June 6th, 2012 is World IPv6 Day, where most major providers and web sites are going to turn off IPv4 in a test to see how well IPv6 is going to work… and there are no more IPv4 addresses, so it is hoped that it will go better than expected…
i passed the test, but don’t have my own IPv6 address, yet, because qwest (which is now known as centurylink) SUCKS!!!
Where do you live? What religion? What race? What nationality?
Today these questions are considered logical. By 2001, it will occur that these questions are absurd, meaningless, illogical — anti-evolutionary. Elimination of each false premise brings about more and more wealth, and more and more time to do the important things. We must fly by the generalised principles governing the universe, and not by the ground rules, or the grind-him-down rules, of yesterday’s superstitions.
— R. Buckminster Fuller, “I Seem To Be A Verb” – 1970
welp… we missed that one… 😐
THE PROBLEM: The New Blue Collar: Temporary Work, Lasting Poverty And The American Warehouse
THE SOLUTION: Why Bother Working At A Job You Hate?, and The RICH Economy
i maintain that if we didn’t HAVE to go to work in order to survive (“wage slavery”), we wouldn’t have the massive problems in society that we CURRENTLY have with “unemployment”… 😛
"The widely prevalent concept of what constitutes news, is a narrow, destructive concept — a sick concept, destructive to society as a whole. The news format in all our media is, in general, inimical or opposed to the development of human potential."
— Dr. Herbert A. Otto, Research Director of the Stone Foundation
The Naked Rambler: the man prepared to go to prison for nudity
Six years ago, Naked Rambler Stephen Gough’s hike from Land’s End to John O’Groats brought him media fame – and a prison sentence. Then another, and another, and… why has he been locked up ever since?
Neil Forsyth
Friday 23 March 2012
Winter at HMP Perth. The river Tay carries slivers of ice on its journey past the prison wall. Prisoners’ breath catches in clouds while they glumly circuit the courtyard. At this time of year, many choose not to take their allotted outdoor exercise. The stone corridors of A Hall sit silent; 133 men are in temporary lockdown while one of them is brought to meet me. To many of the prisoners this man is a stranger. They’ve got more chance of seeing his face in a newspaper than around the wing. Continue reading The Naked Rambler: the man prepared to go to prison for nudity
i completed the replacement of the lead pipe on the ugly sousaphone. i have yet to replace the water key, and patch the split third-valve upper tubing, but those things shouldn’t take long at all, and then i will be able to deliver the ugly sousaphone to its rightful owner (thaddeus), who will, then, hand over to me the double B-flat tuba seen here… and i will play the HELL out of it! 8)
i was contacted by a person who claims to be my grandfather’s half-sister… but she’s around the same age as me… and for someone who might not be who she says she is, she certainly has an over abundance of trivial information and unimportant, but entirely, independently verified facts about people who would otherwise be completely unknown, so at this point i tend to agree that she’s probably my grandfather’s half-sister… but, because of the fact that my family is all that’s left of a bunch of massively inbred yokels and hillbillies, she hasn’t cleared up any of the “family mysteries”, and, in fact, has come up with several new ones that will, likely, never be completely understood, because they have to do with my family, who, traditionally, ignores, berates, or tries to shout down anybody (like me) who says that the way they live is not the best. rosemary, my great aunt, is also a child of the ’60s, and has a hippy heart, which is probably why she survived this long without doing the traditional family thing and going crazy.
seriously… there’s a family history going back almost 200 years, of family members getting killed or maimed by insane people, some of whom have also been family members… weird… 😐
the moisture festival has been going well, but i haven’t started playing shows "for real" yet, despite the fact that i have already played 6 shows with two different bands… starting on saturday, i have 12 shows over the course of 8 days, with two different bands, so i’m going to be more than ordinarily busy. until then, i’ve got a rehearsal this evening, and a rehearsal tomorrow evening, and probably a rehearsal either wednesday or thursday.
