Santa later...

I grew up watching the J.M. Barrie derived "Peter Pan and the Pirates" on Fox. Tim Curry was firmly implanted in my head as the best Captain Hook. What was great was the balance they brought to the story of Peter Pan. The fact that Hook and Pan are two sides of the same coin was an important rule that the series followed. It also had some of the best dialogue of any show on television. At times it could hold it's own against today's cop dramas with the amount of jargon and colloquialisms the pirates and the lost boys bandied about. The show succeeded in creating a new world and following the rules of that world. A trait that has not always been appreciated in other Peter Pan adaptations. I was cautiously thrilled when I heard P.J. Hogan was making a new Peter Pan movie, hoping it wouldn't be more Hook dreck.

In retrospect, I realize Hogan's film Muriel's Wedding has many of the aspects of Peter Pan. Muriel didn't want to grow up and is prone to storytelling. The storytelling has grown quite a bit from Muriel's Wedding and is elaborately built out in Peter Pan. The sets were a joy to watch on screen, even if they could be a bit overdone at times. One thing I particularly appreciated is that London has some of the same fanciful embellishments that Neverland has. This helps to make clear that the whole movie is Wendy's telling of the story from beginning to end. Also I'd forgotten how important Peter Pan is to popular culture. It is the standard all "coming of age" films are judged against in some way or another. It's full of spoken gems like Pan's declaration "To die would be a great adventure", "Second to the right and then straight on till morning" (both lines that have found a second life in Star Trek), "Oh the cleverness of me" and the line that reached the exalted bumper sticker status "I do believe in fairies." Olivia Williams seems a bit typecast as of late as she's been opposite Peter Pans in Rushmore and Heart of Me.

Which brings me back to the telling of the story. The movie is narrated by Mrs. Darling, Olivia Williams. This brings about a nice sense of symmetry since it's Wendy's story. Clearly Mrs. Darling is who Wendy will grow up to be and Mrs. Darling probably told the story of Peter Pan to Wendy, who is repeating/living the story on her own. That same balance exists throughout the movie. Peter Pan needs Hook who needs Peter Pan. Wendy is growing up and that means giving up certain things and gaining others. Also we are finally treated to a real menace in Hook, not the toothless whiner of previous attempts. He kills people left and right without the slightest provocation. His menace adds emotional heft to the moments that Peter Pan confronts him, and the dangerous world of adulthood that may lay ahead for Wendy and anyone else who ever grows up. He's not just an evil caricature as Hook's humanity is on display more than before adding a bittersweet level for adults who can all find a bit of him inside them.

The music was a bit much at times with it's obvious heart tugging. The sexuality of the movie that has been talked up in reviews is a bit much, it's not The Swimming Pool. Ludivine Sagnier was disappointing as Tink. Since she doesn't have any dialogue she fell back to the classic silent film method of over exaggerating. The movie has its moments where it becomes a tad manipulative, the "I do believe in fairies" scene comes to mind. It's a good scene without stretching it out as much as they do. Overall, I found the flaws acceptable since it's a story told by a child who's inventing this new universe as they go along. The experience of seeing it in the theater is one I plan on recalling frequently as I watch the DVD. One little girl was so caught up in the "I do believe.." scene she stomped around in front of her seat chanting along. Any movie that connects with it's audience like that is something special and unique.

Surely one of the most enjoyable movies I've seen this year, well that came out in 2003. It's this years The Iron Giant. A movie aimed at kids which has a magic and story that will grow with them into adulthood.

I hate livejournal's genocidal tendencies towards javascript. I made a fun little entry with a cute little photo album embedded in it. That didn't work. So I got really clever and came up with ways around using <script> tags in my entry. Then I discovered that lj strips out event attributes as well. Now the entry will never be posted on livejournal, and I've got to start over reformatting it for gnumatt if I even decide it's worth the effort.

This isn't the first time lj has done this to me. I get tired of everything looking exactly the same. I don't post the same entries over and over. Why should they look exactly the same? It makes sense to me that I'd want the entry to emphasize the parts I want emphasized and to use the techniques I deem appropriate to tell my story. Well lj fascists here's what I think of your javascript genocide.

David Limbaugh is a big fat idiot: http://www.townhall.com/columnists/davidlimbaugh/dl20031205.shtml

Full story about library: http://www.record-journal.com/articles/2003/12/03/news/news001.txt

Inductive fallacy

You can't simply brush this off as a silly little incident. It represents an increasingly common attitude in the culture that Christianity, on its face, is offensive.

He's making a generalization based on this incident. Also the incident does not prove his initial assertion that "Jesus is offensive"

I've been thinking about how better to visualize discussions in a web browser. It seems like we never really made it past threads. There have been incremental improvements to them over the years. One site has done this better than any I've seen yet. I am quite impressed with the Lugnet discussion forums. For those of you that have participated in Usenet I think you'll find the fact that you can connect to all these discussions with your news reader as easily as your web browser to be technically impressive.

I wrote down some notes about this particular page.

Lugnet Messages [View]

[click for detail]
All messages have a header like the above. It gives you context for where you are in the forums as well as the message thread. If you need more detailed navigation information then thread details are at the bottom of the page. On the right are lists of recently active threads if you are a regular visitor to the site and just want to read what's been updated recently.

Current Forum and Message Navigation

	The message detail includes the name of the forum and if it's nested deeply then it's a full breadcrumb trail back to the top level. After the forum navigation is the number of the current message.
	You can move backward and forward in the thread with these links.

Message Header

This is one of the masterstrokes of the system. As you can tell from these message headers they are built on top of the RFC 2076 standard. The message system is futureproof since it can evolve as standards evolve. Also it can build on the already large body of knowledge for how best to handle online discussions. Although cropped from the picture a reply button, and raw header link are on the right side and readily available. If only the multitude of comment/message board systems out there had this foresight it would be so much easier to move discussions between them.

Message Body

When composing messages the system has it's own markup language. I have mixed feelings about this. I think it's great that lugnet messages have special markup for Lego fans. It helps them get their ideas across in a much clearer way. What disappoints me is that it doesn't follow the standards for markup created by HTML and XML. You sprinkle regular characters like *, -, < and > throughout your message to get things like lists, links and various other text decorations. Why not just use the existing HTML markup for this?

On the other hand I think the LDraw extension is incredibly clever. LDraw provides a standard library of lego block images for embedding in your posts. Another clever feature when composing messages is "transclusion." Proving that he's smarter than the average geek Todd, the developer, quotes Nelson from the Xanadu project. Where inclusion includes a copy of the article transclusion includes a reference to the article. In both cases the article is embedded in the new item, but a transcluded one will continue to update as the original updates.

Message Respones

[click for detail]
After the message body is the list of message responses. This isn't a whole thread, just the messages immediately following this one. They are sorted by date, but can be easily scanned by author. It also includes a summarization of the message response to help you gauge if you should click through to read it.

Thread Navigation

[click for detail]

This is probably one of my favorite features. Each message in the thread is placed in context. The y-axis represents different topics, and the x-axis represents time. The star represents the current message in the thread and each blue box is a message. You can click on any of the blue boxes to jump a specific message. This creates a spatial relationship to the message that makes finding it later easier than trying to remember the author or textual details.

At the bottom of the thread map are thread navigation options to control how the messages are displayed. For those times when nested messages exhibit the staircase to oblivion syndrome you can flatten out the display.

Lugnet Messages [Backend]

This is one of the more impressive aspects to the Lugnet news section. It's not a completely new invention. They built their discussion forums on existing Internet standards for discussions, NNTP and Usenet headers. I can't imagine the web based news reader is reading from NNTP in real time. If so it's incredibly fast and smooth. I imagine it's more likely that the news server uses some kind of gateway to communicate with the web server. That implies that it's using some sort of intermediate message store outside of the news server though.

I read another top ten list with no mention of Northfork or All the Real Girls. Yet again the regional and cultural biases of critics conspire to keep something new out of the public eye. Why do critics warm up to the old South stereotypes perpetuated in Cold Mountain and ignore Southern characters that are far more nuanced, interesting, and ultimately fulfilling like in All the Real Girls. Critics have fallen over themselves to gush over Angels in America, but put those angels on the high plains of Montana as Northfork did and it's forgotten.

I suppose when I look at something long enough the whole recedes and all I see is the parts. I keep looking. The process repeats itself over and over till the machinery not the machine is all I see. I saw Cold Mountain tonight and all I could see was the machinery. Insert T-Bone Burnett song score so we can cash in on the soundtrack like O' Brother. Add a dash of Jack White because some of those White Stripes songs evoke Americana and it brings in the kids. That "other" artsy Civil War movie, Ride With the Devil, had a music star too. (I wonder if Jack's movie career will dead-end the way Jewel's did) I've never seen so many clothing continuity errors in a major motion picture. Is the shirt on or off, torn or whole? The characters all are Oscar movie clich�s. It's got a bad guy, a good guy, the woman they want and comic relief. Does Nicole have to wear that much makeup when hiding out in the woods? Won't Jude Law still love her, she's a movie star after all?

When it first opens with the big battle sequence...now that that was new. I'd never seen the Civil War that brutal before. In so many ways I'm reminded of Saving Private Ryan, great beginning with the story losing momentum as the quest takes over. Thankfully Cold Mountain isn't quite so earnest as Saving Private Ryan.

It's not just Cold Mountain though. This year I've seen three theatrical releases I cared about: City of God, Northfork and All the Real Girls (A much more powerful love story in North Carolina than Cold Mountain will ever be). They're all flawed too. But they took more risks. I'd rather sit through "Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East?" than most of the movies I've seen this year. It took chances and told a new story. My ire is not spared from indie releases. They've spawned the same mediocrity this year as well: The Station Agent, Lost in Translation, Shattered Glass, Pieces of April. All fine films, like the major Hollywood fare I've seen, that I care nothing about because they all come from the same machinery. Why don't we have a Takashi Miike making stuff like Visitor Q or Happiness of the Katakuris? How about an Abbas Kiarostami equivalent putting out things like Close-Up and Taste of Cherry? I guess we've got Gus Van Sant who did surprise me with Gerry this year. Tomorrow I see Elephant so maybe he can redeem American cinema.

http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/01/001gross2.htm&sourceid=opera&num=50&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

Why would Jerry B. Jenkins want to be famous? In The Frenzy of Renown: Fame & Its History, Leo Braudy points out that Emperor Augustus made the Roman state "the only place where personal dignity could be conferred." Then Christianity came along "to define an arena for individual nature well beyond the political," and "dignity was conferred not in the service of Rome, but in the service of God." (Render unto Caesar, and so forth.) The empire socialized the desire for personal recognition; the Church spiritualized it. Still, the Church and the Empire each also retained some vestige of the other's power. The Catholic ecclesiastical structure can still slake the human thirst for worldly recognition within a community of the faithful; for Catholics, salvation has always had to do with actual physical interaction among believers.

I found the idea that Christians just want to be famous kinda funny.

From http://www.nytimes.com/ref/readersopinions/questions-scott.html

Dec. 15

Q. I find it's impossible for me to criticize movies I loved when I was child, even the ones I know are bad. Last summer on TV, for example, I watched "Smokey and the Bandit" for the first time in 20 years and I enjoyed it far more than I should have. Do you have movies from your childhood that you know and admit are bad but are unable to criticize because you liked them when you were young? — Antoine Lahaie

A. Recently, I took my son to see "The Haunted Mansion," which was one of the worst things (I hesitate even to call it a movie) that I have ever seen. He thought it was better than "Finding Nemo" and we had a fruitless argument which I'm sure made him acutely aware of the disadvantages of having a film critic for a dad. I gave up when I remembered my own youthful delight in just about every live-action G-rated Disney picture of my own childhood — "Son of Flubber," "The Shaggy D.A.," "Follow Me Boys," "Herbie the Love Bug" — movies I would probably have a hard time sitting through, much less reviewing, today.

When we're young, we take so much delight in the sheer adventure of going to the movies that we don't bother to discriminate much, which is as it should be. The indiscriminate love of movies is the first step in the development of taste. When I was young, "The Great Waldo Pepper" looked as good as "The Sting," and "Midway," the "Pearl Harbor" of its day, looked like an out-and-out masterpiece.

My head hurts today. When will this flu season end? Finally saw The Station Agent last night. Nicely done. Typically those "outsider heals group" movies become sentimental but this did not go there. I think it's because Peter Dinklage's performance anchors the film. Whenever I saw Patricia Clarkson on screen I couldn't help but think of her role in this years All the Real Girls. She's having a great year especially once you add Dogville and Pieces of April to the list.

This week it's Shattered Glass.

So what is it? everything gets edited a hundred times before it spills out your mouth. no courage. no guts. you go read something someone else wrote, kathy wrote, to see what that's like. all that time spent with whores and bores looking for parts of her. it's an insult to her doncha know. she was a lot more than that.but she was flawed too. flaws that seemed to put her on some collision course. and where were you again? hiding out that weekend vainly hoping she'd magically show up on your door step. hoping that was the great undiscovered country she sought. so many clues and you were too stupid to get them. as you sow, so shall you reap.and so it goes again you are wallowing in your white bread, middle class life. pretending. posing. some great truth eludes you and really it's probably right there. but whining about love lost is so much easier than doing something. it's easy to fantasize about how great things could be with k now that you've begun to catch up with her greatness, but she'd still be at least three to four years ahead of you if she was still here. but you feel like she's here don't you. more dreams than you've had in 20 years. every week or two there's something new with her in it or around it. if only you were smart enough, good enough, bold enoough you could find her.

feels like your head's going to split open talking like this doesn't it? like someone's really here and talking to you. but you're the only one writing ...i feel more normal now. the environs of work taking on a more solid role. and that pressure to produce is creeping back in. my lightheadness is fading. i'm falling apart. or at least yielding more and more to the plastic urge. plastic smiles. plastic responses. plastic feelings.

you want to post this. like a bulwark against the tides. but it might offend some people. people that are good and don't need your toxic comments washing over them. people that would get praise for their great deeds if you weren't so selfish and busy worshipping fallen idols. (false idols?) whatever. post it or not, you're still the same.

From: Kathy O'Malley
Subject: non gui girl
Date; March 16, 2000 10:55:54 PM CST
To: Matt Midboe

i've given it some thought
see this shit is meaningless cuz alledgedly so much will change
but...
okay so it would be nice for the "plants" to automatically notify if
they need watering or sunlight or what have you. of course, if i was
richer i'd way it's be nice if they automatically were watered and
fed and shit without the nuisance of a maid or hired hand. it would
be nice to be constantly monitored for heart rate, blood pressure,
temp, bowel movements, nutrients consumed, overall metabolic
processing and shit, it will be nice to have access to the net 24/7,
which i don't, and all that stuff about the house and car or
transportation turning on for you, it would be really groovy if
movies and literature and media in general came with a barrage of
tags/flags/links to similar/reference/definition/history/allegory
stuff. tie it all together. tie it all down. use it as a trampoline
and bounce into the ether... ether.... ether... (cool fade/echo there
did you catch it). i would love to have a filter for this world a
better one than what i've got. to constantly record and edit and
deform/transform/generate/degenerate what i consume sensually receive
inputs. like if someone were yelling at me talking above a certain
decibel range it would be heard as a chipmunk or if some filter could
detect cursing or hostility and make it into "bliss" that would be
cool. as long as my awareness didn't extinguish the illusion the
fantasy and blow out the fire in my belly my little burning embers
that charm and woo my men into the night under the moon. how many
moons do i have left? it would be awesome to acurately detect
magnetic fluxes and space weather solar flares and sunspots and el
nino and see how they affect the weather and terrain and my
personality that day to really get it down. the numbers would have to
come up. it's not just pi you know. okay i hope it rocks my world. i
hope i have to take a time out to make sure i'm still breathing. i
don't think it will take place that. slow. churning. events begging
to utilize new technology aching to become commonplace like owning a
car and a dvdplayer and an mp3 player. all this entertainment. touch
screens for food orders when i give blood the separter uses a touch
screen. we are so bound by our physicality. want to hear more see
more touch more. it would be nice if i could eliminate all the stuff
i have and want cuz it's all in the ether and i experience it that
way.i don't know how that works. i associate static focused state
with using media currently. it's hard to live it. it's not mountain
biking. how does it become mountain biking?

kathy

The MoMA is hosting a series on The Hidden God: Film and Faith about hidden spirituality in movies. Of course they are showing Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors, Andrei Rublev, Bergman's Winter Light and Carl Dreyer's The Word. However, the movie that gets the focus in a NY Times article is Groundhog Day. Buddhists, Christians, Jews, Wiccans, Falun Gong members and so forth all find meaning in the film.

I bought tickets for Casablanca this morning. I'm looking forward to getting away from all the noise for a little bit while I'm in the Sahara. I'm so lost here.

I'm a few steps closer to getting to Morocco. I asked for February 12th-26th off from work. The plan is week or so of camping in the Sahara desert with a camel and guide, with visits to Casablanca, Marrakech, Rabat and maybe Tangier. Tangier seems like it should be mandatory considering it was the home of Paul Bowles. If this visit works out I have this wild dream that I vanish into the desert or follow a group of Sufi.

I went to the birthday/divorce finalization party last night. I had a good time seeing all sorts of new lj people. I'm continually surprised by the variety of people that use lj. performed and sounded really good for being in someone's dining room. , the lead singer, had this great rock with her cock out ferocity especially on their cover of "Angry Inch" from Hedwig.

I'm working on the new mix for December. If anyone wants one just email your postal address to twyl@gnumatt.org. The past two mixes have included Polyphonic Spree, Flying Saucer Attack, Sea Ray, Grails, Do Make Say Think, My Bloody Valentine, Air, Michael Nyman, Yoko Kanno, Can, Death Cab for Cutie, Neutral Milk Hotel, Belle and Sebastian, Pram, Dismemberment Plan, Atmosphere etc. I also grabbed a DVD burner this week so hopefully the mix DVD project of shorts, favorite scenes, my commentary, music videos and so forth will pan out.