i got the business cards i made for chris, which look astoundingly good, given the fact that the phone number is deliberately off center… supposedly he’s going to get back to me on a postcard, for which i sent out a preliminary draft on tuesday, and talked with him on wendesday, but haven’t heard anything since. i don’t want to hassle him too much, though, because apart from having a more-or-less full time job, he’s also got a new clinic that he’s in the process of opening up… at the same time, this postcard is “time sensitive” at this point, and i don’t want to wait too long, or i won’t be able to get them printed in time.
today is the first day that Snake Suspenderz is performing(!) at the moisture festival(!!). the fact is, i’ve been trying to get Snake Suspenderz into the moisture festival for four years… pretty much ever since i started playing with them… and since i’ve been a part of the moisture festival for nine years (i.e. ever since the beginning), i figured that it wouldn’t be much of a problem to incorporate my cronies into the huge mass of crony-ism that is the moisture festival… but it took my “losing my temper” and sending a ranting email to a couple of people who, presumably, don’t have any more control over who gets into the moisture festival than i do…
it’s another one of those instances that i rant about from time to time, where something that i want to do turns out to be an “old-boys club” and if you’re not associated with one of the “old boys” you CAN NOT get in… i know for a fact that i have ranted at least once in this blog about the oregon country fair, and burning man, both being events that are purposely designed to get people to stay away except under very specific circumstances… which usually involve large quantities of money, or sex (and not the pleasant kind) with the right people, and sometimes both. 😐
nevertheless, apparently my ranting to my peers was enough, and we got scheduled for two “inside” gigs, the first one of which is today, where we appear on stage and play our three-song, 10-minute “mini-set”, and then hang around until the end of the show so we can take a bow with the rest of the performers, and two “fluffer” gigs, where we play for 45 minutes(!) outside the palladium, for the crowds waiting to get in (in other words, “fluffing the crowd”, which is why they’re “fluffer” gigs)…
in other words, we’ve gone from playing no shows, to playing four shows, and two of them are basically us, and a captive audience of people who are already ready for a good time…
i don’t know exactly what i said, or exactly how i said it, that made the difference, but whatever it was, i guess it had the proper effect, because we went from having no appearances to having more appearances than most of the other moisture festival performers, including two 45-minute shows where it’s nothing but us, which is more than most moisture festival performers…
don’t get me wrong, i’m still extremely suspicious of “old-boy clubs” and refuse to get involved with them for the most part, because i dislike nepotism and crony-ism to the extreme, but apparently ranting and losing one’s temper is one of the ways to get things done when one is dealing with such things.
i’ve been puzzling myself with this for some time now, and i thought i would put what i’ve figured out so far into actual words that i can see and attempt to appreciate…
i’ve wondered for some time about my tendency to be a believing athiest. in other words, i don’t believe God exists, but i believe God exists, if you know what i mean. i believe that God exists, and God talks to me constantly, prodding me to investigate further, or guiding me away from things that might distract. and i believe that the very same God who talks to me, talks to everyone else, as well, whether they know it or not… but at the same time, because of the fact that i can’t prove, and, honestly, have no interest in proving that God exists, i have to say, and i can, honestly, say that God doesn’t exist.
it’s interesting, because by saying that God both does, and doesn’t exist, at the same time, would frequently get people committed to the loony bin… but my impression is that to say God exists without also saying that God doesn’t exist exhibits an incomplete understanding of God which is typical of “christians” and other nefarious doodlehums who want to control other people for profit, and other entertainment. a good example of that is glen, who refuses to talk to me – with the exception of ordering new business cards every few months – because i continually responded to his jeezis arguments with counter-arguments that didn’t make any sense from his point of view.
it all goes back to that chapter of Liber CCC – The Book of Lies called The Looby, which says:
Only loobies find excellence in these words.
It is thinkable that A is not-A; to reverse this is but to revert to the normal.
Yet by forcing the brain to accept propositions of which one set is absurdity, the other truism, a new function of brain is established.