I was driving the five minutes it takes to get home and listening to All Things Considered today when this great interview came on. It was about a woman, Liz Yuan, who saw a movie at the Toronto Film Festival that she loved. Sadly it's a small Greek film that did not find a distributor at the film festival. But she loved this movie so much, and wanted others to feel what she felt, that she created a distribution company to get the movie shown in the US. She is a film buff, not someone in the business.

I couldn't stop smiling and crying as I listened to Liz Yuan talk about how much she loved the movie and why people should see it. Her love for the film is immediately evident from the interview. She talks sort of fast at points. You can hear her admiration for the film bursting from inside her. I thought it was cute when she said "When I say 'we' that's my habit. I say 'we' because I don't like to advertise how small my company is...It's like me, myself and I and then some friends." I felt silly because my eyes teared up I was so excited. How many times I've thought "Oh this is so good. How can I get more people to see it." I never decided "Welp I'm gonna distribute this film in the United States and setup Oscar and Golden Globe screenings." I was moved, and for a moment the world seemed like a perfect place.

I immediately went inside and emailed her through the movie's website offering up a few ideas and pledging my support. Even reading her email in response to my queries she has that same unbridled enthusiasm. I made an mp3 [1.04MB] of the interview from the Real Audio of the NPR interview. Listen to it and help get this movie in theaters.

To: Landry’s Seafood Manager 5101 Governors House Dr. Huntsville, AL 35805 I was recently at your restaurant and I enjoyed the food and service. Our waitress was attentive and the food was cooked and prepared correctly. I had the Salmon Fillet. One thing would have made the experience better, the availability of Dr. Pepper. Mr. Pibb is not a suitable substitute. I moved to Huntsville from Dallas in August and I’ve been surprised at the lack of Dr. Pepper when dining out. I was glad your staff didn’t serve Mr. Pibb surreptitiously as some less than reputable establishments have done in the past. She made sure I understood it was not available when I ordered. I hope that you will consider adding Dr. Pepper to your beverage selection in the near future. It is a fine, zesty beverage that I am sure your patrons, such as myself, will appreciate.

An Incomplete Education has an essay comparing and contrasting River's Edge and George Washington. Perhaps Donald Holden will become the next Keanu Reeves.

Oh me, nobody should have this much fun with a 1MB application. I downloaded iStopMotion tonight.

Useless, pointless, FUN exercise number one. I call it Haunted Chair. I plan to get Eddie Murphy to star in Haunted Chair II.

That wasn't enough so I stayed up past my bed time doing a documentary on true love in the aquatic kingdom. I call it Fun with Felt.

Somebody's got the giggle-snorts. I can't wait to explain why I'm coming in late to work tomorrow. If I had more time I'd add titles, music, sound effects and dialogue.

Intrigued: Turner Classic Movies is showing four Kurosawa films: The Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Throne of Blood, and Gate of Hell (which I haven't seen).

Terrified: Director (Ed Zwick) and star (Tom Cruise) of the new film The Last Samurai are hosting the evening.

Turner hasn't done a mainstream movie tie-in like this that I can remember. I'm hoping this isn't a crass marketing attempt to cash in on Kurosawa's name. Oh well, November 28th I'll find out.

The Guardian seem to be quite prolific and talented at making lists. They have lists of all sorts. The latest list to impress me is the 40 best directors. The list only takes into account working directors so don't get mad that it doesn't have Ford, Welles, Wilder, Hitchcock, Godard, Fellini, etc.

The list is sorted by importance so I'd knock Lynne Ramsay and Gaspar No� down a few notches, and elevate Michael Haneke and Michael Winterbottom. Where's Sofia Coppola and David Gordon Green? If they put Lynne Ramsay and Gaspar No� on the list, who also have only two features to their credit, I don't understand how they can ignore DGG. I have a feeling he's overlooked because he has focused on Southern stories, and grew up in the South. His fellow "two feature" compadres hail from the much trendier Scotland and France. Heck Gaspar doesn't even have a Criterion release under his belt.

Somehow ELP's Tarkus made it onto my ipod and into a playlist I was listening to. My how my music preferences have broadened since my "if it's not prog rock it sucks" days. Listening to Tarkus reminded me how incredibly tight prog is. You can hear engineers and musicians of the 60s/70s reveling in the control that new audio equipment gave them over sound. Nowadays I tend towards the fuzzy noise of acts like the Microphones.

In this brief prog reverie I turned to allmusic to look at two bands from the 90's Swedish prog scene, Anglagard and Anekdoten. I've got to give the researchers at allmusic massive credit for knowing the history of Anglagard this well:

Anglagard got itself noticed in the small international circles of progressive rock fandom, and both of their albums were voted album of the year on internet prog newsgroups.

Okay, here is a real winner in the US patent system. Method to improve peri-anal hygiene after a bowel movement

A source of amusement while reading through the journeys of Lewis and Clark is their fondness for eating dog. While they are staying on the Pacific coast they overhunt the game and resort to eating what they have handy which is usually horses and dogs. One of the Chinook indians makes fun of them for relishing dog meat and it's a funny passage from Lewis' journal.

"While at dinner an indian fellow verry impertinently threw a poor half starved puppy nearly into my plait by way of derision for our eating dogs and laughed very heartily at his own impertinence; I was so provoked at his insolence that I caught the puppy and threw it with great violence at him and struk him in the breast and face, siezed my tomahawk and shewed him by signs if he repeated his insolence I would tommahawk him, the fellow withdrew apparently much mortifyed and I continued my repast on dog without further molestation." [copied verbatim]

While the greatest movie of all time is debatable, the greatest animated short film of all time is More. In honor of that film you'll soon be able to buy happy product.

I'm really hoping for More action figures. I can't imagine a hotter cubicle commodity to have this winter.

Meriweather Lewis (of Lewis and Clark) wrote the following while staying at the Shoshone camp on his 31st birthday. The Corps of Discovery was about to cross the Continental Divide.

"I reflected that I had as yet done but little, very little indeed, to further the happiness of the human race, or to advance the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now soarly feel the want of that information which those hours would have given me had they been judiciously expended." [copied verbatim]

Four years later in October of 1809 he would be dead by his own hand in a Tennessee inn. He never publishes the expedition's journals despite early promises to get them out quickly and pleading from President Jefferson and a worldwide audience to see them. Upon returning Jefferson appoints him governor of Louisiana but Lewis doesn't even attend to those duties till the secretary of the territory begs him to attend to them.

Reading the history and excerpts from the journals in Undaunted Courage I was struck by how much I was reminded of myself. Like Lewis I have a great curiosity about the world around me and am happiest with a small group in the middle of nowhere. Once Lewis returns from the expedition he fails again and again to measure up to people's expectations and leaves a wake of unfinished projects behind him. He never married despite courting attempts and this seemed to be a great burden on him. He died alone feeling like he'd let his friends down.

I was reminded of so many of my own 80% finished projects. It's painful at times reading the correspondence to him where someone like Jefferson really needs him to get something done but can't find the right words to motivate him. For his own part, Lewis seems to feel horrible at not finding the energy to finish these things that others need of him.

As I close in on my 30th birthday I have the same thoughts on my mind that Lewis wrote of, and the same inability to deliver on the promises I make. Yet without the great accomplishments Lewis had already made by that same age.

The soldiers, meanwhile, enjoyed the favors of the Arikara women, often encouraged to do so by the husbands, who believed that they would catch some of the power of the white men from such intercourse, transmitted to them through their wives. One warrior invited York to his lodge, offered him his wife, and guarded the entrance during the act. York was said to be "the big Medison." Whether the Indians got white or black power from the intercourse cannot be said, but what they had gotten for sure from their hospitality to previous white traders was venereal disease, which was rampant in the villagers and passed on to the men of the expedition.

The chiefs and captains, warriors and men called on one another, went hunting together, traded extensively, enjoyed sexual relations with the same women on a regular basis, joked, and talked - as best they could through the language barrier - about what they knew.

"we were now about to penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in width, on which the foot of civillized man had never trodden; the good or evil it had in store for us was for experiment yet to determine, and these little vessells contained every article by which we were to expect to subsist or defend ourselves. however, as this the state of mind in which we are, generally gives the colouring to events, when the immagination is suffered to wander into futurity, the picture which now presented itself to me was a most pleasing one. entertaining as I do, the most confident hope of succeading in a voyage which had formed a darling project of mine for the last ten years, I could but esteem this moment of my departure as among the most happy of my life."

"This day I completed my thirty first year," he began. He figured he was halfway through his life's journey. "I reflected that I had as yet done but little, very little indeed, to further the happiness of the human race, or to advance the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now soarly feel the want of that information which those hours would have given me had they been judiciously expended."

"I dash from me the gloomy thought and resolved in future, to redouble my exertions and at least indeavour to promote those two primary objects of human existence, by giving them the aid of that portion of talents which nature and fortune have bestoed on me..." and here he seems to have lost his train of thought. Whatever the cause, he forgot to name those "two primary objects of human existence," and instead ended, "in future, to live for mankind, as I have heretofore lived for myself."

In his field notes, William Clark scribbled his immortal line, "Ocian in view! O! the joy."

"While at dinner an indian fellow verry impertinently threw a poor half starved puppy nearly into my plait by way of derision for our eating dogs and laughed very heartily at his own impertinence; I was so provoked at his insolence that I caught the puppy and threw it with great violence at him and struk him in the breast and face, siezed my tomahawk and shewed him by signs if he repeated his insolence I would tommahawk him, the fellow withdrew apparently much mortifyed and I continued my repast on dog without further molestation."

I woke up from a dream this morning where I went to visit the doctor. I was rotting away. I couldn't really see it though. I only had some vague idea of what was going on with me. It was so horrific that the nurse gasped in shock when I took off my clothes for the doctor. I don't remember his reaction. In the dream I thought it must be really bad if it elicited a reaction from the nurse.

I woke up thinking this is the end of my life. It was a mix of fear and calm resignation.

What rose colored glasses do you have on? They are a company. They do whatever they want, when they want if it improves their bottom line. If they violate some law, I have to litigate, or convince a state/federal (whoever made the law) attorney to prosecute. Only if they are convicted do they have to pay a minor fine. Most likely it wouldn't even go to trial as they'd just settle and continue the offending behavior.

In a state where there is no competition for individual health insurance they don't have to worry about people going elsewhere. The fact that they didn't care about a certificate of continuous coverage should be all the proof you need of that. Sounds like Bush brain rot syndrome is getting to you. Move out of this state before the Christian conservative diesease infects you further.

The southeast is a cesspool of ignorance and hate that should just be flushed into the Gulf of Mexico. I should probably go with it because I feel it infecting me too. The southeast is a blemish on an otherwise great country.

Emily saw a picture I took of a brick wall in Huntspatch. Someone wrote "Beauty is all around, waiting to be found" and I was trying to explain what I thought it meant and the importance of seeking beauty in everything. Without missing a beat she added "One thing's not beauty: killing."

She was really down on the killing thing all weekend. She didn't like that "Kill Bill" had kill in the title. She was bothered by the cartoons that have shadows, and darker colors but admitted that they are sometimes better than the ones with the light colors and no shadows. I was surprised by how often killing came up.

Here I am all excited by the new Death Cab For Cutie CD, Transatlanticism. I was wondering who else rivaled Ben Gibbard for emotional sincerity in lyrics and naturally Elliott Smith came to mind. Apparently he died at 34 this week. Pitchfork has an obit to Elliott Smith. While I was not a great fan of his music I certainly acknowledged his tremendous talent.

"To vanish into oblivion It's easy to do And I tried to leave but you know me I come back when you want me to."

A friend of mine from Dallas is in Zambia on a fellowship reporting for the Dallas Morning News. If you did the CD mix of the month thing you probably remember him. He gets some plum assignments like traveling to Pitcairn Island and covering the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake. Thankfully he's keeping a blog up to date while he's in Zambia and it has some great stuff in it.

I gotta figure out a way to make my job more exciting.

I moderate a mailing list for Dallas movie geeks and the question came up as to whether anyone nowadays can match someone like Rita Hayworth in Gilda for sexiness and charm. I got so caught up in my response I wanted to document it here.

I recommend Gilda and The Lady from Shanghai.

I think part of the Rita Hayworth mystique comes from these two femme fatale roles. In my opinion the role she played has helped cement her as an icon more than any of her natural talents. Look at the list below and I think you'll agree that all these women meet or exceed the Rita Hayworth standards for sexiness and charm. And I think the reason for that is due to the femme fatale roles that enhanced their popularity.

Gilda is an essential film noir, but why settle for Rita Hayworth. 1946 was an exceptional year for hot actresses in femme fatale roles. What about Veronica Lake in The Blue Dahlia (Who had helped pioneer the femme fatale type in 1942's The Glass Key)? Ingrid Bergman did Notorious (although not typical femme fatale), Lana Turner did The Postman Always Rings Twice, Lauren Bacall did The Big Sleep and Ava Gardner did The Killers. Just staying inside the film noir genre you also get incredibly performances from Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity (1944) or the long suffering Maxine Cooper from Kiss Me Deadly (1955).

By the way, I highly recommend Kiss Me Deadly. In my opinion it's one of the highlights of the genre. It's influence on the French New Wave, in particular Godard and Truffaut, lives on as a testament to its excellence. An excellent primer on Kiss Me Deadly can be found here:

http://www.bighousefilm.com/reviews/kiss_me_deadly.htm

Heck you can look at film makers today and see the influence. That suitcase in Pulp Fiction sure looks and acts a lot like the suitcase in Kiss Me Deadly.

Oh and since I brought up all this film noir stuff, Coen Brothers fans should watch The Glass Key and Miller's Crossing, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Man Who Wasn't There and The Big Sleep and The Big Lebowski. It's a fun way to deepen your appreciation of the Coen Brothers movies.

Howard Zinn delivered a speech on Confronting Government Lies at the Unitarian Universalist Association in Boston. The Alternative Radio project broadcast it. He has a certain clarity with points like this:

Zinn warned against being fooled by the preamble to the Constitution, which says “We the People.” It was not a group of farmers creating the constitution for all; it was 55 rich white men. These rich white men wrote the Constitution to protect rich white men.

His speech lingered quite a bit on our recent actions in Iraq and while I cheered his kowtowing to a liberal audience I think his speech would be that much more powerful with less humor and more of his keen historical perspective.

Hearing him speak makes me wonder what happened to the 10 part miniseries Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were working on of his book A People's History of the United States: 1492 - Present. He is certainly a powerful, engaging and hopeful voice.

Talk about fireworks on the radio! Fresh Air has an interview with Bill O'Reilly [RealAudio] that rivals her interview with Gene Simmons of KISS for tension and spirited, verbal intercourse. Bill took umbrage with Terry's questions and accused her of being harder on him than she had been in her interview with Al Franken [RealAudio].

In particular she gave Bill a chance to defend himself against negative remarks made by others. She asked Al Franken similar questions about negative remarks about him made by others.

While the tone is more light-hearted with Al Franken it's clear that Bill came in with a chip on his shoulder. Al Franken is a comedian and Bill O'Reilly is not. Naturally Al's is lighter.

I ran around downtown Huntsville and Monte Sano and Green mountain taking pictures today. It was a really great day. I do have one picture that I thought was particularly funny and important to share.

Apparently the Madison Count Schools CARE Project bought lots of billboards promoting abstinence and marriage. Uhh why? Teen pregnancy was already declining without this ham handed ad campaign. During the Reagan 80s teen pregnancy increased 27%, during the Clinton 90s teen pregnancy dropped to record lows, according to this report. The highest rates of teen pregnancy came during the sexy Eisenhower administration in 1957. Personally I credit the emphasis on personal responsibility that secular humanism promotes versus the bacchanalian folly/guilty purges that Southern christians promote. Is it just me or are Baptists just shy of porn stars when it comes to being obsessed with sex?

Now lets talk about some of the design choices here. It's got a big blue A. Hmm, a big letter A branded on something sure reminds me of "The Scarlet Letter." Not a really positive association to create. I can hear the high school english students now "So she was kicked out of the town for being abstinent?" Oh and they've cleverly co-opted the word "choice" from the "pro choice" movement. There again a confusing association to make regarding abstaining from sex. I suppose their use of "The choice of a new generation" is meant as satire towards Pepsi and therefore indemnifies them from lawsuits. What's up with all the different type faces and text treatments? Did someone just get Print Shop? You've got two slogans here, simplify and pick just one. I've also got issues with the yellow/white backgrounds.

I'm working on a new billboard with stick figure cartoons to illustrate the message here. I'm driving 70 miles an hour I don't have time to read. Give me pictures. We'll see if I figure out a way to get my sketches scanned in.

I went to a wedding last weekend. I had a really great time, with my pants on thank you very much.

When I got back to Huntsville I still had a post-wedding buzz going on for a couple days afterwards. I think it was around tuesday or wednesday that the not so fresh, next day, emotional hangover settled in and cleared out. I definitely want to be a best man at more weddings. Now I know the secret handshakes and stuff that go along with it. I'd never participated in a wedding this much before and it was much better than just being a spectator.

I am grateful that was there and ready to take pictures with my camera because I was indisposed.

The bachelors of the csbgroup cling together. Who's next?

Michael and Maria had three readings during the ceremony. I got to read a poem. embarassing disclosure I've discovered since July that I really like reading poetry out loud. Rilke has probably been the most fun.

The money shot. I got a feeling this kiss won't end.

It's the wedding party. We looked damn swass in our duds.

The location was great. Right as the ceremony began a great wind kicked up and lightning began coming down around us. It was a righteous, powerful moment. I thought it was going to rain but it didn't until the last few people left the wedding site. Jennifer captured the clouds crawling through the trees and mountains with a great shot here.