Vague and mysterious and all indefinite are the contents of this new consciousness; yet they are somehow vital. By use they become luminous.
Unreason becomes Experience.
This lifts the leaden-footed Soul to the Experience of THAT of which Reason is the blasphemy.
But without that Experience these words are the Lies of a Looby.
Yet a Looby to thee, and a Booby to me, a Balassius Ruby to GOD, may be!
it has taken me years to understand what uncle al was talking about, and more years to actually realise, in my own body, the experience he is referring to when he talks about “a new function of brain”… but he is right that THAT, after all, is what one experiences when one undertakes “to accept propositions of which one set is absurdity, the other truism”, which is EXACTLY what i am doing when i say that i believe that God both exists, and does not exist, at the same time… WITHOUT CONTRADICTION.
as rational and realistic as i have come to be over the years, i can still say, with pride, that i am a crazy mystic that belongs in a loony bin, because that’s exactly what i am.
so i’ve put together another And More album, but for a long time (i.e. more than two but not quite three weeks) i have been trying to upload the files to bandcamp, and my browser keeps coming back with a “we’re sorry, but you’re fucked” error, by which the bandcamp people have been stumped.
i finally got it to upload today, from opera on the mac… i tried multiple different combinations of browser and operating system, but apparently i never tried opera on mac… i still don’t know why it wouldn’t upload with any other browser, on either operating system, but now that it’s uploaded, here it is:
i added the last piece, which is the mouthpiece-receiver pipe, to the narrow end of the ugly sousaphone, and cleaned up the tons of old solder left on the instrument. now it’s just a matter of patching the split 3rd valve tube and installing a water key, and it’s a working sousaphone, once again…
i was able to cover the water key hole with my finger, and get the instrument to play… as long as i didn’t use the 3rd valve… 8)
i have been getting a little tired of doing a regular “another week closer to the eschaton” post, because it seems as though the news never gets any better, and frequently gets a lot worse, and i’m tired of reading bad news ALL the time… besides that, it doesn’t seem to matter how much i rant about how awful things are, it never seems to do any good.
besides that, i’ve got a couple more weeks of moisture festival performances to deal with, and i’m going to be spending a lot more than my normally alloted quantity of spoons, which means that i will have even less time than i would ordinarily, because i will be recovering.
so, the upshot is that i’m going to suspend the regular weekly rant about how awful the world is for a while… two weeks at the minimum…
discuss, if you want to. in the mean time, i’ll be posting here as usual… 8)
i got a letter in the mail — yes, a physical, hand-written letter — from warrensburg, missouri… which is one of the places i’ve got tons of undiscovered relatives… another place is arbroath, scotland, but that’s another story…
the letter is from a lady who claims that my grandfather is her half-brother…
except, according to the charts i have (which, admittedly, don’t have all the information, because nobody on my side of the family knows any of it), my grandfather didn’t have a half-sister… but she was born after my great-grandmother died… and she’s got several of the right names…
and the part that makes it even more bizarre is that her father is my great-grandfather, but we are only seven years apart in age… her father was 69 when she was born, and lived another 14 years after that.
i can hardly wait to learn more, but i have to curb my enthusiasm… i talked extensively to a person a couple of years ago, who convinced me that she was related to my great-great-grandfather rufus, and then, just as she was about to fill in a whole bunch of missing information in my past, she dropped off the face of the planet, and i have never heard from her again. 😐
it’s good that i was a little nervous… it prevented me from doing stupid things like picking up hot metal with my bare fingers on more than one occasion… but it also was primarily because of the fact that, apparently, i can’t do things like “sweating” stuff like i used to be able to… it appears to be one of those “use it or lose it” skills that i haven’t kept up on… 8/
oh well, it’s airtight, and that’s really all that matters, when it comes right down to it.