This is the crew with the cool cabin on top of ol' Smokey. I almost died coming down the mountain the day of the wedding as my car skidded for the edge of the twisty mountain road. Since the road didn't have a guard rail I was hoping I'd hit a tree but luckily the tires caught about ten feet before the 90 degree turn and jerked me away from the edge. It had rained that morning.

I'd never believed in weddings or ceremonies before. I'd only been to three that I can remember and I was never part of the wedding party. I was really swept up in this one. I felt a part of something much bigger than me. I don't really have relatives outside immediate family so that might be weird. But I can fondly imagine my friends wishing me well as I walk into the sunset with my bride. It was certainly a powerful experience for me and has made me appreciate the ritual a great deal more.

Off to see and have a wedding ceremony this weekend in Gatlinburg, TN.

Important Things to Remember: Must not recite best man speech in my death metal singing voice. Keep pants on no matter how much champagne I drink. They are laughing with you. Use your best man in a tux super powers to score with the chixors.

Every day that I go into work I start it off listening to "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea" by Neutral Milk Hotel. I've been listening to it almost non-stop since I discovered it in spring on a new article on Salon, and a recent Creative Loafing article that praise it. Not bad for something that came out five years ago.

It was neat to see references to Soft Machine, Elf Power and Olivia Tremor Control. I love it when I've assembled a little music universe for myself and then discover that someone else used the same parts to build theirs. It kinda makes everything seem structured, meaningful.

I got something in my email today from a Dallas theater called the Inwood. This is something I don't think I'll ever see in Huntsville, AL:

USA Film Festival and Landmark Theatres want to offer you FREE tickets
to a Special Screening of SECONDHAND LIONS.

Star Haley Joel Osment and Director Tim McCanlies will be in attendance
at this screening.

I can't imagine Huntsville would ever get a Landmark theater, have a local festival of the stature (which is decidedly humble) of USA Film Festival, or get Hollywood talent to attend a screening of their own film in Huntsville.

Now Huntsville does have a number of cultural activities that are unique. Why don't I find those as appealing? Is it some kind of pop culture brainwashing?

Looks like some folks are finally beginning to bring the brilliant ideas in BFS to other platforms. Beos had the ability to track your work like this from day one, although the addition of Rendezvous to make it work across multiple computers is novel. I wonder if BFS guru Dominic Giampaolo (didn't have to spellcheck his name thank you very much!) will fold this functionality into OS X since he works in the Apple file system group.

It would seem that about 100 years before 9/11/2001 we had 9/6/1901 when President McKinley was shot and killed by an anarchist in Buffalo, NY. (Considering the stock market crashes and miscellaneous other horrible things that happen in September you'd think we'd just skip over that month every year.)

The Boston Globe, in their Ideas section (what a great idea), has a good article about how President Roosevelt dealt with terrorism. The great trust-buster realized that he could fix American social problems by trimming the excesses of unfettered capitalism. Thus removing the conditions that spawned McKinley's killer Leon Czolgosz.

My translocation is almost complete. The last link to Dallas, my cell phone number, has been changed to a Huntsville number. Hopefully within the month I'll have my stuff transported here. Just waiting to get paid. Relocating to Huntsville, AL from Dallas, TX has meant a $500+ reduction on my 6 month car insurance premiums. Yeah! It's below my car payment now. Coming back to Huntsville stings a little. I feel like I've retreated.

I'm obsessively enjoying a project at work. I haven't been this excited about a project for many months. Right now work is like what I had at apt minds, only getting paid regularly, and I can't wear blue jeans. Oh, and I have an obnoxious, belligerent overlord that I didn't have at apt minds. Thankfully my manager is enlightened and willing to buffer us from her behavior. I don't think she'll be destructive to my personal productivity or the groups. However, if that happens I feel confident I can go "nuclear" right back at her and tell her to back off or I'm leaving.

I didn't always feel so ready to stand my ground. I wonder if that's just come from getting older, or if some event happened in my past that flipped a switch. I think part of it is situational. I believe I'm more useful to the workplace than she is. hmm, perhaps ego needs deflation.

One other plus side about where I work. The designer that works with our group has her degree in psychology with a certificate in computer mediated communication. She also has an interest in information architecture. I've been wanting to find an IA person to work with. I think she may be a really great resource on future projects. Her interest in IA seems like it might be a bit deeper than just work...with a little bit of nurturing perhaps it could become a passion.

Those who laud the American do or die spirit and hate that "axis of evil" country Iran should take a closer look at what a couple of Iranian filmmakers are doing. Compare the raft of shit that floated through our movie theaters this summer to what these two guys are doing. Sounds like that American do or die spirit is alive and well, in Iran. I'd be flabbergasted to see a major Hollywood studio take these kinds of risks to tell a good story.

From Studio Briefing:

The Venice Film Festival was plunged into international controversy Tuesday when an Iranian director charged that authorities in his country had confiscated his film and that he had to smuggle out a digital copy to present at the festival. Babak Payami's film, Silence Between Two Thoughts, concerns a Taliban soldier ordered to rape a female prisoner so that she will not be able to enter paradise. In an interview with Reuters, Payami said, "They didn't even see my film before they confiscated it." Another Iranian director, Abolfazl Jalili, who had been scheduled to appear Monday with his film Abjad (The First Letter), about a Muslim boy who falls in love with a Jewish girl, did not appear at the festival after Iranian authorities reportedly refused to authorize his trip.

That's just it though. The studios don't have to take any risks, except commercially, to tell a story like that. I don't get it. We have this great freedom to say what we want, and yet we limit ourselves. These guys, and I'd add Abbas Kiarostami to that list, work around all the limitations they have.

One final thought, organized religion is the great silencer no matter what country you're in.

I'm enjoying the commentary on the All the Real Girls DVD. In many ways I think it's better than what they did on the Criterion DVD of George Washington. As the writer/director, David Gordon Green, and the writer/actor, Paul Schneider, talk about their process for making the movie they remind me of my own approach to life.

When David is talking about how he, Zooey, and Paul sat in the tub listening to Sigur Ros and talking about the scene while the crew setup I understood. When David said he put Neil Young's and Built to Spill's version of Cortez the Killer on repeat as he wrote the last draft of the movie that made complete sense to me. Paul talks about listening to Mastodon, Michael Nyman and Afghan Whigs to inform his performance. It's not just their music selections but the role music plays in their lives.

I feel excited. It's like I've met someone new and I've got that feeling they are going to be friends that I understand on an intuitive level.

Maybe my gut feeling that Huntsville has become more violent as churches and plastic people have multiplied over the years is correct. Right across the street from the Huntsville Hospital building I work in is the Huntsville Hospital Emergency Room. In fact I can see it easily from the window when I look out. Yesterday around when I was leaving a man showed up and brandished a gun in the lobby. (Wes wrote about the story from a more personal angle. I'm sorry Wes.) Today when I was over there a mental patient escaped from the armed guard watching him. Last night some violent, bad stuff happened to a friend which is why I was at the ER today. Guess I better get busy making things better again.

Second day at work was an improvement over the first. I actually successfully debugged something hard. Amusingly the guy next to me was friends with during high school and the girl on the other side of me dated a friend of mine from the Huntsville BBS scene (theoretically I should have met her then), is now dating a UAH professor that I knew and is friends with another guy I know now. I suppose if I talked enough to everyone around me I could find other people to connect to them from.

I'm already missing the great plains in North Dakota and Montana. I've only got pictures to keep me company for awhile. I've got pictures of the world's largest metal sculptures along the "Enchanted Highway" in North Dakota, Pompey's Pillar, cemetaries at Little Bighorn and various plains in Montana.

I watched amazing storms pound away at the earth while I was miles away. I saw fires spring up from the lightning beating the ground over and over. These storms looked like giant jellyfish in the skies. You had the umbrella of the jellyfish fill the sky, and then a wall of clouds falling to the earth where the tentacles would be. Lightning struck all around the jellyfish and sometimes I could see airplanes flying in and out of the clouds.

The people were so nice everywhere I went. Although I'll never forget how awkward I felt after visiting Little Bighorn and then getting gas at the Crow Indian reservation that surrounds it.

I like all the space. You can run a lot further without having to stop. Although I think doing it for stretches of say 2-3 months would be all I needed to recharge for awhile.

I don't drink things alcoholic. In the last seven or so years I'd had one of Designer Andy's famous painkillers the day I got laid off from BroadbandNow and that is it as far as I can remember. I wasn't always like that. There was a time before where I drank till I was silly. Welp the time came again to get silly drunk this past friday when I got to see , , , , and . I had a really great time seeing everyone and hopefully that's just the beginning of the good times ahead.

Party Matt

The Boones Farm "Snow Creek Berry" Challenge

The lovely Jennifer

Superheroes Baghead and Retard

Vodka tastes even better off the table

Making pr0n with Jennifer, Maria and Daniel

Andy at 4am in a completely darkened room with my flash going off.

I just got back from driving to Glasgow, Montana to check out the dam that is featured in the movie Northfork. (Amusingly enough I'd actually spent the night in tiny Glasgow once before on my way to Alaska. Never thought I'd be back)

I took some pictures. So far this is the only time I've been impressed enough by a movie to drive 4200 miles round trip to check out a shooting location. Learned a lot. Deepened my appreciation for the movie.

Dropped everything into storage. Mobile Matt v3.0 arrived in Huntsville Saturday evening. I've seen a few friends since arriving and briefly looked for places to live. Hopefully I've found a good place. Friday I go and meet with the owner to look at two houses she has. One's next to Maple Hill Cemetary and the other is on a tree lined street in Five Points. I'm thinking after I see the houses I hit the road for Great Falls, Montana and see if I can find some of the locations they filmed in Northfork.

Tonight it's a fire truck, ambulance and multiple police cars outside the house. Usually it's just two of the three. I remember when I first started seeing the emergency services stop by and I would timidly look outside the blinds not wanting to be nosey. Now I recognize it for what it is, an opportunity to actually talk with neighbors, and head on outside. Tonight the emergency services folks don't know where they are supposed to be and they are driving up and down the street trying to find the right place.

Earlier I'd gone across the street to Danals. It's a colorful, loud, funky grocery store. Outside it's sort of a carnival with all the street vendors selling hot dogs, shaved ice, clothes and other stuff. Inside they sell jeans, have Mexican music playing from giant loudspeakers and the kind of free for all inventiveness that makes this area so great.

Just another thing I won't really see anymore once I return to the straitjacketed repression that is the middle class, white, Southern bullshit hypocrisy of Christian storm troopers who don't know hard work, invention, art or love for this great damn country.

As the great W.P. Mayhew said "Why Mr. Fink I'm building a levee."

I think The Wire may be on the verge of overtaking The Prisoner as my all time favorite TV show. I don't like TV, but this is something else. Herc had a great one liner from the last episode, "The Prologue":

[Carver is giving Herc a hard time for meekly asking a girl out for some coffee.]

Herc: "Hey listen. I was gonna ask for her panties to make some soup with, but I was afraid she'd take it the wrong way."

The days are counting down till I leave Dallas. No new plans yet other than to be gone when August rolls around. I just keep thinking everything counts down to zero.

What a busy day. I never cease to be surprised when life just takes off and leaves me running after it.

After months of horking around, we finally updated the apt minds design website. Hopefully we can get two more websites wrapped up this week and then we won't have any left to do. Then I've just got one big, hard, Miva thing to finish and it's back to working on my little web gadgets.

This is my last month here. I keep thinking about my final days in this house and the routine I have. It will all have to change within 30 days. 7 years ago I saw ID4 (and maybe Stargate) and it was my last days in Huntsville. I wasn't so aware of an ending then...but this time right now feels like a winding down, completion.

For those of you who remember your Huntsville lore, Talking Girl is now engaged. No dates have been set. Considering the fact that she lives in Pittsburgh and he lives in Austin they have some not insignificant hurdles to overcome first.

I'm surprised and happy.

The Christian Broadcasting Network is running a story that blames bad weather on the Israeli peace process. The insects in Utah and the tornadoes in Oklahoma apparently are examples of this.

I sincerely hope it was just miscategorized as "News" or that CBN viewers realize it's not news.

I was checking out the Apple Design Awards and saw this cool editor. It's called Hydra. Basically it lets multiple people edit the same document at the same time. While not an original idea, it is certainly one of the best implementations I've seen. It uses Rendezvous to find people on the local network sharing documents and let's you join a shared document. You can also do it over the Internet. It color codes changes according to who made them and does syntax highlighting. They apparently envisioned this as a great application for doing XP Pair Programming.

Sadly my favorite FTP client, Transmit, was only a runner-up for best user experience.

[...While rummaging through some of my old toys with Emily...] "Cool, but boring."

Get up and get into a fight with Rebecca. Later get into a little fight with Dave. Later in the afternoon get into a fight with Leia. I had a sort of perfect storm of problems raise their head over the past couple of days. Stuff with Dave, Leia, Rebecca, money, and travel all converged to make it upsetting. Then the one person I always fight with, my conservative Republican step-father, no raised voices at all. Go figure.

Why can't it be like monday when I knocked out my first portfolio website and was all happy.

TV series I miss War of the Worlds (1988), Friday the 13th (1987), Tales from the Crypt (1989), and Brimstone (1998).

War of the Worlds had a neat premise, that the aliens didn't die from the bacteria on Earth they just went into a coma while their bodies dealt with the bacteria. In the first season they take over human bodies since that can protect them and they start infiltrating government. The first season followed a small group trying to prove that this was happening. Then came one of the most shocking series twists I've ever seen. A different alien force came to Earth and began wiping out the original alien invaders and the humans. Main characters from the first season were slaughtered.

Alabama Republican governor slashes taxes on poor increases taxes on rich. How often do you see news like that? Apparently Gov. Riley's justification for this is believe it or not the bible. The New York Times has an Op-Ed piece that wonders What would Jesus do?. Do Bush and Riley read the same bible? I'm surprised to see the bible used as a reason to put through progressive tax reform. Is this the beginning of a split between Christian conservatives?

What a great movie discussion. Tonight is the reason I started going in the first place. Someone new made it to the discussion and I have this sense that she is the closest I've found to my particular tastes in movies. When she said she looked for stuff to shock the shit out of her my ears perked up. She was very active in the discussion. Atom Egoyan, Hal Hartley, Peter Greenaway, Jean-Jacques Beineix, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad these names came out of her as easily as the names of old friends. Originally I'd planned to go see The Sea but I was so engaged in the discussion I didn't want to give it up. The group dwindled down to me, her and Chris.

Eventually it ended up just me and her talking, mostly about movies but frequently I diverted. I was curious as to what forces in her life had made her this movie watching freak. Her husband's frustration with her taste in movies reminded me of times I frustrated friends with my own tastes. That need to eliminate artifice and communicate honestly and directly, I understood that too. Although, I hadn't had the liberated youth she'd had saying whatever she wanted. I was far more restrained. She was born in Rhodesia (Zambia nowadays), grew up in Boulder, lived in Chicago awhile, used to be a flight attendant for American, and lived in France as a teaching assistant,

I wanted to keep talking. Movies, life, people they kept coming up and they wove together in ways they don't for other people I talk to. I said I had to go but I couldn't help myself and I blurted out about Korean and Japanese films. (I'd mentioned Takashi Miike and Visitor Q earlier.) I stopped myself again I told her I had to go and pulled away. I shuffled down the steps of the Angelika and I wondered for a second if that's what Kathy would have been like at 40. I wondered not in a melancholy way, but in a way that brought hope and peace. It was like I lived in a world of infinite possibilities and the point was to accept it and keep exploring.

Then I was like holy cow it's 1am. I need to go to sleep.

I watch zero network television aside from Boomtown every so often. The Daily Show gets my daily attention. Then Six Feet Under and The Wire round out my TV viewing. Boomtown and Six Feet Under could go away and I'd be fine. As many critics have observed The Wire is more novel like with it's slow deliberate pace, and large cast of characters (65 if the promo is correct). Dickensian comes up a few times in reviews.

Here are some things others have said: Ten Reasons to watch The Wire, The Wire pulls in annual TV Critics nominations for Program of the Year, Outstanding Achievements in Drama and Outstanding New Program Of the Year, "...provocative, achingly good, high-achieving television", Return of the Un-Sopranos, "Its density absorbs you, putting you in the middle of things.", and 4 out of 4 stars - USA Today.

How did this happen? Whether one likes it or not it's clearly different from other shows. Why would HBO support it instead of spawning American Idol ripoffs or Friends clones? What makes people take a risk, either as viewer or corporate patron?

• The Believer
• Bully
• City of God
• George Washington
• Hedwig and the Angry Inch
• The Devil's Backbone
• L.I.E.
• Maelstr�m
• No Man's Land
• 24 Hour Party People

The Devils won their third cup and sent the Ducks flying home. I think they're both great teams, but I was pulling for the Ducks. I was hoping to see favorites of mine like J.S. Giguere, Steve Thomas and Ruslan Salei come home with the cup. Despite being on the losing team J.S. heads home with the Conn Smythe (MVP). I don't think anyone will forget Anaheim coming in as the #7 seed in the West and knocking out the #2 (Detroit) and #1 (Dallas) seeds in the first two rounds and the other Cinderella team, the Minnesota Wild, in the conference finals.

Highlights of the series were Martin Brodeur's three shutouts, and Paul Kariya's goal scoring comeback after being knocked out by a hard hit. A low for the series was ABC repeatedly cutting to J.S. Giguere crying after losing the series and the NJ fans booing Giguere when he won the Conn Smythe trophy. Did they also boo when Gary Bettman thanked both teams for playing an outstanding Stanley Cup finals?

The Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) really should google their name.

I didn't believe Gulf War II was about oil. I thought it would be much cheaper to just buy it from Saddam rather than take over his country. Last week Paul Wolfowitz in a Vanity Fair interview suggested the WMD excuse was just a bureaucratic expediency and not the real reason. Then this week Paul Wolfowitz delivers a speech at an Asian Security Conference and says:

Look, the primarily difference—to put it a little too simply—between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil.