because the next few weeks are going to be tremendously busy, and i’m not sure how much time or energy i’m going to have for trendy computer gizmos…
i’m getting ever closer to finishing the repair work on thaddeus’ E-flat sousaphone, for which he intends to give me (on the condition that, when he absolutely NEEDS a tuba, it’s his) a BB-flat tuba that he is in possession of, which used to belong to hokum w. jeebs. i’ve finished the “hard” part, which was actually procuring the correct piece (the “mouth pipe” or “lead pipe” pictured here). the rest of the process, of course, is soldering everything back together… which i have done before, but it was a LOOOOOOOONG time ago, before my injury, and so i’m a little nervous about the whole thing… one of the good things, that i need to remember, is that this is thaddeus’ UGLY E-flat sousaphone, despite the fact that the lead pipe is brand new and shiny, and pretty much anything i do to it doesn’t really matter, as long as it’s playable when i get done… and it WILL be playable, i guarantee that… 8)
then, i’ve been working with chris, who owns neighborhood acupuncture, making a business card, and i’ve been going back and forth with him for about a week. he keeps leading me to believe that he’s ready to send it off to get it printed, and then, at the last minute, there are a bunch of minor changes… which wouldn’t be so bad if chris was more accessible by email, but he’s not… he makes changes, and then he might not check his email again until tomorrow… and if he really needed the business cards “last week” (as he assured me, when i asked him), that’s not the way to get it done…
also, while i was in seattle dealing with the illusion that chris’ business cards were ready to send out, my elderly, brain-injured client called me with news that his computer suddenly quit working. from his (hazy, inaccurate) description of what had happened to his computer, i deduced that he was very likely having power supply issues. so when i was done at chris’, i went to capitol hill and took out my client’s power supply which i suspected had gone tits-up, and took it down to RE-PC, where i confirmed that it had, indeed, gone tits-up: the guy plugged it in, listened to the (annoying, high-pitched) noise it was making, and said that it had at least two blown capacitors. so i recycled the old power supply and bought a new one, which i’m going to put in tomorrow, after the snake suspenderz rehearsal.
AND there’s the moisture festival, which starts on thursday. i’m playing 13 performances over 24 days with the fremont phil, and 4 performances during the same period of time, with snake suspenderz, two of which are “fluffing” the crowd pre-show, and two of which are on the stage with the rest of the performers.
so, without further ado, i’m going to morph into my alternate personality, one of the busiest low-brass players on the west coast… 8)
the new lead pipe arrived! all that’s left now is to put it all together…
and address the other split, leaking tube, and replace the missing water-key… but my impression is that they’re going to be much easier projects than replacing the lead pipe was…
which means that i’m that much closer to an actual, concert-pitch tuba! 8)
The Department of Homeland Security Is Searching Your Facebook and Twitter for These Words – Agriculture avalanche avian bacteria border botnet carbomb China drill drug drug war earthquake execution forest fire gang gas grid hack heroin hostage interstate Islamist Jihad Juarez keylogger kidnap La Familia looting malware marijuana meth lab nationalist nuclear outbreak Pakistan pandemic pipebomb pirates power lines radicals relief resistant Ricin riot San Deigo scammers screening symptoms Tamiflu terror U.S. Consulate violence virus warning weapons grade wildfire, Yemen, enriched, IRA, prevention, pirates, radicals, hurricane, storm, snow, watch, earthquake, help, hail, aid, relief, interstate, hacker, China, worm, and social media…. among others… hello DHS agents clowns 😐
$1B of TSA Nude Body Scanners Made Worthless By Blog — How Anyone Can Get Anything Past The Scanners – too bad i didn’t know this before i went to san francisco… oh well, there’s always next time… there’s a lot of interesting stuff at his blog, TSA Out of Our Pants!… check it out. 😉
US Congress expands authoritarian anti-protest law – and, of course, nobody else is reporting on it…
BP’s $7.8 Billion Settlement of Deepwater Horizon Spill Does Nothing for Louisiana – 😐
Why an MRI costs $1,080 in America and $280 in France – the prices are higher. you don’t get more, or better service, you just pay more. that’s it… 😡
18.6 million housing units in the United States are unoccupied – or, roughly, around 24 houses for every homeless person in the country… and they wonder why people are angry. 😐
wait… what??? – Pat Robertson Blames Liberals for Drug War and Overincarceration
this week’s WHO NEEDS TERRORISTS? segment includes: The report police hid for nearly two years, that corroborates an investigation, and vindicates a whistle-blower the NYPD tried to destroy and FBI Director: I Have to Check to See If Obama Has the Right to Assassinate Americans On U.S. Soil and A man who informed police when he found child abuse images on his computer has not been allowed to be alone with his daughter for four months and School Demands Access To 12-Year-Old’s Facebook and Email. Parents Not Notified and Peaceful Anti-Fracking Activists Pursued by FBI as ‘Eco-Terrorists’ and US soldier carries out brutal slaying of at least 16 Afghan civilians
Walmart For President – hey, corporations are people, remember?