As I thought about it I began to wonder, so what if he admits it's about oil. What is anyone going to do? Although apparently Mexico is worried they're next.

I saw my last D Plan show this saturday, well unless I go to DC July 28th for the last show of the farewell tour. It was a great all request thing. It was sort of funny watching them play musical chairs with their instruments as people requested songs with different instruments. At one point Travis, the lead singer/guitarist, said the audience would have to do a little work as well and try and group songs with similar instruments together. An appeal that was largely unheeded. Towards the end of the show when everyone gets to go up on stage with them they had the largest group I've seen on stage yet, I'd guess 30 or so people. It's kind of impressive to watch them play the song as people are hugging them and they are posing for pictures with fans.

At one point Travis took time to thank the promoter who put the show together and how sane, and easy to work with she is compared to lots of other ones. He's a pretty outspoken guy so it wasn't really surprising when he said people like her make the Clear Channel radio grab irrelevant. An issue he's written about and that kuro5hin has more details about citing Travis' website in the writeup.

I think a highlight was when he broke into "Tomorrow" and "It's the Hard Knock Life" during one of the D Plan songs. This was after the group dance session when he remarked on one of the fans looking like Annie meets Yves St. Laurent.

I'm really happy that Eric Rudolph has been caught. He was the only name on the FBI's top ten list I ever remembered and the one that I always hoped they would catch. Alabama is gearing up to prosecute him before Georgia and this sort of worries me. Considering the strong religious convictions of people in Birmingham, Alabama that support Rudolph's beliefs but not necessarily his actions I have this fear that he'll basically walk and the case will be munged. I have more hope that Atlanta would do a better, more thorough job.

I sort of wonder if Ashcroft or Scalia even see Rudolph as sort of a hero.

I just got back from a preview of 28 Days Later, the new Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, Shallow Grave) movie. I went in with few expectations other than "low budget zombie movie." I really enjoyed it. I'd like to see it again when it comes out.

What I found particularly stunning is the look of the film. While The Beach was full of color and the clich�d view of paradise 28 Days Later goes in practically the opposite direction. The colors are frequently washed out, and the picture feels like television enlarged for the big screen. A conceit that seems to tie the movie together with the opening sequence. There are a handful of scenes where the scenery is clearly digitally manipulated, For example a patch of flowers look like they've been rendered as oil pantings in photoshop. Thankfully it's sparingly used which is why I think it worked so well to help create a different world. In particular I liked the way fire was shown. The fires seem too vivid for the camera at times so they pixelate in neat ways. For me, all these things really added to the sensation that I was a roving reporter with a cheap digital video camera capturing the last moments of human civilization.

The music worked in quite nicely. First Mogwai Fear Satan made it into a movie, and now g!ybe's East Hastings has shown up. East Hastings starts up in the first 10 minutes when he's wandering around an empty London. The movie nicely avoids the generic post-apocalypse clich� of the rag-tag group finding a scientist who explains why the world ended. The closest you get to that kind of exposition is when Selena explains to Jim that the candy (the main "food" that has lasted 28 days) he's been eating is what caused his headache. In general it's details like that (what kind of food would still be around) which make the movie a bit more thoughtful and interesting than the usual zombie gorefest.

I can't believe they just used Canon XL-1 cameras to shoot it. Dave has one of those. Movie making really is getting cheaper.

Top Public High Schools

Weird. Alabama School of Fine Arts in Birmingham is the #4 high school in the nation using this Challenge Index scheme, which uses AP and IB scores. 8 out of the top 10 high schools in the nation are in the Southeast (although only 4 in The South). The 737 high schools on the list represent the top four percent of all American high schools. Color me surprised to see my high school make the list at 640.

Everything is a titanic struggle. Reading books, listening to music even watching movies puts a strain on my brain. I can't piece things together like I used to. I can't manage my responsibilities. Paying a cell phone bill seems inordinately complex, and it's not due now anyways. I'm alone except for Gracie and her presence weighs on me. She's just a beagle but I feel like I'm under some kind of pressure to keep her alive. She follows me everywhere around the house. The action I put the most thought into is guessing when I might run into someone else and how to avoid them.

I can't do anything. I just think of all the things I've never accomplished...or that even if you add up my meager accomplishments they add up to the empty, useless shell that I am now. I feel so alone. I don't want to talk to any friends. I wish I felt like doing something. But like everything I mismanage it is well begun and ends half-done.

I've thought about Kathy the past couple of days, and how I'd like to read her journals. I want to read how much she hated or loved me. I want to understand what made her work. I want her mom to know how much I cared about Kathy and that given the same opportunities I'd do it differently. And my dad, I let him down too. Yeah, they were both idiots doing whatever they did that brought an end to their lives but that doesn't mean my weakness should be forgotten or forgiven.

I have managed to wash clothes. I guess personal hygiene will always retain its proper place no matter how fucked up I get.

wow I wonder what the Republican response to numbers like that is.

Apparently I grew up in a world different from others. A world where CDs are to be treated as near sacred objects that will break at the slightest indelicate moment. I've been re-encoding CDs from my collection and reached Orbital's In Sides disc 2 with the 28 minute version of The Box. This is a CD that had been loaned out and returned somewhat scratched. Apparently the scratches destroyed The Box.

Anyone have a 192 VBR copy I could download?

I lost my 80 GB drive yesterday. The controller went out on the drive. 30 GB of music went with it. I'm not looking forward to ripping all my CDs again. Stupid moon.

Tivo has gone mad recording random TV shows and mislabeling them as porn. For example it recorded an episode of "The Waltons" off the Hallmark channel but the guide describes it as Up and Cummers vol. 16 with April and Randy Wes. Imagine my disappointment when I finished the hour long episode to find it did not actually contain adult content, adult language, nudity or sexual content. Other great hits include Totally Anna which was actually "Fishing with Roland Martin" on OLN. Imagine my surprise when So Big! actually turned out to be the 1932 classic film based on the Pulitzer prize winning book.

In the variety of doomsday scenarios that have played out in movies and books where technology goes awry and mankind reverts back to primitivism, how could this horror have been overlooked?

Busy day. Apt Minds launched two more web sites. Went and saw the Team Tapioca entry at the Angelika on the big screen. One of these days I'll dig out from the mountain of things to do.

Finished the 24 hour video race today at 11:41pm. The goal for the race was to make a 5 minute or less movie that used the stranger as a theme, had a location involving a body of water, had an umbrella for a prop and had the line "We must be nuts!" between midnght Friday and midnight Saturday. I was up with team tapioca till about 5am saturday morning working on a story and then up again at 8am to start shooting it. Thomas finished editing, rendering and printing to tape around 11:20pm and we had it at the finish line 21 minutes later. Out of 90 teams competing 69 finished the race. We had made a movie the weekend before to prep with school as a location and duct tape as the prop. Both of them were a lot of fun. I certainly learned a lot.

One of the many sponsors is Red Bull. You get a plastic card which has information on how to contact their roving Red Bull vehicle. Each team gets one free delivery of however much Red Bull you need. We got ours around 3pm. I can only imagine what a society would be like if you had free energy on demand like this all the time.

A gem from Salon's 5 part series from Sidney Blumentahl's new book:

In 2002, DeLay preached to the First Baptist Church of Pearland, Texas, that God was using him to promote "a biblical worldview" in politics, and that he had pushed for Clinton's impeachment because the president held "the wrong worldview."

I realize that NHL viewership is about the same as the XFL. If you aren't watching this years Stanley Cup playoffs you're missing some great stories. The Minnesota Wild are a recent expansion team, three years old. Expansion teams never make the playoffs, let alone go past the first round. The Wild had the incredible bad luck to have to play the Colorado Avalanche in the first round. The Avalanche have two Stanley Cups and are always contenders for the Stanley Cup. They had the Wild down 3 games to 1 in the first round, a situation teams rarely come back from. It's happened, I believe, 36 times out of the thousands of playoff series. The Wild won the next 3 games and surprised everyone.

They weren't supposed to get that far. Even their coach was making comments about how he never expected to get that far. In the second round they faced the Vancouver Canucks. A team, that while they have suffered in recent years, was a power house this year. Again the Wild went down 3-1, and no team has ever come back from 3-1 twice in one playoffs. The Wild don't have any stars. They have one of the lowest payrolls in the NHL. They're an expansion team. They should be happy just getting this far. Then they crushed the Canucks in the next two games and headed for game 7 in Vancouver. Even after that I never thought they'd win. In the second period Vancouver scored 2 points 61 seconds apart. In a game 7 situation, on away ice, when nobody expects you to win most teams fold after that. The Wild didn't, and went on to win 4-2.

It is a stunning accomplishment. Only one other team, the Montreal Canadians one of the winningest teams in any professional sport, has won two game sevens on the road. Now they head into the conference finals against another improbable team, Anaheim. I don't care if you like hockey, this is just a great story. This is exactly the kind of story people pay to watch at the movies.