normally i try to avoid this site, because mercola is a raving lunatic, but i just learned a quote from winston churchill, that goes “The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.” and this is a good example: FDA Says Walnuts Are a "New Drug" and says that they can’t be marketed in a way that emphasises their omega-3 fats… but as long as people don’t know that they’re actually good for them, they’re fine. 😐
Peter Bergman – no more Principal Poop… 😥
Mœbius – 😥 🙁
twin lambs! 8)
these are ewe lambs, so they won’t be eaten…
they look like birkenstocks, right…
I MADE ‘EM! 8)
America is a Constitutional Republic… NOT a Democracy – actually, i’ve known this for a long time, but it’s still a shock to me that other people might not know it.
BP Settlement Avoids Day in Court with People Hurt by Spill and BP settles while Macondo seeps – oh no, the problem is all cleared up, there’s no need to look, because it’s not really there… don’t worry… 😡
Self-Interest Spurs Society’s ‘Elite’ To Lie, Cheat – this is why there will always be “class war”, and is the primary reason i believe that the only way to fix things is to eliminate wage-slavery! 😐
Rick Santorum, Meet My Son — He has a degenerative disease that has left him blind, paralyzed, and increasingly nonresponsive. If I had known before he was born, I would have saved him from suffering. – whoever it comes down to, rick santorum must not be allowed to win the election. 😐
this week’s WHO NEEDS TERRORISTS? department includes the following: Dad Arrested, Strip-Searched After 4-Year-Old Daughter Draws a Picture of a Gun in School and Remember, Cops Are Your "Friends" and Excessive Force Is Dangerous — To View on YouTube and Arrested for Meditating and Judge Orders Top N. Miami Senior High Student To Leave U.S. and TSA forces new mom to pump milk out of her breasts in public restroom before boarding the plane
Cleaning up the ’hood — Focusing on drug markets rather than users means less crime – the problem is that, despite its success in reducing crime, DMI has been in use since 2004, and nobody has taken the slightest bit of notice… it requires too much participation from people who wouldn’t be affected otherwise, if the drug dealer went to jail… that and the fact that people would still want to do drugs… that’s why the only logical solution is to legalise ALL drugs and tax the resultant income. i don’t know a single user of cannabis that wouldn’t be happy to pay a tax on legally purchased weed… 😉
Verisign seizes .com domain registered via foreign Registrar on behalf of US Authorities. and The Systematic Destruction of the Bill of Rights – in spite of the fact that SOPA is in limbo, the US gummint still feels like it has the authority to seize domains that exist outside of US jurisdiction, any time they want, and here are the reasons why…
… but that will not stop me from saying stuff about it anyway! 😛
Election hacked, drunken robot elected to school board – if it wasn’t such a slap in the face, it would be funny… and it just starts with having your admin username and password set to “admin”… 😐
New speech-jamming gun hints at dystopian Big Brother future – 😮
MASSIVE LEAK REVEALS CRIMINALITY, PARANOIA AMONG CORPORATE TITANS – 😮
monique’s sheep are lambing. we have three on the ground and another coming out as i am writing this… 20 more to go… 8)