Wow, you don't see this often. A regional ISP may be shut down because of flooding. They must be scrambling to build a system of dikes and levees to keep their offices out of the water. They're right next to a major drainage ditch so I bet that's overflowed.

I guess I'm lucky that we just got some annoying humidity and no severe weather in Dallas.

[The following is a letter I wrote to Public Storage today. I pay $91 a month for a storage unit and have for oh three years now (Well it used to be $79, then it was $83). Statusfactory pays that bill like clockwork every month so I was surprised to get a notice saying I owe $0 but they want a $10 late fee. I was angry. I put on my shoes because I wanted to go to PS and scare the shit out of whatever old man/woman they had working there. I shit you not, PS hires retired couples to staff their locations. I called to make sure they were open, they are unpredictably closed at times. In the ensuing conversation I got to be indignant on the phone and that calmed my ire somewhat. I didn't drive over...but I did write this letter]

I received a letter today with a notice for $10 in late fees. It doesn't say I owe anything else. Considering I don't owe anything I don't know how I could owe late fees. I called the location to find out what the problem was and the woman was unhelpful. She remembered seeing my check recently but couldn't check in the computer as it had been down all day. (A not uncommon occurrence from the few times I’ve had to interact with Public Storage facilities) She anticipated it being down the rest of the day. She wasn't going to be at work for two days after that and didn't know when anyone would be able to look into the billing problem on your end.

These sorts of difficulties have created an inimical dread any time I have to deal with someone from your company. As Public Storage is driven by profit, and your staffing and equipment choices clearly portray a desire for cheapness rather than quality, let me make a suggestion. Replace the ineffective cheap equipment, and septuagenarian staff with a collection of high-end, remotely manageable computer terminals. You won’t have to pay any benefits. You can convert those on premise living quarters into more storage. You won’t have to worry about computers ever doing anything to bring on a lawsuit. Best of all you can continue raising rent arbitrarily, and padding your rich, old, white man executive pockets with profit. Also I won’t have to hear any more excuses.

P.S. If the automation goes well you should consider implementing it all levels of the company.

P.P.S. Your industry certainly isn’t the most incompetent. You should see the nonsense that comes from the cell phone guys.

Okay, Pakistan nabbed six more terrorists. They all work for al Qaeda apparently. You know there are 38 other groups on the list. How about capturing some of them? Oldies, but baddies, like Shining Path are still out there. While we're in South America how about some FARC terrorists?

Proving that any metaphor can be taken too seriously the Greece-based Revolutionary Nuclei (ya like that, see it plays on the "terrorist cell" idea. Clever. I'm sure some pomo lit professor is laughing over that one) are still out there. How about the Basque separatists (ETA), while only one movie has depicted them as far as I know (Barcelona), don't they deserve some attention? Despite the Good Friday peace accord the Real IRA is still out there. Come on can't we catch one of them?! They are practically in our own back yard.

You've even got groups like November 17 who've been around since the early 1970s. The 1970s!? What was in the zeitgeist then? That's when you had wacko groups like the Symbionese Liberation Army popping up. Maybe Z (1969), for a long time the only foreign language Best Picture nominee, spawned all this political activism.

Decades of terrorism with almost no progress. I bet the People's Front of Judea is probably still out there. Come on world, you can't let Pakistan pick up all the slack. Get busy.

I've been playing with the new iTunes music service and wondering how it works. It uses urls like this:

itms://ax.phobos.apple.com.edgesuite.net/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/com.apple.jingle.app.store.DirectAction/storeFront

Swap out itms with http and you get a look at an XML document with tags like <LoadFrameURL> <TextView> <View> <PictureView< <GotoURL> <OpenURL< <HBoxView> <MatrixView>

Anyone know if this markup is something Apple came up with? Are there other browsers that can render that markup? I wonder if I could make an Eliteland music store that actually had more of the music I wanted to buy and and drop a link in from iTunes.

It was April 15th, 2003 in Dallas, tax day, and seeking a break I began walking to the convenience store. As I walked past the empty lot next door I saw the letter. The weather had been windy and overcast so the wind must have caught it. The first thing I found was the letter to Clay from Monica. I call it "good and woken up."

You could tell the letter had been meticulously folded the way high school students do when they are passing notes. On the back she had written his name with "I (heart) U" next to it. She had pushed down on the pen so hard it almost poked through the page. The imprint is clear on the opposite side. After reading it my problems disappeared while I remembered what it was like to be in high school and have a crush.

The other piece I call "clay, self-portrait." I found the picture near the letter and Clay's Spanish homework. I'm assuming it's also Clays. My first thought was rejected logo for the Total Information Awareness office. Then I started thinking about how Clay probably feels like a super-star with a letter like that from Monica but the thorny line around the eye is some kind of concern it won't work out in the long run. The eye in the middle being I, Clay. However, I'm betting none of that applies and he just thought it looked cool.

d. saint

Aside from some really strong allergies in Naples, NY my time there was wonderful. I had good food. Local trout, organic tomatoes, duck eggs, rabbit. All but the trout was grown or raised on Rebecca's mom's small farm. Bread made by Rebecca and her folks. I finished one book and started another. I felt like I had all the time in the world.

The strongest feeling was one of contentment and peace whenever Rebecca would hug me, grab my arm or hold my hand. A couple times she gave me a kiss on the cheek or the forehead. I felt loved. I hadn't felt that way in awhile. I felt like Rebecca and I had found our level. Our relationship was fraught with ups and downs. That weekend was just right. I felt sated. Any loneliness I felt dissolved when we were together.

And so I left remembering what it's like when you are around someone who cares as you do.

While I was on my trip I talked to some really smart people. People that finished their bachelors and masters in the course of two years. Also, people who are full of wisdom and intuitive understanding that comes from decades spent studying the world. It's the same as here in Dallas, lots of smart people no matter how you measure it.

90% of all those smart people work on these incredibly pointless problems. As cool as automatic vulnerability remediation may be I can't fathom why the human race needs it. Yeah, you could look at it is being part of this interlocking system of components that all add up to keep people fed, sheltered and clothed but if you want to do that couldn't those components be simplified? Does it bring culture or art? Smart people work on millions of things that will have no lasting impact beyond the next five years. What's the point? Why can't all those smart people set to working on the problem of global warming, ending starvation, etc in a direct and meaningful way.

Considering how short your time is don't you want to work on something that will make a positive difference in as many lives as possible? I can't imagine a time in my life where life and work has ever appeared to be so utterly meaningless. Long-term brain damage seems like the best way to live out your years, it's no wonder we make so much crap to retard thought, feeling and spirituality.

I need money. Looks like I'll be putting stuff up for sale. If anyone is interested then email me. This is just a preliminary list and I'll post more detailed pages and pictures later.

• G4 Cube 450 w/1GB of memory (I think)
• 17" Apple CRT Monitor with ADC connector
• 5GB iPod
• Sony Digital8 DCR-TRV310 NTSC Handycam
• Sony PS2 with games
• Atari Jaguar, Sega Dreamcast, Nintendo 64, Sega Game Gear, Sega Nomad with various games
• Pioneer DV-525 DVD Player
• Jabra Freespeak Bluetooth headset and Sony Ericsson Bluetooth adapter for T61 phones

I've got to go through all my books, CDs, DVDs and VHS but I'll be selling those too. Although the rare stuff will most likely not be for sale.

Some people just aren't worth any of your time. You size 'em up, see some talent and nurture a friendship. At some point you forget that the only person looking out for you is you. So you stretch yourself a little, You make the altruistic play with the new friend. It doesn't work out but you know they've got talent so you keep trying to help them along, ignoring what it's doing to you. At the end of it you realize what a sucker you are because they don't care, and all you're left with is peanuts.

Only one thing to do when that realization comes, hit the road. I'll be in New York to see Rebecca and her mom for Easter weekend. I'll be in DC for a couple of days and see Gumby. Then it's on to Birmingham to stay with Stacey, JT and Katelyn before sliding back into the pit I dug for myself in good ol' Dallas. Who knows, maybe there's oil in there somewhere.

(April 11, 2003 - DALLAS, TX) Matt Midboe sits perched on the high-wire act that is being 29. It's the last year of his life before the Sandmen come and take care of him. A ritual chillingly illustrated in the documentary Logan's Run. This time would be difficult enough for the cheery, but thoughtful young man if it weren't for an early onset of Old Man's Disease (OMD).

Each day this past week has begun for him at 8am, without the aid of an alarm. He wakes up refreshed. Other symtoms of OMD include breakfasts of prunes, lettuce and toast but have not been spotted in Mr. Midboe yet. The rock-star lifestyle he's used to typically includes sleeping later. Scientists are at loss to explain such an early onset.

In what might be early signs of a cantankerous attitude Mr. Midboe pondered "The years tend to blur together anyways. These spans of time are arbitrary anyway. What if we had 12 fingers instead of 10? Then I'd have six more years of life." As OMD settles in Mr. Midboe quietly prepares for a life more pointless than it already is.

Yep, it's tuesday now...and the Little Lebowkis are still the League Champions. That's number one to you and me.